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koganbotHallelujah I'm a bore, or the Top 40 is, anyway, with a Haiti charity knock-off and a country disappointment the only newcomers on an already snoozing chart.
Justin Timberlake & Matt Morris ft. Charlie Sexton "Hallelujah": I have nothing in principle against thousands upon thousands of versions of this any more than I think there shouldn't be thousands and thousands of attempts at Beethoven's Fifth, and this track's doing its job of raising moolah for people who need it. Mike Barthel's already been excellent at pointing out "Hallelujah"'s flexibility but also how so many covers of it nonetheless become major exercises in point missing, taking a little song that's definitely funny but can also be worked for despair as it walks many and varied lines between reverence and irreverence and inflating it into/reducing it to a nebulously pretty evoker of any sorrowful old this or that; Timberlake and co. make it into a nebulous success at illiciting nonnebulous money for the desperate; as sound, it's slow and pretty and reverent, listenable for a couple of spins. NO TICK.
Jason Aldean "The Truth": This is a wasted opportunity from a couple of good writers (Ashley Monroe, who's written some terrific stuff for herself; and Brett James, who's got scores of credits including Carrie Underwood's great "Jesus Take The Wheel"), wasted 'cause, though Aldean's got a good basic twang, he's never evoked a damn thing in me; and because the lyrics botch what's actually a great idea: lovesick narrator drops out of sight, asks the object of his thwarted affections to come up with lies rather than tell the world he's still hung up on her, and the cover stories he suggests get progressively less and less respectable. "Tell 'em I went to visit friends" gives way to "tell 'em I'm out in Vegas, blowing every dollar I ever made." But they could have really gone somewhere with it, made the stories ever more outlandish and disreputable to show that virtually anything is better than admitting he's still in love. In place of that lame Vegas cliché, why not say he's out roaming the boonies with some traveling rep theater playing the lead role in an all-male staging of Tess Of The D'Urbervilles? BORDERLINE NONTICK. [EDIT: But on Rolling Country Chuck's got a good write-up of why he loves this song, so I may give this more listens to see if it can reach me.]
Speaking of Hope For Haiti, down at #72 Taylor Swift's Better Than Ezra cover is painfully out-of-tune, though the pitch problem is the musicians' at least as much as Taylor's; I seem to be erratic as to when pitch problems bother me. Taylor herself is erratic: Cis reported last year that Taylor's London show was completely in tune, and Himes wrote in his year-end essay that he'd witnessed her being pitch perfect. Maybe for all of Taylor's apparent poise, she actually chokes in the face of a national TV audience. (But my own pitch problems never have anything to do with choking or not, from what I can tell.)
Justin Timberlake & Matt Morris ft. Charlie Sexton "Hallelujah": I have nothing in principle against thousands upon thousands of versions of this any more than I think there shouldn't be thousands and thousands of attempts at Beethoven's Fifth, and this track's doing its job of raising moolah for people who need it. Mike Barthel's already been excellent at pointing out "Hallelujah"'s flexibility but also how so many covers of it nonetheless become major exercises in point missing, taking a little song that's definitely funny but can also be worked for despair as it walks many and varied lines between reverence and irreverence and inflating it into/reducing it to a nebulously pretty evoker of any sorrowful old this or that; Timberlake and co. make it into a nebulous success at illiciting nonnebulous money for the desperate; as sound, it's slow and pretty and reverent, listenable for a couple of spins. NO TICK.
Jason Aldean "The Truth": This is a wasted opportunity from a couple of good writers (Ashley Monroe, who's written some terrific stuff for herself; and Brett James, who's got scores of credits including Carrie Underwood's great "Jesus Take The Wheel"), wasted 'cause, though Aldean's got a good basic twang, he's never evoked a damn thing in me; and because the lyrics botch what's actually a great idea: lovesick narrator drops out of sight, asks the object of his thwarted affections to come up with lies rather than tell the world he's still hung up on her, and the cover stories he suggests get progressively less and less respectable. "Tell 'em I went to visit friends" gives way to "tell 'em I'm out in Vegas, blowing every dollar I ever made." But they could have really gone somewhere with it, made the stories ever more outlandish and disreputable to show that virtually anything is better than admitting he's still in love. In place of that lame Vegas cliché, why not say he's out roaming the boonies with some traveling rep theater playing the lead role in an all-male staging of Tess Of The D'Urbervilles? BORDERLINE NONTICK. [EDIT: But on Rolling Country Chuck's got a good write-up of why he loves this song, so I may give this more listens to see if it can reach me.]
Speaking of Hope For Haiti, down at #72 Taylor Swift's Better Than Ezra cover is painfully out-of-tune, though the pitch problem is the musicians' at least as much as Taylor's; I seem to be erratic as to when pitch problems bother me. Taylor herself is erratic: Cis reported last year that Taylor's London show was completely in tune, and Himes wrote in his year-end essay that he'd witnessed her being pitch perfect. Maybe for all of Taylor's apparent poise, she actually chokes in the face of a national TV audience. (But my own pitch problems never have anything to do with choking or not, from what I can tell.)
