June 2011 - Popular Music

Tori Amos

• Little Earthquakes
• From the Choirgirl Hotel
• Abnormally Attracted to Sin
• Audience bootlegs - San Diego 20 November 2001 (2nd show), Paris 27 November 2001, Amsterdam 28 November 2001, Brussels 1 December 2001 (plus someone's attempt at faking a recording of Hamburg 29 November 2001...)

Fiona Apple - Extraordinary Machine
The Badloves - Get On Board
Kate Bush - Never For Ever
Kate Bush - Hounds of Love
Tracy Chapman - Collection
Paula Cole - This Fire
The Corrs - Forgiven, Not Forgotten
Crowded House - Together Alone
Gomez - Split the Difference
Gotye - Like Drawing Blood
Sophie B. Hawkins - Whaler
Billy Joel - River of Dreams
Maroon 5 - Songs About Jane
Roisin Murphy - Ruby Blue
Beth Orton - Central Reservation
Pearl Jam - No Code
Pearl Jam - Binaural
Something for Kate - Desert Lights
Rachael Yamagata - Elephants... Teeth Sinking Into Heart

Various thoughts for this blog have zipped through my head at some point, here are the ones that stuck:

Billy Joel's River of Dreams was a second-hand purchase during the month.  Many years ago I was relying on a cassette copy of this album, I think made from my sister's legitimate CD version.  I hadn't listened to that copy for a long time, but I decided it was time to reacquaint myself with the album, and this time to do it the right way.  I think the music has survived the passage of time pretty well. In particular, the album makes a fine transition from the more aggressive and bitter sounds on side one to the gentler side two.

It's also quite fascinating to hear the song 'Famous Last Words' after all this time.  When it came out, everyone wondered whether it was Joel's way of saying he wouldn't make any more albums, and whether he'd stick to that.   18 years later, and he's been true to his word. Having run out of things he wanted to write music about, he stopped.  Good on him.

The Pearl Jam exploration continues with a return to Binaural.  I remember being excited by this one when I first listened to samples in a shop, something like a decade ago.  However, it turns out to be a rather patchy affair.  The biggest flaw is the production - rather ironically for an album with a name highlighting the special recording techniques used, the sound is often quite muddy and sucks the life out of many of the songs.  'Sleight of Hand' in particular drowns in a sea of murk.

I was inclined to blame new producer Tchad Blake, but then Wikipedia claimed that the band was actually dissatisfied with Blake's work and wanted the mixes to sound 'heavier', and so brought in their old producer.  Judging from the final results, this was not a terribly smart move!

Rachael Yamagata is a wonderful artist that one of my American friends introduced me around 6-7 years ago.  I just wish to God that she hadn't followed the exasperating trend of splitting her quieter and louder songs onto two separate discs.  It makes no sense to me, musically, to reduce contrast in this way. Contrast means interest. It means the ear is attracted by something new.  Music is fundamentally an art of judging the right balance between repetition and variation, and removing one of the options for variation tends to upset the balance.

I do listen to Elephants...Teeth Sinking Into Heart with the songs in the presented order, but this is one of those extremely rare examples where I've also created my own shuffled version with the faster songs interspersed through the work.  In terms of pacing, the result arguably plays quite a lot like Yamagata's first album Happenstance, and that's certainly not a bad result in my book.