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Music Mini-Reviews, and Reminder
Sep. 10th, 2008 08:51 amReminder: Urnash Tarot at Space 242 tonight from 6:30 to 8:00 PM. Afterwards I will attempt to drag people to Mary Chung's in Central for dinner. My plan to make a Tarot webapp for the Urnash Tarot has been sidetracked by massive quantities of homework. I may un-sidetrack it later once I have gotten ahead of work...
OK, now for those of you who aren't local or don't care about Tarot and are thinking "Oh jeez she finally started posting but all she can talk about is going to some art show," here's some actual content: single-paragraph reviews of albums I listened to on plane rides to and from Seattle.
1. Mice Parade - Obrigado Saudade
This album is the kind of glitch you can (and I have) give to your mother for Christmas. (My mother, not yours. Unless you are my sister.) It's largely smooth and instrumental, with vocals as lyrically unimportant as Perfume Tree or parts of Portishead: lyrically unimportant because the voice carries you along through the song instead of telling you something. Mice Parade provide you a comfortable bed of acoustic guitar and these carrying voices, and then provide an undercurrent of slightly askew rhythms beneath all of that. If you weren't listening carefully, you might not realize that someone had altered this music with --- gasp --- a computer! If you need to sleep in an entirely uncomfortable and cramped futurist scenario like a Boeing 737 at 6 AM, the slight twinge of modern discomfort underneath the folksy guitar will beat out just any old lullaby.
2. Joni Mitchell - Court and Spark
I had this album on vinyl when I was a teenager sitting in my parents' basement listening to vinyl while reading James Joyce. It didn't go too well with _The Dubliners_ but even with its age it is just so musically rich --- like other artists I most enjoy (Matthew Sweet, say) Joni isn't confined to a single genre at all. I could hear snippets of rock and country and folk and spoken word and maybe even something that would grow up to be power pop and it's all in the same album. Better, the album has some thematic coherency to it that a lot of them lack: sure, the search for love in a sea of strangers is an old story, but it keeps getting told... "and besides, it's an old album." Trouble Child doesn't describe me anymore; I think I'm OK with that.
3. Manu Chao - Desaparecido
Manu Chao bounce between lyrics in English, Spanish, French, and (I'm told, I don't know these languages) Portuguese and Russian. This is an album I keep listening to not just for the addictive rhythms and sheer enthusiasm of the performance, but because each time I understand a little more of what they are actually saying. "Oh, that word means _Peruvian!_" The songs flow into one another so easily that the changes in language are less confusing than they might otherwise be. Sometimes, the change in language and the tiny skip due to my phone's switching mp3 files are the only clues that it's actually a new song. The only problem with this is that by the end it occasionally feels like I've been listening to the same song for 55 minutes, where the most I usually tolerate is 17 (thanks, The Past Is A Grotesque Animal). The first half of this album, if that counted, would be the most played on my iTunes :)
4. Venetian Snares - Rossz Csillag Alatt Szueletett
After reading the 2008 music issue of the Believer with Cassandra, I was in the mood for something weird, so I put this on. It's weird! It doesn't set out to hurt the listener in the same way that other Venetian Snares does (I love Einstein-Rosen Bridge, but I just cannot handle "Winnipeg is a Frozen Shithole." There is no melody AT ALL) but the whole thing is in 7 and merges glitched out speed-DnB (synthesized, of course) with symphonic Hungarian music and a very earnest woman asking "Pigeon, why are you scared of me? Am I not part of your life... anymore?" Even if you're not normally into glitch, drum and bass, or weird symphonic stuff in 7/4, you should absolutely check out "Hajnal," the track that convinced me to buy the album and probably my favorite piece of music I first heard in 2004, despite that being the year I first heard a whole lot of very good music. Basically, if you imagine the most perfect thing someone could do with symphonic music and a laptop, Hajnal is it. The rest of the album, while I greatly enjoy it, is... other things you could do with symphonic music and a laptop!
5. Of Montreal - Icons, Abstract Thee
This EP, which I bought at a show for the release of their 2007 album, has five songs chronicling what was at the time the separation and imminent divorce of Kevin Barnes and his wife Nina. Fans take note --- Nina and the couple's son were at the Boston show, bopping along to the music and smiling, and he didn't play the one about cheating on her, so maybe things are looking up! Taken in that light this disc is a wonderful love story, first told in the peppy and almost Stars-reminiscent "Du Og Meg" (them and the 80 other bands that came out of Broken Social Scene) with its lush vocal harmonies and overproduced instrumentals. The other four songs try to contradict the love story, peppily and reverbily chanting "It's hopeless" reminding me a little bit of Sick of Myself or Komm Susser Tod. But in a sense, they don't work; the connection between the narrator (who is basically just Kevin Barnes talking about his wife) and the object of desire is the focus of all five songs, even if he's begging God to send her a good boyfriend instead of him, while his voice is layered five times, while reverb is being reverbed. How can you pass up on this? Best five-song disc I picked up at a concert on a lark, and that includes buying the first Dresden Dolls disc before anyone had heard of them because they opened for King Missile, though only barely. (And No, Virginia is growing on me.)
