You would expect that, living by the beach, I would have taken much earlier notice of an album called Beaches by a band called Beaches – and a local (well, Melbourne, anyway) band at that. Actually, I did buy their album sometime ago but, somehow or another, put it aside and I have only just now gotten around to sitting down and giving it a serious listen.
I’m still pretty bad at working at genres, and Beaches really defies traditional placement anyway – but if I had to sum it up in one word, albeit a double barrelled and not terribly good one, I’d call it “pop-drone”. Of course, you could hardly get two genres more disparate than pop and drone, but there is something about the way Beaches manage to build catchy, hooky phrases into a thickly woven, repetitively patterned fabric of sound. It’s like little brightly coloured bricks of sound have been copied, over and over, layered on top of each other, to erect wonderful walls which, once built, present you not with neat little songs about this or that, but with dense landscapes, seascapes and skyscapes.
Beaches begins with some deceptively light and breezy tracks – tricking you into thinking that perhaps this is going to be a languid, lazy day lying in the sun. But by time you get to ‘The Rip’, with its tribal beats, its tonality dragging you down into dark minor key depths, where strange creatures howl, you realise that this journey is not all sunshine and light.
The sense of mystery and strangeness intensifies with ‘Horizon’ and ‘Eternal Sphere’, dreamlike and dark, until the fog and mist dissipates with ‘Ramblin’’ and you feel you are surrounded once more by light and yet a light that, somehow, now seems to be broken by shadows, or at least by the memory of them.
Beaches is full of these changing pictures and colours, not so much within tracks as between them. But what happens within the track is always every bit as dramatic as what happens between them – tunes that seem to emerge out of the thinnest thread of an idea, growing organically, dynamically, as the five women who make up this band feed, and feed off, one another’s musicianship, creating, almost telepathically, it seems, a community of sound through powerful electric guitars; solid, sometimes aggressive, sometimes secure, drums; and occasional vocals that blend into, rather than pit themselves against, the instruments.
Beaches are not just places where you go for summer holidays. They are places where you can see things: big things, bad things, sunny things, scary things, safe things, strange things. And Beaches lets you immerse yourself in every one of these. It lets you splash and giggle in the shallows; and it lets you drown and go to pieces in the depths; but i always somehow seems to bring you back to bask in the sun.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Thursday, January 14, 2010
David Watson the Brave - Wax and Wane
I have to confess that the bagpipes is one of the few instruments that I have never really been able to bond with. I don't know if that's because of hearing 'Scotland the Brave' a few hundred times too many, or something to do with my distaste for kilts, or just simply that it has alwas struck me as instrument that doesn't seem to have much character, except perhaps when you hear it played on a really good documentary about the Scottish countryside.
But, given my newfound commitment to be open to anything in music, when I was burrowing through the experimental/noise section of Melbourne's Missing Link music store today, and came across New Zealand born David Watson's album of avant garde bagpipe music, Wax and Wane, I thought I had better give it a go.
Wax and Wane is an album that boasts a fascinating array of musicians, playing bagpipes, a bass guitar, drums, keyboards, an accordian and a turntable. It's a mixture you can hardly imagine being able to tolerate being in the same room together, let alone pooling their talents and their creativity to produce music.
But that's exactly what they do on this album, with some incredibly interesting results, always stretching the boundaries of music into new territory, some of which seems so good, so right, that you can't believe it hasn't been explored before, and some of which is so strange and weird that you might wonder at times what planet you're on.
Listen, for example, to the sensational 'Blue Out' - with bagpipe riffing that, if played on the electric guitar, would rival anything that Jimi Hendrix ever did. And then listen to the absolute madness of 'Metal Rat', with seemingly random noises coming from all directions, with spits and pops and crackles of sound, and bashes of drums and then, out of nowhere, it seems, the haunting sound of the bagpipes playing what sounds like a nostalgic elegy to souls long dead behind nightmarish batterings of percussion, and screeches of electric noise. There's the awe-inspiring drones of 'Mescalator', the crazed assault and battery on 'Auld Lang Syne' in '2:47 am'. In 'Dead Hand' there are moments where the bagpipes screech and squeal as if they were Miles Davis's trumpet. In 'The Snakes', the pipes really do seem to slither and squirm like reptiles.
