Bat for Lashes - The Haunted Man
Gomez - How We Operate
Jars of Clay - Redemption Songs
Roisin Murphy - Ruby Blue
Not a lot of pop music listening this month (the reason for which will be apparent when I complete the post on classical music). Two of the four albums are 'new'. Gomez' album was another one of the pop albums I bought last year and put aside (like the Jars of Clay one). The Bat for Lashes was a genuinely new purchase of an album that only came out last year - the one on the Christmas and birthday shopping list that I didn't receive for Christmas or my birthday, so eventually went out and bought myself.
How We Operate was in fact the first Gomez album I ever heard - or rather some portions of it were the first bits of Gomez music that I heard. I had come across the name of the band before, but it was a podcast, of all things, that made me more curious in 2006. "Of all things" because the total number of podcasts I've ever listened to can probably still be measured in single digits.
The podcast was from Bob Lefsetz, a person in the American music industry who it seems is somewhat polemical. The reason I was even listening to any episodes of his podcast had to do with Tori Amos (how surprising), but somehow he got my attention talking about and praising this band that, in his view, had not really played by the usual record company rules. It is perhaps worth noting that How We Operate was their first album after being dropped by a major label.
But I didn't buy the album. The reason I didn't buy it was because a very short time later I was browsing through the local second-hand CD store (which is now, 7 years later, entirely lacking in CDs) and came across a 3-disc set of Gomez' previous three albums. Issued by their former record company. Nothing guarantees the release of your old material in a cheaper format than leaving the record company. Just ask Radiohead.
I of course took the opportunity to acquire 3 albums from a band I had become interested in at around $20 rather than buy 1 album for that price or more. But it took a long, long time to really delve into those albums. The roots of the band are perhaps in blues, but Gomez' music is not entirely straightforward. More than anything else it is eclectic. With several singers and songwriters, and also it seems to me an innate musical curiosity, some of their songs can initially sound like they were put together by a slightly mad bird that picked up shiny things in the area.
But the great success of the band is that it works. The changes of pace and of texture are not, in the end, something totally random. There is coherent structure behind the aural surprises. It just took me a while to really grasp this. Multiply that experience by 3 albums, and the cheap box I found lasted me a long time.
It wasn't until 2011 that I went back and bought Gomez' first album Bring It On, which brought them critical acclaim but which to me (as I've previously mentioned in this blog) lacks some of the controlled skill of the following albums. And now, finally, I am back at album number 5. The band itself has progressed to album number 7 in the meantime.
How We Operate is clearly mellower than what went before it. Reactions to this appear to have varied enormously. Those that want a band to stay young and brash and vibrant forevermore seem to have moaned that Gomez had started to 'lose it' by now. I suffer no such desire. I'm not even sure I suffered that kind of desire back when I was a teenager. Perhaps this is what a classical music education does to you. You realise that music doesn't have to be young and hip and fresh to be good.
I think that How We Operate is good. Frankly it's a bit too early to tell. The whole point with Gomez is that it takes a long time to peel back the layers, and I don't think I'm nearly familiar enough with the album yet to work out how it will stand up to the other albums in the long term. But I suspect I will enjoy finding out.
So why am I writing this enormous long post about an album I'm not prepared to comment on much?
Because I only listened to 4 pop albums this month. That's why...
...and also, because I've lived with the idea of this album, sitting quietly in the back of my head, for almost 7 years. That's quite a while to be mentally in future possession of an album before finally acquiring and listening to it. Actually hearing it is a significant marker in my musical journey.
Tuesday 7 May 2013
Friday 3 May 2013
March 2013 - Classical Music
Bach, J.S. - French Suite No.2
Barber - Violin Concerto
Beethoven - Piano Sonata No.26
Beethoven - Sextet for Horns and String Quartet
Bridge
Faure
Liszt - Les Preludes
Messiaen - Quartet for the End of Time
Poulenc
Not that I haven't 'quite liked' the earlier works. But as I've moved through the orchestral music chronologically, I've now hit a piece that truly satisfied me. That piece was the Dance Poem. Hopefully there will be more works that I appreciate to the same extent as I continue, ever so slowly, to explore this repertoire.
Conversely, I'm beginning to give up on Liszt a little bit. There's a lot of incident in these symphonic poems, but it's not often that I feel like all those incidents add up to some genuine, structural drama. I've no doubt that I will go back and try all of these works again at some point, but out of all the purchases I made in the 2nd half of last year, the Liszt symphonic poems are probably the ones least likely to make me feel like I want to have a second listen soon after the first.
Well, except for the early Dvorak quartets. The later ones are very good. The first few are a bit like the Liszt - lots of nice tunes, but not a lot else.
