Many listens more, and this is still my overall favorite round so far. As I previewed a few days ago, I'll probably be digging further into the discographies of even some of the lower-ranked artists. It's hard to say since I kind of have to grade a bit on a curve, but in general 7.0 seems around the point at which I do genuinely start liking a song overall, but may have some reservations about it, which might be amplified a bit more than necessary to justify to myself why I scored some songs lower.
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Crow - Julia Holter - "Lucette Stranded On an Island"
Early Impression - "This might be the flip side of having so many layers."
So I've heard more material from her than most other artists before this round. I know she's become a bit of a critical darling for the music connoisseur community, and I've heard five of her albums and found them intriguing, but nothing had really stuck with me yet. I think you said this was the only album of her's that you liked, although the one that stood out the most on my cursory listens was Aviary. I was kind of glad you sent her, because I felt like it might be the sort of music that needs more listens to begin to unravel. But well, I've certain given this song quite a few plays, and there are still many layers to go for me to quite make sense of it.
I still can't figure out entirely what to make of this song. If I isolate each individual component, there's nothing really wrong with it, to the contrary, I like most of the separate components. The opening bell-like percussive texture is pretty unique. I love how the drum kit is pretty evenly panned around the stereo spectrum. And piano, violin, and harp are textures I'm almost always happy to hear. Apparently there is also saxophone on other tracks on the album, which I don't remember from my cursory listen awhile back. Some of the blurbs about the album I sampled indicate that it is a bit "bigger" sounding than some of her other work, and her voice is more out-front than it typically is, which would normally help.
But somehow it just doesn't fit altogether like I want it to. I think it's a bit too much in the abstract and artsy direction for me. When I listen to it, it's an enjoyable experience to hear all of the different layers bouncing off of each other, but when I'm not listening to it, I can't really remember much about it other than a lot seemed to be happening, and the "the birds can sing a song" line. In contrast to some of the heavily-layered songs in previous rounds, this one just feels kind of messy and cluttered. It's as if they had a bunch of ideas in the studio session and just pasted them altogether. I read an interview snippet where she says that she writes in a stream of consciousness flow, sometimes to an excess, and I think that might be the challenge for me. Maybe it's just not the right song. But still, better to be nebulous and a bit busy than overly minimalistic in general for me.
Score: 7/10
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Vmadera00 - St. Vincent - "Strange Mercy"
Early Impression - "I was not expecting a synth lead to stand out."
Here is an artist that I've heard an album and a few separate songs from, but is another that I'm only cursorily familiar with. And well, here we have exhibit A for why it might be risky to send a live version of a song as the primary entry. There are certainly elements I appreciate about this song, but the live version magnifies a few quibbles that bug me about it.
First, a few things I admired. As my impression alludes to, the tone at 1:37 and other spots is easily the most alluring of the song. I thought it was a synthesizer at first, but obviously once you watch the video you can see that she's playing it live, and it's likely going through some kind of pedal that gives it a synthier timbre, or is even being processed by a synthesizer somewhere else in the room. It's a texture that while still quite interesting live, is diluted a bit and pulled back in the mix, and the timbre is a tad more piquant on the studio recording. I also kind of like the rising swell texture at 3:27. Overall I dig the relaxed vibe of the track, and in spite of what I'm about to say, the overall experience was still positive.
So onto what I struggled with. One problem is that in general the mix sounds really narrow and boxy. Everything is just squashed into the center of the left-right spectrum, and it loses the stereophonic richness that the studio version has. The next issue is that the song has this sort of unadorned trap-style beat that propels much of it, and makes it feel too static. Even though in the live performance it's clearly being played on a pad, there are no dynamics to it - it seems programmed so that every hit of the pad is at exactly the same volume. Supposedly the drummer is fairly well-regarded, so maybe I just don't get along with his groove, but it's even more noticeable live than the album version, even when he switches from the pad to the hi-hat.
