This is NOT Story (This is review...)
Jan. 28th, 2008 10:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lenora_roseMusically, I seem to have rather abruptly ended up in a run of hard metal plus Loreena McKennitt (With Blackmore's Night making a tentative bridge). Heh. Not exactly my usual, but I'm happy.
Blackmore's Night - The Village Lanterne. This band sounds weirdly familiar --- and not just from having sampled a sopng or two ahead of time. I mean, they sounded familiar the first time I heard them. They sound like someone took bands I've listened to for years and poured them together; some Oysterband, Steeleye Span, some Loreena, a number of harder rock bands, bits of Heather in an electric mood. It sincerely didn't feel that much like listening to someone totally new, more like listening to a new album by an old favourite. They sit right on the border between Medieval and Celtic music and Prog rock (Which is an almost exact description of its roots, but is also a place I didn't think existed without any extra connecting tissue..) The lyrics are many of them a little too trite - Candace Night is too fond of words like "Fantasy" and "Dream" as if merely mentioning the word would evoke the meaning. In spite of that, she pegs it twice - in I Guess it Doesn't Matter Anymore, which is the Resurrection Mary/Disappearing Hitchhiker story, and Windmills, which refers to Quixotic behaviour. A couple of the other songs I like because of their defiant hopeful attitude, and musically every track but one feels like a winner (Their cover of Streets of London is Gorgeous. Just Gorgeous.) Of course, that one I can scarcely stand at all; Old Mill Inn sounds like altogether too many other "hurrah for the drinking establishment" songs, a genre I rarely like, and it's not a very good one.
I picked up Nightwish's Dark Passion Play - with the new female singer - at the same time as I got Blackmore's Night. I scored Highest Hopes, their Best of, last week for free (Had a buy-ten-get-one-free card for a local shop for a while, but hadn't foudn anything to burn it on until this last time, when I had to choose between this and Loreena McKennitt's the Visit, which i only have on cassette, but at least I have it.), which meant I wasn't going to be as hesitant as I often am about picking up best-ofs without significant new material to make them alluring. I have two complaints about the packaging for this, incidentally; there's no listing within of which album the songs originally come from, and there's no information at all anywhere as to what's on the bonus DVD (Which I haven't had opportunity to put in downstairs to find out.)
Of the new album, I can say that Meadows of Heaven is pretty much tedious and overblown, and Master Passion Greed isn't quite my thing. My current favourite seems to be Amaranth; the Poet and the Pendulum and The Islander are both up there -- the Instrumental, Last of the wilds, soudns eerily like it should be on the Blackmore's Night album -- it's nummy, though it seems slightly out of place. Having only listened to them sporadically before this, I wasn't attached to Tarja's voice, so while I can appreciate how a non-classical singer would be a jarring change to some, I think Annette is perfectly capable of standing on her own.
Of Highest Hopes, I don't know the material well enough to point out all the places I disagree with their choices as I usually do with best-ofs. I know which two songs I find weakest; Wishmaster and their rather too-true-to-the-original cover of Pink Floyd's High Hopes. Sleeping Sun and Over the Hills and Far Away have both won me over totally. (The latter, a cover, is pretty much the Long Black Veil with prison instead of hanging. Folk process, heh. See below.) But then, I've had it less than a week and haven't had time to absorb many of the others, and while I've never to my knowledge stopped liking something I liked on first hearing, songs I liked less at first have sometimes grown into favourites.
And a friend just gave me a copy of Van Canto. Van Canto is ... a capella and/or drum-and-voices only heavy metal. With stretches that are indeed the vocal equivalent of the guitar solo. Brannie introduced me to these, though technically it was Tomaas who introduced her, and Cristina who gave me the album.
I love the human voice. I love seeing what it can accomplish. I like seeing vocalists pushing the envelope.
But I really like it when they do it *well*, too. More tastiness... Of course, it only landed in my hands tonight, so i can't really give it a longer review.
Loreena McKennitt's Nights from the Alhambra is a double live album (And a single DVD, with the exact same track list but apparently significantly longer. Again, no opportunity to put it in the player as I haven't had it for long.) It captures a lot of the impression of the recent concert I so raved about. The music is vivid, immediate, restored to freshness by the nature of live performance. I'd love to be able to use this to introduce a new listener. Except for one thing. or rather, two songs, which I'd skip for the newcomer. For the same reason they irked me in the live concert in Winnipeg.
