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Rachael Price: The Good Hours

4 Jul

The Good Hours is a jazz album by 23-year-old singer Rachael Price, who is blessed with a voice comparable to that of the jazz greats (and uses this fact to great effect throughout this album). In fact, the first thing that will strike anyone listening to this album is how good Ms. Price’s voice is. You could place her tracks in between those of Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday and they would not seem a hair out of place. Her voice is far and away the strongest thing about this album and, despite the occasional instrument solo, is all you are likely to remember.

If you doubt her vocal prowess, listen to her version of “Skylark” or “Mood Indigo” – they may as well be a capella for all the impact the band makes. She moves into Samba jazz for a single song in the middle of the album called “Lagrimas Negras”, which, although a weaker track, is quite a fun change. A dabble in Samba is all well and good, but Rachael Price is in essence a classic jazz singer who just happens to be releasing records now, and she shines most on classic jazz songs.

This album does have its share of swing though. The first track, “That Old Black Magic” starts things off well and the album keeps its bounce throughout. It has all of the energy and the simplicity of a 1920s swing record and manages to reconstruct much of the feeling those albums would bring up. However, possibly as a result of all that old-time feeling, this album does not challenge the listener, which could be a fatal flaw in a jazz record. There are exceptions, such as “The Trolley Song”, which has all of the verve of Billie Holiday singing “They Can’t Take That Away From Me”. However, the majority of the songs, while not as easy-listening as a Kenny G record, are far from cerebral.

Although this is Rachael Price’s album, the band backing her does a quite solid job throughout. There are a couple of nice solos; the vibraphone in “That Old Black Magic” or the piano in “The Trolley Song” come immediately to mind. They do not stand out, but they perform quite well and do all that could be asked from them. The piano especially frames her voice excellently, but like any frame, is a distant second to the picture itself.

“The Trolley Song”, “Skylark”, “Stairway To The Stars” and “Mood Indigo” are all exceptional performances and should be picked up if you have any love of swing jazz or just good singing. The rest of the album however is nothing really special. If you have exhausted your Fitzgerald and Lady Day collections but want more, then this is certainly worth picking up and even otherwise you will have a quite solid album on your hands, just not a very challenging one.

Verdict: The lack of challenge in the album and a number of weaker performances keep this from being a masterpiece. However, the stand-out tracks make the album worth a listen, or five.

– Nikhil

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Joyce Manor: Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired

2 Jul

Last year, a young British band called Yuck channeled the apathy of 1990s’ teenagers into a near-perfect indie rock record. This year, a young band called Joyce Manor from Torrance, California does something similar, translating the manic restlessness of the 2000s’ into one of the best punk records in recent times. The nine songs on Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired will fill you with an agitated, sustained urge to dance and/or start a band: all within the album’s thirteen (!) minutes of running time.

Similar to Japandroids’ Post-Nothing, the chaotic jumble on Of All Things works well without ever veering into dissonant hipster nonsense (for example, Micachu). The headiness of youth takes you over for thirteen minutes and nine seconds, in bite-sized songs of pure energy.

“These Kinds of Ice Skates” sets the tone for the album, with tight drums, apathetic vocals and an exceptional skill at writing clever lyrics (‘And I don’t think you’re confusing refusal to heal/ With all your selfishness singing, “I know how you feel,”’), all within a minute and a half. “Comfortable Clothes, is a terse tribute to the energetic, fuck-all freedom of youth, reminiscent of Bows + Arrows-era Walkmen. Tracks like “Violent Inside”, “Bride of Usher” and “I’m Always Tired” are heart-felt paeans to youth’s insecurities and melodrama. Despite the mild anguish, however, the band faces as always towards Sunset Boulevard, reminding us of their heritage: that, whatever may come, it’s always sunny in California. (Sorry.)

A classic bass-line drives along the laid-back “See How Tame I Can Be”, but the groovy song bubbles with an undercurrent of adolescent angst (‘And it’s too much to take and so I say to myself, “I never told you that I loved you because I don’t.”’). However, one soon gets the impression that the angst may actually be a joke: that the song’s title – and tameness – is actually a back-handed, precocious compliment to Joyce Manor’s hyperactivity. And the result, hipster aspirants, is irony done right.

