If you’re bored with all these women singer-songwriter types, it’ll be hard to dislike Leona Naess.
Oh sure, she can probably fit nicely on a Lilith Fair bill, but she’s no Jewel, that’s for sure.
Naess eschews the usual heartstring-tugging musical clichés of her contemporaries for a more atmospheric sound akin to a version Mazzy Star that wasn’t psychedlic. Vocally, she possesses a languid, easy-going timbre that manages to keep up with the more rocking numbers on her major-label debut, Comatised. But it’s on the slower, sparser tracks where Naess’ voice shines.
Lyrically, she’s been compared to Joni Mitchell and Liz Phair. Haven’t listened to either artist, so can’t be sure if it’s an accurate comparisson. One thing is for certain — she doesn’t go for melodramatic, chest wringing couplets as badly as Alanis Morissette or Sarah McLachlan. When Naess asks, “Why do I always chase the ones that run?”, she’s definitely not pitying herself.
If anything, Naess takes all the material that’s made the whole “women-in-rock” schtick shallow and makes something meaningful out of it.
The strings on “Northern Star” sound appropriate, not overwrought. The analog drum beat on “Lazy Days” gives the lethargic track some real character. And when the chorus of “Chase” comes crashing between the song’s spare verses, it keeps listeners on their toes.
Comatised is a satisfying debut from a singer who does her feminine rocker colleagues one better.
“I wonder what kind of drugs they’ve been taking,” asked a co-worker of mine after listening to Macha Loved Bedhead.
Macha, in recent times, has skyrocketed in the indie world. The Athens, Ga., band’s mixes atonal rock with far Asian instruments in a fascinating marriage of timbres.
Collaborating with Dallas-based Bedhead, the collective band takes the sonic adventurousness of Macha’s most recent long-player, See It Another Way, even further.
And further away from the hooks of Macha’s 1998 debut album.
The six-song, 86-track EP, Macha Loved Bedhead — billed under the name Bedhead Loved Macha — starts off with the closest thing to a single, “You and New Plastic.” After that, the disc turns into a series of ambient, minimalistic experiments. In short, a great soundtrack with which to light up some fatties.
Steve Reich ought to write for this group.
Joshua McKay’s easy-going-bordering-on-lethargic vocals don’t quite let the beauty of the band’s melodies very obvious, which isn’t a bad thing. It just means you need to listen really close to “Hey Goodbye” or “Only the Bodies Survive” to get it.
After the 80-track ambient sound exercise of “How Are Your Windows?” — the same trick Café Tacuba did on Yosoy — Bedhead Loved Macha finishes the EP with the oddest cover of Cher’s “Believe” imaginable, complete with telephone accompaniment. It’s worth the price of the entire disc alone.
Writing a review for an album already plauded by critics worldwide is pretty useless. Well, reviews are pretty useless if you think long and hard about it — which this one won’t.
(And just why did it take me until now to even acquire the album? I received it as a birthday gift ‘cos I was too busy getting back into J-pop.)
But so Moby? Play? Grammy-award winner? Topped the Village Voice Pazz and Jop Critic’s Poll?
Why all the fuss?
If you saw that DLJ Direct commercial without that floating greater-than sign (>) and wondered how a dot-com commercial could score such cool music, rest assured — it’s cribbed from Moby, it wasn’t written expressly for DLJ Direct.
(Speaking of commericals, anyone think that Björk-like “iPaq” commercial from Compaq is kind of, um, dumb? Never mind.)
The crux of the album lies in Moby’s comandeering of Delta blues and gospels, recontextualizing them in an electronic dance setting. It’s sounds like an insurmountable goal, but Moby pulls it off.
He’s also got some radio-friendly tracks, such as the already-hit “Bodyrock” and the aforementioned DLJ theme “Porcelain.” If anything, Play distinguishes itself from other electronic dance music albums by being song-driven. These tracks aren’t just beat, beat and more beat.
Perhaps the most striking element of Moby’s blues-meets-dancefloor aesthetic is how he’s kept the samples relatively untouched. Unlike Ben Watt screwing around with Tracey Thorn’s vocals on Temperamental, Moby makes his music serve the samples, not the other way around.
“There’s a trick to making a tape,” Rob Gordon (ne John Cusack) tells his audience in the film High Fidelity. And he goes into a detailed explanation about the subtle art of sequencing.
What Rob (ne John) failed to mention was the kind of selection that goes into making a mixed tape. A mixer shouldn’t just grab all the obvious singles from a bunch of bands and hope some random order will make it work. No — you need a bunch of different songs from different artists that can somehow fit well together.
