Album slog continues
Dec. 15th, 2007 11:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbotMims Music Is My Savior: "This Is Why I'm Hot" is eerie and silly (a good description of a lot of my favorite hip-hop these days); the rest of the album is eerie and silly too, but the spookiness comes from rather standard ominous soundtrack-style moodiness rather than "Hot"'s stark strangeness. The album begins with three strong tracks but gets mired in sameness after that. Mims' voice has more presence than people give him credit for; the little bits of lyrics I caught seemed run of the mill, however, except for the bit where he explains that he's fly and has an S on his chest, which made me smile.
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zenith hipped us to the The Hood Internet vs. The Pack, Pack-endorsed mashups that you can download legally for free. The Pack can sometimes sound too dry, so this works best when The Hood Internet cover them in sweetness: they mash "Freaky Bopper" into Glass Candy (whom I've got to start learning about, given the excellent neofreestyle track of theirs kill_yr_idols submitted to the Pop Open) and "Oh Go" into the Dandy Warhols. For three tracks I thought this was a sure thing for my Top Ten (which already has A-Trak's excellent dance-hip-hop mashup), but it didn't sustain itself. A good set, though.
I posted this on Rolling Country:
The Ike Reilly Assassination We Belong To The Staggering Evening. His voice is weak and clogged up so he seems always pushing the music out of his throat. This works well on "Irish Eyes Are Burning," though I wish he wouldn't undercut himself with a Dylan-Springsteen voice. It can't come across as anything but mannered. I like a couple more songs OK: "It's Hard To Make Love To An American" is slow, the voice weakens its swing, but the vocal strain gives the song an emotional push. I think the lyrics are meant to be funny, but on one listen I didn't figure out the joke. "Bugsy Salcido" finesses the vocal question by being an instrumental. There were several more songs I liked, but the singing didn't break them through.
Found Gary Allan's Living Hard at the local library. It's good, of course, but at least initially it's not hitting me nearly as hard as his previous three albums - this even though it's got three or four songs that kind of bash you on the noggin with the fact that they're really hard rock. Right now I'm listening to "Learning How To Pray" (not one of the rockers); he's doing an excellent job, swooping unpretentiously into an easy falsetto, twisting and bending words at the end of lines, and so on. But he's giving the song more than it's giving him. He employs the usual set of good songwriters (three cuts have Odie Blackmon in the credits). Mark Wright is producing - one of Wright's skills is to dump a whole cartload of musicians into a track without losing the melody to clutter. But I think that on some of these Gary would be better off with less stuff in the tracks - less harmony, fewer steel guitars. I thought Tough All Over was at its most intense when sparest. And I thought See If I Care was best when he was easing along on nice little rock 'n' roll weepers. But on the rockers here his easy mastery is self-defeating, making him not commit to the ferocity of "Wrecking Ball" and "Living Hard." A track that really works for me is "She's So California," a light rocker with California guitar licks and deceptively sweet little steel-guitar curlicues that form themselves into Chuck Berry riffs; "Like It's A Bad Thing," which has vague, platitudinous lyrics about living wild ("They say I'm proud of my scars/Each one tells a story, got guts and glory/Down to an art" [but notice the interesting rhyme scheme]), fortunately also maintains a good balance between spare buildup and jam-packed payoff. Another nice track is "As Long As You're Looking Back." Its lyrics are wanky - too much moral and not enough story - but the music has a good ominous quiet pulse, reminds me a bit of the Police's "I'll Be Watching You."
The words on this album bug me more than usual. He's always tended towards stock situations and standard ideas ("Alright Guy" being a great exception), but he's usually chosen songs that tell or at least hint at an interesting story. "Watching Airplanes" has a novel metaphor for romantic obsession (he's watching airplanes, trying to guess which one she's on, and why she doesn't love him anymore), but the rest of these (the rest where I noticed the words, at any rate) tend towards vagueness and simplicity. (I do like the series of metaphors in "Wrecking Ball": "She's a tornado, I'm a trailer house." "I'm a wreck, she's a wrecking ball." Etc.) It's a good album and the guy's a superb singer, but I always feel he could be greater.
zenith hipped us to the The Hood Internet vs. The Pack, Pack-endorsed mashups that you can download legally for free. The Pack can sometimes sound too dry, so this works best when The Hood Internet cover them in sweetness: they mash "Freaky Bopper" into Glass Candy (whom I've got to start learning about, given the excellent neofreestyle track of theirs kill_yr_idols submitted to the Pop Open) and "Oh Go" into the Dandy Warhols. For three tracks I thought this was a sure thing for my Top Ten (which already has A-Trak's excellent dance-hip-hop mashup), but it didn't sustain itself. A good set, though.I posted this on Rolling Country:
The Ike Reilly Assassination We Belong To The Staggering Evening. His voice is weak and clogged up so he seems always pushing the music out of his throat. This works well on "Irish Eyes Are Burning," though I wish he wouldn't undercut himself with a Dylan-Springsteen voice. It can't come across as anything but mannered. I like a couple more songs OK: "It's Hard To Make Love To An American" is slow, the voice weakens its swing, but the vocal strain gives the song an emotional push. I think the lyrics are meant to be funny, but on one listen I didn't figure out the joke. "Bugsy Salcido" finesses the vocal question by being an instrumental. There were several more songs I liked, but the singing didn't break them through.
Found Gary Allan's Living Hard at the local library. It's good, of course, but at least initially it's not hitting me nearly as hard as his previous three albums - this even though it's got three or four songs that kind of bash you on the noggin with the fact that they're really hard rock. Right now I'm listening to "Learning How To Pray" (not one of the rockers); he's doing an excellent job, swooping unpretentiously into an easy falsetto, twisting and bending words at the end of lines, and so on. But he's giving the song more than it's giving him. He employs the usual set of good songwriters (three cuts have Odie Blackmon in the credits). Mark Wright is producing - one of Wright's skills is to dump a whole cartload of musicians into a track without losing the melody to clutter. But I think that on some of these Gary would be better off with less stuff in the tracks - less harmony, fewer steel guitars. I thought Tough All Over was at its most intense when sparest. And I thought See If I Care was best when he was easing along on nice little rock 'n' roll weepers. But on the rockers here his easy mastery is self-defeating, making him not commit to the ferocity of "Wrecking Ball" and "Living Hard." A track that really works for me is "She's So California," a light rocker with California guitar licks and deceptively sweet little steel-guitar curlicues that form themselves into Chuck Berry riffs; "Like It's A Bad Thing," which has vague, platitudinous lyrics about living wild ("They say I'm proud of my scars/Each one tells a story, got guts and glory/Down to an art" [but notice the interesting rhyme scheme]), fortunately also maintains a good balance between spare buildup and jam-packed payoff. Another nice track is "As Long As You're Looking Back." Its lyrics are wanky - too much moral and not enough story - but the music has a good ominous quiet pulse, reminds me a bit of the Police's "I'll Be Watching You."
The words on this album bug me more than usual. He's always tended towards stock situations and standard ideas ("Alright Guy" being a great exception), but he's usually chosen songs that tell or at least hint at an interesting story. "Watching Airplanes" has a novel metaphor for romantic obsession (he's watching airplanes, trying to guess which one she's on, and why she doesn't love him anymore), but the rest of these (the rest where I noticed the words, at any rate) tend towards vagueness and simplicity. (I do like the series of metaphors in "Wrecking Ball": "She's a tornado, I'm a trailer house." "I'm a wreck, she's a wrecking ball." Etc.) It's a good album and the guy's a superb singer, but I always feel he could be greater.