The Bonny Swans and The Lady of Shalott are abbreviated to a degree that makes me wish to grab her by the lapels (if she's in an outfit with lapels) and rant that, no really, you can sing a whole song, dammit. She cut out so many verses that it's like she wanted to give a tiny sampler of the real thing, and wants the listener to depend on the studio version to get what's going on. They're incoherent. (in fact, she added in a couple of verses again for Lady of Shalott in the Winnipeg concert, and it was *still* incoherent.) And I don't listen to a live concert to listen to a tiny sampler of studio work. I listen to capture a performance at its strongest and most real. These songs are made unreal by how much they've been cropped. They are practically debased, and that's not as much hyperbole as I'd like it to be.
But, a clever listener might observe, she also cut a verse each from She Moved Through the Fair and The Stolen Child. And she'd trimmed parts out of the Lady of Shalott by the time she did Live in Paris and Toronto, in about 1998. (Also, other people weren't as bothered as I was by missing lyrics; my mom sang along to Lady of Shalott with everything but Squeeing.)
That's fine, I'd say. Because none of these versions lose the *story*.
I listen to folk ballads. If I insisted that every version of a folk ballad I heard included every damn verse, I'd A) almost never find a "real" version of a song, and B)occasionally go mad of sheer boredom and C) miss a LOT of fabulous music. The 7 minute Fairport convention version of Tam Lin, and the 11 minute Steeleye Span version, both exclude a number of verses whose existence I only know from written renditions. In the latter case, they tweak them to fit. Jim Moray's version of the non-magical Two Sisters ends with the Miller shoving her back in the water. I get the impression that versions of the Unquiet Grave include more devilry and in-verse death than Kate Rusby's (Never mind her "elf-Knight" being a short happy cheerful love song). That's fine. That's folk process. Heck, I wrote a ballad not long ago (Looking for a tune to fit it to so I can present it sometime) by the process of including every verse that could possibly be included, then chopping out the ones that added flesh to the bare bones of the story.
What makes these two songs nag and twitch is that they no longer include the story.
I'm driven by story. Story is my obsession. I learn songs by the story in them if there is one, and sing very few songs that don't contain one. Though I might very well appreciate storyless songs for other reasons.
Ballads such as the Bonny Swans are stories in skeletal form. That is their nature. They are already spare, rarely including a lot of character and motive, or setting or anything at all besides the story. True, it included the motive for the murder in two places, but that's a far cry from excessive wordage. The Lady of Shalott is a Romantic poet's work, a bit of a different creature; it includes details of river side, wind and weather, setting, and more of character and motive than most ballads. It has a little room to trim and still include as much story as a ballad would; cropped as it is in Live in Paris and Toronto, it's essentially disguised a bit more closely as a ballad. She Moved Through The Fair's lost verse is the same one virtually everyone else cuts at some point; such that Elemental is the only album anywhere where I've heard it. Stolen Child's story is only present in the choruses and the final verse, most of the rest is pretty scenery. In all but the two hacked-up versions I started this rant to bitch about, the story remains.
These chopped-up versions... are not stories. Anyone attempting to explain what happens in the whole of the Lady of Shalott from the version here... good luck. Bonny Swans fares slightly better; they'd get the whole bit about the harper and the harp that accuses, but not who pulls her out of the water. The abbreviated versions, the folk process adjustments, almost always form *a* story, not always the one that the original singers intended, but story is undeniably present, driving their choices of arrangement and tone, speed and emphasis.
Mostly, though, it irks me because I cannot fathom a sane reason for doing the cutting. Yes, an 11 minute song is now closer to 5 minutes. Okay, fit one more song on the track list. But name me one fan who'd mind hearing the whole thing in a live performance.
Heck, most of the time, the opposite happens. Steeleye Span's Thomas the Rhymer is considerably longer and includes far more of the original ballad in the Journey live album than it did on the studio version from Now We Are Six (Where it remains a song I'm barely interested in due to being so short, but it was the only version I could find at all before that.) Richard Thompson's Calvary Cross doubles in length in live performances, albeit without a word added.
