Reviews by kuvien

Breezy cowboy folk from up North Dakota way. Brosseau's boyish, carefree voice is enough to put a smile on my face every damn time I hear it. So charming! Never have I heard a voice sing so sweetly about the devastation a flood brings to a community.

What's sadder: playing rock-paper-scissors by yourself or playing Solitaire with a deck of 51?

The most generic dontletgoofyourdreams I'mnotgonnastopfighting theworldissobeautiful dreck imaginable. This album just makes me hate undocumented workers, people I'd never thought about before. You didn't help their cause. You made it worse.

I just don't think contemporary indie folk gets better than Bright Eyes. He's got so much to say, and he sings it in such a way that you believe his sincerity, even when he's way off the mark. I feel like some really deep superficial friendships could be forged over a shared love of Bright Eyes. After all, what else does one need but a therapeutic smile?

This is learning that, though he thought he was an only child, he has a suicidal older brother hidden away in a lunatic asylum somewhere upstate. He then time-travels to the future to meet this man and figure out what not to do on the 2007 album. Funny thing though: wouldn't have been put in the looney bin if he'd never met his younger brother. Chicken or the egg, my peeps?

This is an Oberst-in-progress album, him finding his fragile, bleating voice that sings so compellingly on his later beloved albums. He's just so damn cute when he acts all angry and shouts his adorable, unsure convictions. There's a lot less production on this album compared to his later ones, complete with some moments of incidental or accidental studio sounds in the background. Clearly intentional.

"This guy is so immature he can't help but forever act like a teenager. When he sings about the face of his ex-wife, I just think, 'Ugh. You're too old to be acting this way.' It also doesn't help that his voice didn't mature, so he still sounds like a teenage billy goat."

This was released simultaneously with I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and was promptly overshadowed by that folkier album. You listen to Wide Awake during the day, and once the full lights of the nighttime city come on, you throw Digital Ash on. Oberst strikes me as the kind of guy who fancies himself a seeker, and I sure hope he find what he’s looking for. Anyway, it’s like what Dr. Daniels always used to say: androgyny is a latent function of modernity.

I always feel so content, so happy when I listen to the albums of Conor Oberst’s best project. I can’t explain my reaction. Everything about his music speaks to me on a level beyond music. This isn’t my favorite of his albums, but it has my favorite song, “If the Brakeman Turns My Way”. The lyrics, sound, and structure of the song give me chills, and no matter what I’m doing, I have to stop and sit in awe whenever this song comes on. I sing along silently with all my heart. “Gonna find myself somewhere to level out.” Something about the punching anthem of the song. I mean, who hasn’t sped through the crazy rain?

Listening to this reminds of when I first heard Roland Kirk. Like Kirk, it seems Braxton can play whatever you put in his mouth, here playing alto sax, clarinet, flute, etc etc. This album is a perfect example of the spectrum of jazz accessibility, because with some tracks you're just kind of bopping along, and at other times you sit up and say "what?", like when the moog synthesizer makes you wonder if a robot is taking over the performance. But it's all good, no matter what original composition Braxton is exploring. Like so much of the jazz I like, this recording is not afraid to explore the silence between the notes.

What is improvisation anyway? Isn't it just composing in real time for only that one moment? The album opens with Braxton and Holland getting Medieval on a standard... no, not in the bloody, brutal sense, but in the artistic, literary sense of taking an extant work and altering it to one's own taste and vision, and then sending it out as a new version of that work, no less authentic than the original. What follows is Braxton's original comprovisations fearless creativity that doesn't have to justify itself to any haters: playful flutes and serpentine brass phrasings that barely dodge the stomps of the bass and percussion, all the wonderfully simple interaction surrounded by a wide field of pregnant space.

Somebody fetch me a dirty rag and some duct tape.

Opens with a charming children's rhyming story, setting a tone of festival and playfulness as the singer explores the sometimes frightening, sometimes hilarious vagaries of life's chains of events. Then moves into something more contemplative but equally beautiful, with lovely neo-Medieval instrumentation. In short, the tracks flit like a butterfly through a garden, impossible to track but a delight to follow.

If this doesn't put a smile on your face, then nothing will. So full of every good feeling, a perfect weekend album. Side B is so much a masterpiece I'd put it up there with the best stuff out of Ghana or Nigeria when it comes to groovy, repetitive, feelgood music.

Branch lends her voice to the cause on this helping of trumpet-led avant-garde jazz, and she's not leaving any room for ambiguous interpretation: she calls out racist America (stylized "Amerikkka") in an 11-minute spiritual exploration of the country's rotten soul. And that trumpet tone? Almost like something out of a Spaghetti Western. I wonder if that's part of the commentary. Most of the album is instrumental--as jazz usually is--until we reach the final track, where Branch follows in the footsteps of Carly Simon by calling out the "assholes and clowns" without saying who they are... because they already know who they are. (Pssst... it's no secret. She told NPR that they're the ranting right-wingers who tried to control the political narrative of the 2018 U.S. Midterm elections.)

She was gonna take over the world, but instead she died.

Why not both? She flew and died. Girlbossed too close to the drugs. This is her debut, but you can hear the writing on the score. Living too large, blowing too hard, music with a mission, ready to set the world on fire.

The girl on the cover? Yeah, she's waiting for you. Waiting at the underwater drug orgy...and yes, before you ask, they do conflate religion and sex. I mean, who wasn't in the late 60s? Everyone is no one and everyone else at the same time, so you can literally go fuck yourself at one of these gatherings, a soiree led by your MC, that one high bitch who puts out only when she's tripping.

This jazz tiptoes across the desert floor at moonrise, and the oud (short-neck lute) serenades the night. If you want your jazz minimal, if you want space in your music, this is a good choice. Holland's double bass sets the easy pace.

I was listening to some other ECM jazz featuring DeJohnette and after a little search found this album. I’m glad I did, as I expand my jazz horizons and find more artists. To my untrained ear, I’m not hearing much Arabic influence (beyond the solos) in the music, but that’s probably just me. These are Brahem’s compositions, and Brahem is featured on the oud, a short-neck Arabian lute.