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Friday, September 26th 2003
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Listening Post
I've been listening to several new albums lately and sadly most have sounded poor on first listening. I'm hoping that repeat plays will reveal their charms. Certainly that partially happened with the new Shack album this morning. Some songs still sound like they need a more distinctive melody to hold the interest but the likes of Soldier Man and Meant To Be are sounding better especially the bit in Meant To Be where it goes all Forever Changes with strings and horns. It does seems a bit obvious for Shack to be referencing Love again though.
Jeff Buckley's Live At Sin-e should have the motto 'why make a song 3 minutes when it can last 10?' scratched into the run out groove, if CD's had such a thing. In small doses this may be palatable and admittedly some of it is lovely but this scratched away some of the Buckley mystique for me. Grace is a great album, it's beautiful, impassioned and it rocks but most importantly is has focus, something Buckley's live performances clearly didn't have, at least at this stage. Some may see this freeform approach as a virtue and I may grow to love this album but on one listen I only found that Buckley didn't have as amazing a voice as I had thought with a lacking of clarity in tone which undermined the vocal gymnastics which he frequently attempts.
The Webb Brothers new self titled record is also sorely lacking so far, compared with Maroon, their last record. They've added another brother, Justin, to the band but my initial feeling is that they've lost the Everly style two part harmonies that sounded so great on Maroon. I'll have to go back and listen to that again though to confirm whether it really was such a big feature of the band. Again though, similar to Shack, I find it lacking in melodic hooks although repeat plays may bring these out. I don't feel so bad about it that it doesn't deserve a chance to improve.
Four Tet's Pause isn't disappointing me though. I had got and loved Rounds, and having read the review on Allmusic I thought I would give Pause a go, and it's great. It's instrumental and could almost be described as electronica but to be honest it isn't as simple as that. It's cut together from samples but the mix of instrumentation from trumpets, piano, acoustic guitar, skittering percussion and various string instruments from around the world all laid over beats turn this into something more. Whatever it is, it's beautiful.
Coming home this evening I was pleased to find the new Tim Christensen album waiting for me. I ordered it from Denmark on Tuesday night and it's here already. Well done CD-Skiven! Of course having listened to it this evening I'm disappointed after the greatness of Secrets On Parade. A few memorable tracks on first listen but again future listens, I hope, will reveal more.
This all seems rather negative about almost everything I've got recently. However, I'm interested to see if my opinion changes, and I suppose that having put my first thoughts down here I'll be able to look back and see what I thought. Anyway, often the records you end up loving are not the ones that grab you fast but rather the ones that reveal their charms slowly over time.
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