Uh, ok. Fairly harmless, but I have heard pretty much exactly this dozens of times before. So nothing special. I only skipped the first one because it was described as "Contemporary Soul/R&B Influenced by Billie Holiday, Etta James, Nina Simone" and I have heard lots of that before. The third one is Mark Applebaum: Speed Dating, described as "Experimental Spoken Word Music / Contemporary Classical Music" Blogger won't embed, so follow the link for "3 Unlikely Corporate Sponsorships: No. 1, Nestlé"
This is a polyphonic version of Kurt Schwitters Ursonate mixed up with Tom Waits "Step Right Up" in a special version for kindergarten. Number four is Typh Barrow: Raw, described as the Belgian Amy Winehouse.
Pretty typical soul/blues to my ear, but with a nicely gravelly voice. Number five looks really promising: Thomas Bartlett and Nico Muhly: Peter Pears: Balinese Ceremonial Music, described as "Gamelan Transcriptions and Contemporary Songs Inspired by Them" Oh dear, imagine my disappointment when what I hear is gamelan reduced to kind of bland new age music with dreary breathy semi-spoken vocals. I would describe this as road trip music for overstimulated folks who really need to calm down.
And besides isn't this the worst kind of cultural appropriation?
I could go on, but all this seems to prove is that 90% of everything really is crap. If Ted Gioia had actually done the proper job of a music critic and tried to pick the ten good ones out of the hundred, now that would have been a public service. And we could have some good arguments about it. But as it is, in this post-critical wasteland, he makes no critical judgements so you have struggle through the whole bloody list to find the few gems that might lie within. How marvelous.
UPDATE: Just to be fair, this is Ted Gioia's reason for presenting the list as it is:
UPDATE: Just to be fair, this is Ted Gioia's reason for presenting the list as it is:
Each of these albums deserves equal recognition? Why is that exactly? How delightfully egalitarian.I am listing my top 100 and honorablemention albums for 2018 in alphabeticalorder, rather than ranking them. Thismarks a change from pre-2017 lists. Iam doing this because each of thesealbums deserves recognition and thesequential ranking tended to focustoo much attention on just a fewrecordings.
"This is a polyphonic version of Kurt Schwitters Ursonate mixed up with Tom Waits Step Right Up in a special version for kindergarten." Ouch. Was looking forward to a livestream from Wigmore Hall on Tuesday (Vivaldi, Handel, Corelli) until I discovered that the ubiquitous Nico M. is doing a premiere-- which at WH continues to be a French word-- the first part in the middle of the first half and the second in the middle of the second; still looking forward to the concert of course but expect to get a couple of brief naps in. But-- to the confounding of my expectations!
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My specialty is the mean, one-sentence put down review. I was recently accused of being hard to please for my review of the Fidel Leal concert. Guilty as charged, I suppose. Hard to please in the fine art of music, in my book, means that you keep practicing until you get it right, you keep working on the piece until it comes together, you throw away everything you have written that is just not up to standard. I mean, how else would you work?
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