The best desktop speakers, ever
Posted on | August 20, 2010 | 1 Comment
Everyone’s lamenting the decline of proper stereo equipment. Teens are losing their hearing to their tinny iPod earbuds and nobody knows what non-compressed music sounds like anymore.
People don’t buy stereos these days — listening to music in one’s living room has become part of an overall surround sound home entertainment setup that comprises a tv, five or seven speakers and a subwoofer. All music destined for commercial success is now mixed with such high compression (to grab attention on the radio and compensate for the poor quality listening devices that are so prevalent) that it’s lost all nuances and dynamics. There’s actually a movement to reduce the amount of compression applied to recorded music.
And yet, in our era of the long tail and tech entrepreneurship, there’s more and more excellent, affordable audio equipment available, mostly made in China to exacting specifications from US or European engineers and sold on the web or through smaller retailers. As with everything these days, Google and niche sites are your friend — as long as you know what you’re looking for, chances are you will find it at a price point that works for you.
The quest for ever-better audio equipment never ends, truth be told. The scale has an unlimited top end of course, and — given enough money — it could always be just a little better. I’m never not thinking about it (like any good nerd).
I listen to a lot of music while working in my home office.
Recently, I found what I think are the best desktop speakers I’ve ever heard. They’re made by a company called Audio Engine and cost only around $200 (a remarkable feat given that Bose charges twice as much money for what are essentially two plastic boxes with artificially enhanced bass and the most horribly coloured sound you can imagine).
The Audio Engine A2 speakers come in two kinds of black (glossy or matte) and white. They’re small, heavy and quite beautiful. They have Kevlar woofers and silk tweeters. And — after about a week of burn-in, which all good audio equipment requires — they sound simply extraordinary. The built-in power amplifier (in the left speaker) produces ample power to fill a room, and if you’re sitting right in front of them (using a near-field monitoring setup in a typical computer application) they can be quite overwhelming even at low volumes.
They have excellent bass, focused mids, and trebles that are never sharp or uncomfortable, regardless of what kind of music you play. The A2s also have great depth of field and sound stage. Even coupled with a better-than-average, yet still quite flawed external sound card/DAC such as my trusty old M-Audio Audiophile USB, they sound briliant — musical and coherent regardless of musical style. Even complex orchestral music doesn’t overwhelm these tiny wonders.
Audio Engine sells a set of little rubber pedestals that tilt the speakers slightly backwards and bring them inline with the incline of your monitor.
I’ve replaced the cables that came in the Audio Engine box with my own — I’m using a decent-ish pair of Monster interconnects plus some leftover Totem Tress, a fantastic speaker cable made by Totem, who make the speakers I use in my main stereo, to connect the amplified left hand side to the unamplified right.
I cannot recommend these speakers enough.
Buying (classical) music online, digitally
Posted on | August 16, 2010 | No Comments
For the past 6 months, I’ve been listening to classical music almost exclusively. (There’s a much longer post – or maybe a series – about that in the works.) Toronto, like most major cities, is definitely under-supplied with bricks & mortar classical CD stores now. The deep structural changes in the music business over the past seven or eight years have wreaked havoc on what I’m told was once a vibrant classical record store culture. And while these changes have actually resulted in more and better-recorded music being available in the global market, you won’t find most of it in Toronto retail. (New York, I discovered during a visit earlier this year, is not much better.)
What’s left now is L’Atelier Grigorian, a small specialist classical and jazz CD store (very well curated but unfortunately expensive), HMV’s flagship store on Yonge Street (whose classical department upstairs focuses more and more on Naxos, Brilliant and other budget releases), and the classical sections in stores like Soundscapes (whose classical buyer is either myopic or schizophrenic, or both; it appears that only a small selection from mostly major labels gets brought in – surprising in a store that is so ‘indie’ in all other genres). There are classical departments in an ever-shrinking number of second hand CD stores in Toronto but they’re typically not really worth visiting.
Naturally, my eye has drifted online. Amazon.com, Amazon.ca and its various independent sellers have generally been a good, speedy – and cheap source. ArkivMusic (with its very useful catalogue containing syndicated reviews from Fanfare and other premium online review sources) is also very good (though pricier on average, and shipping can take a while).
