Sunday News
Published: November 29, 2006
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent
Twenty-four years is an awfully long time to wait for a follow-up album. Many thought, and some had honestly hoped, that the terse, lackluster, synthesizer-laden "It's Hard" would be the Who's final bow. Since 1982, the band members have fought amongst themselves, launched successful solo and acting careers, been endlessly anthologized, suffered embarrassing legal problems and mounted a reunion effort in 1989 that accelerated over the next decade and a half.
After losing bassist John Entwistle to heart failure in 2002 on the eve of a major U.S. tour, the Who fought back to become, once again, an imposing, if grayer and balder, live act. And even though Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend, the remainder of the Who, have been touring almost steadily for nearly four years (they play Hershey's Giant Center Nov. 27), no one could imagine what might result if the two powerful personalities - Townshend's cerebral perfectionism and Daltrey's controlled swagger - were unleashed in the studio again.
"Endless Wire," without a doubt, proves that age and experience have made both men seasoned, sensitive performers, even at the expense of the youthful fury that defined the band in its first two decades. In a way, the Who has been pointed in this direction ever since Daltrey could no longer hit that spine-melting scream on "Won't Get Fooled Again."
From the mid-1960s, when the band ruled the punkish Mod movement, through the arena-rock years of the 1970s and 1980s, and the through the long battle against becoming yet another shattered oldies act in the new century, the tug of war between Daltrey and Townshend's musical personas has been setting up this showdown.
Daltrey's voice, weathered and deepened, is still a potent instrument for interpreting Townshend's emotionally turgid songs, many of them barely concealed autobiography, meditations on the trappings of fame or contemplations of life in accelerated times. "Are we breathing out or breathing in/ Are we leaving life or moving in/ Exploding out imploding in/ Ingrained in good or stained in sin?" Townshend asks on "Fragments."
The central theme of the band's classic concept album, "Tommy" - living inside the invisible prison of a disabled mind - gets revisited on "In the Ether," in which an autistic boy longs to strengthen his faint connections to the ones he loves. Religious fanaticism is the target of the sneering acoustic track "Man in a Purple Dress," though it's easy to see a connection to Townshend's own persecution in the media in recent years. (In 2003, police in England accused him of accessing child pornography on the Internet. Townshend maintains he simply stumbled onto it while researching the nature of his own childhood traumas. The charges were dropped, but the damage to his reputation had been done.)
The mini-opera, "Wire and Glass," that comprises the second half of the album contains the lion's share of strong melodies and aggressive playing as well as the best performances from both men. Highlights include "Pick Up the Peace" and "The Mirror Door," though at scarcely two minutes each, the degree of satisfaction these songs deliver is akin to getting a fun-size candy bar instead of a king-size candy bar in your Halloween bag.
"Endless Wire" succeeds as a fine rock album, if not as a rock opera, which has been the fate of virtually every similar Townshend attempt at the genre since "Quadrophenia." A tweak here or there - the elimination of some short bits for the extended versions tagged on at the end, reshuffling of the running order here and there - would have made it a great rock album. The argument has been made before on other Who albums: if only they had done this or that, or dropped that song, or reined in Townshend's ambitions here or there.
But even after decades of the same mistakes, we count the Who an FM rock staple. If "Endless Wire" is indeed the band's final statement, it's not a bad way to go. The music is older, wiser, still has something to say and remains punctuated by that windmill strum.
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