Dealing with eccentric geniuses in pop music is always a tricky thing: you can love the work of Sun Ra or Kool Keith or Jandek on purely musical terms, but there's also an undercurrent of lunacy tourism to some peoples' appreciation of them. For those folks, the appeal of the musician's bizarre personality and alleged craziness overwhelms the legit brilliance, turning it from a sideshow into the main attraction. Lee "Scratch" Perry has hovered on the periphery of that divide since the end of the 1970s: as much deserved recognition as he gets for his production innovations, there's also the "he burned down his studio, man" aspect of his legend, the stories and rumors that tend to depict him as a cannabis-fueled goof-off and, with age, a sort of crazy-grampa oddball persona as well.
Scratch Came, Scratch Saw, Scratch Conquered-- the second album Perry has released in the span of two months, coming shortly after the Andrew W.K.-produced oddity Repentance-- should suit fans of Scratch-as-weirdo just fine. His role on this album is in a purely vocal capacity, and even if his voice is mostly preoccupied with croaking out stream-of-consciousness mutterings and aimless non-sequitirs, he still shoots off a few good lines: Opener "Having a Party" invokes "A skeleton from outer space/ With his Remington in his suitcase," and when he gets abstractly spiritual on tracks like "The Game Black" and "Saint Selassie", he seems to harbor a compellingly odd sort of mysticism. And there's still a mischievous spark in his ragged, aging voice, gentle and reserved as it frequently is.
Thing is, he still spends most of the time on Scratch Conquered blue-skying from phrase to phrase in odd moments of free-association-- which isn't bad in and of itself, except when he loses the plot and kind of half-asses it, which is often. Sometimes this aimless randomness is funny, when he concludes "Yee Ha Ha Ha" with shout-outs to New York City, California, Chicago, Wisconsin (!) and "Texas Town"-- which he then appends with a softly-mumbled "George Bush", to the accompaniment of cowboy-movie gunshots. Too bad he repeats that same travelogue almost verbatim (sans W. shoutout) in "Once There's a Will There's a Way". He also tends to ruminate on the same brief snatches of phraseology about banks, money, politicians, and assorted "sinful fuckers," invoking them over and over without making much of it really cohere past the three-word soundbite level.
And if you consider that just Scratch being Scratch-- well, he's being Scratch over some pretty ordinary reggae. Producer John Saxon is stingy with the dub signifiers, and with the exception of the knife-sharpening, melting-synthesizer rhythm on "Jealousy" and the otherworldly skank to "Scratch Is Alive", there's little sign of the percussive experimentation, thick slabs of bass, or echo-chamber deepness one would hope for from a Lee "Scratch" Perry record. It's not really bad, per se, as far as roots-revival reggae goes; it's at least tightly arranged and boasts a good horn section, which would make it a fine record for someone like Jimmy Cliff to sing over. And despite a couple of gratuitous famous-peer-driven genre experiments thrown in-- George Clinton joining in for the spaceman-summit funk jam "Headz Gonna Roll", Keith Richards adding some late-period Stones guitar entropy to "Heavy Voodoo" and "Once There's a Will There's a Way"-- none of these collaborations really feel as momentous as they should. Without the important musical half of Perry's bizarre genius, the one that proved there was plenty of creativity behind his peculiarity, Scratch Conquered is a hollow experience where most of the enjoyment depends on how much you like the idea of one of popular music's strongest visionaries reduced to a novelty act just dicking around.