One of the more exciting options these days is buying music digitally. While I remain deeply skeptical about iTunes (or anything that comes in a low-ish quality and with DRM), there is now an increasing number of credible and accomplished indie labels selling high-resolution digital files directly. In some cases, these are actually higher-resolution than a CD – up to actual studio master quality (SACD resolution or better). Even though I don’t have equipment that would easily allow me to play back high res audio files like that, it’s exciting to imagine that – as computer-based audio becomes cheaper and less niche-y – it’ll be possible one day to fully enjoy a studio quality master at home.
First up in the classical digital download offerings has to be Linn Records. Founded as an off-shoot of the Scottish high-end stereo manufacturer in the early 80s, Linn Records is a boutique audiophile label that is slowly emerging with a limited but excellent catalogue of classical recordings (as well as forays into jazz and singer/songwriter material). I’m a big fan of some of Linn’s Baroque releases, such as the truly outstanding and unanimously well-reviewed Bach Mass in B minor by the Dunedin Consort, a Scottish group that performs this work with one-to-a-part voicings (only one singer for every voice in the choral parts – this has the distinct advantage of showing off Bach’s intricate part-writing and illuminates the music’s overall architecture).
Other Linn releases I love are by various other Scottish Baroque players, many of whom have made big names for themselves in their various specialties since (and, sadly, moved on from Linn Records as a result). Particularly wonderful recordings are by the Palladian Ensemble (featuring the wonderful Rachel Podger, my favourite Baroque violinist) and by Pamela Thorby (who plays the recorder). Thorby’s Garden of Early Delights, performed together with Andrew Lawrence-King on harp and psaltery, is one of the loveliest selections of early Baroque music I’ve heard, beautifully played and recorded with an immense clarity, resonance and a width of sound stage second to none.
In fact, the audio quality of Linn’s work – there’s an interview with Linn’s chief producer/engineer, Calum Malcolm, here – is outstanding on every release. I’ve now bought and downloaded 320 kbps MP3 versions of a number of releases, and everything is breathtakingly well recorded.
Linn offers its own Adobe Air based download manager application, which works very well. The only complaint I have is about the somewhat awkwardly done digital booklets (they are PDFs of the print versions, so the pages are out of order in the PDF) and poor MP3 metadata. This latter issue is somewhat inexcusable for a download store – and while I understand that my 320 kbps MP3s are at the low end of Linn’s offerings and price point, there really is no reason why I should have to spend 10 minutes after every download importing and re-working the metadata in iTunes to ensure that it’s complete and accurate.
Another excellent digital music seller is Hyperion Records. Hyperion is primarily known for its outstanding efforts in chamber music, Lieder and the pre-classical repertoire. Its greatest claim to fame so far is probably the complete edition of Schubert Lieder (something I aim to own – and listen to – one of these years…).
Hyperion offers digital downloads either as VBR MP3s (targeting 320 kpbs) or FLAC (FLAC is generally emerging as the audiophile download format of choice – I grab FLAC where I can for archiving and down-convert to 320 kbps MP3s for the time being, in the interest of portability).
I’ve bought several excellent digital selections from Hyperion Records. Particularly enjoyable have been releases by Stephen Hough, an English pianist whom I admire greatly (and who also has an always intriguing and occasionally amusing Twitter presence). His Mozart Album is a wildly successful recital of Mozart and Mozart-inspired music, and I highly recommend it. I’ve also grabbed two very special Rossini releases – the Soirées musicales song cycle and an otherwise out-of-print edition of the String Sonatas in their original chamber version played by Elizabeth Wallfisch and ensemble.
Downloading from Hyperion is less convenient than Linn Records because Hyperion doesn’t offer a download manager (it references a few on its website, but alas – I use Google Chrome and none of the Firefox plugins support my browser) so you have to actually download each file separately. On the plus side, though, Hyperion’s metadata-labeling is superb and I have no completeness or accuracy concerns to report.