Unlike the incredible precision of yesterday's Rammstein, Wax and Wane is an album where everything sounds spontaneous, improvised, experimental. It's music that seems to grow as it grows. You feel that everything is being done for the first time and that a lot of it might never be done again - but, however odd and unexpected the results might be, you can't help but feeling kind of privileged to be hearing it, and being curious to hear more.
Wax and Wane might not be enough to turn me onto 'Scotland the Brave', nor to change my opinion about kilts, but it has certainly convinced me that the bagpipes have a lot of character after all. They just needed someone like David Watson to have the skill, and the nerve, to coax it out of them.
But, given my newfound commitment to be open to anything in music, when I was burrowing through the experimental/noise section of Melbourne's Missing Link music store today, and came across New Zealand born David Watson's album of avant garde bagpipe music, Wax and Wane, I thought I had better give it a go.
Wax and Wane is an album that boasts a fascinating array of musicians, playing bagpipes, a bass guitar, drums, keyboards, an accordian and a turntable. It's a mixture you can hardly imagine being able to tolerate being in the same room together, let alone pooling their talents and their creativity to produce music.
But that's exactly what they do on this album, with some incredibly interesting results, always stretching the boundaries of music into new territory, some of which seems so good, so right, that you can't believe it hasn't been explored before, and some of which is so strange and weird that you might wonder at times what planet you're on.
Listen, for example, to the sensational 'Blue Out' - with bagpipe riffing that, if played on the electric guitar, would rival anything that Jimi Hendrix ever did. And then listen to the absolute madness of 'Metal Rat', with seemingly random noises coming from all directions, with spits and pops and crackles of sound, and bashes of drums and then, out of nowhere, it seems, the haunting sound of the bagpipes playing what sounds like a nostalgic elegy to souls long dead behind nightmarish batterings of percussion, and screeches of electric noise. There's the awe-inspiring drones of 'Mescalator', the crazed assault and battery on 'Auld Lang Syne' in '2:47 am'. In 'Dead Hand' there are moments where the bagpipes screech and squeal as if they were Miles Davis's trumpet. In 'The Snakes', the pipes really do seem to slither and squirm like reptiles.
Unlike the incredible precision of yesterday's Rammstein, Wax and Wane is an album where everything sounds spontaneous, improvised, experimental. It's music that seems to grow as it grows. You feel that everything is being done for the first time and that a lot of it might never be done again - but, however odd and unexpected the results might be, you can't help but feeling kind of privileged to be hearing it, and being curious to hear more.
Wax and Wane might not be enough to turn me onto 'Scotland the Brave', nor to change my opinion about kilts, but it has certainly convinced me that the bagpipes have a lot of character after all. They just needed someone like David Watson to have the skill, and the nerve, to coax it out of them.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
The power of industrial Germany - Rammstein
When German industrial metal band Rammstein's latest album, Die Liebe ist für Alle da, begins you could be excused for thinking you were listening to the opening of a modern opera about the world's apocalypse. Choral and orchestral chords murmur and echo and a cavernous voice chants to us of the end of waiting and of the promise of a legend.
But the pounding beat of electric guitars and a massive battery of percussion breaks in and Rammstein announces its own name with a strength and authority that is commanding and arresting; and the sound of metal bashing metal, like a huge factory machine, pumps pistons of steel-like sound through your veins.
But Rammstein don't just play good metal, they play good music, where each song is structured with enormous ingenuity, like the breathless pace of 'Waidmanns Heil' with its dramatic key change half-way through, and played with astonishing precision, like the military beats and rhythms, like rapid gunfire, of the album's title song.
The music is given shape, too, by its contrasts, throwing moments of acoustic gentleness in amongst the metallic ferocity, as in 'Frühling in Paris', or massive brass chorales, as in 'B********' (which, incidentally, is a nice way of saying 'Bückstabü', which, as far as I can work out, doesn't actually mean anything - but Marty R may be able to enlighten me further on that), or the haunting, eerie, nursery-rhyme simplicty underpinning 'Roter Sand', like a spectral version of the Brecht/Weill 'Mackie Messer', giving me, I fear, nightmares for a long, long time.