The work I probably spent the most time listening to this month was Faure's La bonne chanson, and here I'm still puzzled. Here is one of my very favourite composers, here is what is considered one of his great masterpieces... and I didn't really respond to it all that well. Is it me? The performance? The fact that the song cycle is insanely complex and I just haven't grasped it all yet?
I did try. I tried a lot. I listened to the songs separately and as a complete cycle. I did it reading the words (knowing little French) and putting the booklet aside to focus on the music. And while I admired a great deal, I never really fell in love with it.
Which is damned odd. This is Faure we're talking about. I obsess over his music at times. And I enjoyed the Five Venetian Melodies quite a lot - same composer, same poet, written only a year or two earlier. I also know that within the few years after La bonne chanson, Faure wrote the 3 piano pieces that convinced me of his genius in the first place.
The difference in my attitude is instructive. With Dvorak (and to a lesser extent Bridge), I put my weak response down to Dvorak's relative immaturity. With Liszt, I put another work on the pile of Liszt mediocrities. But with Faure, I'm determined to get to the bottom of the mystery of why he hasn't made me ecstatic.
Barber - Violin Concerto
Beethoven - Piano Sonata No.26
Beethoven - Sextet for Horns and String Quartet
Bridge
- The Sea
- Dance Poem
- Summer
- The Pageant of London
- Where she lies asleep
- Love went a-riding
- Impromptu No.1
- Berceuse
- Waltzes, opuses 69 and 70 (published posthumously)
Faure
- La bonne chanson
- Cinq mélodies 'de Venise'
- Valse-caprice No.3
- Shylock suite (piano version)
- En prière
- String Quartets 15, 17, 18, 19 and 20
- Quartetto Sereno (completed by Nørgård)
- Haiduc (Marauders)
- Reminiscences for solo violin
Liszt - Les Preludes
Messiaen - Quartet for the End of Time
Poulenc
- Villageoises
- Presto in B flat
- Two intermezzi
- Intermezzo in A flat
Not that I haven't 'quite liked' the earlier works. But as I've moved through the orchestral music chronologically, I've now hit a piece that truly satisfied me. That piece was the Dance Poem. Hopefully there will be more works that I appreciate to the same extent as I continue, ever so slowly, to explore this repertoire.
Conversely, I'm beginning to give up on Liszt a little bit. There's a lot of incident in these symphonic poems, but it's not often that I feel like all those incidents add up to some genuine, structural drama. I've no doubt that I will go back and try all of these works again at some point, but out of all the purchases I made in the 2nd half of last year, the Liszt symphonic poems are probably the ones least likely to make me feel like I want to have a second listen soon after the first.
Well, except for the early Dvorak quartets. The later ones are very good. The first few are a bit like the Liszt - lots of nice tunes, but not a lot else.
The work I probably spent the most time listening to this month was Faure's La bonne chanson, and here I'm still puzzled. Here is one of my very favourite composers, here is what is considered one of his great masterpieces... and I didn't really respond to it all that well. Is it me? The performance? The fact that the song cycle is insanely complex and I just haven't grasped it all yet?
I did try. I tried a lot. I listened to the songs separately and as a complete cycle. I did it reading the words (knowing little French) and putting the booklet aside to focus on the music. And while I admired a great deal, I never really fell in love with it.
Which is damned odd. This is Faure we're talking about. I obsess over his music at times. And I enjoyed the Five Venetian Melodies quite a lot - same composer, same poet, written only a year or two earlier. I also know that within the few years after La bonne chanson, Faure wrote the 3 piano pieces that convinced me of his genius in the first place.
The difference in my attitude is instructive. With Dvorak (and to a lesser extent Bridge), I put my weak response down to Dvorak's relative immaturity. With Liszt, I put another work on the pile of Liszt mediocrities. But with Faure, I'm determined to get to the bottom of the mystery of why he hasn't made me ecstatic.
Thursday 2 May 2013
March 2013 - Popular Music
Tori Amos - To Venus and Back (studio disc)
Tori Amos - audience bootleg, Dallas 29 September 1999
Kate Bush - Lionheart
Marc Cohn - The Rainy Season
Counting Crows - August and Everything After
Gavin DeGraw - Chariot
Bryan Duncan - Mercy
Peter Gabriel - So
Genesis - We Can't Dance
Gotye - Making Mirrors
Incubus - Make Yourself
Jars of Clay - Redemption Songs
Jars of Clay - Good Monsters
Billy Joel - River of Dreams
Radiohead - In Rainbows
Something for Kate - Echolalia
Something for Kate - Leave Your Soul to Science
Talk Talk - The Colour of Spring
The new entry in here was Redemption Songs. A not entirely new purchase - one of several pop albums that I bought around about the same time as the classical music avalanche I keep referring to, and put aside for later. Plus, of course, it was released in 2005 so I am performing my frequent trick of buying albums most people have stopped talking about.
