Laurie Anderson - Homeland (CD/DVD)
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Music CD Cover
Artist: Laurie AndersonEdition: Music CD
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
CD Release Date: 2010-06-21
Music Label: Nonesuch
Product features:
- ANDERSON LAURIE HOMELAND (CD+DVD)
- Transitory Life
- My Right Eye
- Thinking of You
- Strange Perfumes
- Only an Expert
- Falling
- Another Day in America
- Bodies In Motion
- Dark Time In The Revolution
- The Lake
- The Beginning of Memory
- Flow
Free Music Notes for Homeland (CD/DVD)
Free Music Review: Laurie Anderson may have changed, but the world has too, and she's seen it all...
Hit: 5 Stars
If you are a fan of the avant-garde, the independent spirit, personal achievement in a singular artistic genre, then Laurie Anderson - and this new album - is for you. She has spent over 40 years of her life in the pursuit of creation from the heart, not overproduced garbage from (and for) the target audience - popular mainstream sad lyric-spewing bobbleheads who know absolutely nothing about true musical expression.
Laurie is a true musical artist of the highest caliber, drawing from the stream of consciousness events from the last 30 years, going as far back and slightly referencing her opus "United States I-IV", and making it very sure to the listener that this is a new world we are living in, and television and fame and emotions have become compartmentalized and filed somewhere in a dark corner of a computer.
Fame is a horrible disease, being rich is great and a curse, and personal freedoms and our choices are duct-taped to the wall with pieces of the Constitution.
She sees it all, and her music tells the horrible stories of truth, using her male alter-ego Fenway Bergamot and throat-singing and what seems at times primal scream therapy. And what's wrong with that?
She has been touring with this show since 2008 and has finally stepped into the studio to recreate her one woman show. This album is 12 wonderful songs, adding up to over an hour:
01 Transitory Life - the opening track explains it all in one sentence: "It's a good time for bankers, and winners, and sailors, with their stories of jackpots and islands of pleasure... they're sailing through this transitory life." Only Laurie can see the best and the worst of what you think is a good thing to be.
02 My Right Eye - I have never felt more connected to Laurie's music than when I first heard this. She tells you to relax and feel the world rush through your fingers and your skin. It does work...
03 Thinking Of You - Is this her love letter to the city of New York in the winter of 2001? As she sees it, the whiteness from the snow covers the ashes, hides the burnt ground, and she floats above the gaping wound in the earth and she tells us about mother's thoughts, and lovers thoughts, and lost introspections as the drums pound and she reminds us "I was thinking of you... and I wasn't thinking of you anymore..." Powerful.
04 Strange Perfumes - this Indian-tinged lament is a dedication to beauty, and the pursuit of it. She speaks of war, and of love, and how if you lose at either one, there is nothing left but blue skies, as the battles are done.
05 Only An Expert - "Only and expert can deal with the problem..." And America always sticks it's collective noses into the hornet's nests and almost NEEDS to be the Great Problem Solver, and only the USA, the big (and once rich) brother of the world, can solve it all, but if you aren't an expert helping in solving the solutions, forget it. You have no usefulness. And her Oprah reference about solving 'problems'? Priceless! We live from paycheck to paycheck, we dig deeper in debt to buy the good steaks and patio furniture, but for what? This song is a club rocker, but you'll never hear it there. It's too out there and too deep for club kids to understand.
06 Falling - sometimes having our pace, our tics, and our open arms to the skies aren't a bad thing... but Laurie does have some thoughts about that, though. Roger Waters couldn't have said it better about how "the American way" has become America's downfall.
07 Another Day In America - this is the song that will compel you to understand Laurie's entire catalog of music. This is her definitive statement of the world in 2010, and I don't think she could have said it any better. The world is imploding, old people are simply breathing and have no purpose, America has become a cultural wasteland and a technological wonder, and the Doomsday clock is approaching midnight and no one cares because they're too busy trying to buy more things. She tells you about the old timey days, the better times, the nostalgia, and then she hits you in the face with an iPad and a nuclear swordfight.
08 Bodies In Motion - who ever thought quantum mechanics could be sexy? We move, we think, we create, we destroy. We sometimes regret what we've done, but most of the time we don't. We went from being scared of the sky to fearing anything falling from the sky to kill us all. And we created it all, just simple motions... I feel very Madonna-ish here. I mean the good Madonna, the `telling us what life is all about' Madonna. That thread of thought seems to work here.
