hey willpower’s debut, Dance EP, was one of my favorite eMusic downloads of 2007. Imperial Teen guitarist Will Schwartz and musical partner Tomo channel a sincere love for radio pop into four songs devoid of hipster irony. These guys really do love their Rhianna.
P.D.A. was released in the UK in 2006, but it saw a stateside release in 2008. All four tracks of Dance EP appear on the album, which is handy since the EP itself doesn’t seem to be available in stores any more.
P.D.A. is perhaps the first album in a long time to make me smile.
Really — I tried to get into 69 Love Songs. I was impressed as everyone else that one guy would try write, record and essentially perform three hours of love songs, pared down from the original 100 planned.
At the very least, such an effort ought to be commended. Stephin Merritt wasn’t trying to go for some three-disc prog rock concept album — he just wanted to write 69 love songs.
Reviewers at the time thought the entire set was just pristine, but over time, I’ve found otherwise. I no longer have the albums in my collection because I only ever found about 23 of them very likable.
And thus established my relationship with the Magnetic Fields — a band upon whom I like to check from time to time, but one whose work I don’t actually whip myself into a frenzy to follow. Merritt comes up with some really clever ideas, such as writing songs where all the titles begin with the letter "I". But sometimes, the follow-through is less compelling than the concept, as was the case with said album i, the band’s first for Nonesuch.
Distortion promised an album "more Jesus and Mary Chain than the Jesus and Mary Chain". I’ve had only scant exposure to the Jesus and Mary Chain, so I don’t know how well Merritt keeps his promise. This time, I’m inclined to think the Magnetic Fields deliver the goods.
Something about Ari Gold’s second album, Space Under Sun, rubbed me the wrong way. His self-titled debut felt raw, the proverbial diamond in the rough, but the slick follow-up didn’t quite live up to the promise of that debut.
Before the release of Gold’s third album, Transport Systems, I went back to Space Under Sun to figure out why it didn’t appeal to me. I found the answer in two consecutive tracks at the midpoint of the album — "Bashert" and "He’s On My Team".
The former is a sickly sweet ballad too plainspoken to be very poetic, and the latter is stagey novelty song too limited by its antics to even be funny. The rest of the album, however, actually sounded all right.
Gimmicks backfire if they’re not handled carefully, and Gold’s weakness are tracks that mishandles the gimmick. Transport Systems nearly skirts that peril — "nearly" because a cover of Human League’s "Human" embellishes the original with additional (read: unnecessary) material.
Dude — "Human" was a great song to begin with. It needs no addition. Would you paint a beret on the Mona Lisa? Gold salvages the alleged cover by singing the song’s chorus as is, but if he stuck to the original, he would have had a great encore.
Thankfully, it’s the only misstep on a focused, ambitious album, perhaps Gold’s best to date.
Ex-Boyfriends’ first album, Dear John, has such a contemporary sound — that’s a euphemistic way of saying it’s, like, totally in with the emo kids right now — it feels like it could date fairly easily.
The immediately likable hooks and the brash energy give Dear John a fighting chance at endurance, but there’s no betting on fashion. And Dear John is tres indie fashion.
In With, the band’s follow-up, shows definite signs of maturity. It’s not so quick to reveal its strengths, and its amiability can only be appreciated with multiple listens. What it lacks in quick gratification, it makes up for in long-term rewards.
Reviewing popular music is easy, especially when the people who write the music also perform it. Classical music, on the other hand, is more about interpretation, since the repertoire in question has already been thoroughly vetted. So it can be somewhat problematic when reviewing a piece that’s relatively new and doesn’t have very many recordings.
The only recording of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians I’ve so far heard is the 1998 performance by Reich’s own ensemble on Nonesuch. The piece itself has been recorded only five times, twice by Reich. The Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble is the latest ensemble to give this landmark piece a shot.
The story of the Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble is something a Cinderella tale. The ensemble’s director, Bill Ryan, programmed a performance of Music for 18 Musicians to commemorate Reich’s 70th birthday. Sensing the group of college musicians (and one volunteer) could successfully pull it off, he brought five of the group’s members to New York City, where the "Reich @ 70" festival was under way.
Subsequently inspired by the trip, the ensemble’s performance in November 2006 was impressive enough to garner an invitation to the Bang on a Can marathon in June 2007. Ryan also sent a demo of the rehearsals to Innova Recordings, which recorded the group in January 2007.
At the end of his book The Rest of Noise, author Alex Ross describes a "great fusion" where "intelligent pop artists and extroverted composers speak … the same language." He demonstrates the point by comparing Björk with Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov.
If you were to listen blind to Björk’s "An Echo, A Stain," in which the singer declaims fragmentary melodies against a soft cluster of choral voices, and then move on to Osvaldo Golijov’s song cyble Ayre, where puslating dance beats underpin multi-ethnic songs of Moorish Spain, you might conclude that Björk’s was the classical composition and Golijov’s was something else.
With Oceana, my first reaction to the piece was pretty quick: Finally! The follow-up to Spiritchaser Dead Can Dance never recorded!
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.
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.