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koganbotSo far The Voice in 2012 has produced no moments of genius to match Dia Frampton's "Heartless," though "Cinderella" is audacious enough to make me think there's a chance we'll get one. And I've found six standouts that are better than good (and I'm doing this all by YouTube, so my listening hasn't been all-inclusive). Here they are in no particular order:
[Lindsey Pavao "Say Ahh"]
Wobbly quirks with pebbles and glass thrown in. Lindsey's not yet got the command that a Taylor Swift or a Xenia has to turn her uncertainties into aesthetic bull's eyes, but the wavers and swallowed words fit this performance fine.
[Son Seung-yeon vs. Oh Seul-gi "It's Raining Men"]
Impressed by how both of them have smoldering depths and high fires.
Among this performance's bait-and-switches, there's the smoky jazz he gives you at the start, in no way foreshadowing the twirling glitter globes and shattering stomps to come. Talent-show clip of the year, if he doesn't surpass it himself. By the way, Kangta (leather jacket, no hat) always has a look of half-astonishment and half-delight when he turns his chair; our Cinderella-man hero Bae Geun-seok merely provides him an excuse to ramp it up from 5 to 9.
The song is an IU number variously translated as "Lost Child," "Missing Child," "MIA," "Lost And Found." Love how Kang Mi-Jin goes from wispy to loud without ever abandoning the wispy. By the way, she's a music vet with a résumé as long as Dia Frampton's; was ushered out or booted from Brown Eyed Girls pre-debut, NegaNetwork then putting her (under the name Yoari) into commercially unsuccessful rock band Sprinkler, then set her on a solo career, including an OTT angry, self-pitying single "Excuse Me" a.k.a. "Listen" ("That pretty face, even the fingers, how would it be living in this world as you?/Beautiful heels fit well, and any hairstyle goes well/You would laugh looking at your reflection in the mirror/Do you know what pain is by any chance? Do you know how to cry by any chance?") with a memorably hair-destroying video (but I prefer her cover of G.Gorilla's "To My Mama").
[EDIT: Sorry, the video has now gone missing, and I can't remember what or who it was.]
Quirk girl like Lindsey, but with a hard lower register and fangs in the upper. She too has a back catalog, which I want to explore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WUppRSnBIM
[EDIT: Charlotte Sometimes vs. Lex Land "Pumped Up Kicks." Sorry, this poor rip is the only video stream I could find of this, and it no longer allows embedding, so I'm just giving you the link.]
A confident Charlotte versus a restless Lex; Lex had been powerfully soft through the first third of her audition but fell apart when she decided to show what her voice could do. Here she falls into feeling and originality; should have been awarded the victory, though I can see why Blake might have thought that Charlotte's command and control would go farther. (And in the next round Charlotte got lost in her arrangement and was sent home.) I'm pissed at Blake for running the two against each other, but it makes sense, for the sake of the show's overall variety and also for matching singer and material, to pit like against like in the battle round.
As for others, Jesse Campbell is the best of the American soul bores and is a favorite to win, and it wouldn't be an injustice if he did. Even given my pro-Korea bias, I'm surprised at how, when you get past the standouts and down to the average song upon song upon song, the Koreans are so much better than the Americans. In my notes on the U.S. series, the word "soul" is all over, while "r&b" appears not once — this is probably a technical mistake on my part, but says that the singers who veered in those directions were looking backwards rather than into adventure. (I used "soul" to cover a wide range, from gruff rockers to gruff pleaders to MOR pop guys to sweet lamenters.) Whereas the American quirk girls who've heard Adele and had their ears open to the last two decades of singer-songwriters and quasi-eccentric stylists are hearing a world of permutation and possibility. And this is what the Koreans seem to hear in most everything, though of course, being unfamiliar with Korea, I could be projecting novelty onto whatever they do. (But listen, for instance, to how much fun Nah Deul Ee and Lee So Jung have with bluesy material that Americans would use to demonstrate endurance and pain.) For what it's worth, the Korean contestants are staying away from what I love most in K-pop, the fierce freestyle and the hip-hop tunepop amalgam and T-ara's thirty flavors of piffle, etc., none of which is built to impress talent-show judges. Son Seung-yeon, the best of the two Weather Girls, auditioned with a solid version of 2NE1's "Go Away," but that's basically a power ballad. Jang Eun-a and Lee Yun-gyeong did a thoroughly inventive version of SNSD's "Hoot," but as a bossa nova/r&b conglomeration. What strikes me is that the bossa nova (or whatever; I don't claim to be accurate with that designation) is so easily daubed onto the canvas.
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[Lindsey Pavao "Say Ahh"]
Wobbly quirks with pebbles and glass thrown in. Lindsey's not yet got the command that a Taylor Swift or a Xenia has to turn her uncertainties into aesthetic bull's eyes, but the wavers and swallowed words fit this performance fine.
[Son Seung-yeon vs. Oh Seul-gi "It's Raining Men"]
Impressed by how both of them have smoldering depths and high fires.
Among this performance's bait-and-switches, there's the smoky jazz he gives you at the start, in no way foreshadowing the twirling glitter globes and shattering stomps to come. Talent-show clip of the year, if he doesn't surpass it himself. By the way, Kangta (leather jacket, no hat) always has a look of half-astonishment and half-delight when he turns his chair; our Cinderella-man hero Bae Geun-seok merely provides him an excuse to ramp it up from 5 to 9.
