FEED is definitely the best UK band to not come from the UK.
This Japanese quartet’s sound calls to mind any number of women-fronted, post-punk bands, including but not limited to debut-era Cranberries, Innocence Mission, All About Eve and Mazzy Star.
Singer Saito Maya, whose perfect English diction can be attributed to her time spent at NYU and her half Scottish-American heritage, alternates from apeing Dolores O’Riardin and Sinéad O’Connor. She’s gone on record disliking the comparrison, but that doesn’t make her any less of a powerful, talented singer.
And while FEED tends to wear its influences on its sleeve — Smiths, anyone? — the band’s songwriting is strong enough to overcome any appearance of blind hero worship.
Sure, back in the early 90s, FEED would have been deridedly considered “alternative-lite”, but while the Cranberries have since moved further away from the kind of dreamy folk-pop that made Everybody’s Doing It So Why Don’t We? sublime, FEED effectively picks up where that debut left off.
If the band’s showcase at SXSW 2000 is any indication, its debut for Sony should even expand on that sound. The six tracks on this debut E.P. leaves listeners craving for more.
Make Every Stardust Shimmer consists entirely of English-language tracks, making absolutely no hints that the band is from Japan.
That could work either way for the band — on the one hand, they can appeal to the parts of an American audience that craves this music; on the other, they might not sound distinct enough for more casual listeners.
Make Every Stardust Shimmer is available in the U.S. through De-I Records. FEED’s full-length debut album will be released in Fall 2000 on Zone/Sony Music Entertainment in Japan.
That’s not entirely true. I love Gish, and it’s because of that love that I’ve pretty much disliked the Pumpkins’ subsequent output.
Siamese Dream had absolutely no arc — it was one mid-tempo song after another, and after a while, the entire album blurred into one song.
Adore, on the other hand, had a great premise and quite a few nuggets. But the lethargy of the performances and the void left by drummer Jimmy Chamberlain pretty much hammered the nails in the coffin of this commercial dud.
Disclosure: When Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was released, I had no interest in listening to two discs worth of Billy Corgan indulging himself.
And yet, I’ve remained interested in the group despite Corgan’s overbearing influence. Credit that to the expert musicianship of James Iha, ex-bassist D’arcy and the re-recruited Chamberlain — Corgan may the group’s brain and muscle, but its other members are the Pumpkins’ heart and soul.
Hence, MACHINA/The Machines of God is actually good. It’s the follow-up to Gish I’ve been waiting for since 1991. It’s the single disc of Melon Collie the band should have released in 1995. It’s the Siamese Dream the Pumpkins should never have recorded in 1993.
The heart and soul of the Pumpkins rock out on this album, and the grand gestures once explored by the band — strings! acoustic guitars! drum machines! synthesized bass! — are drastically scaled back, if not entirely done away with.
Remember that cool bass solo in “I Am One” or the dynamics changes on “Siva” from Gish? The first single off of MACHINA, “The Everlasting Gaze,” has a break in which an a capella Corgan rants an entire verse of the song. Ya see — that’s the kind of clever songwriting shit the band has been missing since the early 1990s.
Rumors have been flying around that the Pumpkins may call it quits after touring this album. If that were the case, MACHINA would be the perfect opus to wrap up an otherwise intersting if not scattered recorded legacy.
Q: What do Tift Merritt’s Bramble Rose and Radiohead’s Kid A have in common?
A: Both albums are best heard when you’re not paying close attention to them.
In the case of Kid A, Radiohead achieved, by design or by accident, a goal Brian Eno set out to do with Music for Airports — to keep background music in the background while making it interesting.
Given the conventional songs on Bramble Rose, Tift Merritt most likely didn’t aspire to attain Eno’s goals either. After all, Music for Airports and Kid A barely have a single between them.
And yet, Merritt’s accomplished debut is best heard when relegated to the outskirts of consciousness.
On close examination, there really isn’t anything too remarkable about Bramble Rose — it’s a collection of nicely written, literate country music delivered by a singer constantly compared to a young Emmylou Harris.
The album is so determined in its modesty, nothing about it really stands out.
Ordinarily, such lack of flash can be construed as a virtue, especially in an era where Britney Spears can’t be escaped. But there’s a fine line between modesty and indescript, something Bramble Rose seems to straddle.
It’s only when Merritt’s music is playing in another room on a quiet late night when its beauty emerges.
The sweet harmonizing on “I Know Him Too”, the Georgia blues of “Sunday”, the simplicity of “When I Cross Over” — when the bits and pieces of Merritt’s most memorable moments transmit indirectly does that subtlty turn into seduction.
Sure, there will be folks for whom Merritt makes an immediate connection — it’s not like she’s recorded an album of throw-away filler. Merritt’s voice really is beautiful, and after a while, tunes such as “Trouble Over Me” and “Virginia, No One Can Warn You” ingrain themselves into your karaoke subconscious.