As I build my classical library, lingering doubts remain after every digital-only purchase. “If only I had bought the CD instead. What if MP3 or FLAC aren’t the last word yet for digital audio? If I owned the CD, at least I could re-rip it at a future date into whatever format will then be de rigueur.”
For right now, convenience wins out. 320 kpbs MP3s sound quite wonderful to my ears on most equipment (barring, perhaps, my main stereo in the living room, where they sound merely somewhat above acceptable but lack the fullness and depth of my CD player), and their portability-to-audiophile-to-economy ratio on a 160GB latest generation iPod is quite excellent (especially with one of these line-out iPod dock cables for the car).
There are other classical digital download options. Notably, Deutsche Grammophon offers some 3,500 of its releases, as well as some of the Decca catalogue (both now owned by Universal Music) as 320 kbps MP3 downloads. I haven’t tried this yet, but at first glance, the online catalogue seems somewhat confusing (you can always trust the corporate behemoth to create the dodgiest e-commerce offering). I was a little sad to see that the DG website doesn’t offer all of the newly merged Universal classical labels – I would have liked to be able to access the Deutsche Harmonia Mundi catalogue in this way, as it contains many gems I’d like to get my hands on digitally. Finally, I’m keen to see whether Harmonia Mundi itself, the fantastic French indie classical label, has digital sales plans of its own. Now that would be something…
An octet with four people
Posted on | July 17, 2010 | No Comments
In 2005, the Emerson String Quartet released an album of Mendelssohn’s string quartets which also included a version of the octet. Instead of partnering with another string quartet, though, they recorded it by themselves, taking great care to make it sound like a real ensemble of eight (I was particularly interested in their idea of rotating chairs).
These two videos explain the process and are an interesting micro-documentary.
Part one:
Part two:
The CD is also entirely worth owning, even if it is a little expensive:
Two one-take music videos
Posted on | July 6, 2010 | No Comments
These are fun, though (I think) unrelated. Both were shot in a single take (or at least made to look like it).
OK Go, This Too Shall Pass (Rube Goldberg Machine Version) - sort of strange and amazing all at once. It’s a sort of postmodern magic show created in someone’s garage. Or like that ‘Crazy Machines’ game.
LCD Soundsystem, Drunk Girls – Amusing primarily because it’s so deranged and destructive. It also reminded me a bit of The Kills’ The Good Ones which I’ve mentioned here before, and which isn’t a one-take video but also quite messy.
(Thanks to A. for the OK Go recommendation.)
Listening to: Peter Gabriel, Scratch My Back
Posted on | April 16, 2010 | No Comments
A review of Peter Gabriel’s Scratch My Back (2010)
It’s a tricky business, doing covers of well-known and well-loved songs. Perhaps not when you’re Keith Jarrett or Brad Mehldau and you can fall back on a long-established tradition of converting the day’s popular songs into improvised jazz, a process by which they become ‘standards.’
But when you’re the éminence grise of politically conscious progressive rock, the expectations are high. You can’t just go ahead and perform the songs in ways reminiscent of their original arrangement. You need to add something significantly new and insightful, shine a different light on them, make them your own. (Why this should be required is an interesting question, and – somewhat ironically – the rule only seems to apply to those who have proven themselves capable songwriters. Nobody expects Michael Bublé to add penetrating new insights to Frank Sinatra’s songs.)
The starting point for this collection was, as Gabriel says in the short but eloquent sleeve notes, to perform songs by others that he loves, and to use no drums or guitars. Setting a deliberate constraint like that is an interesting and useful artistic conceit – brushing up against the limits of the constraint helps clarify the vision (it’s a useful trick in all sorts of creative situations – try it some time in a meeting).
The end result is twelve tracks (53 minutes) of mostly quiet, stark beauty – some of the songs are very different from the originals, most are successful as covers, some are entirely outstanding and all shine a light on the original that wasn’t there before.
The songs are set orchestrally, arranged and orchestrated by John Metcalfe, sometimes with piano, and all the instruments are acoustic. The CD is beautifully recorded, obviously with a great deal of care and skill.