For me, it is ultimately this bottomless pit of innovation and creativity with which Rammstein infuse the metal/industrial genre, combined with their gob-smacking musicianship, that makes this band, and this album, such a thrill. Everything moves at a lightning pace and, by time it ends, you feel you have to go back and listen to it again, if only to try to take stock of the massive store of ideas it contains.
Liebe ist für Alle da is one of those truly sensational albums that is able to combine the accessibility of being immediately engaging with the ongoing fascination of being inventive and inspired. You'll like it after one hearing and after one hundred you might begin to know why.
But the pounding beat of electric guitars and a massive battery of percussion breaks in and Rammstein announces its own name with a strength and authority that is commanding and arresting; and the sound of metal bashing metal, like a huge factory machine, pumps pistons of steel-like sound through your veins.
But Rammstein don't just play good metal, they play good music, where each song is structured with enormous ingenuity, like the breathless pace of 'Waidmanns Heil' with its dramatic key change half-way through, and played with astonishing precision, like the military beats and rhythms, like rapid gunfire, of the album's title song.
The music is given shape, too, by its contrasts, throwing moments of acoustic gentleness in amongst the metallic ferocity, as in 'Frühling in Paris', or massive brass chorales, as in 'B********' (which, incidentally, is a nice way of saying 'Bückstabü', which, as far as I can work out, doesn't actually mean anything - but Marty R may be able to enlighten me further on that), or the haunting, eerie, nursery-rhyme simplicty underpinning 'Roter Sand', like a spectral version of the Brecht/Weill 'Mackie Messer', giving me, I fear, nightmares for a long, long time.
For me, it is ultimately this bottomless pit of innovation and creativity with which Rammstein infuse the metal/industrial genre, combined with their gob-smacking musicianship, that makes this band, and this album, such a thrill. Everything moves at a lightning pace and, by time it ends, you feel you have to go back and listen to it again, if only to try to take stock of the massive store of ideas it contains.
Liebe ist für Alle da is one of those truly sensational albums that is able to combine the accessibility of being immediately engaging with the ongoing fascination of being inventive and inspired. You'll like it after one hearing and after one hundred you might begin to know why.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Solid Aussie rock - Goanna's Spirit of Place
I had never even heard of early 80s Aussie rock band, Goanna, until Wayne introduced me to their (more or less) only album last night - but then I hadn't heard of hardly anyone until a few months ago, so that didn't necessarily mean much. But then a quick check with my nephew revealed that he hadn't heard of them either so it made me think that maybe this band really was one that never got very far into the limelight.
But when you combine some good solid Australian rock with music that seems connected to the Australian landscape, the Australian spirit, with its indigenous roots and its eternal sense of wandering and restlessness, you can't help but wonder why this music never became more popular. It flows with a soft rock beat, and overflows with catchy hooks that bring you in, hook, line and sinker, before you have even noticed their deeper, more serious edge.
Spirit of Place is far from just an album of simple songs about an easy life in a sun-drenched land. They are songs full of yearning and often of anger - like in the anthem to Aboriginal land rights, accusing as much as pleading, of 'Solid Rock (Sacred Ground)', perhaps the first piece of rock music to incorporate a didgeridoo; or the challenges to hold onto what you know to be right, brought to you via the folk-infused vocals of Roslyn Bygrave, stirring and rousing in 'Stand yr' Ground', moving and inspirational in 'On the Platform'; or the way gently weeping electric guitar phrases urge us to remember our debt to the land in 'Children of the Southern Land'.
These songs are tremendous examples of what can be done, and of what power can be wrought, just by employing the trusted basics of music - good, unpretentious melodies and solid, reliable beats - with conviction and musicianship.
Spirit of Place is a good way of showing that music doesn't have to break into totally uncharted territory to sound new and innovative - it just has to have some honesty, some point, some spirit.
Thanks Wayne for introducing me to Goanna, and to these brave and spirited songs that speak to us as loudly now, and as earnestly, as they did in 1982.
