Friday 23 September 2011

August 2011 - Popular Music

Tori Amos
  • Under the Pink
  • Boys for Pele
  • To Venus and Back (studio disc)
  • Strange Little Girls
  • Scarlet's Walk
  • The Beekeeper
  • Abnormally Attracted To Sin
  • Midwinter Graces
  • Scarlet's Hidden Treasures
Fiona Apple - When the Pawn...
Jimmy Barnes - Flesh and Wood
Kate Bush - Never for Ever
Kate Bush - The Red Shoes
Tim Corley - Anywhere But Here
The Dissociatives - The Dissociatives
David Gray - A New Day At Midnight
Patty Griffin - Impossible Dream
Missy Higgins - The Sound of White
Billy Joel - An Innocent Man
Billy Joel - River of Dreams
Nik Kershaw - Radio Musicola
Wendy Matthews - Lily
Wendy Matthews - Beautiful View
Joni Mitchell - For the Roses
Joni Mitchell - Shine
Moloko - Statues
Van Morrison - The Best of Van Morrison
Beth Orton - Daybreaker
Over the Rhine - Ohio
Pearl Jam - Backspacer
Pink - Greatest Hits... So Far!
Radiohead - The King of Limbs
Tears for Fears - The Seeds of Love
Thrice - The Alchemy Index
Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Wow. Did I really listen to all that?!

Okay yes, there is an enormous Tori Amos binge going on there. I basically had a phase of getting ready for her new album (Out Now!) by doing an overview of her previous body of work.  I'm insticintively a 'body of work' kind of person.  I didn't quite finish as you can see. I ran out of steam at some point, I can't recall whether it was because of a feeling of Tori overdose or because the stresses I was under just made me feel I couldn't really concentrate properly on what I was hearing.

Apart from that, and despite the stresses, I seem to have listened to a HECK of a lot over the month.  I know that several albums were covered in two car trips, but there's plenty of other exploration all over my library.  Which is good to see, that's what it's there for.  It'll be scary to find out just how many CDs I have once I finish the catalogue, it's up to a couple of hundred entries for pop and I'm nowhere near finished yet.

David Gray was one of those cases of unearthing something virtually unlistened to. I remember being terribly disappointed with A New Day At Midnight when I bought it.  Turns out it's fairly enjoyable light music for a car trip - it still doesn't seem to have anything that comes close to rivalling the highs of White Ladder, but it's certainly not a total waste of shelf space.

Beth Orton's Daybreaker is an album that truly fascinates and puzzles me.  Despite a fair amount of listening, it still doesn't feel very integrated to me.  It starts off with 4 of the most truly wonderful sonic landscapes I know. They just somehow have the right combination of detail and sweep to resonate with me personally.  And then... Beth pulls the rug out from under me.  Suddenly the album veers off into a more electronic title track, followed by folk, then country, before gradually heading back in an arc to where it started, getting there for the 10th and final track. There's nothing in the excursions that I dislike (the title track is probably my least favourite but it's still reasonable), but it just lacks something in either the production decisions or the song order to glue it all together into a single artistic vision.

And that's what I really look for in an album.  It's the combination of the individual songs, and even the touches within songs, with the big picture to make a satisfying whole.  Every song sounding the same is no good, and neither is every song sounding completely different. Despite what modern listening practice would have you believe, an album is not just a playlist slapped together by the singer which a listener can then change at their whim into their own playlist - or at least, that's not what an album should be in my view.  It's a multi-movement work, in just the same way that classical composers frequently created multi-movement works.  An album is the highest level structure in an system of sonic organisation that goes down to songs, then verse and choruses and bridges, write down to details in a single bar.

Well, the great ones are, anyway.

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