(Um, that’s to say at the very least, you’ll be singing the songs in your head.)
But that quiet beauty may take some work to appreciate. Or it may just be a matter of not listening too closely.
The classically-trained musician in me ought to be offended by William Ørbit’s Pieces in a Modern Style, but it’s not.
In fact, the pieces selected by Ørbit are pretty much unfamiliar to me, and the timbres he’s selected to interpret these pieces render them nearly unrecognizable as classical music.
As a result, inexperienced listeners — id est, most of us — would probably refer to other non-classical albums to describe Pieces in a Modern Style than compare them to the hallowed interpretations on any number of classical labels.
Craig Armstrong’s orchestral ambient album, The Space Between Us, comes to mind. Maybe even Bang on a Can’s live interpretation of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports.
Pieces in a Modern Style makes for nice, trancey listening if you don’t let the source material distract you. At the same time, Henryk Gorecki’s Pieces in the Old Style 1 or Ludwig Van Beethoven’s Triple Concerto couldn’t have been written by any other composers.
I just wish Ørbit included some detailed liner notes to inform listeners how much of a transformation these pieces under went.
The most recognizable work is perhaps the most unchallenging interpretation on the whole disc — Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings from his only String Quartet. C’mon — I did the exact same thing when I was learning about sequencing back in 1991. Thankfully, Ørbit places the Adagio at the beginning of the disc, dispensing it forthwith.
A second disc of remixes takes up the job of radically reinterpreting Barber’s biggest hit. To the classical establishment, these remixes are crass. But the ATB remix in particular is quite personal. In other words, little of Barber remains — as it should be.
The remixes also beg the question: if Barber were alive today and hanging out gay bars, would he appreciate hearing his own composition blaring through the P.A.?
The Brodsky Quartet seems to have learned a lot from the Kronos Quartet.
The cover of Best of the Brodsky Quartet prominently displays the names Björk and Elvis Costello, as if indicating the Brodsky’s hip factor. And amidst a program of mostly Common Practice period pieces, a few pop tunes crop up.
But the Brodsky is not the Kronos, in the same sense that the Kronos is not the Arditti.
Although the Brodsky numbers Dave Brubeck and Paul McCartney as collaborators, the ensemble isn’t saddled with a mission to work exclusive in a particular era of music.
From the Kronos, the Brodsky has learned the value of embracing the ever pervasive popular culture, but unlike Kronos, the quartet frees itself to pursue music of all eras — even if the repetoire leans toward the more crowd-pleasing.
Best of the Brodsky Quartet spans a number of different styles — from a Japanese folk song to an arrangement of a movement from Sergei Prokofieff’s First Symphony. And it’s all performed tightly and expertly. The quartet even manages to keep a lock on the beat over Björk’s freely rhythmic chanteusing on “Hyperballad.”
Some selections are bit too obvious — Copland’s “Hoedown”? Gershwin’s “Summertime?”
Nonetheless, Best of the Brodsky Quartet amply demonstrates the Brodsky’s versatility and diversity.
Truth be told, there isn’t anything really remarkably artsy about the Blue Man Group’s first foray into the audio world.
The reknowned performance theater troupe whose members can catch things with their mouths produce a rather appealing, unobtrusive set of incidental music on Audio. While a good portion of the album’s liner notes are devoted to explaining Blue Man’s custom-made instruments, the context in which these musical devices are performed is instrumental pop.
Of course, we’re running on the Harry Partch asthetic of custom instrumentation — if you build it, you must create music exclusively of its own context.
In reality, there’s nothing wrong with whacking a bunch of plumbing pipes or flipping a thin, long stick in the air to the accompaniment of electric guitars and a drum set. There’s just one problem — without the visual element, it’s easy to assume that anything that doesn’t sound like a guitar or a bass or a drum set is a synthesizer.
While Blue Man’s use of plumbing pipes creates the same kind of jegog timbre prominent in Yamashiro Shoji’s Akira Symphonic Suite, my own Korg N-364 has a patch that sounds approximately like it.
All right. So Audio isn’t pop music’s answer to Harry Partch — it’s still a good set of instrumental music.
Blue Man attempt to get at something primitive with Audio, and the almost Indonesian and Southeast Asian sense of rhythm on most of the these tracks succeed. Blue Man recognizes that rhythm was the first expression of musicality in the history of man and have set melody and harmony aside for the pursuit of something driving and energetic.
At the beginning of ray, L’arc~en~Ciel sound like a grungier Rolling Stones. By the end of ray, the group sounds like latter day U2.
Along the way, this Japanese rock group makes nods to the Smiths, the Alarm, the Fall, Unforgettable Fire-era U2 (again), Pearl Jam, Soundgarden (with a little Nine Inch Nails), and maybe even a sliver of James Brown.
