Album review: Living Colour – The Chair In The Doorway

What was a trickle has become a torrent; I suspect I’ll always remember 2009 as the year that dormant bands of the nineties came back. The debate about why that is can wait for another time, but suffice to say for now that I suspect it’s the loosening of cultural hegemony caused by the decline of the power of the major labels… and that’s no bad thing, as far as I’m concerned, because here’s a band who – while I was never a huge fan – I think should have had a better crack of the whip last time round.

Living Colour had everything going for them: a great singer and frontman in Corey Glover, a dynamite lead guitarist in Vernon Reid and an ear for good songs that drew on wide influences. But one of their strengths was, I suspect, also their albatross, in that they never really settled into one distinct style. Mainstream rock listeners are terribly provincial, arguably more fickle than pop fans in some respects – if the new single doesn’t sound like the one they really liked, well, it’s all over. Living Colour thrived on variety in their songwriting… and pretty much disappeared off the face of the map, with the notable exception of the none-too-successful Collideøscope album of 2003. But now they’re back with The Chair In The Doorway, a diverse yet surprisingly contemporary sounding offer.

The first few tunes had me thinking that a coherent sound may finally have asserted itself. “Burned Bridges” is a slow builder, ramping up the tension using prodcution tricks cribbed from nu-metal and dance music without indulging the worst excesses of either – lots of filters, phasing, sliced sound and fragmented percussion. It never quite explodes into the all-action fat chord rock-out I kept expecting of it, however – perhaps because it’s meant to act as an intro or first half to “The Chair”, which beefs things up somewhat in the guitar department while still working the soundscape into a swirling thing, almost alive.

“Decadence” sees Living Colour wander back into more traditional metal/rock territories, but there’s still an unusual intelligence lurking beneath the surface, aided by weird trip-fall rhythms and more of those droning guitar notes between the riffage and splashing cymbals. From here on in, the old variety reasserts itself, from the funk-rock of “Young Man” to the metallic workout of “Out Of My Mind” via the urban claustrophobia of “Method”, the slightly trippy radio rock pop of “Behind the Sun”, the ballsy blues of “Bless Those” and the straight-up rock of “Hard Times”. There’s a whole lot of inventive ideas and radical fusions of style packed into The Chair In The Doorway.

But therein lies the rub – are there enough listeners who want a band to take them to new places rather than drive them round the same old block? I’d like to hope so, in this brave new world of the downloadable single track… and there’s no escaping the fact that Living Colour are a staggeringly talented band. More realistically, I can’t see them taking the crown of rock popularity any time soon, but I sincerely hope the ecosystem of modern music can keep them in business. We need more bands willing to break the mould from time to time, and The Chair In The Doorway is by a group who’ve always excelled at it. Give it a listen.