March 1998
James Iha
Let It Come Down
We felt it coming when he started wearing skirts and flower dresses on stage, and we were totally sure when he walked down the catwalk during a
show by the hip fashion designer Anna Sui as a mannequin: Being a
sideman started to annoy Smashing Pumpkins guitar player James Iha. To be hounest it isn't difficult to imagine: you're second guitar in one of the worlds biggest and most famous rock bands, but you're doomed to stay in the
shadow of a megalomanic controlfreak that won't know of any help, nor
resistance.
You'd like to be his musical right hand, but he thinks of you only as
his
right pinky toe, and in less favorable moments, as the acking boil on
top
of it. About a hundred days a year you're standing in front of an
outrageous audience pulling huge monsterrifs out of your amps, but
because
of your tiny posture, and the enormous charisma of the rockgod next to
you,
you have to look where your standing on the stage or people won't even
notice that you're there too. Once in a while, while practicing, you
stumble upon a usable tune. But when you, after careful consideration,
try
to sell it to the boss, he comes up, suppressing a sardonic smile, with
ten of them he found the night before, ten better ones. Found when he
was
sitting on the toilet.
Once in a while, you can give an interview, but only when the boss
doesn't
feel like it himself. In short, you're a rock star but you're not. Once,
you even dreamt you were in a hotel and a groupy asked you very
excitedly
whether the band had arrived yet. That's when you called your mother in
the middle of the night and cried your eyes out.
So it doesn't surprise us that James Iha appeared with a solo cd.
Everybody's got a right to an ego. We could also have expected that 'Let
It Come Down' would be a collection of light popsongs with here and
there
a touch of folk and county. If you're playing with the Pumpkins, you
don't
want to listen to some more loud guitar noise after hours. 'Let it come
down' is not half as bad as you'd expect. Iha's voice is pretty good, he
wrote a few nice songs (like the fun single 'Be strong now' for example)
and with the help of a great group (when you rock, you've got friends
like
singer-songwriter Neal Casal, Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne and
d'Arcy) he put down a sober, but very well finished sound. On this
record
are mostly acoustic, with here and there some organ, some pedal steel,
ballads, in which Iha lingers about love in all it's shapes and in which
you, whichever you prefer, can hear the Gram Parsons, Prefab Sprout,
Neil
Young in Harvest, James Taylor in Sweet Baby James and the Lemonhead at
their softest. After a song or five we had to wipe our eyes, not really
because sentimal thoughts like ' See the sun','Beauty' or 'The sound of
love' had touched us, but we found ourselves yawning, because Iha
doesn't
succeed to put a lot of variation in his songs, and his hyper-romantic
view on luurve...
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