Why cut past the point of *story*? Can anyone explain this one?
Blackmore's Night - The Village Lanterne. This band sounds weirdly familiar --- and not just from having sampled a sopng or two ahead of time. I mean, they sounded familiar the first time I heard them. They sound like someone took bands I've listened to for years and poured them together; some Oysterband, Steeleye Span, some Loreena, a number of harder rock bands, bits of Heather in an electric mood. It sincerely didn't feel that much like listening to someone totally new, more like listening to a new album by an old favourite. They sit right on the border between Medieval and Celtic music and Prog rock (Which is an almost exact description of its roots, but is also a place I didn't think existed without any extra connecting tissue..) The lyrics are many of them a little too trite - Candace Night is too fond of words like "Fantasy" and "Dream" as if merely mentioning the word would evoke the meaning. In spite of that, she pegs it twice - in I Guess it Doesn't Matter Anymore, which is the Resurrection Mary/Disappearing Hitchhiker story, and Windmills, which refers to Quixotic behaviour. A couple of the other songs I like because of their defiant hopeful attitude, and musically every track but one feels like a winner (Their cover of Streets of London is Gorgeous. Just Gorgeous.) Of course, that one I can scarcely stand at all; Old Mill Inn sounds like altogether too many other "hurrah for the drinking establishment" songs, a genre I rarely like, and it's not a very good one.
I picked up Nightwish's Dark Passion Play - with the new female singer - at the same time as I got Blackmore's Night. I scored Highest Hopes, their Best of, last week for free (Had a buy-ten-get-one-free card for a local shop for a while, but hadn't foudn anything to burn it on until this last time, when I had to choose between this and Loreena McKennitt's the Visit, which i only have on cassette, but at least I have it.), which meant I wasn't going to be as hesitant as I often am about picking up best-ofs without significant new material to make them alluring. I have two complaints about the packaging for this, incidentally; there's no listing within of which album the songs originally come from, and there's no information at all anywhere as to what's on the bonus DVD (Which I haven't had opportunity to put in downstairs to find out.)
Of the new album, I can say that Meadows of Heaven is pretty much tedious and overblown, and Master Passion Greed isn't quite my thing. My current favourite seems to be Amaranth; the Poet and the Pendulum and The Islander are both up there -- the Instrumental, Last of the wilds, soudns eerily like it should be on the Blackmore's Night album -- it's nummy, though it seems slightly out of place. Having only listened to them sporadically before this, I wasn't attached to Tarja's voice, so while I can appreciate how a non-classical singer would be a jarring change to some, I think Annette is perfectly capable of standing on her own.
Of Highest Hopes, I don't know the material well enough to point out all the places I disagree with their choices as I usually do with best-ofs. I know which two songs I find weakest; Wishmaster and their rather too-true-to-the-original cover of Pink Floyd's High Hopes. Sleeping Sun and Over the Hills and Far Away have both won me over totally. (The latter, a cover, is pretty much the Long Black Veil with prison instead of hanging. Folk process, heh. See below.) But then, I've had it less than a week and haven't had time to absorb many of the others, and while I've never to my knowledge stopped liking something I liked on first hearing, songs I liked less at first have sometimes grown into favourites.
And a friend just gave me a copy of Van Canto. Van Canto is ... a capella and/or drum-and-voices only heavy metal. With stretches that are indeed the vocal equivalent of the guitar solo. Brannie introduced me to these, though technically it was Tomaas who introduced her, and Cristina who gave me the album.
I love the human voice. I love seeing what it can accomplish. I like seeing vocalists pushing the envelope.
But I really like it when they do it *well*, too. More tastiness... Of course, it only landed in my hands tonight, so i can't really give it a longer review.
Loreena McKennitt's Nights from the Alhambra is a double live album (And a single DVD, with the exact same track list but apparently significantly longer. Again, no opportunity to put it in the player as I haven't had it for long.) It captures a lot of the impression of the recent concert I so raved about. The music is vivid, immediate, restored to freshness by the nature of live performance. I'd love to be able to use this to introduce a new listener. Except for one thing. or rather, two songs, which I'd skip for the newcomer. For the same reason they irked me in the live concert in Winnipeg.
