Neil Gaiman decided he didn’t want to be a movie critic for the rest of his life when, after watching a particular assignment, he realized he would never get those two hours back. I could spend my time spinning some albums in the hope that something clicks, but I kind of don’t want to give away those stretches of 30 to 50 minutes either.
So onto the slush pile these titles go ….
The 50th anniversary of the death of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius happened back in Sept. 2007. I’d heard of Sibelius for years — I even own the music notation software bearing his name — but I hadn’t really listened to his music. Tom Service finally got me curious when he wrote an article for the Guardian positing why the composer wrote no major works in the final 30 years of his life. Even Alex Ross devoted an entire chapter of The Rest Is Noise to Sibelius, which also appeared as a stand-alone column in the New Yorker.
So I downloaded performances of Sibelius’ last major works from eMusic: the Symphones Nos. 6 and 7 and the Tapiola Suite. I usually don’t consciously listen to classical works, just so I can get a sense of a structure if it comes through in the background. With Sibelius, that structure came through immediately.
Sibelius is a figure displaced in time. He was born when Richard Wagner and Franz Listz were the top composers of the day, and he died just as rock ‘n’ roll established its foothold in the public consciousness. (Here’s a handy chart.) He stuck with Romantic-era conventions when other composers were deconstructing the very elements of music, and at one point, he was called "the worst composer in the world". Modern-day critics, however, find an undercurrent of radicalism in his works.
I’d wager to say part of that radicalism is the clarity and effortlessness of Sibelius’ music. It doesn’t take very many repeated listenings to get a sense of Sibelius. Lush as his orchestrations may be, they’re not dense, and the themes aren’t obfuscated by a lot of excess material. When other composers were seeking larger ensembles and more complex forms, Sibelius sought economy. The one-movement Seventh Symphony clocks in at 20 minutes, a quarter of the length of Gustav Mahler’s Seventh Symphony.
The first moment I heard a bass line fart on a Duran Duran album, I had to declare it "teh SUCK". In the first few minutes of listening to Red Carpet Massacre, I could barely recognize a band of whom I’m still an ardent fan (on some nebulous level.)
Yes, that was certainly Simon Le Bon’s voice coming out of the speakers, and yes, that was John Taylor’s singular fingering on the bass guitar there. Some hint of Nick Rhodes seemed to pop up occasionally with a glittery keyboard pad here and there. Roger Taylor? I think he got buried under a pile of drum machines.
Perhaps, yes, perhaps there is a Duran Duran album lurking somewhere beneath the hip-hop and R&B veneer of Red Carpet Massacre. Something in the chord progressions or the melodies, but wherever it is, producers Nate "Danja" Hills, Timbaland and Justin Timberlake sure couldn’t find it.
In the press, Duran Duran members have talked up a big game of wanting to remain relevant, while also disclaiming the historic pop trappings of the band as an accidental side effect. (We didn’t mean to become teen idols!) It sounds like they’re hedging their bets. They’re reassuring long-time fans who also perceive Duran Duran as an art project, while attempting to court the kids of the soccer moms who listened to them 20 years ago.
Good luck with that.
The result is a Duran Duran album that attempts to keep up instead of a Duran Duran album that establishes the pace.
Honestly, I’m not sure if the remastered sound is all that apparent, and I do love the convenience of having this album’s b-sides on one disc.
But the one thing for which I’m most thankful is the restoration of the cover art.
When The Joshua Tree was first released on CD in the late ’80s, it was housed in a longbox, which was well-suited to the odd panoramic shot of the American desert with the band off-center. It’s perhaps one of photographer Anton Corbijn’s most emblematic pictures of U2.
Back then, cover designers took liberties with the entire package — the image on the longbox wasn’t necessarily the cover shot in the jewel case. When longboxes were phased out in 1993, that totality was pretty much thrown out. As a result, the CD edition of The Joshua Tree featured a blurry facsimile of that classic photo.
It’s taken 14 years to correct that mistake. The 20th anniversary edition of The Joshua Tree presents the cover art as it should be.
Sure, but what about the rest of the reissue?
In the run-up to what would have been Onitsuka Chihiro’s fourth album for EMI Japan, there was a sense that the singer-songwriter was running out of steam. Onitsuka achieved fame by rehashing Carole King, and it was a formula her handlers would have liked to milk for years to come.
But as abruptly as she reached stardom, Onitsuka took drastic steps. She left both her management and EMI Japan in 2002. A short time with Sony’s management resulted in a move to a larger label, Universal, and a 2004 single, "Sodatsu Zassou". But a comeback wasn’t in the cards. She put the skids on her career again and withdrew from the pop machinery for another three years.