Here are my thoughts about each track:
David Bowie’s ‘Heroes‘ receives a tentative, cracked-voice, minor-key makeover. Without the 1970s German prog rock ‘motorik’ beat we know from the original, it becomes a lot more pensive and fragile sounding. The orchestra builds to a crescendo, Gabriel’s voice shifts up an octave into his ‘power range’ and, somehow, magically, this becomes a Peter Gabriel song. It ends suddenly, a little surprisingly, and in so-doing elegantly answers the question of how to end songs without a fade: just stop.
Paul Simon’s ‘The Boy In The Bubble‘ is next. This is a tough song to cover without drums. The original is so vividly and memorably marked by the concertina, Bakithi Kumalo’s fretless bass and Vusi Khumalo’s booming, elastic drums that it’s hard to make the connection at first. Curiously, and I think somewhat unfortunately, Peter Gabriel opts for a slight piano arpeggio to provide the rhythmic backing, slowing the track down to the ‘slow mo’ of the lyrics. Most disconcertingly, he re-chords much of the song, often creating discomfort between the melody and the backing. This does create (in me, at least) an interesting tension between what I’m expecting and what I’m getting. And of course the harmonies eventually resolve, but only after a fairly uncomfortable four minutes. I oscillate between thinking it’s genius and hating it. I suppose that makes it a good cover.
Elbow’s ‘Mirrorball,’ from 2008′s outstanding The Seldom Seen Kid, is an obvious choice because Gabriel’s and Elbow singer Guy Garvey’s voices are actually quite similar, and the original already has an orchestral backing in the chorus. I think this is well done but ultimately, perhaps, one of the lesser covers here. It does demonstrate, though, just how much Peter Gabriel has influenced the current ‘new wave’ of prog rock. You can easily hear it in Elbow, TV on the Radio, and many others. (The vocal similarities between Gabriel and Garvey are coincidental to the quality of the cover, the songwriting similarities aren’t – and that’s what makes Gabriel easily inhabit this song.)
I’m not familiar with Bon Iver’s ‘Flume,’ but it’s evidently a brilliant song and eerily Peter Gabriel like. This is perhaps the one track that could most easily pass for a Peter Gabriel original here (and I think that’s great praise). Part of what makes this arrangement so successful is that we’re used to hearing Gabriel’s voice paired with dense horn arrangements. While they’re typically synthetic pads, it is a sound he’s favoured for a few decades so ‘Flume’ sounds familiar to us sung by this voice with this backing. It would not be out of place on So or Us.
Talking Heads’ ‘Listening Wind‘ from 1980′s Brian Eno produced Remain in Light is one of the best covers I’ve ever heard, period. A satisfyingly quivering, squirming and twitching call to anti-colonial resistance in the original, Gabriel’s version here lifts it into the realm of essential listening for our troubled, war-torn 21st century. The swirling string arrangement sounds at times like the Kronos Quartet, a the ‘free trade zone’ in the lyrics suddenly sounds like everything you’ve ever heard about Baghdad’s Green Zone, sad and threatening at the same time.
‘The Power Of Your Heart‘ is a new Lou Reed tune. It doesn’t appear to be available on any Lou Reed releases yet – according to Google, he’s been playing it live for a few years, and it’s been recorded for a Cartier advertising campaign (but I couldn’t find it on that website, either; just on Youtube). This is a beautiful piece of song craft and suits Gabriel like a glove. It has the stateliness, the grace of his older slow songs, like ‘Don’t Give Up,’ while not exactly sounding like a Peter Gabriel original. The thoughtful arrangement gives is a 21st century Tin Pan Alley sheen that’s quite lovely.
Next up is Arcade Fire’s ‘My Body Is A Cage,’ a long-time favourite of mine and beautifully done here. It’s been re-chorded, too, but much more gently than ‘The Boy In The Bubble.’ I love the drama of the orchestration – it has a dark, movie-like scoring that suits it very well. What’s curious is that the Peter Gabriel version drifts between menace and fragility while the original is agonized, spiritual and seeking. There’s quite a contrast between the two, yet both versions shed light on the lyrics in entirely legitimate ways. I also love the ending: around minute 4:45, Gabriel introduces a choir in one of those incomparable Peter Gabriel moments of quiet, poignant beauty which – I think – elevates his version above the original if only for the subtlety and complexity of the orchestral arrangement.
