Reviews by kuvien

Rage-inducing music. Michael Bolton with a mirror-mirror goatee, ruining, in her own special way, already terrible songs, making everything on Earth just a little bit worse. Side A is enough to take the vinyl off the turntable and throw it as hard as you can, hoping you can decapitate your neighbor's prize sunflower.

This album is apparently the Czech version of Child ballads, songs transcribed by an ethnomusicologist over a century ago when he became enamored of a small Moravian farming community near the Carpathians. The tunes are lost but the fairy-tale lyrics are preserved, so this duo has set these songs to the music of their own imagination. Gnarly guitars draw out the light, measured steps of stalking kittens and the wails of ghosts haunting deep valleys.

This concept album is not merely music but one part of a multimedia stage experience wherein this seven-woman theater troupe, in deliberate face-paint, uses its fearless and freaky cabaret chops to interpret poetry, contemporary literature, as well as the members' own compositions. This is bold, angry, and burns in the fires of the Russo-Ukrainian war that had been raging for seven years by the time the album was recorded.

Associated with the Dakh Theater, an independently-run theater in Kyiv, members of this collective of seven women are involved not only in this but in other ethno projects of musical resistance against contemporary conflict and politics. The ladies here aren't aiming for subtlety, using the voice of the avant-garde to express a uniquely Ukrainian form of political activism. All dolled up in striking, white-face cabaret makeup, the artists tackle multiple instruments, multiple texts, and multiple languages to create their vision of what art can do to save the world: remind us that the old bohemian ideals of love, beauty, and freedom are things worth fighting for (of course) but also worth expressing fearlessly.

As a side note, this album has a special place in my heart because it was exactly the 10,000th album I'd heard in my listening life journey.

Some Vietnamese locals call the artists on this collaborative album "the three monsters", supposedly because they bring a kind of music no one expected, a music full of moaning, screaming, crying, music from the gutter of the soul. Music in the avant-garde not because the artists are looking to expand the boundaries of music or discover new forms of artistic expression but rather as an act of resistance against the strictures of a society that says, at the governmental level, music should sound only a certain way and be only about certain topics. Ngọc Đại, however, is not merely all talk and no trousers. He had to pay a substantial fine when he published music that was not pre-approved by the state. And performances of music on this album caused an earthquake of questions and dialogue (some curiosity, some condemnation) throughout Vietnam.

The subject matter is no surprise here. Jah. Zion. African brotherhood. American slavery equated with Biblical slavery. What is a surprise is the religious origins of this Rastafarian music, the hand drumming evoking a meditative ceremonial feeling.

Really awful, despite "Wishing Well"... which isn't as good as I remembered it.

This is a smooth, flowing album, and the percussion (congas and bongos), both full and hollow, gives off a natural feel. Some parts of the percussion sound like bullfrogs, and the flutes are fireflies. The bass guitar hypnotizes.

I love the kind of jazz that's made by musicians chasing a sound around the world, especially when they just miss each other flying over the Atlantic. That's hyperbole, of course, but the Frenchman on piano on this recording once lived in the US, then returned to France and formed a jazz trio of his fellow countrymen. Then comes an American over to Paris to make an album with them, thus going around the sun to find the moon. Jazz musicians like this, the ones who don't care as much about location, seem not to care much about genre adherence, which makes sense. A lot of people call this album "unclassifiable", but in my tenure as a music nerd, this term is used a bit too much, in my opinion. Once you hear enough jazz like this breaking its boundaries (boundaries only the listener brought to the experience--the artists know exactly what they're doing), the "unclassifiable" becomes a category all its own, and thus it becomes a comfortable listen in its unconventionality. Give this one a spin and decide how it's unclassifiable to your virgin ears.

You ever go to one of those haunted houses run by a local harvest festival? They're not the least bit scary. Actually, they're lame, but the people running it are trying their best. They're so earnest that all you can do is play along and hide your cringing. Bless their hearts!

Bro, you are tedious!

A charming, delicate, lovely little collection of Haitian folk songs arranged by the classical guitarist Frantz Casseus. An excellent interpretation of Haitian music for a single voice and a single guitar.

High energy but not in a gregarious way. Feels like party music for a party of one. Something you spin when you're alone but still want to party. It's got all the elements of pop music except crowd-pleasing. (The Sigur Rós sample confirms all this.)

This album is the musical equivalent of fireworks going off in your dream. They're not quite real, the explosions are soft, but the colors are more vibrant. It is a trip down a memory lane you've never traveled before, taking you on a surreal Jungian journey. Cruise's breathy vocals, Badalamenti's soporific arrangements, and Lynch's storytelling lyrics combine to create a cool, twilit garden of longing. This album isn't in a hurry to go anywhere, and indeed, it doesn't go anywhere, unless you count spinning as traveling, so don't rush the inner journey.

Fake at its core. Some good window dressing, though.

If you're going to try to fool people into thinking you're smart, at least spell check your words first. It's prophesied, not "prophesized". Despite protestations to the contrary, this proves that Ween and Captain Beefheart are siblings, because their baby is redacted.

Ah! So these are the boys down on the corner! The working American poor. Busking, picking cotton, playing their raunchy harmonicas, finding solace in their blues guitars, protesting, asking rhetorical questions a la Steinbeck about adequate food and new shoes, warning the listener about just what a mean ol' boy The Man really is.

Karak is an empty world of desolate caves and barren forests. Not the kind of place I want to get lost in. The only thing remaining is an old abandoned piano you can play to alleviate your loneliness...until you hear the approach of the train.

I became instantly sad (but in a good way) the moment this haunting music started.

I'd call this Tribal Ambient, too, what with the pounding tribal drums and the almost ritualistic vocalizations surrounding the centerpiece percussion. This is a summoning.