Another great song on the album is the mellow “Drainage”, an unexpected, seventy-one-second simple love song, complete with gently-plucked acoustic guitar and faint cello. “If I Needed You There” is Panic! At the Disco with an irreverent buzz cut; against all odds, the minute-long sonic blast not only comes across as a legitimate song, but its chorus even manages to embed itself in your brain.

All through the album, Joyce Manor subtly showcase their many talents underneath the mess and clutter. The band takes pop music, and gives it back to us – trodden, deconstructed and reassembled – and yet somehow pays tribute to it. They are highly skilled editors and arrangers: there isn’t an out-of-place or unnecessary second on the album. And finally, the band is entirely audio-oriented in today’s world of VEVO and pop superstars: they demand – and get – your undivided, aural attention. All of this, and more, comes together on the best song on the album, a cover of 80s one-hit wonder band the Buggles’ signature track, “Video Killed the Radio Star”. We honestly think it’s one of the best covers of the often-covered song, ever.

There are a few criteria that all great songs possess: they grab your attention, pack in as much passion as possible, showcase musical skill, provide intelligent lyrics and have melodic sensibilities. Joyce Manor’s songs rarely cross the two-minute mark, but every single one of them hits all these criteria. The album really is a study in brevity and (there’s no other word for it) genius.

The genius extends to the album cover and title too. The neat capital letters on the cover, defiantly but aesthetically jumbled, give you a good taste of the music that’s inside. The album title, too, strikes us as particularly ingenious. Joyce Manor is a band with enormous talent and very little patience for bullshit. They are confident enough to cut down their album to less than 90 degrees on the clock. Naturally, mundane things in life tire them, and this album is a divine distillation of all that.

Verdict: Of all things Joyce Manor may soon grow tired, but of Joyce Manor you will not very soon grow tired. If you have thirteen minutes and nine seconds of time, listen!

– Neeharika

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Jack White: Blunderbuss

27 Jun

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Very few active musicians under the age of 40 today could be called living legends, but Jack White is truly one of them.

Blunderbuss, his fantastic debut solo album, is a rebirth of sorts. It channels his Stripes, Raconteurs and Dead Weather past with some more White mojo, and more than a  touch of vintage White weirdness. In fact, it’s a cleaning out of sorts. Besides, his form’s much better here than his recent studio work, be it with the Strips or the Raconteurs. What’s most exciting is that Bluderbuss could well be the start of a great solo career for this modern-day Guitar Slinger.

The album kicks off with the very warm Missing Pieces, where the narrator’s being treated for a nosebleed by a woman but only wakes up to find his nose and legs hacked off, and the woman departed. Channeling vintage British prog rock tones, against the backdrop of a Rhodes piano, White sings lines like “Sometimes someone controls everything about you“, which pretty much sets the mood for the album. Produced in the backdrop of his divorce to Karen Elson, who also provides backing vocals, this song also packs in some brilliant lead guitar work. The spluttering guitar solo is sonic-perfect and melodious at the same time.  Freedom At 21, an avant-garde freak-out track peppered with peppy, breakfast hip-hop beats, continues with the anti-21st Century woman theme, with Jack White rapping (!) about a punishing femme fatale.

The first single, Love Interruption, invokes White’s gothic Dead Weather days, while second single Sixteen Saltines is the most Stripesque track on the album. A 1970s stoner boogie with heavy, filthy raunchy guitar (very reminiscent of  the White Stripes’s The Hardest Button To Button), this track is tinged with tones of jealousy and an angry falsetto that works.

 

 

The rather dark side one of the album is rounded out neatly by the title track, a beautiful piano-driven ballad about wordless love where White explains Blunderbuss as “a romantic bust, a blunder turned explosive“.

There’s a visible change in the mood from side two. The first song Hypocritical Kiss has White admitting his faults from the opening line itself, amidst the backdrop of some great piano waltz. Weep Themselves To Sleep, a staggering piano rocker, backed by some great JW electric guitar riffing, is very post-Ziggy Stardust 1970’s Bowie in its theatrics and inspiration. Interestingly, a bit of the album’s anti-woman sentiment continues on this song – “No one could blow the shows/Or throw the bones that break your nose the way I can,” sings White.

