Monday, February 2, 2009
Monday Music #5 (Rebecca Collins, Miriam Ingram)
I don't have nearly a large enough sample size to make this statistically meaningful, but my music collection contains a disproportionate amount of Irish artists. A lot of this is probably due to how I look for new music. Mailing lists are great, as are Amazon recommendations and Pandora and such, but more and more, I'm using Myspace friends lists. There's a great deal of self-promotion with friending, but it's self-correcting; if an artist you love lists someone near the top, that's a good indicator that you'll love him or her too.
Last week, I ordered Julie Feeney's debut, which had been sitting in my CD Baby wishlist for quite some time. (It's very much recommended too, but not new to me.) Only recently, however, did I think that perhaps a browse through her Myspace friends would be a good idea. It was. The following two artists had well-deserved spots near the beginning.
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Rebecca Collins' music can loosely be described as "dark cabaret." It's a bit of a nebulous genre (sure, they all are sometimes); according to Wikipedia, it's large enough to encompass Tom Waits, Regina Spektor, and the White Stripes somehow. This isn't really useful for description purposes.
There's a subspecies of it, however, the rough musical equivalent of noir: moody, slightly jazzy, often unresolved. Portishead belongs to this strain, as does Jill Tracy. It's not for everyone, of course, but the target audience is larger than you might think. As Collins states in her bio, it's made up of "anyone who has ever woken up in the middle of the night with their heart racing."
She's got several songs up from her album Chameleon Blues, but "Involved" is by far my favorite. She incorporates everything I like about the genre and in the process, turns the dehydrated euphemism "involved with [someone]" into a portent.
The song's beginning is already great: coy, reflective, restrained, but then it gets to the 2:30 mark and becomes insistent, adding a frantic saxophone solo and crashing drums to complement the lyrics: "If you make another move, I won't be responsible for what I do." That's a dubious sentiment in the real world, but one that matches the music perfectly. It takes the straightforward love song from afar and extracts every dangerous, tumultous, wonderfully possessive undertone.
All this dissolves into a chorus of ghostly backup vocals, and the song returns to the start, almost apologetically. There's no resolution, no closure. It's a statement before its answer, and for that it is haunting.
Listen here.
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Miriam Ingram's music is just as evocative, but in a different way: lush, rich soundscapes that expand the more you listen to them until you're sure they contain entire worlds to get lost in.
"Slide," from her album Trampoline, is the most gorgeous song I've heard in a long time. I haven't been this mesmerized by chord changes since the absolutely perfect one in the second verse of Kate Bush's "Never Be Mine." (I realize that I'm being highly hypocritical here in using her as a comparison, which I complain about regularly.) It's the same thing: an already-wistful progression that takes a sudden yet perfectly conflicted turn for a second. It's only one chord, but it's as evocative as twenty.
Now imagine this happening over and over again. Just when you think you've pinned down the song, it shifts beneath you. Near the start is an almost a cappella section - just Miriam's vocals and the drum beat. Later on in the song, you hear different arrangements of acoustic guitar, piano chimes, electric guitars, lots of synths, electronic and organic at the same time. There's a lot going on here, but still plenty of space; not once does it feel crowded. It all flows perfectly into each other, held together by that drum part. It's a song that fills the room. It's something to get lost in.
Trampoline is a year or so old; since then, she's released Trampolonica, a remix album. She acknowledges on her site that the remixers could "seduce, ravage, violate, disfigure, abuse, annihilate, or eat the files if they so desired."
I might be biased by having heard the original song first, but the Amoebazoid remix just sounds wrong. It doesn't do anything egregious like turn it into a disco song, mind you. The basic structure's the same, more or less, but it's cluttered. Among other changes, it drenches Miriam's a cappella part in reverb and throws every instrumental part at each other until there's no space left.
This isn't to say that it's bad, but I much prefer the expanse of the original. The remix just seems like over-tampering.
Your mileage may vary, though. Both are available at her site.
Listen here.
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