There is, or perhaps was (as I'm not really up on the last several years) an interesting trend in Christian contemporary music that really blurs the boundaries between participatory, worship-style music you'd find in a church setting and performance-style music you'd expect an audience to hear in concert or buy on CD. I say 'trend' partly because there did seem to be a distinct wave of bands releasing worship-style music, at a time a few years back when I was listening to Christian radio enough to notice. (My loss of touch with Christian radio is at least partly a function of my loss of touch with radio generally.)
Redemption Songs is definitely part of that 'trend'. It generally consists of old words - probably old hymns although I'm not completely certain in some cases whether these were hymns or only poems - set to newer music. Or in the case of some old hymns (definitely this time), some new music has been added to the old. The liner notes refer to the band's hope of carving out 'a new tradition of church music'. It's a particularly Christian take on doing a musical crossover.
(There is some cheating involved in the concept here. Based on the credits, there are at least a couple of songs where the music hasn't been updated.)
It's an interesting idea. To my ears, however, most of this doesn't sound terribly 'new' at all. It sounds old. The words sound like the words of another generation, and the music does nothing to bring it forward.
The funny thing is, though, that not only do about a third of the tracks succeed in having a more modern sensibility, the successes are generally the songs that Jars of Clay themselves provided all the music for (and conversely, the Jars of Clay-composed songs are generally successful). If the album is not an especially great listen, it isn't because the idea behind it was bad, it's because the idea wasn't pushed hard enough and worked on more.
Or maybe that's just my ears. Maybe they wanted it to sound 'old'. Maybe the target audience wasn't the Christian contemporary music fan base, but the more traditional American churchgoers that eye CCM as some kind of bad compromise with the devil (seriously, some of the things you can read about it on the internet are... not complimentary). Maybe for some people this was one of the few favoured 'pop' albums that they could tolerate.
Then again, they did release one of the self-composed, modern sounding songs as the single.
Tori Amos - audience bootleg, Dallas 29 September 1999
Kate Bush - Lionheart
Marc Cohn - The Rainy Season
Counting Crows - August and Everything After
Gavin DeGraw - Chariot
Bryan Duncan - Mercy
Peter Gabriel - So
Genesis - We Can't Dance
Gotye - Making Mirrors
Incubus - Make Yourself
Jars of Clay - Redemption Songs
Jars of Clay - Good Monsters
Billy Joel - River of Dreams
Radiohead - In Rainbows
Something for Kate - Echolalia
Something for Kate - Leave Your Soul to Science
Talk Talk - The Colour of Spring
The new entry in here was Redemption Songs. A not entirely new purchase - one of several pop albums that I bought around about the same time as the classical music avalanche I keep referring to, and put aside for later. Plus, of course, it was released in 2005 so I am performing my frequent trick of buying albums most people have stopped talking about.
There is, or perhaps was (as I'm not really up on the last several years) an interesting trend in Christian contemporary music that really blurs the boundaries between participatory, worship-style music you'd find in a church setting and performance-style music you'd expect an audience to hear in concert or buy on CD. I say 'trend' partly because there did seem to be a distinct wave of bands releasing worship-style music, at a time a few years back when I was listening to Christian radio enough to notice. (My loss of touch with Christian radio is at least partly a function of my loss of touch with radio generally.)
Redemption Songs is definitely part of that 'trend'. It generally consists of old words - probably old hymns although I'm not completely certain in some cases whether these were hymns or only poems - set to newer music. Or in the case of some old hymns (definitely this time), some new music has been added to the old. The liner notes refer to the band's hope of carving out 'a new tradition of church music'. It's a particularly Christian take on doing a musical crossover.
(There is some cheating involved in the concept here. Based on the credits, there are at least a couple of songs where the music hasn't been updated.)
It's an interesting idea. To my ears, however, most of this doesn't sound terribly 'new' at all. It sounds old. The words sound like the words of another generation, and the music does nothing to bring it forward.
The funny thing is, though, that not only do about a third of the tracks succeed in having a more modern sensibility, the successes are generally the songs that Jars of Clay themselves provided all the music for (and conversely, the Jars of Clay-composed songs are generally successful). If the album is not an especially great listen, it isn't because the idea behind it was bad, it's because the idea wasn't pushed hard enough and worked on more.
Or maybe that's just my ears. Maybe they wanted it to sound 'old'. Maybe the target audience wasn't the Christian contemporary music fan base, but the more traditional American churchgoers that eye CCM as some kind of bad compromise with the devil (seriously, some of the things you can read about it on the internet are... not complimentary). Maybe for some people this was one of the few favoured 'pop' albums that they could tolerate.
Then again, they did release one of the self-composed, modern sounding songs as the single.
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