When she debuted, Onitsuka’s press bragged how she wrote 60 songs after moving to Tokyo to pursue a music career. The press before the release of LAS VEGAS, her first album for Universal, notes how she wrote only 10 during her hiatus.
The message is clear: Onitsuka Chihiro is taking her time. She is not to be rushed.
It’s an encouraging development, and one that seems far more in keeping with a performer as inwardly focused as Onitsuka. There’s just a catch: she still isn’t much of an adventurous writer.
Sacha Sacket has one of those phone book/grocery list voices — he can sing a [phone book/grocery list] and it would sound … yeah, you’ve read that comparison before.
Sacket’s previous album, Shadowed, found him diving head-long into electronic effects. It couldn’t be described in any of the usual dance music terms, since the foundation for his songs is the poignant piano ballad. What resulted was a distinct work, moody and atmospheric without getting excessively maudlin or pretentious about it.
As wonderful as that exploration of synthetic sound was, there was always a nagging suspicion that Sacket would sound great in a live setting. Thankfully, that’s what he offers with Lovers and Leaders. The electronics have been drastically cut to make room for more guitars and fewer drum machines.
I don’t know how it happened, but it’s the reality of our surroundings: the chasm between high and low art is the size of a canyon. Eh, maybe I’m exaggerating, but for some reason, I can’t shake this habit of separating the two, even though I try to practice a categorical imperative to ignore musical categories.
When I was a would-be composition student back in the early ’90s, the music department of my college made that separation stark. Classical only, please — learn that demon pop music on your own time. My boo-hoo story: it was a composition professor who ultimately turned me off to pursuing composition.
OK. Get to the Nico Muhly review.
Nico Muhly doesn’t work under such notions. The canyon I was trained to see is little more than a pothole to him, if even that much. Muhly’s résumé includes premieres by orchestras and conducting gigs with Anthony and the Johnsons and Björk. He composes works that could thrill the most analytical of music theory masters and appeal to indie rock fans devoted to their Godspeed You! Black Emperor or Sigur Rós.
The liner notes make a big deal of his "vocabulary", and why not? The works on his debut album, Speaks Volumes, feel free of dogma. Yes, echoes of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Arvö Pärt and John Tavener can be heard in his music, but if you’ve never heard anything from Reich, Glass, Pärt or Tavener, it sounds like the karaoke tracks of an album Björk isn’t weird enough to record.
My friend Jette started this … "initiative" in 2000 to write everyday in the month of December as a holiday gift to her readers. She got a few people to do the same, and now seven years later, Holidailies attracts hundreds of participants. It’s not the phenomenon of, say, NaNoWriMo, but both ideas pretty much came together at the same time.
I’ve participated in Holidailies before but not with this site. I could probably stretch out the backlog of reviews for an entire month, but that kind of commitment can really interfere when other things are happening. I still have a bunch of Eponymous 4 stuff I’m trying to get done, and these days, the studio trumps the web sites every time.
So instead, I’ll resort to the dreaded capsule reviews, that nether world between a one-sentence impression and a full-blown entry. Here’s what I might have written about had I participated in Holidailies this year.
There are too many vectors by which to determine the success of this album. How does it compare to other Tokyo Jihen albums? How does it compare to the solo work of Shiina Ringo? Does Tokyo Jihen sound better when Shiina takes complete control of the songwriting? Or do the songwriting contributions of the band’s remaining members give a much-needed jolt to the Ringo enterprise?
Regardless of listener reaction, Goraku comes at an important time in the band’s life. The debut, Kyouiku, served as a transition for Shiina Ringo, solo artist, to become Shiina Ringo, band member. The follow-up, Otona, could be considered Tokyo Jihen’s true debut, with the quintet solidifying its sound and Shiina catering her writing specifically to her cohorts’ strengths.
Goraku, then, finds the band asserting itself as, well, a band, with creative duties spread among its members. By becoming more of a unit, Tokyo Jihen’s members are once again reinventing the whole. It’s the typical career arc of an ensemble in reverse.
But the question remains — is Goraku any good?
Between the Austin Record Convention, the Waterloo Records storewide sale, an eMusic quota and a fall release schedule, I’ve got a lot of stuff on my playlist right now. If anything, these playlist entries are a bit misleading because a lot of titles from previous entries are still in rotation. I mentioned the complete Bartók string quartets a while back — it’s still on the playlist.
When the backlog accumulates, it’s tough to give everything a fair shake. It’s even tougher when nothing stands out so distinctly as to clarify where the cruft is. So I keep everything and let inertia determine what falls through the cracks. In other words, "Huh. Haven’t really listened to that in a long time, and I’m not feeling much of a compelling need to. Must not be very good."
Nothing has really reached that point either.