The song is an IU number variously translated as "Lost Child," "Missing Child," "MIA," "Lost And Found." Love how Kang Mi-Jin goes from wispy to loud without ever abandoning the wispy. By the way, she's a music vet with a résumé as long as Dia Frampton's; was ushered out or booted from Brown Eyed Girls pre-debut, NegaNetwork then putting her (under the name Yoari) into commercially unsuccessful rock band Sprinkler, then set her on a solo career, including an OTT angry, self-pitying single "Excuse Me" a.k.a. "Listen" ("That pretty face, even the fingers, how would it be living in this world as you?/Beautiful heels fit well, and any hairstyle goes well/You would laugh looking at your reflection in the mirror/Do you know what pain is by any chance? Do you know how to cry by any chance?") with a memorably hair-destroying video (but I prefer her cover of G.Gorilla's "To My Mama").
[EDIT: Sorry, the video has now gone missing, and I can't remember what or who it was.]
Quirk girl like Lindsey, but with a hard lower register and fangs in the upper. She too has a back catalog, which I want to explore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WUppRSnBIM
[EDIT: Charlotte Sometimes vs. Lex Land "Pumped Up Kicks." Sorry, this poor rip is the only video stream I could find of this, and it no longer allows embedding, so I'm just giving you the link.]
A confident Charlotte versus a restless Lex; Lex had been powerfully soft through the first third of her audition but fell apart when she decided to show what her voice could do. Here she falls into feeling and originality; should have been awarded the victory, though I can see why Blake might have thought that Charlotte's command and control would go farther. (And in the next round Charlotte got lost in her arrangement and was sent home.) I'm pissed at Blake for running the two against each other, but it makes sense, for the sake of the show's overall variety and also for matching singer and material, to pit like against like in the battle round.
As for others, Jesse Campbell is the best of the American soul bores and is a favorite to win, and it wouldn't be an injustice if he did. Even given my pro-Korea bias, I'm surprised at how, when you get past the standouts and down to the average song upon song upon song, the Koreans are so much better than the Americans. In my notes on the U.S. series, the word "soul" is all over, while "r&b" appears not once — this is probably a technical mistake on my part, but says that the singers who veered in those directions were looking backwards rather than into adventure. (I used "soul" to cover a wide range, from gruff rockers to gruff pleaders to MOR pop guys to sweet lamenters.) Whereas the American quirk girls who've heard Adele and had their ears open to the last two decades of singer-songwriters and quasi-eccentric stylists are hearing a world of permutation and possibility. And this is what the Koreans seem to hear in most everything, though of course, being unfamiliar with Korea, I could be projecting novelty onto whatever they do. (But listen, for instance, to how much fun Nah Deul Ee and Lee So Jung have with bluesy material that Americans would use to demonstrate endurance and pain.) For what it's worth, the Korean contestants are staying away from what I love most in K-pop, the fierce freestyle and the hip-hop tunepop amalgam and T-ara's thirty flavors of piffle, etc., none of which is built to impress talent-show judges. Son Seung-yeon, the best of the two Weather Girls, auditioned with a solid version of 2NE1's "Go Away," but that's basically a power ballad. Jang Eun-a and Lee Yun-gyeong did a thoroughly inventive version of SNSD's "Hoot," but as a bossa nova/r&b conglomeration. What strikes me is that the bossa nova (or whatever; I don't claim to be accurate with that designation) is so easily daubed onto the canvas.
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just_keep_on
no subject
Date: 2012-04-04 05:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-02 10:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-04 07:10 pm (UTC)Mona Lisa Girl
Date: 2012-04-04 08:11 pm (UTC)[Error: unknown template video]
(By the way, Wikip says this about the Brown Eyed Girls launch: "Debuting as a 'faceless group' they did not appear on any visual media and choosing to not even show up in their own music video." Maybe NegaNetwork thought this was a viable promotional strategy for Yoari, as well, though I'd like to think it was Yoari's idea, to have her alienation and connect via it too.)
[Error: unknown template video]
Quite the Dolores O'Riordan stan, evidently.
*But the YouTube posts I see usually have "요아리" (Yoari) in the subtitle or tag — though for all I know those are later reposts by fans, after the original posts have disappeared.
Re: Mona Lisa Girl
Date: 2020-06-02 10:57 pm (UTC)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZufGJCyLYI
no subject
Date: 2012-04-05 01:45 am (UTC)Which isn't to say I wasn't bored shitless by, e.g., two-thirds of last year's Leessang album, which sounded like an amalgam of sappy tuneful balladry and sappy tight-crotched rap. (Gil of Leessang is one of The Voice judges, the one who dresses the most hip-hop.) I was thinking of The Voice Of Korea in particular where the average style seemed to be calling forth more adventure in the performers. But there's probably plenty of adventure in Leessang; it's just not adventure for me. There's a lot potentially adventurous in the current dreadful Euro-American dancebeat'n'r&b'n'Autotune amalgam; I just think the results are crappy (and that stuff isn't getting onto the talent shows anyway).