Skip to main content

Blacklisted

I can't pinpoint my initial encounter with Neko Case's voice with any precision. It would have been between '02 and '05. Perhaps I'd heard her on The New Pornographers' song 'Mass Romantic'. Or maybe one of the tracks from Blacklisted ('02) was included on a promotional CD affixed to a music magazine. In any event, Blacklisted was certainly the first of her albums I bought.

And it's turned out to be the only record of hers I've held on to. I eagerly ordered Fox Confessor Brings the Flood ('06) when it was first released, but never did warm to it. Much more recently I purchased Hell-on ('18) which hit me only just a little wide of the mark. Even this record, much as I love the tone & timbre of Case's voice, is one I revisit quite seldom - annually or so - but each new listen has been a fresh pleasure, so its place on the shelf is secure.

The tunes are lovely. Case's lyrics are often interestingly oblique. Her singing is wonderful, as are her backing band, with Calexico's Joey Burns & John Convertino among them (along with their former band-mate Howe Gelb). The recording and production are just right. The striking cover photo intrigues me to this day. My favourite tracks are 'Deep Red Bells', 'Outro With Bees' (and its reprise), 'Pretty Girls' and 'I Wish I Was the Moon'.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4.  An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ein Schattenspiel, etc.

Georg Friedrich Haas is a contemporary Austrian composer of "art music". "Haas's style recalls that of György Ligeti in its use of micropolyphony, microintervals and the exploitation of the overtone series; he is often characterized as a leading exponent of spectral music" says wikipedia. Only a relative few of his many compositions have been issued on CD - many more of them can be found on YouTube. On this 2020 disc are three of his works in which standard classical instrumentation is augmented and altered by "live electronics". Two are string quartets and one is for solo piano. Is a string quartet still really a quartet if there are meanwhile some other people with laptops busily twizzling the sound? There is a live performance video of the 'String Quartet No. 7', the first work on the disc, where the JACK Quartet are supplemented by a trio of sound boffins to realise the composition. Whether it's properly a quartet or a septet is neithe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Influencías

In my original blogging days, I would occasionally run giveaways to offload unwanted books or CDs to whomever claimed them. Sometimes the recipients would offer to send me something in return. It was in this way that, ca. 2007, a Catalan correspondent sent me Influencías: a CD of perfomances by the Barcelona-based Cuarteto Casals. The CD begins with Maurice Ravel's renowned string quartet: I hadn't known the piece before receiving this disc, but I was sold on it by this fresh & bright performance. Next is a quartet called 'Vistes al Mar' by the Catalan composer Eduardo Toldrá. Its evocative maritime movements are prefaced by recitations of poems by Joan Maragall, a Catalan author whose works directly inspired the piece. Lastly there's an arrangement of Joaquín Turina's atmospheric 'Oración del Torero', originally composed for a lute quartet. I'm on the fence about the cover photo: it's a well-composed picture & not a bad idea, but with 2...
Post a Comment
Read more