I don’t know The Magnetic Fields’ ‘The Book Of Love,’ but this version makes me want to seek out the original (something all good covers should do). With lyrics that gently make fun of the silliness of romantic love’s gestures, words and songs, this doesn’t immediately jump out as something that would be a natural fit for Peter Gabriel. But the various Gabriel shows I’ve been to over the years revealed a gently funny man with a quiet sense of humour and a great deal of humanity. ‘The Book Of Love’ is a beautiful lighter moment on Scratch My Back.
‘I Think It’s Going To Rain Today‘ by Randy Newman is stylistically similar to the Lou Reed cover. It’s pensive, and the piano backing – recorded at a resonant and slightly wooly distance – makes it sound almost like a Schubert Lied. I don’t think it’s terribly successful, but it’s not very problematic either in the greater context of the record. It’s a resting point of sorts, and at just over 2 minutes it hasn’t been given enough time to reveal any magic it may hold.
Regina Spektor’s ‘Après Moi,’ on the other hand (another one I’m not familiar with in the original; Youtube to the rescue once more) seems very problematic to me. Here, the bigness of the arrangement makes what’s merely banal in the original overblown and unwieldy. It sounds a lot like one of those faux agony moments in many modern musicals – something by Andrew Lloyd Webber, perhaps. I also find the Peter Gabriel arrangement oddly pompous, adding circumstance where the original had very little, and I’m not sure of the interpretive intent. I’ve never been a big fan of Regina Spektor (in fact, I sold or gave away her first two CDs after owning them for a couple of years and never warming to them). And that thing she does in the chorus where she explains ‘après moi’ by immediately following it with ‘after me comes the flood’? Ham-fisted in the way the actors on CSI always explain everything in ‘casual conversation.’
I don’t have much to say about ‘Philadelphia,’ the Neil Young song. I feel similarly about it as I did about the Randy Newman tune discussed above. It’s quiet, to the point, and provides another resting point. ‘Quietly elegant’ might be the best way to describe it. I suspect that repeated listens will reveal more of it than I’ve discovered so far.
Finally, there’s Radiohead’s ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)‘ which – without the rapidly picked guitar and high-pitched agony of Thom Yorke’s voice – is quite different. What I like here is that Peter Gabriel deliberately strains his voice near the top end of his register to achieve a similarly pained effect. I really like the instrumentation here, the piano and orchestral palette chosen are interesting and engaging. There’s a lightness and theatricality to the cover that the original doesn’t have and that Radiohead themselves only learned after recording ‘Street Spirit.’ I’m quite fond of this.
All the artists covered on Scratch My Back will also cover a Peter Gabriel song each, to be anthologized on a future CD called, presumably, And I’ll Scratch Yours. Some of these covers are currently being released on iTunes as song pairs (one Peter Gabriel song covered by someone else coupled with Peter’s cover of that artist’s song).
All told, I think Scratch My Back is one of the better cover records by a major artist I’ve heard. Its predominantly pensive and somber mood leaves me unsure of whether this will become a staple on my iPod, but I know there are songs here that I’ll prefer in this version over the original – and there are one or two I’ll prefer to skip over entirely. As always, the quirks may bring me back to this more frequently than I think. I’m learning this about great records: it’s the quirks that make them great.
My theory about Nickelback
Posted on | March 8, 2010 | No Comments
Now that the kind folks from the Vancouver Olympic committee have once again forced them down our collective throats during the closing ceremony of the 2010 Winter Olympics, I was reminded to share my theory about Nickelback. Does Nickelback warrant a theory? You bet. Since they are one of Canada’s biggest entertainment industry exports, I think we deserve all the attempts at an explanation we can get.
Let me start off by stating my theory: I think Nickelback is a country band. There. It’s a simple theory – I’m basically positing that we’ve all been herded down the wooden path of believing they’re hard rock, post-grunge, whatever; but really, they’re a country band from Hanna, Alberta, a hamlet of 2,800 inhabitants deep in the Canadian prairies. Two and a half hours from Calgary, three hours from Red Deer and about 5 hours from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Hanna is literally in the middle of nowhere. The Canadian heartland.