But when you combine some good solid Australian rock with music that seems connected to the Australian landscape, the Australian spirit, with its indigenous roots and its eternal sense of wandering and restlessness, you can't help but wonder why this music never became more popular. It flows with a soft rock beat, and overflows with catchy hooks that bring you in, hook, line and sinker, before you have even noticed their deeper, more serious edge.
Spirit of Place is far from just an album of simple songs about an easy life in a sun-drenched land. They are songs full of yearning and often of anger - like in the anthem to Aboriginal land rights, accusing as much as pleading, of 'Solid Rock (Sacred Ground)', perhaps the first piece of rock music to incorporate a didgeridoo; or the challenges to hold onto what you know to be right, brought to you via the folk-infused vocals of Roslyn Bygrave, stirring and rousing in 'Stand yr' Ground', moving and inspirational in 'On the Platform'; or the way gently weeping electric guitar phrases urge us to remember our debt to the land in 'Children of the Southern Land'.
These songs are tremendous examples of what can be done, and of what power can be wrought, just by employing the trusted basics of music - good, unpretentious melodies and solid, reliable beats - with conviction and musicianship.
Spirit of Place is a good way of showing that music doesn't have to break into totally uncharted territory to sound new and innovative - it just has to have some honesty, some point, some spirit.
Thanks Wayne for introducing me to Goanna, and to these brave and spirited songs that speak to us as loudly now, and as earnestly, as they did in 1982.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Body and soul united - Philip Glass and Leonard Cohen's Book of Longing
If there is one good thing about buying Christmas presents for people when they’ve already got them, it’s that you end up being able to keep them for yourself.
And so it was that I managed to acquire a copy of Book of Longing, a double CD release of a song cycle of the music of Philip Glass and the poetry of Leonard Cohen, which I had bought for my friend Philip, a great fan of his Glass namesake.
Philip Glass has become a bit of a household name these days amongst people who like music that strides both the classical and the more popular genres but that still challenges conventional norms, is original and, without being easy-listening, is easy to listen to.
If you are at all familiar with Philip Glass, you will recognise Book of Longing as his work within a second or two of hitting the play button. The swirling phrases, where few more than a couple of notes repeat over and over, with subtle changes to time and beat that make even its catchiest moments almost impossible to tap your foot to, spread out across solid, diatonic harmonies that shift and change like fractured light, are all Philip Glass trademarks that make his music so instantly recognisable and so immediately hypnotic.
Glass has employed this style, and made it work, in a staggering range of contexts – such as his epic five hour no interval surrealist opera Einstein on the Beach, his almost (but not quite) conventional Violin Concerto, his movie music to Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi/Powaqqatsi/Naqoyqatsi trilogy, his David Bowie inspired first symphony and now this, his 2007 adaptation of Leonard Cohen poetry.
The music is performed by a small ensemble of musicians, with a soprano, mezzo, tenor and bass baritone providing the vocals alongside some spoken lines from Cohen himself.
The poems follow the grungy, slightly sordid paths, with their perennial struggle between body and soul, that you might expect from Leonard Cohen, vagrant songs that reach for the salvation of the stars from the damnation of the gutter – sometimes with a twisted humour, sometimes layered with lust, sometimes dark and depressed, always with a kind of gruff, almost naïve, immediacy.
It’s not a style that you would expect to lend itself easily to structured formality of Glass’s music, nor to the precisely articulated and intonated singing of an operatic quartet and there are times when you can’t help but notice that these poems were not originally written for this music.
But just because something is done differently to how it was originally planned doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, and, as always happens with Philip Glass’s music, you find yourself getting drawn into it very quickly, captivated by its mesmerizing, magnetic pull. There are moments of slow, contemplative, gentle meditation; others of frantic, frenetic, whirlwind energy (like ‘Puppet Time’, for example – maybe the one poem in the whole cycle where you can hear Philip Glass in the words before you’ve actually listened to the mjsic); and some incredibly beautiful passages for the solo instruments, such as the almost Bach-like passage for solo cello, or the jazz-like chromaticism of the one for solo saxophone.
