Skip to main content

The Id

The Id is an album which gives the impression of having had a great deal of talent, time and money thrown at it in a way that by no means guaranteed a successful outcome. Recorded in the wake of the runaway success of her first record On How Life Is, Macy Gray's second features a large cast-list; seems to have been recorded all over the place; runs to nearly an hour long; and includes many thickly-layered production jobs. Yet (for me) it does mostly work very well, just about holds together, and marks an improvement over what had been an excellent debut.

I don't think I bought this from a record shop but rather from some other kind of retail space - a petrol station or a department store maybe - it would have been somewhere in Sweden in late 2001. While I was a tad nonplussed by it at first, it has grown on me, and I've played it so often that the disc is now in a sorry-looking state: I probably ought to get a new one. The opener 'Relating to a Psychopath' sets up a mood of heady derangement from the off, and includes some of the album's most memorable lyrics. 

Of the many other highlights I might pick 'Boo', 'Harry', 'Freak Like Me' and the exquisite 'Sweet Baby' as particular favourites. 'Oblivion' is an oddity with an unexpected oompah backing track, but I like that too. The bonus track 'Shed' isn't bad, but feels a somewhat superfluous addition: one course too many at the end of a long meal. Back in 2001 I found the lyrics of 'Gimme All Your Lovin' or I Will Kill You' to be cartoonishly amusing ("It's amazing what a gun to the head can do," etc.), but not any more. In most other respects, I think it's a record that holds up very well twenty-one years on.

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

All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...
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