With her previous album, irony, ACO had gone so far beyond the electronica-pop of Material and absolute ego, she would have fallen off a cliff if she went further.
So on the mini-album mask — 2 1/2 years to record six songs? — she pulls herself back into the world of beats and melodies.
Call it a creative adjustment, kind of like the market corrections on Wall Street.
And personally, I’m glad she’s brought herself down to earth.
It didn’t seem possible that Sasagawa Miwa could get any more introspective, but she does.
Yoake, her third studio album, starts off softly and never really rises to a boisterous level. At least, not in the same manner as some of her more extroverted moments on previous albums.
It’s that steady mood that gives the album a more coherent feel, even when some dead spots threaten to derail its pace.
There was a time when Mukai Shuutoku wasn’t the force of avant-garde nature he is today.
Wrapping up a reissue campaign commemorating what would have been the band’s 10th anniversary, Omoide In My Head 4 ~(Chin) NG & Rare Tracks~ brings together the flotsam and jetsom of Number Girl’s output.
Compilation tracks, demos, live tracks — the two-disc set charts the development of Mukai’s muse in more detail than Omoide In My Head 1 ~Best & B-Sides~.
When the Carpenters were listed as an influence on Hem’s previous album, Eveningland, I braced myself for a sophomore slump.
The band’s debut album, Rabbit Songs, was my favorite album of 2002, and it was so good, I instantly wanted a second album. Eveningland arrived, and I found myself … not as mesmerized.
(Reviews for both albums are available at archive.musicwhore.org.)
When news came down that No Word from Tom would contain outtakes, live recordings and b-sides, I thought it would be scattershot. As it turned out, the album’s clarity is threaded by its adventurous choices.
It was a bold move for Shiina Ringo to form a band after a successful solo career. The standard operating procedure is to leave a band to go solo.
But there was a sense Shiina wasn’t totally ready for the leap to team player.
Tokyo Jihen’s debut album, Kyooiku, featured some dazzling performances, but it seemed the songs Shiina wrote for the album weren’t the right ones for this set of players.
Kyooiku might have sounded great with Gyakutai Glycogen (her touring band from 2000) or Hatsuiku Status (a one-off club band featuring members of Number Girl and DMBQ). But not with Tokyo Jihen.
With the ensemble’s second album, Shiina seems more comfortable as a member of a group, and Otona shows it.
I love Mukai Shuutoku for who he is. He is not, however, John Zorn.
ZAZEN BOYS’ third eponymous album brings the band back to the inscrutible improvisation that made its first album a chore. In fact, ZAZEN BOYS III goes further.
Mukai has pretty much abandoned any minimum requirement of songcraft. Opening track "Sugar Man" sets the tone — it starts with a menancing riff but quickly dissolves into a mess of spoken word, scratchy guitars and disjointed rhythms.
It’s a racket in the worst sense of the word.
One of the hidden extras on Number Girl’s first DVD release, Sawayaka na Enesou, is video footage of guitarist Tabuchi Hisako singing “Mappurima Girl”.
It’s a performance she reprises during the career-capping Number Girl film. Karaoke makes anyone sound reasonable good, and in those clips, she sounds all right.
It’s a different story for I dedicate D chord, the debut album by toddle, which Tabuchi formed in 2003. There, she sings slightly off-key, sounding earnest and bittersweet.
Sigur Rós has always struck me as a band I could probably like, but my exposure to them has always been at inopportune times.
I was under the mistaken impression the band’s third album, () (I like to call it Two Hot Dogs Facing Each Other), would be the kind of subtle ethereal as Wayne Horvitz’s 4+1 Ensemble.
It wasn’t, and I returned the disc to Waterloo Records when I discovered a debilitating scratch on it.
Then I listened to Takk …, and when I heard the driving conclusion of “Glosoli”, I thought, “Huh. Just like mono and Explosions in the Sky”.
Takk … got under my skin, and before I knew it, Sigur Rós had me.
After achieving crticial and commercial accolades for 1985’s Hounds of Love, Kate Bush released two albums not considered her most shining moments — The Sensual World in 1989 and The Red shoes in 1993.
And then she recorded nothing else for 12 years.
In 2005, Bush re-emerged with Aerial, an album quite out-of-step with anything happening in popular music at the moment.
But it makes me curious — what would have happened if more than decade hadn’t passed between releases?
It’s been nearly 20 years since Madonna commandeered the imperative, “Shut up and dance”.
It’s an imperative Madonna at times has lost sight of herself.
2003’s American Life was described by its performer as an “angry” album. It can also be described as scattershot and cold. I can’t see how she ever thought Mirwais would add any value to her work.
For her eleventh album, Confessions on a Dance Floor, Madonna recorded with her touring music director, DJ Stuart Townsend, a.k.a. Les Rhythmes Digitales, in his home studio.
The result is one her strongest, most focused albums in years.