Reviews by kuvien

I've heard this guy's voice many times before... is this the guy who sings "You Got a Friend in Me" in the Toy Story movies?

Well, the album cover is a clear homage to Bill Evans' & Jim Hall's Undercurrent (1962), except this woman lacks the serenity of the other one. She seems to be struggling in a confined space, which is quite a different feeling from the free, open space of the 1962 art. I think the woman in the Evans/Hall album art is pulled under quickly, and she is resigned to her fate. There's a kind of blissful peace about it. But the music in this one tells me that the woman drowning has her whole life flash before her in one interminable moment of torture. Not at all a good way to go.

A fine collection of dark folk tunes driven by enchanting melodies and a strong violin presence. Quite melodically driven in parts, grabbing the attention and pulling you out of mere atmosphere.

This is the kind of album you put on when you want to both concentrate and chill out at the same time. I know that might sound like a contradiction, but it's not. You're engaged in some activity that takes some measure of concentration, but you're chilling out at home on a winter's evening with a cup of hot tea. Or mead.

This is what a dark folk film score would sound like. From the beginning, the music is both evocative and atmospheric. I feel a real narrative running through it all, even when (or maybe especially when) no one is singing/chanting.

[https://i.makeagif.com/media/4-19-2020/V8ktfk.gif,The correct choice.]

Barking-mad gravedigger metal, the kind of jazz made by vampires who've watched generations pass away, all their earthly glories leading only to the death and decomposition. Real Ozymandias-core shit, this. Listen to this, and you might finally understand Ecclesiastes.

Tear in my damn beer, and that ain't no joke! Is there anything more bitter, more profoundly sundering or more destructive to the human spirit, than the dissolution of a marriage?

Bassoon- and oboe-heavy avant-prog in the vein of Aqsak Maboul, Debile Mentol, and, of course, Univers Zéro. I wonder what the local Mexicans at the time thought of this RIO-born weirdness. All the mystery and acute-angled mania of the genre are present here, and this, like many other great albums from this music scene, would have made an excellent soundtrack to some art-horror B-flick.

Fuck all yall who like this.

I had a lot of Canterbury scene in my collection before I ever added this band. Actually, I didn’t even know they existed until they were mentioned offhand along with four or five other bands in a prog rock documentary. The musicians know their instruments and know their scene perfectly, and the lushness of this album is in no way mitigated against by its technical complexity.

This opens with an orgasm of music, culminating in the beautiful, ethereal vocals of Amanda Parsons. The electric piano work on this album is extraordinary, and the evocative vocals and woodwinds just slay in their exquisite delicacy.

This falls right in the slim Venn diagram overlap of silly and annoying that I like to hear. The failed vocals are comedy gold. Everything on this is quite loose and theatrical. Borderline novelty act at points, but the rest is seriously fun jazz.

The childlike choruses and rambling, falsetto vocals sprinkled here and there give this album a whimsical, carefree quality. The juxtapositions on this album are quite unexpected: you get something so smooth and inoffensive as soprano sax phrasings, and then bang right into a track that's got underlying discordance, experimenting with percussive space. This tidy little album has a bit of everything, right down to not only some lovely string quartet work but layered, futuristic-tinged electric piano.

A lot of weird wailing and speaking in tongues. It's not bad, but musically this just misses the mark for me. Other people: y'all gonna love this freaky shit.

Yes. Yes, I am conscious, and I speak English, so I do know what you're saying. Thanks for checking, though!

A lot of people mention "World Music" in their reviews of this album, and I guess that's fair, despite how much I despise that term and how ethnocentric it is. This jazz is a wonderful platform for touches of non-jazz indigenous music to shine, whether it be as the center of the brass storm or riding the smooth melodies that proceed from it.

Recorded live without any significant edits, this short album is the voice of one woman amid the sounds of ocean and history. One woman in an asylum on an abandoned, plague-ridden island, singing to the sea and letting the sea sing back to her. Letting memory seep into her bones. Water meets water, that place between dreaming and waking, between life and death.

As a three-part vocal experiment, starting off with clarinet accompaniment, then moving to drums and double bass, and finally finishing off with homemade instrumentation, this collection of recordings is a dive into the extremity of vocal expression, be it for hunting, for warfare, or for lamentation for all the lost rivers of the world. Though Lost Rivers was recorded in 1991 around the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and was therefore a direct response to profound political and social changes, this conceptual follow-up finds the world no less turbulent or unsure, either politically or ecologically.

The liner notes call this "fey" and "childlike", and, yes, I agree it all hangs on the vocals: if you like this sort of thing (weird, freaky female vocals), you'll love this. If you don't, you might chuck your laptop out the window. If you fear not the wilder shores, take Tuulikki's hand as she leads you through a narrative of love and death. Watch your footing, though. Or not. Some people might enjoy the thrill of plunging into the dark waters below.