09 Dark Time In The Revolution - "Was the Constitution written in invisible ink?" We fight, America's been fighting for over 200 years, every 20 years or so, and what have it proven? For fat balding men in impeccably-dressed suits in Washington DC, war sells, war is good business, war makes good press for presidents and oil companies, and war has gone from solving problems to creating thick 401k plans for potential bailout CEOs. Oh yeah, young men and now women die, and they really don't know why. Is it for America, or for the bottom line?
10 The Lake - Laurie has dreams. This is one of them. That's it.
11 The Beginning Of Memory - Pink Floyd meets the Greek tragedy. This is a spoken piece with some muted music about how so so much simpler living one's life was, and if you can't see the subtlety of what she's saying, what she's implying, than this album - and most of Anderson's catalog of music in general - might not be for you.
12 Flow - a 2 minute and 14 dirge, a funereal echo pronouncing the end of the album, and her thought process, and all of the things she's tried you to get to understand for over the last hour as you slowly pull back from the endless thought processes she's lobbed at you like mind grenades.
So that's it. This album, almost four years from creation to today's release, is why Laurie exists, for her kind of artistry is necessary to remind us that when it does all collapse, she will smile, knowing she was right, because she is the perfect kind of musical artist - thought-provoking, understanding, topical, timeless.
Is it full of negativity and pessimism at times? Yes.
Is she still right, sharing her fears and dreams and getting us to think in the only way she knows how to universally approach the world like this? Definitely.
The CD album also comes with a DVD about how she's come to be with her violin (her words) and a short project based on some of her music here.
Now go! Buy this album, or go to her website and download it now - then sit back late one night, or early one morning, relax as you put on your headphones, and drink it all in. You'll be the better person to have let Laurie into your mind for a while to sing and speak to you about what she sees and feels in this broken world.
(Thanks for reading and please check out my other scatterbrained reviews of music from all over the world...!)
Homeland (CD/DVD) Poster
'America is a good place for stories,' Laurie Anderson told London's The Guardian right before she brought 'Homeland,' her self described 'concert poem,' to English stages. 'Homeland' contains some of Anderson's most incisive work, -- darkly humorous, starkly emotional, and, at times, movingly tender. Her stories are once again about these United States of America, the sprawling subject that first brought her acclaim more than 25 years ago with her eight-hour Reagan era phantasmagoria, 'United States, Parts I - IV.''Homeland' is a distilled, up-to-the-minute portrait of our agitated nation, its politics, its economics, its delusions and its dreams. Her tone is less outraged than elegiac, mourning for lives lost, ideals misplaced. The music is dramatically stripped down to a handful of players, centered around Anderson's haunting violin and voice, frequent Bill Frisell band-mate Eyvind Kang's viola and Peter Scherer's keyboards. The arrangements are embellished with such touches as the siren-like vocals of Antony Hegarty (of Antony and the Johnsons), thumping keyboards from Keiran Hebden (of Four Tet), and, on the brilliant, wickedly funny 'Only An Expert,' a gnarly guitar turn from Anderson's husband and co-producer Lou Reed.
'Homeland,' long awaited in recorded form, has evolved over more than two years of touring as Anderson developed the songs in front of concertgoers around the world, from downtown clubs in Manhattan to an amphitheatre in Athens, Greece. In Artforum, Anderson summarized the songs as 'one-third politics, one-third pure music, and one-third strange dreams.' The work was shaped more by humanity than by technology; Anderson built an intimate rapport with her audience during a show that featured a shifting set-list of new material and relied on words and music far more than visual and theatrical effects. That intimacy is just as palpable in the songs that evolved to make up her new album.. The Guardian said ''Homeland' represents some of the most purely beautiful music she has ever made.' In the States, Daily Variety declared, 'The music that accompanies the vignettes and songs is some of the loveliest that Anderson has ever written ...Like the narratives it accompanies, the sound's grave but not without wit; measured and dispassionate, but not without heart.'
On the road, 'Homeland' drew acclaim and attracted controversy for its political content. But Anderson is not merely criticizing or complaining; on tracks like the stunning 11-minute album centerpiece, 'Another Day In America,' Anderson is really singing for our survival, retelling the stories of our present state in the most forthright material of her career. It can be harrowing but it can be hopeful, and it is as riveting as anything Anderson has produced since the groundbreaking 'Big Science' in 1982. As Variety concluded, ''Homeland' reinforces Anderson's place as the best interpreter of our troubled times.'
Packaging Specs: 4 color 36-page hardbound book, CD and DVD. DVD contains 'Laurie's Violin' (7:22): Laurie plays and talks about the violin, and 'Homeland: The Story Of The Lark' (41:27), an art documentary broken up into 16 chapters.
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