Monday, February 23, 2009
Monday Music #8 (Helene Horlyck, Nan Vernon, Amelia Brightman)
Genre shift!
I've mentioned Sarah Brightman quite a bit, if not in Monday Music, because she was the single most influential artist on my musical tastes. I discovered her back in 2003 or so and would listen to nobody else for years, slipping back into some primordial formative stage where she was the atmospheric music.
Her producer Frank Peterson was as responsible for this music as she was, but he's hardly the only one doing it. There's a whole genre out there, without a clearly defined name. It's music for epics - well, before Internet memes and Frank Miller movies hijacked the word. Every landscape is a wide meadow before the singer; every love story is a covenant built to last. It acts like it's never heard of irony or anything crude. Sure, the music can be a bit overblown and unrealistic, but the best songs convince you that this is reality and everything else is just getting it wrong. Sometimes it sticks past the song too.
~*~*~
Helene Horlyck is a protege of Jens Gad, whose other projects include Enigma, his own project Achillea (for which Horlyck sang vocals), and The Veronicas (can we play One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others now?)
I'll get this out of the way first: "Service Star" is a terrible title. It sounds like you're talking about a convenience store from a space opera. When you sing "where are you now?" my immediate thought is "Just off the next exit."
That said, musically, it exemplifies the genre. You have the strings at the beginning, the vaguely choral sopranos, and the vocal line, delivered like a missive to a far-off army. Title aside, it never once feels overblown or false. Sure, there are bulkier songs like this, and lighter ones, but sometimes you don't really need extremes.
Listen here.
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Nan Vernon, in all likelihood, never worked with Frank Peterson. She worked with Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics. But this isn't Platinum Weird stuff at all. (tangent: Kara, be awesome again, please!). Her music completely belongs to the genre. Well, almost. It's a bit more towards ecto.
Nan is old enough relative to the Internet that information about her is relatively difficult to find. The MySpace link I'll provide is an unofficial fansite. I would have killed to know about her a few years ago, but I didn't discover her until a couple days ago, in a War Against Silence review.
Manta Ray's US release was on EastWest Records, as was Sarah Brightman's Fly. I'm not going to extrapolate this next observation to every artist there - that would be stupid and likely wrong - but visually, at least, she fits their type. Observe:
http://home.global.co.za/~jvd/princessa/calling_f.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/af/SarahBrightman_FlyAlbum.jpg
http://i43.tower.com/images/mm106699059/manta-ray-nan-vernon-cassette-cover-art.jpg
Short dark hair, pale-ish skin, posed to appear tough, or cool, or cool-and-tough. The musical style's similar, too. Hers is more singer-songwriter-artist than trobairitz-maiden-in-white-dress-bathed-in-light, if that makes any sense to anyone but me.
To add another artist into the mix - for that extra dose of scattershot - "Elvis Waits" sounds to me like what would happen if Frank Peterson started working with Schiller a decade earlier. The piano part is a few rhythmic skips away from what would eventually appear on "The Smile," but the percussion is all Dive, with a little bit of Fly thrown in (more so on her other songs than here.)
Sarah Brightman wouldn't generally allude to Elvis, though ("I Loved You" aside), nor would she sing like this. Nan Vernon's voice is classical-ish at some points, but owes more to Tori Amos. Pasting a Tori performance over the Sisters of Oz wouldn't be far off. And maybe if I found her then that would be my path to Ecto, rather than through Stina and Kate. I have her music now, though.
Listen here.
~*~*~
Of course, this style has its limitations. On the spectrum, it falls less towards "sung, played, written, produced all by herself" and more towards "Ethereal Female Vocalist brought in to float above this dude's lyrics and maybe she'll get a solo album if she's lucky." I won't rant about the latter any more than I already have. Right now I don't need to.
As I've written before, I've been waiting for Violet's solo album since at least 2003. Apparently she's been waiting even longer. But now, six years later, we've got snippets of her (other) solo album. This has happened before with Nemo, of course, but somehow this seems a lot more promising.
What's remarkable about these tracks is how fully she's purged this style from her music. It's most apparent in "Wasted Life," but you can hear it everywhere else. It's modern. It's got some expeirments happening. She's got a style emerging. And that's wonderful.
Listen here.
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