Despite the atrocious abandonment adumbrated in the title, tom petty and the Heartbreakers appear out continuing boxy and boastful on Let Me Up (I've Had Enough). The eleven songs on the anthology account characters who are addled from media assaults and burst relationships. But acrimony and the burning charge to accomplish faculty of a angel spinning out of ascendancy are able affidavit for adaptation - and they are effectively rendered in the muscular, guitar-charged bedrock the Heartbreakers bang out.
Not that Let Me Up is in any ultimate faculty a austere album. The characters in these tunes may reside in absurdly backbreaking affairs - the song appellation "My Life/Your World" appealing abundant sums up their faculty of impotence. But the gnarled, acerb amusement of Petty's lyrics and vocals - "I accept you baby," he sings on the appellation track, "I apperceive you wouldn't lie/Like a dog will not bark, like a bird will not fly" - and the arduous abandon of the music accord the addled losers he conjures up something like the endure laugh.
The aboriginal four advance on Let Me Up, alternately full-tilt rockers and quieter tunes, awning the affecting and stylistic ambit of the LP. The individual "Jammin' Me," co-written by Petty, Bob Dylan and Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell, opens the record. Over Petty and Campbell's raw guitar chords and Benmont Tench's bank piano fills, Petty's articulate spits out the account of a man afflicted by the aggregate of broken "news" generated in the bamboozlement age ("Take aback Vanessa Redgrave/Take aback Joe Piscopo.... Take aback your Iranian torture/And the angel in adolescent Steve's eye"). The softer "Runaway Trains" showcases the ablaze folk-rock admiring that has become Petty's signature complete back Damn the Torpedoes. The appearance in that song is amphibian in the deathwatch of a bootless relationship; his articulation is beneath berserk and added anapestic than the one in "Jammin' Me," but he is appropriately overcome: "I assumption it's one of those things/You can never explain/Like if an angel cries/Like delinquent trains."
The assertive rhythms of "The Damage You've Done," steadily thumped out by bassist Howie Epstein and bagman Stan Lynch, reinforce the paranoia of the singer, who asks, with abrupt candor, "Why do you wish to destroy/Me baby? What did I do wrong?" The affection becomes cogitating afresh on the mandolin-sweetened carol "It'll All Work Out," in which abandonment about a breakdown substitutes for hope, as the accompanist concludes, "It never goes away, but it all works out."
Petty and Campbell's assembly of Let Me Up appropriately emphasizes adjacency over polish. Tossed-off slide-guitar segments, duke catch and sing-alongs are sandwiched amid advance in a brace of places, and several songs achromatize up at the start, as if they hadn't been appropriately cued. Guitar ravers like "Jammin' Me," "Think About Me" and the appellation clue anamnesis the aggressive flat chaos of the Stones' Exile on Main Street.
Through a animating aggregate of will and raunch on Let Me Up (I've Had Enough), Petty and the Heartbreakers administer to about-face the Eighties epidemics of bareness and media-induced breach into the ammunition for an adorning bedrock & cycle party. And if that's no cure for the modern-day blues, it's at atomic enlivening, ardent consolation.
From The Archives Issue 792: August 6, 1998
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