Everything Is Alive is a very good record. It makes me excited for their next album, because these guys just might have a great record in them. Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I need to go call my shrink and tell him why I'm having dreams about skipping through Central Park as I'm holding hands with an indie rock boy in a sundress.
DCFC albums take a while to sneak up on me, though, and Narrow Stairs is no exception. Death Cab tends to hide little presents in the dark spaces of their music, which makes it difficult to critique their albums after a few quick listens.
Lots of people are complaining that Third doesn't sound like Portishead. These people are smoking crack. In fact, they're probably trying to smoke crack through their ears, which means the crack smoke is blocking out the music.
There's nothing on Saturdays = Youth that Johnny Cash could sing. The lyrics are bad poetry, and the melodies are completely forgettable. The only time the album works is when the band moves away from dull '80s pop, like they do on "Couleurs" and "Midnight Souls Still Remain."
Moby is a deep artist, but Last Night is a shallow album. This is Moby's tribute to his roots as a New York DJ in the mid- to late-'80s.
I hate the fact that music is divided among race lines. I hate that there is “black” music and “white” music. The musical color line serves only two purposes that I can see: 1) institutional racism within the music industry, and 2) lazy marketing departments within the music industry.
Now, I’m not a religious man, but I like to think that God doesn’t much care about the race of musicians. I like to think He gave Jimi Hendrix mad skills as kind of a joke on white people, and He gave Eminem mad skills as a joke on black people.
But what has the Big Man done to help His children sing? What gifts did He lay upon His African offspring that he denied to their European siblings? And did he bestow a certain musical something-something on his pale children that he didn’t share with their darker brothers and sisters?
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (SFR) has put out a couple of interesting CDs that look at “black” and “white” gospel music. One is called Classic African American Gospel from Smithsonian Folkways and the other is Classic Southern Gospel from Smithsonian Folkways. Read on for more…