If you’re expecting regular, rough and ready Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing is sure to disappoint you. If you’re expecting regular Philip Glass you might at first be a little bemused to hear lines like “See what you’ve done to me/As if you give a shit/I used to live behind a line/But now I’m over it” sung to the measured Glassesque pulse. But if you are ready for some of the best poetry Leonard Cohen has written in his later life, set to some of the best music Philip Glass has written in years, this is sure to hold you captivated, and will probably lure you back for more.
And so it was that I managed to acquire a copy of Book of Longing, a double CD release of a song cycle of the music of Philip Glass and the poetry of Leonard Cohen, which I had bought for my friend Philip, a great fan of his Glass namesake.
Philip Glass has become a bit of a household name these days amongst people who like music that strides both the classical and the more popular genres but that still challenges conventional norms, is original and, without being easy-listening, is easy to listen to.
If you are at all familiar with Philip Glass, you will recognise Book of Longing as his work within a second or two of hitting the play button. The swirling phrases, where few more than a couple of notes repeat over and over, with subtle changes to time and beat that make even its catchiest moments almost impossible to tap your foot to, spread out across solid, diatonic harmonies that shift and change like fractured light, are all Philip Glass trademarks that make his music so instantly recognisable and so immediately hypnotic.
Glass has employed this style, and made it work, in a staggering range of contexts – such as his epic five hour no interval surrealist opera Einstein on the Beach, his almost (but not quite) conventional Violin Concerto, his movie music to Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi/Powaqqatsi/Naqoyqatsi trilogy, his David Bowie inspired first symphony and now this, his 2007 adaptation of Leonard Cohen poetry.
The music is performed by a small ensemble of musicians, with a soprano, mezzo, tenor and bass baritone providing the vocals alongside some spoken lines from Cohen himself.
The poems follow the grungy, slightly sordid paths, with their perennial struggle between body and soul, that you might expect from Leonard Cohen, vagrant songs that reach for the salvation of the stars from the damnation of the gutter – sometimes with a twisted humour, sometimes layered with lust, sometimes dark and depressed, always with a kind of gruff, almost naïve, immediacy.
It’s not a style that you would expect to lend itself easily to structured formality of Glass’s music, nor to the precisely articulated and intonated singing of an operatic quartet and there are times when you can’t help but notice that these poems were not originally written for this music.
But just because something is done differently to how it was originally planned doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, and, as always happens with Philip Glass’s music, you find yourself getting drawn into it very quickly, captivated by its mesmerizing, magnetic pull. There are moments of slow, contemplative, gentle meditation; others of frantic, frenetic, whirlwind energy (like ‘Puppet Time’, for example – maybe the one poem in the whole cycle where you can hear Philip Glass in the words before you’ve actually listened to the mjsic); and some incredibly beautiful passages for the solo instruments, such as the almost Bach-like passage for solo cello, or the jazz-like chromaticism of the one for solo saxophone.
If you’re expecting regular, rough and ready Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing is sure to disappoint you. If you’re expecting regular Philip Glass you might at first be a little bemused to hear lines like “See what you’ve done to me/As if you give a shit/I used to live behind a line/But now I’m over it” sung to the measured Glassesque pulse. But if you are ready for some of the best poetry Leonard Cohen has written in his later life, set to some of the best music Philip Glass has written in years, this is sure to hold you captivated, and will probably lure you back for more.
Friday, January 8, 2010
Whether he's dead or not, long live the King!
There's nothing like an anniversary to get you rummaging through the back of your CD shelves or, if you're like me, to get you off to the closest CD store to buy the music that everyone else bought years ago.
Depending on your theory about whether he's really dead or not, today is either Elvis Presley's 75th birthday, or the 75th anniversary of his birth. In either case, it's a good excuse to listen to the music of this man who has had such an iconic place on the rock 'n' roll stage since he first stepped onto it with 'Heartbreak Hotel' in 1956, until long after he left it with his final public performance in June 1977.
I have a tendency to be a bit obsessive about buying original albums rather than compilations but, for someone whose career was so characterised by the release of hit singles, it seemed not totally disloyal to break my own rule and purchase the 3CD Sony compilation Elvis Presley HitStory. It's a tremendous collection of 91 tracks, spanning the whole of the Elvis career and pretty well every hit he recorded.
