Bobby Conn
King For A Day

THE REVIEW

Bobby Conn is part of that endangered species known as the Rock Artist.

This forty-something from Chicago, on the scene for more than ten years, with four solo albums and one under the name Bobby Conn & The Glass Gypsies (Homeland ID_2174) to his credit, possesses that mad genius appeal that only Bowie, Mercury, Prince, and a few others had.

His music is a concentrate of influences that trying to sum them up under one label (glam?) is as difficult as it is pointless, suffice it to say that the three aforementioned names are a fairly frequent source of inspiration in his works. So, primarily rock, as popular and bold as necessary, excessively ambiguous, black and white together.

This year, his fifth solo album, "King for a Day," was released, one of the best releases of 2007 so far, according to the author. The opening track immediately leaves you stunned: "Vanitas" is an eight-minute hard-prog crimson-like suite, complete with a Latin choir, which starts lightly with the notes of violin and acoustic guitar, then explodes into an unexpected electric ride, and finally fades into a spacey finale, characterized by the distorted howls of the guitar and the looping birds of Floydian memory. This track alone is not enough to give you a precise idea of what you will listen to next. To complete the picture, the track that best summarizes a different aspect of this eccentric musician is "Love Let Me Down," a pop song that would make Jarvis Cocker green with envy and which reveals all of Conn's glam soul, romantic and wanton. Discover the rest on your own.

A multicolored, multilayered, multiform work, that can delight many but also disgust many others, simply because it was not conceived to please everyone. The spirit that birthed it is the rock spirit by definition, the spirit of making music just for the pleasure of doing it, of someone who does not care about trends and the neighbors. Which also makes you grimace at his thinly veiled self-indulgence (one point less), to which Bobby apparently responds: "Ecchisenefraga!", with his middle finger held high.

P.S.: An eponymous film directed by Iraqi Usama Alshaibi, a sort of unique video of all the tracks, is also supposed to be released. So far only a clip concerning the title track has been seen.