"Love Rears Its Ugly Head"

This is miraculous: a seething, boiling cauldron of about five different styles with a stinging lyric that just shoves you back into your seat and demands to be heard. What can we call this? Funk/rock/metal/soul? It's got the lot. Living Colour seem perfectly at ease straddling the genres, easing from one style to the other, throwing down a fearsome backbeat and constructing a wall of thudding guitar, while the lyric just punctures one balloon after another: "I always thought our relationship was cool/You played the role of having sense/I always played the fool/Now something’s different/I don’t know the reason why/Whenever we separate/I almost want to cry." And the reason? "Oh no, please not that again/Love rears up its ugly head." Another slice of everyday life, framed and hung at exactly the right spot on our wall, accusing, knowing, ironic. Vernon Reid's voice hangs above the song like a foghorn, a hog-caller, a nervous, funky swain, half-chuckling at his own perceived weakness, while the band weaves back and forth from funk to metal flame-out. This is clever, clever stuff.