When you listen to his work all brought together like this, you can't help but be staggered by the enormity of his output - not just in quantity but in variety, too. You swing to 'Hound Dog'; you rock wildly to 'Jailhouse Rock' and gently to 'Wooden Heart'; you feel lonesome, even if you're not, when he sings 'Are you Lonseome Tonight?', you want to go out and do something outrageous when you hear 'Blue Suede Shoes', and you remember what it's like to fall in love when he reminds you of it in 'Can't Help Falling in Love'; you cry a little to 'In the Ghetto', you feel his pain in 'Suspicious Minds', and you want to comfort him for it in 'Crying in the Chapel'.
I suspect that I'm no the only person who listens to a collection like this and seems to be constantly thinking, "Oh yes, I forgot that Elvis sang that one". There's just so much there.
There's not much that can be said about someone like Elvis Presley that hasn't already been said thousands of times already - his genre-defining style, his rich, seductive voice and, of course, that pelvis.
Elvis Presley Hitstory is not just a very generous tribute to this unforgettable artist who still causes men and women, regardless of where they stand in relation to the sexuality fence, to drool and swoon - it's also great to listen to if only to remind you that music can have an easy, uncomplicated tune, and still be marvellous music.
No wonder Elvis Presley has so many imitators, and so many who refuse to accept the proposition that he is dead.
Depending on your theory about whether he's really dead or not, today is either Elvis Presley's 75th birthday, or the 75th anniversary of his birth. In either case, it's a good excuse to listen to the music of this man who has had such an iconic place on the rock 'n' roll stage since he first stepped onto it with 'Heartbreak Hotel' in 1956, until long after he left it with his final public performance in June 1977.
I have a tendency to be a bit obsessive about buying original albums rather than compilations but, for someone whose career was so characterised by the release of hit singles, it seemed not totally disloyal to break my own rule and purchase the 3CD Sony compilation Elvis Presley HitStory. It's a tremendous collection of 91 tracks, spanning the whole of the Elvis career and pretty well every hit he recorded.
When you listen to his work all brought together like this, you can't help but be staggered by the enormity of his output - not just in quantity but in variety, too. You swing to 'Hound Dog'; you rock wildly to 'Jailhouse Rock' and gently to 'Wooden Heart'; you feel lonesome, even if you're not, when he sings 'Are you Lonseome Tonight?', you want to go out and do something outrageous when you hear 'Blue Suede Shoes', and you remember what it's like to fall in love when he reminds you of it in 'Can't Help Falling in Love'; you cry a little to 'In the Ghetto', you feel his pain in 'Suspicious Minds', and you want to comfort him for it in 'Crying in the Chapel'.
I suspect that I'm no the only person who listens to a collection like this and seems to be constantly thinking, "Oh yes, I forgot that Elvis sang that one". There's just so much there.
There's not much that can be said about someone like Elvis Presley that hasn't already been said thousands of times already - his genre-defining style, his rich, seductive voice and, of course, that pelvis.
Elvis Presley Hitstory is not just a very generous tribute to this unforgettable artist who still causes men and women, regardless of where they stand in relation to the sexuality fence, to drool and swoon - it's also great to listen to if only to remind you that music can have an easy, uncomplicated tune, and still be marvellous music.
No wonder Elvis Presley has so many imitators, and so many who refuse to accept the proposition that he is dead.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
A smorgasbord of consciousness - Devendra Banhart
I had never even heard of American-born, Venezuelan-reared, Devendra Banhart until a couple of weeks ago when I received a rather urgent sounding SMS from Scott, my nephew, telling me that I had to listen to him. With all the chaos of the Public Holiday Season, I didn't get a chance to go out and buy any of his music until yesterday - but now, with his latest album What Will We Be already almost worn to oblivion by playing it so many times, this very unique artist has already reached a pretty prominent position on my list of very best discoveries.
His music is hard to categorise for a whole lot of reasons - not least because it is so individualistic anyway - but also because it shifts from place to place in the most unexpected ways, sometimes between songs, sometimes within them. It's like a string of beads, with different shapes and different colours, but where the thread links them, and makes them seem to belong, together.
