Marshall Crenshaw

Marshall Crenshaw may well be the most frustrating major talent of the Eighties. His 1982
debut, Marshall Crenshaw, showed incredible promise, demonstrating in a dozen songs just
how much wit, melodic craft and vocal ability this singer/songwriter could muster. It's been
downhill from there, though, first with Field Day and now with his third album, Downtown.
Granted, many of Field Day's problems can be laid at the feet of producer Steve... More >

One reason his debunkers can't decide whether he's ripping off Buddy Holly (nice boy, wears glasses) or John Lennon (played him in Beatlemania, wears glasses) is that he loves the music of the '50s just the way '60s rockers did before they fell victim to hippie condescension--not as living tradition but as living music. With its played-not-produced intimation of process, Downtown gets this unpretentious message across--this is the kind of album whose negligible songs can open your set. It's well-crafted, fully imagined. The commitment and understated sexual urgency of Crenshaw's singing make it real. But it's filled with the quality retropop his debunkers always thought he wrote. Even the pointedly mature "The Distance Between" has a fairly arbitrary happy ending, which you'd figure from the way it stresses "When it gets right down to the bottom line." Two years ago, Crenshaw would have glanced right off that tired trope. (Grade: A-)