Reviews by kuvien

Ribeiro's wail nine minutes and 40 seconds into side B makes this all worth while. I mean, it was good already, but halfway through "Poème non épique N° II", Catherine chills spines and raises neck hairs with her powerful poetic recitation, all the while the rolling, swelling percussion relentlessly maintaining the tension. Damn, girl, this is how you make yourself go hoarse the next morning!

Good stuff vocally, but too much Berlin School synths for my taste.

Arguably the first ecological album, this recording immortalizes one of Ribeiro's epic rants as the entire side B, a six-part descent into rage and mourning, accompanied by pounding timpani, the high whine of a drizzling violin that ends up just going berserk, and some freaky, ominous organ work. Buckle up, boys: it's another Ribeiro+Alpes classic.

This is so, so bad. Poor Catherine feeling like she has to try to stay relevant by putting shitty shitty shitty 80s synths in her music. The 80s fucking suck.

Like a female French Tim Buckley on the first track, but with more passion and power, not afraid to sing herself hoarse. The second track's instrumentation has the meditative quality of a Leonard Cohen composition. When the violin drops acid, shit gets real. But it's not all freaky "druggy" music. There are some solid folk rockesque moments here, too. I hadn't heard this one in a while, but as soon as that opening vocalization started (and this album is all about vocalization and not so much "singing" as many think of it), I sighed. I remembered it all instantly.

Not as good as her work with Alpes, but still pretty damn good. The intensity of her voice is gripping. What Ribeiro starts with Patrice Moullet here they expand on with their later work. Her voice is like a fiery French version of Grace Slick's bold vocals.

A hazy, dreamy little neo-psych album from an artist known for her experimentation, here going for something more soothing and melodic, with interesting instrumentation weaving in and out of the layers.

Workmanlike jazz-rock and prog without vocals. Future Magma band member featured here on bass. This music is on the more melodic end of prog rock and fusion, with no hairpin turns.

Holy mackerel! Oswald has been shot! Guns...guns will bring us together. Those damn bums blowing up the campuses!

This reminds me of the gift of rain, as we have also been blessed with the gift of tears. Rain and tears--often assigned a negative connotation. But they're both necessary to nourish and to cleanse. We cry when we hurt, of course, but we also cry when confronted with sudden beauty, or when we feel love. Come on, rain. Rain on me. Come, Holy Spirit! Enter my heart. Enkindle me with the fire of Your love! As Tolkien wrote, "tears are the wine of blessedness."

This band cares about only one thing: beauty. That which does not serve or express beauty is discarded, and that's the philosophy that has underpinned their music for the past 40 years. This album is yet another example of RAIJ's inspirational soundscapes, and I don't mean "inspirational" as in the new age or the kitsch but rather that which is steeped in history and religious expression. So what dreams do you carry? "Dreams" as in hopes and aspirations, or "dreams" as in that otherworld where you live between waking and waking? And we're interested only in beautiful dreams, aren't we?

I feel like this album is a mix of the old and the new RAIJ, the darker ambient explorations being an echo of the old band and the cleaner, delicate folk being a herald of the new. It's all good, though. This band is a gem with a short discography, despite going back to the 80s.

There's the old (and lame) insult about being so ugly you break mirrors. But what about something being so beautiful a mirror cannot contain it and thus shatters? What about the beauty that comes through healing, when crushed bones are repaired, when guilt is washed away, when the repaired mirror is more beautiful through mercy than the unbroken mirror ever could have been?

Rich, mesmerizing, beautiful. And everything about this music feels authentic, as in genuine to the feelings of the artists. I'm not saying I understand their hearts, but this music seems to reveal the beauty within them that they cannot hide. The spoken word parts are used to wonderful, chilling effect here. It's great how they can make such dark music but it not be sad at all. It's like a forest at night lit by faerie fire.

Sure, it's not raw like their 80s stuff, but that's fine. This is more refined yet no less beautiful. I wonder, though, why they feel it necessary to sing in English, French, Greek, Russian, a Finnish dialect of Swedish, and Latin. A sampling of Europe? Moments of eastern meditation amid rich, full textures.

Have you ever wanted to be something else? Listen to this masterpiece and be transformed, as you experience a close encounter with the beautiful, mysterious soul of Brazil. This album is pan-music, containing a bit of everything, defying genre... but that's to be expected since it's based on the narrative of Macunaíma, a shapeshifter who represents pan-Brazilian culture.

Jacqui McShee's vocals are, of course, lovely as always, and thus the link to Pentangle is unavoidable, since her voice is the very fabric of that band's sound. With Renbourn's nuanced arrangements of traditional folk songs, this charming collection opens upon a brief vista of stories as strong as death.

This sounds more like an historical music artifact than anything contemporary. The music featured here is about 500 years old, so don't go into this expecting Bob Dylan or some other kind of folk sound at the turn of the 70s. Get dressed up and go out to an intimate concert by candlelight featuring a tasteful guitar, the mysterious sitar, flutes and violins, and you know what?--let's throw in a glockenspiel, too. If you would be so kind as to don your reading spectacles and peruse tonight's handbill, you will see that among the composers are Bach himself as well as a 14th-century Frenchman.

The poetic atmosphere created by the melodic lyricism with touches of darkness of this 70s gem comforts me more with each listen. This is a very wintry album, and in my mind, the whole document is a build up to the last, epic track, "Mother Russia", which veers away from the delicacy of most of the album and brings the hammer down. I don't know anything about Solzhenitsyn other than the fact that he was an exile from his homeland, but man I really feel for the guy when I hear the lyric, "Red blood white snow, He knows frozen rivers won't flow, So cold so true, Mother Russia he cries for you." I'm glad he was able to die on his native soil.

1,001 nights. That's a long time to be a sex slave telling stories to your captor. Long enough to bear a couple children to him. I imagine Scheherazade being in labor, pushing out a baby while still keeping up her tale-telling to make sure the sultan wouldn't execute her in the morning. Oh, well. All's well that end's well, I guess. Set the tables for the festival and hire the minstrels! Scheherazade has survived her captivity by not cuckolding her rapist!