Some songs just shouldn't be covered; they're so closely associated
with one artist that it's just not worth trying to reinvent them. And
even if you could, just to prove you could, you'll never give them the
kind of life and soul they had in their more famous version.
Elvis is the quintessential example. Has anybody taken a classic
Elvis song and turned it into anything more than an homage or a
parody? It shouldn't even be attempted.
Okay, that's a gross overstatement. (Mostly.) But it's a tribute to
Doyle Bramhill that his version of
His
Latest Flame doesn't make me long for Elvis. It's that good,
as is
his
totally bluesy take on
Johnny
Nash's classic
I
Can See Clearly Now. Gotta love a guy who'll take those kind
of risks, and then make them pay off.
With a title so reminiscent of of modern warfare, I guess I was
expecting something far more explosive. Instead we have heartfelt
anthems that are anything but. Not with a bang, and not exactly a
whimper either. More a deep sigh at the vagaries of life, where the
destruction is less mass and more personal. Not so much wholesale as
retail, as it were.
I need to spend more time on MySpace.
I was reading an interesting forum thread recently about accents. The
gist of the thread was that so many singers lose their
accents when they sing. Somehow vocals mostly sound American, at least
to my ethnocentric ears. Unless they're singing traditional
music, when it's okay to sound Irish or Scottish. Or even Southern,
if they absolutely must.
Sometimes they come without being called.
Blame Apple and their damn iPod Nano ads for this one. I like to
think I'm immune to advertising, but Leslie Feist's
1234
is so earwormily catchy that I had to Google the lyrics to find out
who was singing. Heck, it's so catchy it makes me want a Nano, for
which I have absolutely no use. I mean, I'm already carrying an
iPhone, which is what a Nano wants to be when it grows up. And yet I
still want it, with that $100 store credit burning a hole in my
virtual pocket. You have a lot to answer for, Leslie Feist, with your
perfectly imperfect voice. And the rest of the album isn't bad
either, even if none of it makes be want to buy stuff.
On his MySpace page,
David Courtenay describes his music as sounding like blue whales
mating. Now what could I possibly say that could possibly improve on
that?
What's the best way to experience Arms and Legs? A game of
Name That Influence? There are certainly plenty to pick from, and
most of them are like shells on the beach just waiting to be
collected. Or you could be lazy like me and just enjoy the warm,
bouncy and familiar but new sounds as they float by.
Music has the power to evoke a time and a place, to take us somewhere
we've never been and can't even imagine. And so it is with this 1979
recording of a combination of traditional and more contemporary songs
(and I dare you to tell one from the other)
from the Orkney Islands, ostensibly part of Scotland but, if the
album's liner notes and Wikipedia are to be believed, really a world
of their own. And one I suddenly have a strong desire to visit, if
only the need to actually show up for work tomorrow weren't so very
strong. Curse you, 21st century employment! Curse you and all your
kind!
Victoria
Hart's new album asks the musical question,
Whatever
Happened to Romance?. My reply would be that it traded in
your
overproduced version for the silky Brazilian sounds of Luciana
Souza. And that's just fine with me.
Funny that a track called
Disaster
should be so contemplative. Although if it and
Devastation
are any indication, this duo from Montreal is not among nature's
optimists. Then again, neither am I.
I listen to way too many podcasts. And my favorites are the dramas,
by which I mean audio performances. I've mentioned
Decoder Ring
Theatre and Mr. Deity, but
there's also the weirdly entertaining (or entertainingly weird)
Mustache
Rangers, and
The
Dixie Stenberg Adventure Theater, which both try to
recreate some aspect of olde tyme radio, to say nothing of podcasts
like the
Adventures
of Sherlock Holmes and
Case
Closed!, which give us the
real thing, 40s and 50s radio shows with all the crackles and even
some of the commercials. But I have a new favorite, a soap operatic
drama in six parts called The Many Men of Martha Manning.
What I love about Martha is that it's both over the top and
extremely carefully written, performed and produced. Just listen to
the "foreign" dialogue and you'll see what I mean; I haven't
encountered such subtle absurdity since the Tolkienesque "poetry" of
Bored of the Rings. Hmmm... I wonder if anybody's ever
considered dramatizing that...
I discovered this album by way of
Bittersweet
~ an American Romance. Which is nice enough in an
instrumental New Agey sort of way, but feels like warmed over
Liz Story or maybe
Mannheim Steamroller on
Valium. But at least it got me here, where I could be charmed
Ms. White's folk vocals. Much better, I'm thinking.
Whenever I discover a listing for a new band on the iTunes Store, I
start by sampling their Top Songs. My assumption is that somebody who
got here before me might know something I'll only discover through
actual effort. And with effort being something mightily to avoid,
I'll take whatever shortcuts the world hands me. But I'm not stupid,
in spite of what you may have heard. I'm immediately suspicious when
the Top Songs are the first five tracks, that being an indication that
anybody who bought this stuff just picked up the album.
If you're in America, I hope you're enjoying Labor Day by not working
too hard. (If you're anywhere else, I guess it's just another
manic
Monday.) I mention this because I didn't expect to work this hard
to find something to write about. Turns out there's not much to
inspire out of this past week's iTunes offerings. I guess the late
summer blahs attack the music business along with everything else.
An old friend introduced me to Da Vinci's Notebook during my
Farscape music video phase, a fortuitous
happenstance that changed my life! Okay, not really; all it did was
lead me to make my best video, and likely the reason I didn't do any
more after that. How after all do you top perfection?
Asked and answered.
Historical Conquests starts out sounding like
Dylan,
except less nasal, but where it goes after that will surprise you. At
least it surprised me, as the too-cheerful-for-a-sleepless-Sunday-morning
tracks gave way to the almost
Cat
Stevensesque
The
Temptation of Adam. The styles here are all over the place,
but in the best possible way. Surprises are good, although not
necessarily on a sleepless Sunday morning.
This is another moment where ignorance is bliss. Judging by the
reviews on the iTunes Store, people who knew Rihanna's original
version of this song hated Hated HATED this one, where people like me
who haven't listened to the radio since the 90s (if not earlier) think
it sounds pretty nice. Marié has just the one track on iTunes,
but there are a few others
on her MySpace page,
both covers and what may or may not be original tracks. Oh, and a
blog post about the shock of her Rihanna cover becoming so popular.
She sounds nice, and level headed about it all.
As I type this, the sequel to Disney's insanely successful High
School Musical is still a few hours away from broadcast. That
means I'm reviewing without having seen the program or listened to
more than a couple of minutes of the music. Still, lack of knowledge
doesn't imply lack of opinion. So here we go...