Anyone with ample knowledge of Jim Morrison and proper distance from adolescent fandom recognizes the Lizard King's gift for comedy. Forget poetry, dude brought the laffs, from quasi-poetically stringing together the words "mute nostril agony" to regaling us with tales of "Indians scattered on dawn's highway." Priceless! Our ex-hippie gym teachers were right: The Doors frontman died way too young. Because, had the Shaman of Shtick made it through the 1970s, he might have realized his now-obvious comedic ambitions as fully as Richard Ashcroft, who used to catch Mojo Risin' comparisons back when his former band, the Verve, were actually psychedelic. Now, I slapped an 8.3 rating on a compilation of the Verve's singles as recently as 2004, and didn't hate Ashcroft's last two solo albums as much you all did, so my expectations were wide-open approaching Keys to the World, which the man self-hyped with Gallagher-brother aplomb as "hot shit." Riffing on John Lennon, he clearly meant "flaming pile."
See, Ashcroft's latest takes the over-seriousness of 2002's Human Conditions-- which he has personally likened to Marvin Gaye's best work-- and turns it still seriouser, into inimitable omg-wtf farce. Swept up in maudlin strings and chintzy brass, Ashcroft blurs his anguished syllables like Tom Petty doing Bob Dylan, embraces U2-jerkoff bombast, and follows his idiosyncratically generic muse into uncharted depths. Keys to the World is as hilariously indulgent as "Trapped in the Closet", if vastly less self-aware; it's also a more laughable satire of contemporary music than Bang Bang Rock 'n' Roll, though less durable and totally accidental.
Before Keys to the World, I never knew Coldplay's "Fix You" was subtle. Then I heard "The Words Just Get in the Way" (inevitably inferior to the similarly titled Gloria Estefan power ballad), on which, over colorless midtempo acoustic guitars, Ashcroft offers Chris Martin-like assistance: "When your back's against the wall/ There's no one left to call/ Then call me." And right on cue come the handclaps, the twangy guitar licks, dripping strings, and endless "Hey Jude" ad libs. "Sing it to me now!" Ashcroft instructs to a chanting chorus that, appropriately, consists only of himself.
Before Keys to the World, I never knew Bono was humble. The title track loops a C+C Music Factory-esque vocal sample amid canned MOR rhythms and melodramatic synths as Ashcroft jumps into a tragic, awkwardly worded tale: "Institutions, you went through them, ah/ From the age of five/ And no one loves you, cared/ If you lived or you died." But, like Africa's great white Time Person-of-the-Year hope with money-solves-everything ambitions, Ashcroft has another hubristic fix: "Perhaps I could make it better." How, Richard? "I've got the keys to the world, yeah, aw/ Mixed-up world/ I've got the keys to the world, yeah." For good measure, we also get an Everlast-style megaphone almost-rap. I promise.
Before Keys to the World, I never knew our world's problems could be presented so laughably by anyone not named Stephen Colbert. On fast-paced opener "Why Not Nothing", Ashcroft takes shots at the religious right ("the god squad"). But his slurred barbs soon fizzle into non-sequiturs: "Who the fuck are you when you take that mask away?/ Friend, I don't know/ Oh, where do we go?" Again Ashcroft has a keen suggestion for our betterment: "Take my advice, don't let 'em treat you like a fool." Then he emits porcine grunts for the last 30 seconds. On brightly adorned showstopper "World Keeps Turning", he mentions the U.S. president in suddenly apolitical fashion, and informs us of the Earth's movements with all the self-destructive solemnity of Copernicus: "The world keeps turning/ Everybody's learning/ Keep your head up."
Before Keys to the World, I agreed with the general consensus that music reviews should be relatively concise. But I still haven't told you about how "Cry to the Morning" reinterprets those three ominous "All Along the Watchtower" chords on music-box keyboard, how mechanically depressive single "Break the Night With Colours" bizarrely hints at Mr. Big's "To Be With You", or how the sprightly Cat Stevens folksiness that opens "Why Do Lovers?" transmogrifies into a fierce affirmation of a deity's existence, the stupefying one-liner, "The demons I've got they are amazing," and the stupefyinger, "Life is tough and life can be hard."
On Jim Morrison's sprawling, nipple-eyed "Celebration of the Lizard", chronicled on the 1970 double-disc Absolutely Live album, he captured psychotropic absurdity Ashcroft hasn't matched in years. He does this on the neighbor-loving ("until his wife gets home") title track from 1969's The Soft Parade, too. And also on the posthumous An American Prayer poetry disc, with impossibly kitschy blues-funk overdubbed by his surviving bandmates, money-grubbers even then. The drugs really worked for Morrison. Ashcroft, too, could leave audiences howling with that record's finest rib-tickler: "I will always be a word man, better than a bird man."
