It Is Hard To Be Diplomatic With Album Reviews
After all, it’s all about our taste and perception
Pho
Photo: Hatice Yardim on Unsplash
How do you hit it right with an album review? Wit all elements considered, by sheer luck. Of course, you have to have the sense and a bit of knowledge of the music involved, have the ability and a (bit) of knowledge how to transfer those into words. Still, there are many elements involved where you can miss with your review.
You can be too tied to an artist, like or dislike them or the genre they’re performing or a number of other elements that can influence your opinion. There’s also a good chance that wherever you’re publishing the review the editor(s) has/have a guideline. It could be anywhere from ‘find something positive’ to ‘diss it as much as you can.’ Former more often than latter.
So it is good to have a vent somewhere where you can tell it ‘the way it is or to be more precise, ‘the way you like it.’ So since it is like time, here are a few recent albums that maybe got a bit criticized too much. But then, as trite as that saying has become, ‘time will tell.’ We all eat our words sometimes or other.
M. Caye Castagnetto - Leap Second
Castagnetto is a producer of Peruvian origin who bides his working hours between London and Los Angeles (when he can travel, I guess). He decided to make his art by making musical collages (rather than just straightforward samples) from snippets of vocals and instrumentation. A tricky business that takes time, pain, and sweat and it still don’t have to work. No wonder it took him five years to come up with ‘Leap Second.’ After all, it can take you a split of a second for things to fall apart. Here they don’t. New, fresh, and exciting.
Midnight Sister - Painting the Roses
Midnight Sister is a duo that has a particular reason to work in LA. Bot Juliana Giraffe and Ari Balouzian are involved with movies - Giraffe is a filmmaker and Balouzian writes movie scores. And you can actually see, ahem hear it on ‘Painting the Roses.’ When teenage brothers from Lemon Twigs dropped on the scene they fascinated with their dumbfounding combination of everything pop. Midnight Sister, add their experience to such a mix but also with a solid dose of vaudeville, jazz, and whatever tickled their fancy at that moment. Quite a fascinating release.
Carm - Carm
How do you apply chamber ensemble music to something that is more palpable to broader audiences without sacrificing your artistic vision? To answer that question you may ask J. Camerieri, composer and horn player with chamber ensemble yMusic. He responds with his first solo album under the moniker of Carm. Sure, there are horns aplenty on the album, but why would that be a problem. Not only can Camerieri play, but he knows how to make brilliant arrangements and use his guest vocalists (Sufjan Stevens, Justin Vernon of Bon Ever, and Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo) to make it all work.
Lambert - False
Lambert has been around for a while (since 2014 to be more precise) and has been quietly building a name for himself as one of the musical agent provocateurs donning a special mask, making satirical short films, and doing covers of Oasis. But to make such an approach work, you need more than solid musical knowledge and capabilities. On ‘False' Lambert makes all that knowledge and capabilities come through with his blend of everything that can even in a tiny bit be connected with the term ‘modern classical’ or modern music, to be precise.