Now, since Nickelback is already apparently the most hated band ever, I’m not going to spend a tremendous amount of time trying to prove that I’m right. But I will suggest you watch some of these Youtube clips (most of which can – conveniently – not be embedded in other websites at the request of EMI Canada, Nickelback’s record label – because, you know, why would you encourage free online marketing for your band?).
In each case, try to notice and imagine the following (apart from Chad Kroeger’s Albrecht Dürer hair, of course, which you’ll notice whether you want to or not):
Cowboy hats and boots are in evidence, however fleetingly, everywhere. Band members other than Chad Kroeger have very neat, heartland cowboy hair styles. There are a lot of pickup trucks and Jeeps. The choruses all sound like modern country music (which, as we all know, sounds like 70s/80s mainstream rock). Every time a chorus comes on, try to imagine away the crunchy distorted guitar chords, and instead think about how it would sound if it were played with acoustically strummed guitars and fiddles and/or pedal steel guitars. Notice the really skilled close harmony singing in many of the choruses. It sounds just like Big & Rich or Rascal Flatts.
So here are the video links:
- Photograph (A party on the back of a pickup truck: ’nuff said.)
- Far Away (What’s with the sleeveless shirt? More pickup trucks here. And what possessed 17 million people to watch this on Youtube?)
- Someday (She drives a giant SUV with New York plates, and the streets of New York are totally empty; it’s a kind of hick town fantasy of what the big city’s like.)
- Never Again (Cowboy hat at 0:07.)
- Never Gonna Be Alone (Close harmony singing in the chorus, sounds just like Rascal Flatts.)
- If Today Was Your Last Day (see above)
Now please excuse me while I go and find something light to listen to, something that’s not depressing and where the lead singer doesn’t sound terminally constipated. If I have to watch one more depressing video about breakups, deaths or accidents I’ll throw myself in front of a bus. Do people actually like this kind of music?
For some much-needed lightness, you might want to watch this version of Photograph, which made me laugh out loud. It’s a bit long, but it’s definitely the right idea.
Listening to: Madagascar Slim, Good Life Good Living
Posted on | January 4, 2010 | No Comments
A review of Madagascar Slim’s Good Life Good Living (2009)
Sometime in September or October 2009, I woke up – as I always do – to the sounds of CBC Radio 1. I’m not always sure why I listen to it, but it has something to do with all other options on the dial being much, much worse. Andy Barrie, the host of ‘Metro Morning,’ has a sort of dignified, grown-up way about him, a seemingly sincere desire to pander to my shrinking highbrow demographic, and so I get my tax dollar’s worth every morning between 6 and 7. Very occasionally, Metro Morning plays music; to introduce something the editorial team has deemed worthy of our rarefied ears. That morning, I encountered Madagascar Slim, an exceptionally talented Canadian singer, songwriter and guitarist, originally from Madagascar.
Now, Madagascar isn’t a geography I’m familiar with musically, despite having lived in Southern Africa for 20 years. This was perhaps a sign of South Africa’s disconnection from the rest of the region (culture, like foreign currency, wasn’t allowed to flow freely during the Apartheid years, and rebuilding regional relations since has been slow). In terms of widely recognized African music, West Africa (Mali, Senegal…) and South Africa itself always seemed to dwarf everyone else’s output, especially since the Western market for ‘world music’ isn’t known for its ability to differentiate sounds or appreciate the subtleties of regional inflection.
Madagascar, the world’s 5th largest island, had been a proudly independent seafaring monarchy for centuries before being invaded and colonized by France in the 1880s. It was a crucial trade gateway between East Africa and Southeast Asia, and – perhaps this is purely in my head – some of these influences can be heard in Slim’s music. For me, the recognizable elements are similarities to a certain South African ‘folk’ – I hear early Johnny Clegg (when he was still playing with his original band, Juluka) and Vusi Mahlasela. There’s a simple lyricism with very distinct Southern African elements here (I would call them kwela rhythms, but I realize that that’s just nomenclature). There’s also a “Latin” tinge, perhaps echoing the deep influence salsa, son and cumbia have wielded in other African coastal economies (such as Senegal, whose music is deeply influenced by Latin American sounds imported by sailors). While I can’t really hear an Asian influence, I sense elements of European folk song – evidence, no doubt, of the missionary colonialism present everywhere in historical Madagascar; this is similar to Waldemar Bastos from Angola, say. In this sense, Madagascar Slim’s music is an amalgam of his country’s history and geography.