The next challenge for me is the fuzzy, broken speaker guitar tone she uses starting at 2:44. There are probably contexts where that might be an interesting sound for contrast, but it just doesn't work for me here, and the timbre is even more obtrusive on the live version than the studio one. And then a further concern is that at 3:32 when the synth guitar lead returns, this time it's being doubled by another instrument an octave up, but they aren't in-tune with each other, which is distracting.
Score: 7/10
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Sacul - Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man - "Mysteries"
Early Impression - "Not as depressing as expected."
Which for me isn't always a good thing. It can be fascinating when an artist from a more well-known project does solo or collaborative work, to see if they lean even more heavily into the sound of their main project, or whether they go for something completely different. In this case, it appears that she's done the latter. I'd heard this album at some point before, but didn't realy know it. I'm more of a casual Portishead fan, but I generally like the darker grittiness of them, so you could say I was a bit sad this was so happy. It's certainly not a bad song, but it just doesn't really move me as much as I'd like it to, and I think I prefer her work with Portishead.
It seems silly and superficial, but when the melodies don't hook me, it appears that it can boil down to it just having too many major chords for me, the intro being deceptively minor. It's also a bit on the minimalistic side for my tastes, with mostly just a single guitar and lead vocal, with some backing subdued choral vocals. A few interesting background textures start popping up around 3:38, but it's not really enough to move the needle. I still like her voice enough to keep it from the bottom, and maybe another song on the album would work better for me. A blurb described this album as "Billie Holiday fronting Siouxsie & The Banshees", which should be right up my alley, but I guess I just don't hear it on this tune, it's pleasant, but not indelible like I wish it was.
Score: 7.25/10
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Elite - Marína Ósk - "Meðan höndin mín í hendi þinni hvílir"
Early Impression - "Is this song too happy for me?"
Well, so you have picked an interesting vocalist, but this is probably not the right song. I'm beginning to feel a theme here with some of these first few tracks. I'm wondering if this is one of the least jazz-oriented songs that Marina's done, which might have been a mistaken, even if technically we've already had "the jazz round." It's not a bad song by any means, and there are certainly enjoyable things about it, but there are just too many other cuts this round that I like more. I think it might just be a weakness in my taste, that with some exceptions, it's more rare for brighter-sounding music to resonate with me as much as more melancholic songs. I'm not sure if I'd want nothing but sorrowful music all roulette long, because some more positive songs will occasionally hit, it's just less common.
Stylistically, this probably could have been a minor hit in the 90s, as it's not that far off from some Dave Matthews material and some country songs of the time. Although, it does have some more unique characteristics, like Marina's voice, and the rounder guitar tone often played in octaves and with tremolo. 2:26 is the "we might also play jazz" tease with the grace note, but unfortunately that's about all you get. I do also find that the light drumming, a few bass runs, and increased presence of backing vocals and harmonies gives it some lift in a few spots. I'll probably have to check out more of her work, because I could imagine other songs appealing to me more.
Score: 7.25/10
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TAC - Helloween - "Longing"
Early Impression - "Do I prefer this vocalist in a different context, or a different era?"
So Helloween is not an unfamiliar band to me. When I was discovering power metal, I kept running across people recommending the Keeper of the Seven Keys pair of albums, which I purchased and listened to a number of times ("I Want Out" was my favorite song of theirs), and some other scattered songs here and there, and while I understand their importance in laying the foundation for the style, building upon Rainbow's work, they just never quite appealed to me the way some of the later bands did. Well, their reunion albums a few years ago with Kiske, Hansen, and Deris joining forces renewed my interest in them a bit, and I enjoyed them more than I expected I would, since later-era releases from older bands can be pretty hit or miss. Well, Kiske's performance on those albums was probably the most surprising facet - his voice seemed to have aged much better than Deris' or Hansen's.
But here, we're back to the first decade of their output, and frankly, I think I prefer the more current version of him. He's perfectly fine here, which is probably less than you want to hear. But without refreshing my memory more strongly with the Keepers albums, I'm torn between wondering whether he sounds better with the complement of the full band, or if I just prefer the more refined and polished later incarnation of him. Regardless, it does show a greater amount of range and shade of vocal timbre than I was aware he had. This holds up much better than some of the Timo Kotipelto ballads of the 90s and early 00s, for example.
