REVIEW: Michael Hutchence, Michael Hutchence (V2)
- Michelle Aguilar
I should probably get this out of the way now: With a decent number of genuinely catchy exceptions ("Devil Inside" "Need You Tonight" "Not Enough Time") I have never been a huge fan of INXS.
Having said that, I have the odd luck to have seen one of INXS frontman Michael Hutchence's last shows, a few weeks before he killed himself in a Sydney hotel room. It's one of those blips of an event that takes on unexpected significance in your life only in retrospect.
In a fairly intimate Montreal club setting that night, the crowd was packed with teenagers and thirtysomethings alike (including my brother - the huge INXS fan in the family who invited me to drive eight hours from Massachusetts to see this show), who were all pretty damn excited to be there. Nicholas Cage was in the audience, taking a break from shooting "Snake Eyes," and graciously waved to Hutchence and the audience when spotted. All in all, Hutchence should have felt fairly on top of the world, but instead, the whole thing seemed to be ringing very hollow for him.
While his bandmates played their songs solidly behind him, Hutchence mostly ignored them and alternately preened and sneered at his audience, constantly pacing, as if he couldn't decide between heaven and hell. He pulled underdressed, underage-looking girl groupies out of the audience seemingly at every turn, spending half the song serenading them, the other getting them to simulate sexual acts on him. While this over-the-top persona could have evoked the bad-boy sexual electricity of Zepplin-era Robert Plant, it came across instead as actions full of numb rage.
Not a great way to remember the last time you saw someone.
You know that classic moment in most war movies, where a soldier loses his friend in the war and he faces the overwhelming task of writing to his buddy's parents a testament to their son's bravery and goodness? Because he deserves a better final image than a pile of blood and urine on a battlefield? That's a bit what this album is like.
Hutchence's producers Andy Gill (Gang of Four) and Danny Saber (Black Grape) pulled out this almost-finished album a year after Hutchence's death, determined to sweep aside the ugliness of that Sydney hotel room, convinced that he deserved a better legacy. As odd luck would have it, they had some pretty decent stuff to work with. While he had turned over to INXS' label a perfectly standard and not all that exciting INXS album in Elegantly Wasted, for his solo work, Hutchence seems in his last year to have been trying to find a way out of the stylistic expectations of INXS. This half-finished album bears hearing, not as a sordid catalog of Hutchence's last year, but as his most honest, most direct, most human album to date.
Which is not to say that all these songs succeed. Some can't escape the dull sheen of heavy programming and uninspired melodies, despite the appealing honesty of their lyrics. But there are some genuine winners here, especially for any fans of INXS who may have always secretly wished for something more deep from Michael Hutchence.
"Possibilities," a slow reggae number with minor-key string arrangements, gives us Hutchence ruminating on his career-long Jim Morrison pose, and "All I'm Saying," is a pretty, grey rainy-day of a song that recalls and far surpasses INXS' "Beautiful Girl." "Get on the Inside," is more surface and more poppy, but quite catchy, while at the same time, hinting at darker thoughts, the way Bowie did so well in the '70s. You can almost see Hutchence taking a symbolic stand, smack dab between where he had come from with INXS and where he seemed to be trying to land himself.
"Baby It's Alright," and "Flesh and Blood" recall U2's Achtung Baby in their swaths of High Production, tons of programming and warm, upfront vocals. (According to Saber and Gill, Hutchence had been fascinated with U2's postmodern self-reinvention) The eerily-titled "Don't Save Me From Myself" is a simple, naked song that makes one wonder what Hutchence might have done with a second or third solo album, once he had exorcised his personal and musical demons.
However, the one song with an actual U2 stamp on it, "Slide Away," is a disappointment. Featuring guest vocals by Bono, it frankly sounds less like a loving tribute than filler. My suspicion is that this is the real reason it is the album's last track, not because it was intended as Hutchence's swan song. "She Flirts for England," is also disappointing, with a boring repetitive melody and lyics that seems more like one of INXS' worst indulgences, covered up with lush production by Saber and Gill, still writing that soldier's letter back home.
This album won't convert any outright Hutchence-haters, but it is an album that deserves an open-minded listen by INXS fans and those who can appreciate the hidden beauty inside gaudy packages.