Cusack (ne Gordon) and his film buddies have made such a tape with the soundtrack to High Fidelity. The tracks on High Fidelity range from little-known but still-great ditties from the Thirteenth Floor Elevators (“You’re Gonna Miss Me”) and the Velvet Underground (represented twice with “Oh! Sweet Nuthin'” and “Who Loves the Sun”) to more recent tracks by Bob Dylan (“Most of the Time”) and the Beta Band (“Dry the Rain.”)
And while it’s unlikely to ever see Stereolab, Love, Stevie Wonder and the Kinks all on the same album, it’s even more of an accomplishment that no track sticks out significantly from the other.
If anything, putting Dylan, the Velvets and Elvis Costello along side John Wesley Harding, Sheila Nichols and Royal Trux shows how the former artists will somehow always be timelessly indie. It’s that spirit that somehow threads itself through the disc. Maybe it’s all those unadorned, electric guitars — no grand gestures of distortion on this disc, thank you very much.
Strange thing, though — the music in High Fidelity didn’t have as much of a starring role in the movie as other music-driven films, such as Immortal Beloved and Amadeus.
But really — a movie about Mozart compared to a movie about pop music? What am I thinking?
Yet it was that sort of co-starring status in the film that raised the question about whether the soundtrack would be any good. Duh. It is. It truly is.
P.S. I’m going to get my hair cut like Cusack (ne Gordon).
If there’s a group whose discography consists entirely of concept albums, it would be the Kronos Quartet.
Ever since the quartet’s debut recording for Nonesuch in 1985, Kronos has released at least one album a year, each with a different theme. Some yield fascinating results (Early Music, Black Angels), others are just plain questionable (Pieces of Africa, Short Stories.)
With Caravan, the Kronos becomes gypsy musicians. The diminished scales and bizarre harmonies of gypsy music are only a few aesthetic steps away from the usual dissonance of Kronos’ repetoire.
But a jack of all trades is a master of none.
When Kronos explored similar harmonies on Night Prayers, the ensemble produced a work of breathtaking emotional breadth. Caravan features some rather spirited performances, but exactly what it’s meant to contribute isn’t altogether clear.
Like Pieces of Africa before it, Caravan is a nice attempt by a classical ensemble to bridge the western art tradition with a global community. But it’s an attempt that finds the group grasping at a tradition it has only a vague comprehension.
Nothing makes such a stretch so evident as the arrangement of “Misirlou Twist,” the Dick Dale surf twang hit that found new life through Quinten Tarrantino’s Pulp Fiction. On this track, the Kronos does something it’s rarely done and perhaps has yet to master — playing with a drummer.
Kronos, however, must be given commendation for continuing its relentless pursuit in creating a kind of global art. By forcing the western art music tradition to explore times and timbres and tradition the establishment refuses to acknowledge, it insures that classical music has a direction — even if it’s a scattered one.
When I first donned on the headphones at a music store listening station to sample the Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin, I thought the Bacharach-on-dope strings of “Race for the Prize” were a bit precious.
So I took the headphones off and forgot about the album.
When I walked into my favorite record store one day, the store’s staff was playing a disc that I thought was Radiohead or maybe Guided By Voices with a different lead singer. It was the Flaming Lips.
Oh. The band I passed on a few months earlier.
Then I kept reading good reviews of the disc, and the album was even listed in the Village Voice Pazz and Jop Poll. All the subliminal hints finally came to the fore, and I gave The Soft Bulletin a second chance.
Wow.
I don’t really think I can add anything different to what’s already been said about the Flaming Lips or The Soft Bulletin. It’s probably one of the best-recorded and best-arranged albums of 1999. “A Spoonful Weighs a ton” alone has all sorts of neat orchestral effects — even without a real orchestra — and that drum arrangement is pretty durned neat.
Quite frankly, the album would perversely sound rather cool if it were recorded with a real orchestra. It’s certainly has a rather epic feel. Take that, Metallica.
Wayne Coyne’s scraping vocals might wear some listeners thin after a while, but his inability to hold a note altogether straight somehow magically works with the ambition of the group’s arrangements. They work together, and it’s hard to figure out how.
Not like anyone ought to find out.
Oh, and “The Spiderbite Song” has got to be one of the most unlikely lyrics to ever grace such dramatic music.
When you got that spider bite on your hand
I thought we would have to break up the band
To lose your arm would surely upset your brain
The poison then could reach your heart from a vein
Okay. Singer-songwriters tend to blur into one for me. Take acoustic guitar, add introspective, potentially solipistic lyrics.
But let’s say there’s a spectrum.
On the one hand, there’s Jeremy Toback, who wears his Bob Dylan influences on his sleeve, who writes decent if not exactly memorable songs, who sounds commercial enough to warrant inclusion on a few movie trailers.
