Occasionally, when an artist breaks out into the big time, a
\nrecord company releases work from their past. Even more
\noccasionally, it’s good. It’s more likely, however, the work is,
\nshall we say, substandard. It’s a crapshoot where the odds are
\nstacked against you.<\/p>\n
Because of this, I didn’t pick up Meredith Brooks’ first CD,
\nSee It Through My Eyes<\/i>, until I found it used and tres
\ncheap. Despite the fact I’m a big fan of both her
\nBlurring The Edges<\/i> and
\nDeconstruction<\/i> CDs, I was, frankly, a touch nervous about
\nthis one. And guess what, gang? I was
\nright<\/b> to be nervous. Meredith, I love you, but this is
\nfrankly
\n
\nawful<\/i>
\n<\/b> .<\/p>\n
Despite its 1997 release date, these songs were originally
\nrecorded in 1984 by a much younger and much less skilled Brooks,
\nand it shows. Boy, does it show. The entire album feels like a
\nMissing Persons or Scandal knockoff, complete with shallow power
\nballads and drum machines. At any moment, I expect to hear Debbie
\nGibson’s vocals kick in rather than Brooks’, and in fact her
\ndelivery is immature enough compared to her nineties work you begin
\nto notice
\nshe<\/i> sounds like Debbie Gibson in places.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the most painful element is that Brooks’ guitar playing
\nis still
\ngood<\/i> through this morass of early MTV cliches — when you
\ncan hear it, which isn’t often. But the songs are so bad it’s
\nalmost impossible to appreciate it. There are occasionally moments
\nwhere Brooks’ attitude and style shows up for a moment, but they’re
\nfew and far between. Most of the time, this is just a reminder of
\nwhy it sucked to be a female rocker in the eighties. This album
\nprobably isn’t even Brooks’ fault. I couldn’t find any information
\nanywhere on it, but I suspect these babies are demo tapes that
\nsomeone decided to make a buck off of.<\/p>\n
There are a couple of barely-acceptable tracks. “Pick It Up” and
\n“The Look” are occasionally interesting, as straight-ahead as rock
\ngets under these circumstances. “Video Idol” has a mildly hooky
\nmelody and keyboard line. But mostly,
\nSee It Through My Eyes<\/i> is a trite collection of really bad
\neighties cliches, a stale confection of bad cheese and boring
\nfilling. It’s a record company (and remember, all A&R men must
\ndie) sucking off an artist’s current success like some sort of
\ngiant, bloated, timetraveling leech.<\/p>\n
Meredith Brooks deserved better than this, and eventually (some
\n15 years later) she’d get it. However, unless you have some insane
\ndesire to torture yourself, avoid
\nSee It Through My Eyes<\/i> like the plague.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":25385,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[6314],"rating":[11203],"class_list":["post-36591","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-meredith-brooks","rating-rating-d-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/36591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/36591\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36591"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=36591"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=36591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}