Entertainment For Lively Minds
Beware soaring, lilting adjectives
I got a press release yesterday about a singer I rather like. It doesn't seem fair to say who it is. Here's an extract:
"xxxx xxxxx" goes straight for the jugular. As the arrangement slowly builds, taking in leaping drums, swooning horns and bar-room piano, H’s voice soars, bruised but sensual, on what is equal parts torch song and jazz-flecked folk tale. Barely-there electronics gently simmer away and are used sparingly; no detail is overlooked, and in a song which sounds as huge as this everything is carefully constructed, with rich textures overlapping, and ebbing and flowing, before reaching a rousing climax.
That's the B-side, by the way. The release links to a review, which contains this gem of a sentence:
The feint and fragile ‘xxx xxxx’ is a gorgeously dimpled and wistfully retiring folk nugget, understated and touching and sounding as though aside being meticulously crafted in a woodshed it also appears to have partaken in a tot or two of moonshine its unearthed hidden there given its rosy glow and its slight though detectable off centred teeter, the blending of opining strings braids and the delicate brass beading eke out tender heart rushed flutters that dapple the overall effect with a hushed sepia trimming the type of which should see it endearing itself to admirers of the Heartstrings.
This overfishing of the adjectival ocean is bad enough, and proves yet again that the Internet needs an editor (I'm interested - what are the hours?), but worse is the expectation that this rancid bumguff will help sell records. Talented people write and record great songs, then give them to showboating oafs who bury them forever under a steaming splat of wordure.
I think we may have got to the point where all the off-stage talent in the music business is moving on, like the money. The good managers, the committed A&Rs; they've taken the hint and they're now teaching Rock Studies at The University of Basingstoke.
Am I being unfair? Probably. I've been up all night with a streaming, eye-redding, tissue-shredding, brow-creasing, screen-sneeze-splattering cold. With a hushed sepia trimming, of course.
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"Rancid bumguff"
will be seamlessly slipped into my next rant about whatever I get hot under the collar about, hopefully vastly improving my usual "steaming splat of wordure".
Well spoken Cap'n, as usual.
Rancid Bumguff
Three more from them...
It can only be Shakin' Stevens
If it wasn't for this kind of thing the NME would have been one sheet of A4 in the 80s. I think "shimmering shards of sepulchral majesty" was the phrase of choice at that time.
Not forgetting
the associated "sonic cathedrals":-).
I should hold my hands up at this juncture and confess that I once wrote a published review of New Order's Low-life which contained much of this sort of stuff - I remember "a stark, ethereal tone poem" being a clear highlight of the prose.
A gorgeously dimpled folk nugget
Mrs C informs me that's a perfect description of Seth Lakeman.
no unrepentant doo wop harmonies ?
.
Impossibly Beautiful
Like the imaginary childhood friend who told you to steal your father’s lighter and burn things, Marcel resides in the pearlescent recesses of the inner ear and her adopted home of Shoreditch. Her canvas is a symphonic panorama – a bountiful savannah , where herds of tuba embark upon sumptuous migrations, stalked by lean session guitar and the ever-present spectre of tambourine.
“I like to think of this album as my Joni Mitchell record,” says Marcel, alluding to a style of harmonic architecture that can only be described as indescribably beautiful ; an empyreal jazz fugue speckled with the gold dust of 18th century Trad. Arr.
Like the intricately patterned wings of some rare folk moth, Marcel’s velveteen tones ride the updrafts of Northern Soul and Acid Jazz, soaring betwixt the twin poles of Nick Drake and The Thompson Twins, with joyful whale song rising up from the oceans, braiding with her seraphic vocal modulations (On her new album she duets with Tyson, the Killer Whale from the Grimsby Oceanlife Survival Park). A swam of beats (bee ts?)barely audible to the human ear pollinate her fragrant basslines as they blossom into a reworkings of the Turkmenistan national anthem.
Marcel stands semi-naked before Jesus (and readers of this month’s Nutz magazine) and says: “Lord, I seek no forgiveness for the contemporary Doo Wop harmonies that I and my nine co-writers have created. Cast me down into the fiery pit if that is your will, for in doing so you will make Hell a mirror image of Heaven.”
(Marcel will be appearing at Beryllium Nights in Blackpool on the 16th October where she will be signing copies of here new digital single - Boyz (Don’t Want No Nice).
I know
Who it is.
She's from Liverpool
isn't she?
Me too.
Thanks to google. And unless she releases something to rival Unhalfbricking or Beethoven's 5th the first thing I'll think of when I hear her mentioned will be 'ridiculous press-release'.
This made me laugh out loud
"soaring betwixt the twin poles of Nick Drake and The Thompson Twins".
Nice one, b7.
Isn't it tiresome?
But it's everything, not just rock. The adjective pool is running very dry now.
Everything must be hyped to death and PRd to buggery, or there's a (not entirely unfounded) fear it'll fail to sizzle and capture the imagination of the nation.
How did we get here?
Universal Guff
Posted this yesterday - similar balls from a more obvious source:
Coca Cola have released this statement about their work with Wayne Rooney;
"Our relationship with Wayne Rooney is ongoing. We are currently working with Wayne on Coke Zero Street Striker - an award winning programme which over the past three years has encouraged thousands of young people to get involved in football."
Thank you Coke. Now if only you could possibly get young people interested in sex, booze and video games too, your work would be truly done.
I do like the way
her record company website lists her name as "Surname, First Name". Seems a bit formal to me, but perhaps they're not that close.
Oi!
I wrote that!
Well.. I probably could have done, if asked..