The Bonny Swans and The Lady of Shalott are abbreviated to a degree that makes me wish to grab her by the lapels (if she's in an outfit with lapels) and rant that, no really, you can sing a whole song, dammit. She cut out so many verses that it's like she wanted to give a tiny sampler of the real thing, and wants the listener to depend on the studio version to get what's going on. They're incoherent. (in fact, she added in a couple of verses again for Lady of Shalott in the Winnipeg concert, and it was *still* incoherent.) And I don't listen to a live concert to listen to a tiny sampler of studio work. I listen to capture a performance at its strongest and most real. These songs are made unreal by how much they've been cropped. They are practically debased, and that's not as much hyperbole as I'd like it to be.
But, a clever listener might observe, she also cut a verse each from She Moved Through the Fair and The Stolen Child. And she'd trimmed parts out of the Lady of Shalott by the time she did Live in Paris and Toronto, in about 1998. (Also, other people weren't as bothered as I was by missing lyrics; my mom sang along to Lady of Shalott with everything but Squeeing.)
That's fine, I'd say. Because none of these versions lose the *story*.
I listen to folk ballads. If I insisted that every version of a folk ballad I heard included every damn verse, I'd A) almost never find a "real" version of a song, and B)occasionally go mad of sheer boredom and C) miss a LOT of fabulous music. The 7 minute Fairport convention version of Tam Lin, and the 11 minute Steeleye Span version, both exclude a number of verses whose existence I only know from written renditions. In the latter case, they tweak them to fit. Jim Moray's version of the non-magical Two Sisters ends with the Miller shoving her back in the water. I get the impression that versions of the Unquiet Grave include more devilry and in-verse death than Kate Rusby's (Never mind her "elf-Knight" being a short happy cheerful love song). That's fine. That's folk process. Heck, I wrote a ballad not long ago (Looking for a tune to fit it to so I can present it sometime) by the process of including every verse that could possibly be included, then chopping out the ones that added flesh to the bare bones of the story.
What makes these two songs nag and twitch is that they no longer include the story.
I'm driven by story. Story is my obsession. I learn songs by the story in them if there is one, and sing very few songs that don't contain one. Though I might very well appreciate storyless songs for other reasons.
Ballads such as the Bonny Swans are stories in skeletal form. That is their nature. They are already spare, rarely including a lot of character and motive, or setting or anything at all besides the story. True, it included the motive for the murder in two places, but that's a far cry from excessive wordage. The Lady of Shalott is a Romantic poet's work, a bit of a different creature; it includes details of river side, wind and weather, setting, and more of character and motive than most ballads. It has a little room to trim and still include as much story as a ballad would; cropped as it is in Live in Paris and Toronto, it's essentially disguised a bit more closely as a ballad. She Moved Through The Fair's lost verse is the same one virtually everyone else cuts at some point; such that Elemental is the only album anywhere where I've heard it. Stolen Child's story is only present in the choruses and the final verse, most of the rest is pretty scenery. In all but the two hacked-up versions I started this rant to bitch about, the story remains.
These chopped-up versions... are not stories. Anyone attempting to explain what happens in the whole of the Lady of Shalott from the version here... good luck. Bonny Swans fares slightly better; they'd get the whole bit about the harper and the harp that accuses, but not who pulls her out of the water. The abbreviated versions, the folk process adjustments, almost always form *a* story, not always the one that the original singers intended, but story is undeniably present, driving their choices of arrangement and tone, speed and emphasis.
Mostly, though, it irks me because I cannot fathom a sane reason for doing the cutting. Yes, an 11 minute song is now closer to 5 minutes. Okay, fit one more song on the track list. But name me one fan who'd mind hearing the whole thing in a live performance.
Heck, most of the time, the opposite happens. Steeleye Span's Thomas the Rhymer is considerably longer and includes far more of the original ballad in the Journey live album than it did on the studio version from Now We Are Six (Where it remains a song I'm barely interested in due to being so short, but it was the only version I could find at all before that.) Richard Thompson's Calvary Cross doubles in length in live performances, albeit without a word added.
Why cut past the point of *story*? Can anyone explain this one?
