THE BOTTLES :: The Bottles ~ 6.8 | "Valerie" (single) ~ 0.0
MCA | MCA-3177
The self-titled release by the Bottles contains a lot of things I like in music. It appeared when most records sounded great from a production standpoint and all pop-rock bands became more competitive to keep up with the new wave explosion of fresh-faced artists. A cool aloofness can be found in “She’s a Mystery” and "Look at Julie," the latter about a spoilt rich girl with a "messed-up personality" and containing a rollicking little piano solo in the middle. Sounding a bit like the Cars playing boogie rock, "Elaina" employs an effectively simple and sassy lyric and grooves wonderfully. The contrast between the slick riffing in the verse and bouncy piano in the chorus in "Broken Apart" is exhilarating. Side two contains a pair of pretty gems. "Pulls Me to You" is a heartfelt love song with a stark piano/bass/drums backing. Sung from the perspective of a disapproving friend, "You're a Liar" puts down someone mistreating his partner. The track features some tasteful jangle and a few unexpected chord changes and vocal harmonies. The title of "I Don't Wanna Be Your Man" is the perfect setup for some clever digs and twists on the tired "I want you" motif, but the song's ho-hum lyrics don't push it to any great heights. The closer "Citizens" references "urban suicide" and seems to be about something heavy, but I'm not sure what it's getting at. The Bottles are Peter Bayless and Jefery Levy, shown in uncomfortable close-up on the back cover. Although a drummer and keyboardist also played, I'd like to know why they weren't credited as official Bottles. Although it’s a solid effort overall, only a few tracks could have stood alongside the jittery, skinny-tie hits of the time. A 3:05 edit of "Elaina" backed with enough label support could have made a dent, but in a competitive field of catchier tunes, The Bottles faded away rather quickly. Still, a copy in nice shape is worth a buck or two in a cheapie bin.
The Bottles story includes an odd epilogue that only an obsessive like me would investigate. A single with two new tracks appeared in 1982, a lifetime (in relative terms) after the album had dropped. I had to order it from a friendly Discogs seller in Spain. The timing of the single’s release is strange, so I was really hoping for a diamond in the rough, a rockin' knockout that demonstrated that the Bottles were worthy of a second album that fell through for some unexpected reason. "Valerie" opens quietly with a simple piano figure much like "Pulls Me to You," but it quickly faceplants with cavernous reverb and very melodramatic singing when the other instruments enter. It contains none of the zip or the fun of the album, and you may guess that it's REO Speedwagon with the flu until halfway through the second verse when Bayless' vocal sounds like it did in '79. Ballads were never the Bottles' strength, and "Valerie" is sunk by cheeseball MOR strings, a death march tempo, and cold distance. "Late Night Dreams" begins slowly with voice and guitar, and I wondered if the band really had the audacity to slap two uninteresting ballads onto a single. Eventually the song shifts into a mid-tempo Z-grade Springsteen throwaway. The playing sounds like sleepwalkers were handed instruments, the extent of the producer's work could have been hanging a couple 57s to capture the sounds being made, and the vocal breakdown in the middle is laughably half-assed. Were the Bottles self-sabotaging their career or just completely out of gas? It's a real head-scratcher of a single. The Bottles' best moments are on the long player.
November 18, 2018