And as we come out of the busted noses part of the album, things are shook up with I’m Shakin’, an R&B cover of Little Willie John’s 1961 song. White absolutely sexes it up here with some great R&B riffs and hooks, making a blaster rocker out of this jook-joint classic. Trash Tongue Talker is White at his tribute-paying best. The piano riffs are reminiscent of his adopted Nashville roots while the vocals are reminiscent of Jagger in jive and 50’s bounce. The Nashville roots show up big-time again on the pedal steel in On and On and On, a psychedelic pop with a haunted piano accompaniment. I Guess I Should Go To Sleep has a jazzy tempo, great vocals, great piano fills and a beautiful violin solo.

While any of these tracks could be stand-alone stand-outs in any album, White has more than that up his sleeve, in the form of the best song on the album: Hip (Eponymous) Poor Boy. With a great descending bass line, hopscotching rhythm and melody, White channels Dylan in his artistry and early 70s Kinks in his sound. Its irresistible arrangement is instantly lovable and makes it an instant JW classic, though it’s nothing like he’s ever done before. Also, it must be said that there’s no man out there who could do justice to this track quite like JW can.

The album closer, “Take Me With You When You Go” is an absolute JW cracker, backed by piano, fiddle and distorted electric guitar.  “And I can’t catch a breath or a break/Like a guy who’s strangled and begging,” White whines, only to push himself back on his feet with a hope of love. “Take me with you when you go, girl/Take me anywhere you go/I’ve got nothin’ keeping me, here/Take me with you when you go“. Quite a positive note to end on.

Blunderbuss is a great solo debut album. It has a great range in its influences, but still heavily steeped in the blues. But White doesn’t let the somewhat rigid structure of the blues contain him; instead, he rather uses it to paint a vivacious canvas. Last year, White’s contemporary and probably his only equal Derek Trucks’s Relevator won the Grammy for Best Blues Contemporary Album Of The Year, perhaps signaling the re-entry of the blues back into popular realms. Jack White, with his spectacular Blunderbuss, simply takes it forward. Hats off, Jack!

Verdict: Blunderbuss is easily 2012’s best album till now. Listen!

– Sayid.

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Miles Davis: Blue Moods

25 Jun

Blue Moods is a beautiful album. It’s absolutely perfect for after a stressful day, cutting effortlessly through the knot of your tension – not like Alexander with a series of vicious chops, but peacefully. Very, very peacefully. Don’t get me wrong: peaceful as it may be, Blue Moods is not an album that can dismissed as just ‘easy listening’. What’s important to understand here is the fact that while its four tracks are restrained, it doesn’t mean that the songs are shallow or uncomplicated in any way.

Blue Moods is a quintessential cool jazz album by Miles. It’s full of those slow ballads that he liked, and the sound is like fat, iridescent bubbles rising in a smoky room and then popping, one by one. While Miles completely overshadows his supporting cast in this album, both Charles Mingus (bass) and Elvin Jones (drums) do wonderfully in a much more relaxed setting than they were used to. Mingus has a couple of nice solos as well, but these merely serve as breaks from Miles’ playing. This is his album; and despite the greatness of his supporting cast, one really cannot overstate that at all.

The first track “Nature Boy” in particular is wonderfully  slow and relaxed; it’s easily the best song on this album. In fact,  put “Nature Boy” in any album ever, and it alone would be enough justification to pick that album up.  However, the languidness of the song makes the albums’ transition into the more active “Alone Together” rather dissonant. (And it doesn’t help that “Alone Together” is probably the weakest track of the album either.) However, a nice vibraphone does a lot to save it. The two standout compositions, “Nature Boy” and “Easy Living” are weakened by their surrounding of merely good tracks. However, if a couple of tracks set an impossibly high bar, we should not complain that the rest fall short.

Verdict: This is not an album that must be picked up. Really, one would do just fine with “Nature Boy” and nothing more, but these are all rewarding tracks, and if you are looking for some relaxing cool jazz, this is as good a place as any other.

– Nikhil

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