For the last five years, UA has set her muse loose to do pretty much anything it wanted. Children’s music? Check. Covers with a jazz trio? Check. Avant-garde big band? Check.
These explorations yielded adventurous results, and it was easy to admire the gumption behind the drive. It wasn’t necessarily music you could like, but YMMV, of course.
Golden green shows the pendulum swinging back, with UA delivering some of her best pop music in years, at the same time not surrendering the eclecticism she’s forged on the last few albums.
John Corigliano has an Oscar and a number of composition prizes under his belt. His father was a renowned concertmaster for the New York Philharmonic. So he’s got some serious cred in classical music circles.
And yet the First Edition reissue of orchestral works performed by the Louisville Orchestra didn’t seem all that impressive. Perhaps the fact I was listening to this disc as well as First Edition’s reissues of Ellen Taaffe Zwilich and George Crumb colored my perception. Corigliano’s set of works doesn’t possess the timbral adventurousness of Crumb or the lean expressiveness of Zwilich.
But perhaps history plays a role as well. The very first Corigliano piece I listened to was his Symphony No. 1, a work inspired by the NAMES Project AIDS quilt. The piece won a Grammy Award for best contemporary composition, and it’s tough not to feel the anguish, anger and darkness of the piece.
The works on the First Edition release feel quaint by comparison.
Composers in the classical tradition — even living ones — aren’t immune to fashion. Maybe they don’t cycle as quickly as their pop music counterparts, but any study of music history follows the "trends" that came into — and out of — favor with composers and audiences of the time.
Just as Nirvana spawned its share of imitators, so too did Ludwig van Beethoven. And just as the White Stripes was called neo-garage and Eryka Badu neo-soul, Igor Stravinsky wasn’t above dabbling in neo-classical, and serialism? Oh, so stylish in the post-war years.
The labels are still getting thrown today — minimalism, post-minimalism, post-classicism, neo-Romanticism, totalism. Ellen Taaffe Zwilich doesn’t follow any "-isms", so states the liner notes from the First Edition reissue of orchestral works performed by the Louisville Symphony. Rather, her works concentrate on the rigorous development of motifs. If I were so lazy, I’d call that neo-Hadynism.
Do not assume you will be adventurous with your music tastes forever. Ten to twenty years from now, the bands you love today will be recycled by so-called new bands, and you too will voice the refrain, "I liked it better the first time around."
I thought I would welcome an ’80s revival. I thought it would be nice to see bands I grew up with exert influence on bands coming up. I was wrong. I liked Franz Ferdinand better when they were called Gang of Four. The title of Duran Duran’s 2004 album was supposed to be Astronaut, not Hot Fuss.
So thank your dieties for Voxtrot — a band that sounds like the ’80s without having to rip off the decade wholesale.
I’ve compared Levi Kreis to Onitsuka Chihiro numerous times, but like any such comparison, it’s not exact.
Kreis makes his R&B influences plainly known, while Onitsuka draws more from the Carole King school of balladry. When either artist cuts loose from the confines of the piano ballad, the results are strikingly different.
But within the context of the piano, their similarities are more perceptual than musical. In plainspeak, I don’t usually like this kind of stuff, but I like it far more when they play it.
Kreis’ first album, One of the Ones, is pretty much him and the piano. For such limited instrumentation, the album is incredibly expressive.
I’d seen the comparisons between toddle and the Breeders, but when the Tabuchi Hisako-led project first debuted, I focused more on how it related to bloodthirsty butchers and Number Girl. Now that toddle has a second album under its belt, it’s easier to evaluate the group on its own terms. And toddle sounds like … the Breeders.
The butchers’ Yoshimura Hideki — who is also now married to Tabuchi — once again serves as producer, and toddle’s second album, Dawn Praise the World, has a beefier, cleaner sound. Studio technology is a wonderful thing, and the heavy processing on Tabuchi voice makes me question how much she’s improved as a singer.
At the same time, it’s difficult to find much fault with the sweetness of her overdubbed harmonies. They just sound so nice! They also figure very prominently on the butchers’ latest album, Guitarist wo Korosanaide, where they provide a sharp contrast to Yoshimura’s monotone wail.
There’s some interesting discussion happening over at the Keikaku message boards about bloodthirsty butchers. Some folks have observed the addition of Number Girl guitarist Tabuchi Hisako has coincided with a wane in the quality of the band’s albums.
It’s an observation I’ve been reluctant to acknowledge myself. Green on Red, the first butchers release to feature Tabuchi, didn’t seem to be the kind of live album I’d picture out of the group, while birdy, her first appearance on a studio album, tended to drag. But banging the drum found the band being adventurous, and the latest album, Guitarist wo Korosanaide, is confounding if not enjoyable.
At the same time, the post-Tabuchi work doesn’t grab the way yamane or Kouya ni Okeru bloodthirsty butchers do.
Guitarist wo Korosanaide has something of a strange identity crisis. There’s a brashness comparable to the band’s early work, but with Tabuchi contributing more backing vocals, it’s imbued with an unprecedented sunniness.
How can happiness sound so angry? Or angst sound so bright?
The stereotype dictates gay people are tastemakers and pioneers when it comes to fashion, art and culture. But rock ‘n’ roll is a straight man’s club, which is why I have this terrible assumption that only lesbians are best suited for the task.
When Sony announced it would form a label that would sign only gay-identified artists, the measure of my skepticism burst any indicator. Music with a Twist aims to feature gay artists with potential mass appeal, while also releasing compilations geared for gay audiences, so says the press release scuttlebutt. If my abbreviated dating history serves as any reference, that’s going to result in a lot of bad music.
(And somehow I miraculous exempt myself from such criteria. Funny.)
Revolutions is the first sampling of what the label may produce. Oddly enough, only two artists on the compilation, the Gossip and Kirsten Price, have actually signed with the label. Everyone else seems to have licensed their content. Given the major label backing, the collection itself leans heavily to commercial music. The indie gays won’t find their Grizzly Bear, Xiu Xiu or Sleater-Kinney.
The 2006 Broadway cast recording of Stephen Sondheim’s Company is the first time I’ve listened to the score. I have no knowledge of the original cast recording from 1970, so I can’t make a comparison.
That also means I’m listening to this score with no preconceived notions, and for a play set 37 years ago, it’s aged remarkably well. The characters of the show have bittersweet attitudes toward relationships and marriage, and it feels as topical today as it probably did back then. (The show opened two years before I was born.)
Company focuses on a guy named Robert, who’s celebrating his 35 birthday. All of his friends are coupled or married, and the show follows his interactions with them. Some couples are in a rut, one couple is about to tie the knot, another is untying theirs. All of them needle Robert about his inability to commit, while he too probes the question of whether commitment is all that it’s cracked up to be.
Director John Doyle took the same approach as his 2005 revival of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd — the actors doubled as the orchestra, with the set kept to a bare minimum. Although the show got good reviews and won a Tony Award for Best Revival, it closed in July 2007. Good thing there’s a cast recording.
When I get productive in my home studio, I usually work in month-long bouts. I’ll work and work and work, then reach a stopping point where I go back to juggling other stuff. But moving into a new apartment where I’ve got an entire room dedicated to the home studio has made it difficult to tear away. It’s hard to post to a music blog when the only thing I’m listening to is … myself.
So here’s a stop-gap entry to give this site the remotest flicker of life. Whenever I post a "One-Sentence Reviews" entry, they inevitably cover what’s on my Winamp playlist. So I’m just going to redub it "On the Playlist". Here’s the stuff I’m actually kind of not listening to at the moment.