Cheap Partyball (Music) (Stan Ridgway) Price

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Customer Reviews of Partyball

PartyBall will spellbind you !
This album is like a treasure you come across by accident. Dont be fooled by the cover. It is such a well produced album with such musical diversity you feel like you are reading a Raymond Chandler book with its eccentric tracks that are exciting to the imagination and send you off to a world of imagination that propells into becoming your very own film director as the stories unfold. Musically it's flawless and unique and can only be conceived by the master story teller of STAN RIDGWAY.

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Don't let the price fool you
At under $X, this purchase is a no-brainer. "Jack Talked" is a hard-rocking fun song. "I Wanna Be a Boss" is a timeless anthem for workers everywhere: "...I've been watching the boss carefully and he always seems to be having a ball/Then I scratch my head and wonder why I'm down here and he's up the hall." "Roadblock," like "Camouflage" from his The Big Heat album, demonstrates Stan's story-telling prowess that is unmatched in all of modern rock and roll.

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Important Transition, Not As Good As Before Or After
Coming after "Mosquitos," "Partyball" doesn't maintain the momentum. Part of that is due to the darker nature of this disc, with corporate paranoia and general sociopathology compounded by dense arrangments and muddy sound. There are things that appear on this disc, but show up on later releases to much better effect.

A rage surfaces on this record that is put to devastating effect on the next project (Drywall). Stan uses the device of instrumental prologues to good effect, but it isn't until "Anatomy" were the device really delivers. However, all this doesn't mean that there aren't some great songs to be found.

"(Mouthful Of Sand)/Roadblock" is a great tale of a small town law enforcement screw up. "Right Through You" is a nice mid-tempo ballad, but it's not until "Black Diamond" that Stan perfects its use. "Harry Truman" is a mid-tempo audio bio-pic of the power of the American Dream, with the darkside thrown in at no extra charge. "(Venus Is Hell)/Overlords" is a great, dark companion to Warren Zevon's "Transverse City" disc.

This disc won't make any converts, but it's a look at a brilliant artist making a very important transition. The ultimate result is that his next three REGULARLY distributed records would be some of the best music of the 90's, and the best of his career.