Neil Diamond: Beautiful Noise : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

In Beautiful Noise, Neil Diamond recollects his days as a scuffling young Tin Pan Alley writer. Though the songs are better crafted than those on Serenade, there remains an enormous disparity between Diamond's sentimental three-chord songs and their portentous interpretations. While Diamond has a naturally theatrical baritone, he mires himself in the pose of a gauche, swashbuckling ham, using it to attack everything as though he were Charlton Heston creating "The Star-Spangled Banner." If "Beautiful Noise," "Jungletime," and especially "Street Life" and "Surviving the Life" begin to evoke New York clamor and hustle, none conjures the feelings Diamond wants nearly as well as the classic score for West Side Story did. Still, these songs contain the seeds for a possible Broadway revue. And the production by the Band's Robbie Robertson (of all people) manages to be theatrical but not too overbearing.

Diamond's ballads "Lady-Oh," "If You Know What I Mean," "Signs" and "Home Is a Wounded Heart" repeat the formulas of the earlier hits "Holly Holy," "I Am .. I Said" and "Longfellow Serenade." Here, Diamond's flowery clichés and stentorian declamations are underscored with lavish orchestration in an attempt to create pop record equivalents of turn-of-the-century concert chestnuts like "None but the Lonely Heart" and "Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life." Though Diamond's redundant musical ideas make these songs far less substantial than most of the standard concert song repertoire, it is a tribute to his oratorical skill that they work as dramatic, if corny, pop ballads.