Known as a Canadian world music guitar virtuoso, Slim also has another set of influences. Much has been made of his early discovery of Hendrix and his desire to play Jimi’s and B. B. King’s music. And certainly, there are tracks on Good Life Good Living (such as the cleverly named ‘Take Me Home (Slight Return),’ the name an homage to Hendrix’ ‘Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)’) that feature electric, blues-inflected guitar work. In essence, though, this is largely an acoustic, melodious, low-key affair that’s a lot less austere than a blues record, and it has absolutely nothing in common with West African ‘blues’ like Tinariwen, Ali Farka Touré or Boubacar Traoré. (I find myself wondering whether the “Malagasy kid discovers Hendrix, takes up guitar” origination story is maybe one of those self-perpetuating PR myths that don’t really serve to shed any light on an artist’s work but rather obfuscate the complexities of heritage and the richness of influence.)
There is much on this CD that is both immediately accessible (for someone open to world music) and benefits from repeated listening. Slim is an outstanding acoustic picker (witness the instrumental ‘Neny Malala,’ for example) whose simple picked chords propel everything here. There’s a heaviness of spirit here, a sadness of love and loss, underscored by strong and simple harmony vocals (‘Fankahalana’). Since I don’t understand the Malagasy lyrics and don’t have access to the CD cover (bought it on iTunes), I can’t say if it’s longing for lost love, home or a resolution of Madagascar’s complicated politics and poverty, but it’s touching in its simplicity and earnestness.
There’s one moment that borders on a misstep: ‘Take Me Home,’ a beautiful melody and a perfectly executed mid-tempo number, is apparently about every immigrant’s nightmare of living abroad, away from home, and about being sent home, deported. Suddenly, in the middle of the song, there’s a very Canadian voice (presumably meant to belong to an immigration official) announcing Slim’s deportation. It’s jarring… presumably deliberately, but uncomfortable nonetheless. At the end of the track, we hear a female voice waking the singer from his nightmare. It puts this track uncomfortably close to the ‘novelty song’ category. On the other hand, it’s these idiosyncrasies that make us remember and cherish certain albums, so I’m choosing to interpret it this way.
All is well the minute the next track comes on – a rollicking party of a song called ‘Sitaka’ that blends Malagasy roots, Quebec folk (or maybe Zydeco?) and intersperses it with a beautifully executed 12 bar blues seemingly out of nowhere. It’s effortless and demonstrates why Slim is in high demand as a sideman in Toronto’s blues scene.
I can wholeheartedly recommend this if you’re at all interested in world music. It’s one of the freshest things I’ve heard in a while, particularly since African music on CD has become so heavily oriented towards West African desert blues in recent years.
Madagascar Slim’s Good Life Good Living is available on iTunes, Amazon.ca, and Amazon.com. He also had a self-released (?) earlier album called “Omnisource” that is out of print and has sketchy availability.
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Recent Posts on Changebowl, Carsten’s other blog- Playing around with Ontario electoral geography August 11, 2010
- HelTweetica for iPad July 20, 2010
- Facebook privacy & digital NIMBY July 19, 2010
- What we can learn from gear porn May 31, 2010
- Are creativity and intellectual property rights inversely proportional? May 27, 2010
- Comparing the tech giants May 2, 2010
- Corporate applications and content on smartphones March 21, 2010
About
Carsten Knoch
Attentive music listener, reader, vegetarian, affordable audio hobbyist, software and services professional, vision enabler, instigator, product manager, marketer, thinker, writer, blogger, tinkerer, Internet dweller since 1992
Teabowl is my blog about music, vegetarian food, books, art and life.
Teabowl's sister blog Changebowl discusses technology, community, design and business.
