I’m not a big fan of 19th Century classical music. It’s a personality thing.
I’ve got enough of an analytical mind to prefer absolute music, such as the kind written by the 18th Century bigshots — Mozart, Hadyn and Beethoven. And of course, the dissonance of 20th Century music is far more interesting to me.
Music from the Romantic era, on the other hand, is the source from which overwrought movie soundtracks are borne. The stereotype of the temperamental artiste took root in the 19th Century, and the works from that era can get pretty bloated.
A quick scan of my classical collection pretty much eschews music from the 19th Century with one exception: Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 in E minor.
Back in 1992, I sometimes felt like the only person in the world immune to Annie Lennox’s solo debut album, Diva. Everyone I knew was singing its praises. It left me cold.
The album’s heavy reliance on synthesizers made the music stiff, and Lennox’s icy voice did nothing to dispel that chilly perception. The only track I liked was "Keep Young and Beautiful", and not surprisingly, it was the only track to require a live band.
I do, however, like "Love Song for a Vampire", a track she recorded for the movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula, directed by Francis Ford Copolla. Lennox included it as a b-side to the single, "Little Bird".
There’s a debate happening among recording engineers worldwide about the death of dynamic range. Over the course of 1990s, albums got louder and louder.
A co-worker of mine e-mailed a link to a news story about Bob Dylan’s rant against CDs. Dylan may have sounded like a curmudgeon, but he was essentially complaining about the same thing — albums are compressed within inches of their lives.
I offer the original studio recording of Chess as an extreme example of an album in dire need of "louder" remastering.
I told some friends of mine about the second departure of Andy Taylor from Duran Duran, and one of them pointed me to a thread on a message board (can’t find the link at the moment) with posts reacting to the news. The first few replies snarked that we can look forward to Thunder II.
Thunder was Taylor’s debut solo album after leaving Duran Duran in 1985. Despite the commercial success of the single "Take It Easy" — which he recorded for the forgettable movie American Anthem — the album tanked. Anything associated with Duran Duran around that time lost its cachet, as the teen-aged girls who catapulted the group to phenomenal success started to grow up.
Admit it — you’ve bought an album you’ve never listened to before because you liked the cover. Before the days of 30-second online previews and evil sharing networks, buying an album just because the cover looked cool was a gamble. Oftentimes, it was a gamble I ended up losing, but once in a while, I would strike some gold.
I was intrigued by the cover All About Eve’s Scarlet and Other Stories, so I asked the guy behind the counter at the record store whether he had heard of the band. He did one better, opened up a copy of the album and played it right there. I liked what I heard and bought it. On my limited allowance, Scarlet and Other Stories ended up being a favorite of mine in 1989.
Music writers are prone to hyperbole when describing such concepts as "greatest rock song of all time" or "best album in the history of rock ‘n’ roll", and inevitably, their scope is limited to music produced in the US or UK. What about the rest of the world?
Well, it’s a pretty big place to cover, and who has time to explore an entire planet’s worth of music? As prone to hyperbole as I would like to be, I just can’t claim that AJICO’s "Hadoo" is one of the greatest rock songs of all time.
I can say, however, it’s one of my favorite songs, and it certainly stands up with the best rock music has to offer.
I was intrigued when I saw "I Know What Boys Like" included in the track listing for ACO’s 2006 mini-album, mask. When I heard a 30-second excerpt of the track, I couldn’t wait to hear the whole thing.
Although considered a one-hit wonder, The Waitresses recorded two of the smartest post-punk albums of the era. Main songwriter Chris Butler approached his songs like a theater composer. (He even admitted wanting to write a musical in the liner notes for the 1990 compilation, The Best of Waitresses.) He spun long yarns with sharp wit, made all the more sassy by singer Patty Donahue.
"I Know What Boys Like" and "Christmas Wrapping" are pretty much the Waitresses’ legacy, but even those songs are more literary than most pop confections.
Patty Griffin’s 1,000 Kisses was one of my favorite albums of 2002, and I couldn’t quite warm up to 2004’s Impossible Dream. So I’m no stranger to her music.
Living with Ghosts is one of those albums that seemed to be referred to in hushed reverence, so I thought I’d give it a shot. I wasn’t expecting a demo tape.
Had I done my research, I probably would have found out. Griffin recorded her debut album for A&M Records with producer Nile Rodgers. The label didn’t like it, and Griffin wasn’t comfortable with it either. So instead, she re-recorded the vocals on her demo and released it as her debut.
"Modern classical music" has always confounded me as a term. How can it be "classical" (in the adjectival sense) and "modern" at the same time? Alternatives have been proposed — I rather like "art music" myself, but it still has an elitist undertone to it — but I think this is a case where semantics must remain imprecise.
I’ve been listening to some classical music recently. One collection really does qualify as "classical". The others were borne from that tradition.
Around the time I ran across ACO’s cover of Kate Bush’s "This Woman’s Work", an R&B artist named Maxwell released his own version of the song. It was the most excruciating interpretation I’d ever heard.
Singing in a painfully grating falsetto, Maxwell attempted to imbue soul into a song that, by its sparseness, had plenty of. He ended up turning it into a sentimental showcase of caterwaul.
It had me running and screaming back to ACO’s version.