OK, now for those of you who aren't local or don't care about Tarot and are thinking "Oh jeez she finally started posting but all she can talk about is going to some art show," here's some actual content: single-paragraph reviews of albums I listened to on plane rides to and from Seattle.
1. Mice Parade - Obrigado Saudade
This album is the kind of glitch you can (and I have) give to your mother for Christmas. (My mother, not yours. Unless you are my sister.) It's largely smooth and instrumental, with vocals as lyrically unimportant as Perfume Tree or parts of Portishead: lyrically unimportant because the voice carries you along through the song instead of telling you something. Mice Parade provide you a comfortable bed of acoustic guitar and these carrying voices, and then provide an undercurrent of slightly askew rhythms beneath all of that. If you weren't listening carefully, you might not realize that someone had altered this music with --- gasp --- a computer! If you need to sleep in an entirely uncomfortable and cramped futurist scenario like a Boeing 737 at 6 AM, the slight twinge of modern discomfort underneath the folksy guitar will beat out just any old lullaby.
2. Joni Mitchell - Court and Spark
I had this album on vinyl when I was a teenager sitting in my parents' basement listening to vinyl while reading James Joyce. It didn't go too well with _The Dubliners_ but even with its age it is just so musically rich --- like other artists I most enjoy (Matthew Sweet, say) Joni isn't confined to a single genre at all. I could hear snippets of rock and country and folk and spoken word and maybe even something that would grow up to be power pop and it's all in the same album. Better, the album has some thematic coherency to it that a lot of them lack: sure, the search for love in a sea of strangers is an old story, but it keeps getting told... "and besides, it's an old album." Trouble Child doesn't describe me anymore; I think I'm OK with that.
3. Manu Chao - Desaparecido
Manu Chao bounce between lyrics in English, Spanish, French, and (I'm told, I don't know these languages) Portuguese and Russian. This is an album I keep listening to not just for the addictive rhythms and sheer enthusiasm of the performance, but because each time I understand a little more of what they are actually saying. "Oh, that word means _Peruvian!_" The songs flow into one another so easily that the changes in language are less confusing than they might otherwise be. Sometimes, the change in language and the tiny skip due to my phone's switching mp3 files are the only clues that it's actually a new song. The only problem with this is that by the end it occasionally feels like I've been listening to the same song for 55 minutes, where the most I usually tolerate is 17 (thanks, The Past Is A Grotesque Animal). The first half of this album, if that counted, would be the most played on my iTunes :)
4. Venetian Snares - Rossz Csillag Alatt Szueletett
After reading the 2008 music issue of the Believer with Cassandra, I was in the mood for something weird, so I put this on. It's weird! It doesn't set out to hurt the listener in the same way that other Venetian Snares does (I love Einstein-Rosen Bridge, but I just cannot handle "Winnipeg is a Frozen Shithole." There is no melody AT ALL) but the whole thing is in 7 and merges glitched out speed-DnB (synthesized, of course) with symphonic Hungarian music and a very earnest woman asking "Pigeon, why are you scared of me? Am I not part of your life... anymore?" Even if you're not normally into glitch, drum and bass, or weird symphonic stuff in 7/4, you should absolutely check out "Hajnal," the track that convinced me to buy the album and probably my favorite piece of music I first heard in 2004, despite that being the year I first heard a whole lot of very good music. Basically, if you imagine the most perfect thing someone could do with symphonic music and a laptop, Hajnal is it. The rest of the album, while I greatly enjoy it, is... other things you could do with symphonic music and a laptop!
5. Of Montreal - Icons, Abstract Thee
This EP, which I bought at a show for the release of their 2007 album, has five songs chronicling what was at the time the separation and imminent divorce of Kevin Barnes and his wife Nina. Fans take note --- Nina and the couple's son were at the Boston show, bopping along to the music and smiling, and he didn't play the one about cheating on her, so maybe things are looking up! Taken in that light this disc is a wonderful love story, first told in the peppy and almost Stars-reminiscent "Du Og Meg" (them and the 80 other bands that came out of Broken Social Scene) with its lush vocal harmonies and overproduced instrumentals. The other four songs try to contradict the love story, peppily and reverbily chanting "It's hopeless" reminding me a little bit of Sick of Myself or Komm Susser Tod. But in a sense, they don't work; the connection between the narrator (who is basically just Kevin Barnes talking about his wife) and the object of desire is the focus of all five songs, even if he's begging God to send her a good boyfriend instead of him, while his voice is layered five times, while reverb is being reverbed. How can you pass up on this? Best five-song disc I picked up at a concert on a lark, and that includes buying the first Dresden Dolls disc before anyone had heard of them because they opened for King Missile, though only barely. (And No, Virginia is growing on me.)