On the other hand, there’s Yuji Oniki, who doesn’t hide his affinity to the Byrds or the Beatles but carries it off as his own, even singing a verse or two in Japanese.
Josh Rouse is a sort of singer-songwriter who could open for Whiskeytown or the Old ’97s without ever sounding like he’s a No Depression musician. In that sense, he’s more like Oniki.
Rouse’s latest album, Home, is an understated collection of tunes performed with an uncommon restraint. Rather that impress with a lot of dramatic swells of chiming acoustic guitar — like Toback — Rouse would prefer to embellish his songs with a touch of harmony there, a little countermelody there.
There’s a bit of press floating out there about how Home’s sense of desparation slowly etches itself into your subconscious. Well, if you’ve got the dishwasher and laundry going, it’s hard for that to really happen.
Rouse’s music demands the kind of attention suitable for late night listening — soft enough not to wake the neighbors but not so ambient as to treat it like sonic wallpaper.
It’s a good album for those meditative kinds of moments.
Piece and Love has got to be one of the best albums of 1999 to go unnoticed by every critic on the planet.
While everyone was cooing over Moby’s marriage of techno and Folkways recordings or the Magnetic Fields‘ magnum opus to love or the Flaming Lips’ string-laced psychedlia, Meg Lee Chin produced one of the loudest, slickest, rock-meets-rave albums in recent history.
Combining distorted, thundering drum machines with blasts of NIN-ish, Orgy-esque guitars, the former singer of Pigface crafted a set of hook-ladended, dynamically arranged music to come out of a recording studio.
Chin’s voice ranges from seductive whisper to blaring scream, and she does an excellent job in layering all her vocal abilities in a single song — it’s not uncommon to hear rap, straight-forward singing and wails all at the same time.
She wraps her powerful vox around some pretty clever lyrics, too. References to Allen Ginsberg in “Nutopia” don’t seem overly smarty, and that bit about “7-Eleven nightmares at 3 a.m.” is particularly evocative.
Musically, Piece and Love is a studio wonder. The array of effects used in each song complements Chin’s own talent. The music whispers when she whispers and screams when she screams. It’s terrific.
Trent Reznor said he’s been looking to collaborate with a woman. He’d be remiss to overlook Meg Lee Chin.
There’s just no other way to enjoy this album: Turn off your brain.
Coco Lee’s American homecoming — she’s recorded seven Chinese-language albums in Asia — sports the kind of bubblegum R&B trafficked by the likes of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera.
Pretty savvy move, really — it’s a recognition of what’s driving the music business economy these days, at least until the next demographic-income shift.
Does that mean Just No Other Way is necessarily a bad album? Not really.
Lee definitely has a set of pipes on her, and when she wraps them around those inane “love me-love me-love me” lyrics trademark of her chosen genre, she actually sounds earnest. She doesn’t melissmatize her ad libbing as badly as many R&B grandstanders. And above all, her voice is actually pleasant.
Musically, Utada Hikaru she is not. All of the tracks on Just No Other Way contain the interchangeable hooks found on other such R&B albums. When she slows down to sing a dramatic pop ballad, don’t be surprised if you hear an electric piano playing the step-wise hook.
(I’ve always wondered how people who dig R&B can distinguish one album from another. I certainly wonder about that with most alternative rock music.)
And for all its lack of anything really original, Just No Other Way is guiltily enjoyable. Like Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, which works best when you actively ignore it, Coco Lee’s brand of cookie-cutter R&B is pretty tolerable.
If there’s such a thing as an “Austin sound,” Bob Schneider would exemplify it.
Schneider’s latest solo outing, Lonelyland, sports a dirty, bluesy brand of rock that’s not twang or wail enough for Americana music and not post-grunge or post-Lilith Fair enough for mainstream “modern” rock.
It’s a similar kind of sound listeners can find on Ian Moore’s … and all the colors. Traces of it appear on Seela’s Something Happened, and of course, Austin rockers such as Fastball and Vallejo owe more to, say, Joe Ely than the Clash.
Schneider’s singer-songwriter blues rock won him an award at the Austin Music Awards this year and for good reason.
Schneider knows the power of a simple, catchy chorus, and after packing a whole lotta words in his verses — and there isn’t a track on this album that doesn’t have a lot lyrics — the immediacy of his choruses positively shine through.
Lonelyland also sports some pretty smart arrangements. From the Beck effects on “Jingy” and “Big Blue Sea” to the African chanting and operatic accompaniment on “Round and Round,” Schneider’s music takes many clever turns without coming off as precious.
Schneider’s parent band, the Scabs, packs the house at Antone’s every Tuesday night, and his solo work has gotten similar attention. Deservedly so, quite frankly.