Colonel Jeffrey Pumpernickel--A Concept Album

Concept albums. Who needs them?

The idea is excellent. For every hippy idealist's anti-paradise (Rush's 2112) there's a Setting Sons (the Jam): decaying old school Britain as seen through the eyes of two former public school chums. For every Tommy or The Wall, there's Iron Maiden's outrageously funny 1988 opus Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. (A prophet foretells of a great disaster due to strike a village. The villagers refuse to believe the prophet: big mistake on the villagers' part.) Few would argue that Bowie's finest moment occurred some time around The Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust. And what about Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds? Three generations of English teachers cringe and hold their heads.

Even when concept albums are bad, they're funny (cf: Sham 69's That's Life!?a day in the life of yer average punk according to People's Friend Jimmy Pursey). If they're good, they're funny too. The sheer pomposity of such projects is a marvel to behold. Sadly, they're now so ridiculed in the rock arena that only the most un-ironic or sadly deluded (hello Sting and Garth Brooks) go near them nowadays.

And yet?isn't the world a poorer place, the day the world turned on Prince?

Fortunately for critics and stunted indie fans the world over, Colonel Jeffrey Pumpernickel is far closer to Commander Cody & His Lost Plane (I'm speaking from memory here) than Sting. The concept itself is simple: ask a bunch of fading hipster musicians and cartoonists to contribute, bring old-school rock critic Richard Meltzer to add incomprehensible sleeve notes and? er, that's it. Each musician is so intent on cramming their own personality onto the album, they forget their primary purpose: that is, to tell the story of the sad and sagacious Colonel Jeffrey Pumpernickel through use of words and time and a craftily thrown-away middle eight. Or perhaps they succeed? Who knows? Certainly not Guided By Voices, Stephen Malkmus, the lovely and lolling Ann Magnuson, Peter Buck, a star-struck and supremely wistful Quasi, Ian Svenonius even. It's as much as they can do to stop from laughing, and blowing the whole gaffe?unless, of course, they are Granddaddy, Howe Gelb or Sentridoh, in which case it's as much as they can manage to stop breaking irretrievably into fitful tears of crocodile gold.

The most telling contribution is from Meltzer when he writes: "So big and ponderous is 'Colonel Jeffrey Pumpernickel' that its concept has been farmed out to musicians in double digits: not one manwoman on his/her own having sufficient spuzz to be its universal solvent. In their combined hands, this fat and fatuous concept, as professionally realized, bulges with arcane allusions to the Colonel's sick dreams, his war record and above all his allergies?"

And so on.

If this makes no sense to you, fret not. Buy the album, and you have much to ponder, not least the accompanying illustrations by virtuoso cartoonists like Peter Bagge, Jim Woodring and Kim Deitch. They add color but certainly not clarification to the project.

So what you have here is a very superior compilation album: albeit one with a possible hidden meaning that I'm too damn lazy and British to ascertain. My favorite track is the one that bubbles underwater from Black Heart Procession because one gets the impression they listened to copious quantities of Pink Floyd beforehand.

Maybe we should leave the final word to Meltzer. Trust him, he's a critic. "That the lion's share of participants recruited (some of them celebrity drunks) hail from the Golden Age of Murk, and a few from the Age of Clarity, doesn't help matters, and I dare you to find me a cut not influenced by the notoriously murky 'Glass Onion' from the Beatles' White Album?"

And so on.

Buy this album. This ridiculousness should be encouraged.