And that thread is, of course, Devendra Banhart's unique musical stamp - a stamp characterised by jagged, angular phrases, often articulated through the percussive precision of acoustic guitar and piano, which give the music a solid, instantly recognisable, framework within which everything else grows and flourishes.
There is an almost stream-of-consciousness feel to much of this music, with new ideas emerging out of nowhere to replace old ones, like a seed blown in from somewhere, germinating, growing and ultimately blossoming. You see this in songs like 'Rats', where an electric guitar lends moments of hard rock to a background of funky blues that then gives way to bits of dancey pop; or in 'Brindo', where the album's ever-present world music roots, Latin-American infused, actually break through the ground, grab you by the feet and hold you in place, while the rest of your body sways to the music's eclectic beats and rhythms.
What Will We Be weaves its unique, freaky, folk-like thread through the boppy poppy beat of 'Baby', through the nostalgic jazz/blues trumpet of 'Chin Chin & Muck Muck', through the reflective sax and carillon-like tolling of 'Maria Lionza' - through everything, really.
The album is a smorgasbord of ideas, nothing ever resting in the one place long enough to grow mould, and every flavour blending and contrasting with everything else in a way that makes you know that this is the work of the one very, very clever, and daring, chef.
If you don't listen to this album closely enough, you might think it was cobbled together, with a whole lot of half-formed ideas thrown into the spotlight, each for its own 15 seconds of fame, and then forgotten. But listen to it properly, and you will see that it is in fact a brilliant mosaic of modern life - where things rush past, are savoured for a moment or two, sometimes for a little longer, sometimes a little less, but where someone is able to pick out each bit, blend it with each other bit, and infuse it with that special, secret, unifying, defining, ingredient.
In What Will We Be that 'someone' is, of course, Devendra Banhart, and his personality and character give this album that special, distinctive flavour that you will, I'm sure, want to try in many, many dishes yet. I look forward to sampling the rest of his output.
Thanks, Scott, for one of your very best recommendations.
His music is hard to categorise for a whole lot of reasons - not least because it is so individualistic anyway - but also because it shifts from place to place in the most unexpected ways, sometimes between songs, sometimes within them. It's like a string of beads, with different shapes and different colours, but where the thread links them, and makes them seem to belong, together.
And that thread is, of course, Devendra Banhart's unique musical stamp - a stamp characterised by jagged, angular phrases, often articulated through the percussive precision of acoustic guitar and piano, which give the music a solid, instantly recognisable, framework within which everything else grows and flourishes.
There is an almost stream-of-consciousness feel to much of this music, with new ideas emerging out of nowhere to replace old ones, like a seed blown in from somewhere, germinating, growing and ultimately blossoming. You see this in songs like 'Rats', where an electric guitar lends moments of hard rock to a background of funky blues that then gives way to bits of dancey pop; or in 'Brindo', where the album's ever-present world music roots, Latin-American infused, actually break through the ground, grab you by the feet and hold you in place, while the rest of your body sways to the music's eclectic beats and rhythms.
What Will We Be weaves its unique, freaky, folk-like thread through the boppy poppy beat of 'Baby', through the nostalgic jazz/blues trumpet of 'Chin Chin & Muck Muck', through the reflective sax and carillon-like tolling of 'Maria Lionza' - through everything, really.
The album is a smorgasbord of ideas, nothing ever resting in the one place long enough to grow mould, and every flavour blending and contrasting with everything else in a way that makes you know that this is the work of the one very, very clever, and daring, chef.
If you don't listen to this album closely enough, you might think it was cobbled together, with a whole lot of half-formed ideas thrown into the spotlight, each for its own 15 seconds of fame, and then forgotten. But listen to it properly, and you will see that it is in fact a brilliant mosaic of modern life - where things rush past, are savoured for a moment or two, sometimes for a little longer, sometimes a little less, but where someone is able to pick out each bit, blend it with each other bit, and infuse it with that special, secret, unifying, defining, ingredient.
In What Will We Be that 'someone' is, of course, Devendra Banhart, and his personality and character give this album that special, distinctive flavour that you will, I'm sure, want to try in many, many dishes yet. I look forward to sampling the rest of his output.
Thanks, Scott, for one of your very best recommendations.
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