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.
Utada Hikaru is scheduled to release a new single, "HEART STATION/Stay Gold", on Feb. 20, 2008, so says Oops! Music. "Stay Gold" was used as the commercial music for Kaou Hair Care. Her official site also mentions that a new album is arriving in the spring. I didn’t know this tidbit, but Utada is also featured on a single by American R&B singer Ne-Yo, titled "Do You".
I don’t usually start paying attention to the year in music till it reaches the second quarter. The release schedule usually needs three months before it starts churning out notable releases. It seems on this side of the Pacific Ocean, that pattern pretty much holds true.
On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, the first quarter of 2008 is quite packed, not so much with big names but with names familiar to readers of this site. I’m not sure the Hamasaki Ayumi and Utada Hikaru fans would care about comebacks from Kicell and Oblivion Dust, but I’m thinking those are going to be my first purchases of the new year.
No, I am not a fan of Duran Duran’s latest album, and the notion that a more organic work was shelved on the count of Andy Taylor’s departure makes me curious. But in a Pitchfork interview with bassist John Taylor, he mentions how he’s been listening to a lot of 20th Century classical music. Why? He’s reading The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross.
OK. John Taylor has definitely scored Brownie points in my book.
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.
Of all the artists I would never imagine sounding "more Jesus and Mary Chain than the Jesus and Mary Chain", it would be the Magnetic Fields. But that’s exactly what the Fields’ headmaster Stephin Merritt promises with the band’s new album, Distortion, coming out on Jan. 15, 2008. The Nonesuch blog mentions an article in Uncut which previews the album. I like the Magnetic Fields, and for a time, I bought into the 69 Love Songs hype. Honestly, that album doesn’t have a very good shelf life, and I’m not curious enough to explore the band’s catalog. This album, however, sounds intriguing.
The Nonesuch blog has been extraordinarily chatty this fall. In September, the blog had all of two posts. The following month, the floodgates opened. Sadly, I’m not terribly interested in a lot of the stuff that’s been on Nonesuch’s recent release schedule.
But I like the fact the blog seems a lot more communicative. Before last month, it just seemed to exist for the sake of being some sort of web presence.
If there’s anything interesting hitting stores in December, I’m deferring it for the Favorite Edition list of 2008. I’ve settled on my favorite 10 albums of the year.
For me personally, 2007 is the year classical music exerted its strongest influence in a long time. When I was in college, I had a healthy diet of classical music since it was part of my curriculum. After college, classical was sidelined by indie rock and Japanese music.
In the past, my disposable income — what little there was and is — determined how I prioritized my listening habits. I could only listen to what I could buy, and I wanted to make sure those purchases mattered. Then the one-two punch of digital audio and the Internet made music extremely portable, and the barrier to access was lowered dramatically.
So I’ve made room for a lot of catalog, music I didn’t get a chance to check out at the time it was released. And classical — I could finally play catch up with all the pieces I’ve been meaning to listen to.
Of course, too much choice makes the bell curve of appeal all that more severe. In other words, things that get my attention have to be really good to emerge from all the ways I can get music. It’s almost to the point where 10 spots is actually too many.
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.
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."