In short, L’arc~en~Ciel does what you’d expect from a Japanese megacorporation — improve on a bunch of Western innovations.
A good number of Japanese rock bands make a slavish devotion to sounding like their idols. L’arc~en~Ciel does as well, but the distinctive musicianship of its members turns that imitation into something clearly unique.
Singer Hyde (pronounced “hai-do”) whines through his nose like the Japanese cousin of ex-Faith No More’s Mike Patton, but when he hits those falsetto notes, he transforms totally into Bono.
Guitarist Ken can transform himself into his guitar idols with a drop of a hat. From Keith Richards on one track, to Johnny Marrs on another, to Kim Thayill and Robin Finck on the next, Ken becomes a guitar diety his-bad-self.
The result is a strangely cohesive yet wonderfully divergent sound in which rock music’s vast legacy becomes a definitive, personal statement.
Listeners would be hard-pressed to find even an American group that does what L’arc~en~Ciel accomplishes so well on ray.
Confession: I don’t mind R&B music. Really, I don’t.
I love those slinky beats, those jazzy, sexy harmonies and that overly slick production. It takes no less craft to make a Janet Jackson or TLC album than it does to polish the rough edges around a Nine Inch Nails or Rage Against the Machine album.
It’s the lyrics that get on my nerve.
Utada Hikaru is the perfect solution for a person who loves R&B music but hates most of the inane couplets that accompany it. “Hikki” sings mostly in Japanese, and for non-speakers, it’s the best way to enjoy her seductive diva pop.
With a language barrier in tact, Hikki must depend on her music to convey her theme, and while it’s a good guess she may be singing about the same topics as some teen band based in Orlando, it’s packaged in a mature, adult contemporary sound more akin to Des’ree than to Britney Spears.
Utada also writes her songs solo. First Love contains not a single collaboration, although she does enlist a team of arrangers to flesh out her music. On such tracks as “Automatic” and “Movin’ on Without You,” the beats are all familiar, but there’s nary a recycled riff.
Even when she quotes Sting on “Never Let Go” or the Rolling Stones on “Amaiwana ~ Paint It Black,” it doesn’t come across as commercially crass.
Dare I say it, but a 17-year-old Japanese teen has the Orlando pop machine beat. Take that Britney Aguilera.
What if Alanis Morissette sang in Japanese and numbered Stevie Wonder as one of her songwriting influences? Don’t imagine — Shiina Ringo pretty much does that already.
Oh c’mon — Alanis and Stevie? On paper, it looks the musical equivalent of the bride of Frankenstein, but Shiina pulls off the combination without a hitch.
Shiina takes the big, rawking guitars of Jagged Little Pill and filters it through Wonder’s sense of funk. “Marunouchi Sadistic,” the third track on Ringö’s debut Muzai Moratorium, exemplifies the formula. She even preserves Wonder’s harmonica without making it sound as sacchrine as it usually does.
At various points, Shiina departs from this basic rock-funk formula to present more sonically oblique fare. On “Koufukuron(etsurakuhen),” she’s positively punk, and on “Shido to Hakuchuumu,” she even channels Björk.
While it’s not unusual for Japanese vocalists to sing through their nose, Shiina’s technique makes her sound just like Everyone’s Favorite Canadian with a tad more helium. Nowhere is the comparrison more aparent than on “Kokode Kiss Shite.”
What results is a strangely enjoyable album of funky Japanese rock music that doesn’t take its funkiness too gravely.
Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana ranks up with Enya’s “Book of Days” and Patrick Doyle’s score to Henry V as the most overused movie trailer music in the entertainment industry.
Carmina Burana’s simple quarter-note hook is total dramatic fodder. Hence, movie marketing forces have comandeered the powerful choral work to render apparent points absolutely redundant.
Oh my. What drama.
Enigma mastermind Michael Cretu aspires for a loftier aesthetic than most of his music actually achieves. When bits and pieces of Orff’s one-hit wonder leaks its way onto the tracks of The Screen Behind the Mirror, it’s easy to groan at the sheer obviousness of the reference.
Had he used a slightly more obscure reference by pop culture standards — something from Igor Stravinsky, perhaps? Maybe even Gustav Holst’s The Planets? — his cleverness would have been taken more seriously.
But Orff?
That’s perhaps the only blunder in an otherwise relatively cohesive Enigma album — but it’s a big one.
MCMXC a.D., Enigma’s debut, casts a very long shadow over Cretu’s subsequent Enigma albums, but The Screen Behind the Mirror does a fine job of standing on its own two metaphorical feet. Cretu writes for voices on many of The Screen’s tracks, and while he seems to be using the same electronic gear since 1989, the dreaminess of his older works is finally waking up.
Let’s hope next time Cretu digs into his music collection rather than rely on Hollywood.