After my first listen I had an impression of the string accompaniment feeling really dated, but on later listens, it was not as bad as I recalled. They sound ok in the upper and midrange, and it's just the lowest-pitched ones that sound like they're based upon a dated keyboard sample, most noticeable at 3:29.
Score: 7.25/10
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Tomislav95 - Micah P. Hinson - "Beneath the Rose"
Early Impression - "This does way more with its runtime than I expected it to."
I was a bit worried at first, because with the sub-three minute runtime and the opening, I thought this might be the sort of overly simple indie folk that generally doesn't connect with me. But as it went along, it really picked up steam, and I was surprised with how much it packs into its length. We get some upright bass, some vocal double tracking, some slide guitar at 1:09 (possibly the first use of it in this roulette - I love that sound), some accordion, and some piano triplets in sync with the acoustic, but a different pattern, so there's a sneakily large amount going on by the ending. And he has a more unpolished voice than I normally prefer (it feels really weird scoring him higher than Kiske, but the instrumentation is also doing some heavy lifting here), but I actually kind of dig it, the vibe just really works. And I guess this is where the fickle nature of my tastes comes out a bit, because this is also on the happier side of what I normally like, which perhaps keeps it from scoring a bit higher, but it would have placed solidly in the middle in most other rounds.
Score: 7.5/10
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Nachtmerrie - Jo Quail - "Forge"
Early Impression - "This would make a fantastic intro to a song."
So here we have another song that might have been hurt a bit by sending the live/performance version instead of the studio one. It's definitely riveting to watch, particularly with the more detailed runthrough she does of how she's constructing it on the fly. But as a complete piece of music, it's just missing something, and feels like an extended intro to a full album or a more conventional song. I don't know about the album as a whole, but I did listen to the studio version of this song for comparison, and while it's not perfect either, it does have more parts and elements that might have made this score a bit higher.
So as people may be figuring out, I really do love violin and cello as solo instruments, generally much more than in large symphonic ensembles, where I find too often the individual brilliance of a particular performance is just lost in the wash of sound. And this is a pretty enthralling composition in how Jo uses nothing but the cello itself to produce a pretty staggering array of different sounds, from body percussion to atmospheric parts to more driving rhythmic motifs. But a bit like Amenra a couple rounds ago, it's just lacking something melodically. It's not intended to be as heavy as that one, and it has much more ambiance than "De Evenmens" did, but it is also light on anything memorable to hook me in. The closest it gets is the ending solo of sorts, but even that is more texture than melody, and is a bit lower in the mix than it should have been, as she notes in the explanation video. There were some more melodic electric guitar parts in the studio recording that would have come at least a bit closer, but they're not even mimicked at all in this live performance rendition.
The construction of the piece is quite impressive, noticing how it is in an odd time signature, with different layers having different cycles where they resync with each other, kind of a Meshuggah concept applied to chamber-ish music. It was probably done long before them, but they're an obvious metal example of it. I've seen a lot of different uses of live looping technology used to create pieces, generally on guitar and sometimes on vocals, but this is definitely one of the more unique and striking ones. The slicer effect on the high note at 3:55 is also delightful. Towards the end it becomes something of industrial chamber music.
The biggest surprise was finding out that Jo performed the cello parts on Emma Ruth Rundle's "Blooms of Oblivion" and "Citadel". The former song in particular is one of my absolute favorite tracks of the decade so far, and while it's mostly from Emma's contributions, the cello work did help set the mood as well. That can't really directly help the score of this song, but those sort of connections do make me even more likely to check out more material from an artist. And it's always nice to find more chamber music that isn't strictly classical or Apocalyptica.
Score: 7.75/10
Topic: LithoJazzoSphere Roulette V1: Variety & Reciprocity (Post-Roulette Playlist) (Read 119636 times)