Rated 8/10
My goodness! This recording desperately needs to be remastered. It's so...fuzzy sounding. A remastering would set it up nicely, because it's a beautiful, rustic, and mysterious folk album featuring the hammered dulcimer, cello, tanpura, piano, and flute. Not afraid to work in some heavy droning with the primitive, medieval high-register plucking and strumming.
Rated 8/10
I need more hammered dulcimer in my life, especially when it accompanies beautifully sung psalms, ruminating on the identity of the King of Glory. This album is one part faerie instrumental, one part sung hymns, and one part traditional ballads. I've written this before about some of my favorite quirky vocalists, and I'll write it again: her voice is a feature, not a bug.
Rated 4/10
It's bad enough already, but oh lord, the covers...
Rated 8/10
Any album that starts with a 16-minute opener is going to grab my attention, in this case singing about standing at the edge of the world, which in my imagination I interpret as standing on the threshold of dream-land. This metaphor continues with the idea of finding the end of the rainbow, but unlike Dorothy in her dreamy-eyed, breast-clutching optimism, this is where the sky falls on your head, creating a rather bleak view of things. There is a dreariness and emptiness where there should be excitement.
Rated 10/10
Scales, tuning, instrumentation... all of it is unconventional, original (that originality drawing from sources of music across the globe as well as from her own mind), and not really duplicated afterward. To say this album is a trip is an understatement, for not only does it span the globe, as before mentioned, but it plumbs the depths of human creativity, itself an examination and exploration of the intersection of real instruments and digital sounds. A fecund cross-pollination. In the end, this album is how you interpret it, for the compositions challenge the listener to meet them halfway.
Rated 8/10
MPB (short for Música Popular Brasileira, a loosely defined genre that formed in the mid 1960s as a modernized version of bossa nova and samba-canção) is still a new genre for me and requires a lot more exploration on my part before I can even halfway intelligently talk about it. It goes without saying that I can’t understand the lyrics, but the easy, festive mood of the music is just what I needed to relax after a long day of work—took my mind off my aching feet. I hear a lot of different styles on this album, a hallmark of MPB, which takes its influence from many forms of foreign popular music. Part psychedelic pop, part folk rock.
Rated 6/10
As anthemic a beginning as any album could hope for!
Rated 6/10
There's nothing wrong with being miserable, just, ya know, make your misery interesting.
Rated 10/10
As far as I can tell, a musician came from the big city of Rio de Janeiro to play indigenous Amazonian music far off the beaten path, the carioca getting lost in the virgin forest among not only the natural sounds of the environment but also that of purely acoustic instruments, both crafted (guitar, zither, tabla, flute, mandolin) and handmade (percussion). This album is warm, tribal, with a wild heart beating at the center of its peaceful exterior.
Rated 8/10
They’ve got only one album, and it’s pretty great. This album goes on and on, a long jam that is simultaneously high energy and soothing, like a long, hard day of work that is s engaging that it leaves you full of energy, not exhausted.
Like when a fire guts a house, leaving only scorched walls. Like when the autopsy doctor scoops out your brain, leaving an empty skull. What are we without our memories? Empty caverns so barren even the noise of confusion has disappeared, like the rushing of the waters that once formed the subterranean tunnels. All that's left is dry bones. This stage requires the closest listening, for the subtleties are entrenched so deep that they are almost subconscious. What with the massive DMT release that comes at the moment of death, I wonder if the memories briefly return. Like your life flashing before your eyes? I wonder if the music does, indeed, return.
I feel that up until this point, the albums have shown a gradual fading of the music, the lack of music, but with this one, the focus isn't on the lack of something but rather the presence of something else. The music is replaced by noise, memory by madness. It's no longer the losing of one's mind but rather replacing a sane mind with an insane one, but one lost to such utter confusion that one cannot--as one did at the beginning stages--even conceive of the madness. What makes this one so frightening is how the music will pop back up for three or four seconds before being replaced by noise for several minutes, showing what used to be and can never be again.
This is the clear break in the stages, here between 3 and 4. This stage doesn't even try to start off with the veneer of music. It's gone. What's left is a warbled, jumbled, confused mess where music is only incidental to what's going on. A maelstrom moving in slow motion, agonizing in how it takes its time scattering sanity to the wind. This album is a slog, but I think it's supposed to be, so it succeeds. The smash edits are disconcerting, to say the least.
The mind fractures, the music fades, giving place to the muffling static that's been floating beneath the surface, ignored for too long. Memory echoes back onto itself, creating confusion. An invisible, elastic, yet impenetrable barrier arises, like the mind being encased in bubble wrap. Who was it that died again? She was... important, right? Picking at the memory like a worn blanket might just bring the face back, or it might unravel everything.
Once the mind is locked inside the music box, there's no need to pretend anymore. Isolation looms like a specter, the only company dead memories. Everything slows down: the music, the dancing, everything. The waking dream (nightmare?) has begun....does anyone else hear that static?
The ghosts of music playing through the fog of memory, from a world dead and gone and alive only in the mind. Daily resurrected in snippets of half-forgotten memories, the mind's grasp on the past more tenacious than a gravity well. Then comes the moment of frightening yet temporary bewilderment in which you second-guess yourself and wonder... a mental claustrophobia crashes in, locking the mind inside a dilapidated music box where the same snippets of old songs slowly drive you mad with images of old loves long gone.
Rated 6/10
Too long.
Rated 8/10
On a transparent submarine going to visit the mermaid kingdom--no, not the Disney idea but the beautiful needle-mouthed monsters who would just as soon drink your blood--and the question is whether to navigate the prehistoric seaweed forest or not.
Rated 8/10
I wonder if silicon based lifeforms make music, and if they do if that music sounds anything like ours. I imagine Mr. Spock hearing it and going, "It's music, Jim, but not as we know it." I just wanna add that I love when albums end with their best song.
Rated 8/10
Canterbury scene artists just don’t do catchy love songs well. I think it’s because a lot of the blokes are, at least in part, brains in jars. They’re very good at tongue-in-cheek love songs like “Golf Girl”, but that’s because they approach love as a kind of curious puzzle. At least that’s my impression. This album is the farthest thing from hot blood, so Caravan is at its best when they stick to mellow, quirky optimism.
