Parade Review

The orchestration here is the finest work anyone did on his behalf, arranged by an outside collaborator and woven so tightly into the band tracks that the joins vanish. Christopher Tracy's Parade opens the album with strings and percussion and no obvious verse, and the first four songs run together as one continuous piece. Kiss is the enormous one, and it is worth remembering how little is on it: a scratchy guitar, a drum machine, a falsetto, no bass at all.

Girls and Boys is fizzing. Mountains is a huge sounding single that never went where it deserved. Then side two loosens. Do U Lie is a piece of French cabaret that charms and evaporates, Anotherloverholenyohead is filler, and the record only recovers with Sometimes It Snows in April, a piano and voice elegy that is one of the most affecting things he recorded. Beautifully made and structurally uneven, which is the fairest thing to say about most soundtracks.