The Good the Bad & The Queen - Good the Bad & The Queen
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Free Music Notes for Good the Bad & The Queen
Free Music Review: Damon Albarn is a genius!
Hit: 4 Stars
I love Damon Albarn and basically will purchase anything that he has done. He is one of the best musicians out there and this new band of his doesn't fall short of expectations. This CD is refreshing and rocks!!Free Music Review: Dirty, wonderful music
Hit: 4 Stars
Some instances reflect the way of making music of the components of the band, but results are very impressive. A new way for making music a' la Waits.
Very interesting
Free Music Review: Requires effort; partially rewards it.
Hit: 3 Stars
This project looks amazing on paper: the bass player from The Clash, the drummer from Fela Kuti's band, and a Brit-rock guitarist, directed by Gorillaz mastermind Damon Albarn and produced by modern hip-hop deconstructionist Danger Mouse. The possibilities seem huge. Punk and reggae meeting Afrobeat? A hip-hop rewrite of "The Guns Of Brixton"? Albarn singing in melancholy falsettos over crazy rhythms? You'd expect anything from the man who jammed with African musicians in Mali and later wrote a score for a Chinese opera.
Well, in the end, The Good, The Bad And The Queen just sounds like an Albarn solo album produced by Danger Mouse. This is pretty disappointing at first. Albarn went to the trouble of getting two legends for his rhythm section, but Danger Mouse puts them so low in the mix that you can't hear them. Once in a while, Tony Allen's distinctive shuffling drum patterns come through, on the singles "History Song" and "Herculean" and a couple of other places. Simonon is almost completely inaudible. The few basslines that come through are pretty generic.
This leaves Simon Tong's capable acoustic guitar to serve as a foil for Albarn's moody vocals, which summarizes the album quite concisely. Its low-key, sullen sound is remarkably consistent. The music is not really slow -- even when Allen is out of the mix, the acoustic guitar slinks along at a nervous, hurrying-through-a-dark-alley pace. But the album never breaks into a more strident sound, nor does it ever really slow down. All the songs sound very similar to each other, and it may take many listens to learn to distinguish them.
It's not just the production that makes the songs sound the same. They really are very similar, without a single stand-out hook, and since the rhythm section never makes it into the spotlight, without a single stand-out rhythm. The fastest song on this album (the title track, the only one to feature distorted guitars) and the slowest song (the piano ballad "Eighties Life") sound very similar, because they are both built on simplistic one-note musical lines (guitar and piano, respectively). The title track is supposed to have a rollicking music-hall sound, but the one-note guitar calls up bad memories of "Crazy Beat," and makes the song quite boring for its seven minutes. Likewise, "Eighties Life" comes unfortunately early in the album, and the slow piano drains the momentum created by the acoustic guitar in "History Song."
Perhaps this highlights Albarn's limitations as a composer. Don't get me wrong -- he's a genius, but his real talent is as more of a theatre director than a musician. Nobody comes close to him in inventing interesting concepts; nobody has his finely-tuned sense of the dramatic. He's also a frequently brilliant lyricist and vocalist. But, as an actual musical composer, he's not great. He works best when he's teamed up with inventive performers (like Graham Coxon or the guest stars on Gorillaz' Demon Days) who can turn his conceptual direction into great music.
The good news is that Danger Mouse, after removing the rhythm section from the mix, nonetheless manages to salvage the rest. His muffled, swampy production is very reminiscent of Demon Days (no surprise there), and adds a lot of incidental electronic squiggles and details to liven up the music. "Northern Whale" would be less interesting without two alternating keyboard blips that sort of create a groove. Some songs are augmented by ghostly, wispy keyboards. This is tremendously effective in the uneasy outro to "History Song," and also in the submerged atmosphere of "Nature Springs."
The album's strength is the flip side of its weakness. Because all the songs are so determined to sound the same, eventually one can really get into the minor changes that do occur. The gloomy vocal harmonies in the background of "Herculean" start to seem like a huge dramatic climax, and the jerky transitions in "Three Changes" sound effectively disconcerting. Tong's acoustic guitar keeps things moving, and so, if one listens to the album enough times, one may find that its sound does have a certain seductiveness of its own.
Another strength is Albarn's vocals. Over the course of the 2000s, his vocal style became much smoother and more skillful than it ever was in Blur. He does, indeed, pull off some amazing falsettos here -- "Behind The Sun" would otherwise have little to recommend it, but Albarn's plaintive delivery of "the cool breeze behind the sun" gives it a lot of unexpected poignancy. This adds a lot to the appeal of the album, though paradoxically it makes it easier to ignore what Albarn is actually singing. It's strange, but although the album is supposed to be some kind of commentary on contemporary British life, Albarn's lyrics are mostly forgettable. He has a few vaguely topical lines like "drink all day, 'cause the country's at war," but his attempts at social commentary are undercut by the album's extremely mannered delivery. If a pop album can be called "Victorian," this is it.
If you're willing to stick it out and listen to the album many times, eventually you might be rewarded. But its charms are very specific, and its monochromatic, endlessly careful approach is a lot harder to like than the kaleidoscopic sprawl of Demon Days. It's hard not to feel like it could have been a lot more interesting, looking at the names involved. But it's a pretty good mood piece, and its eerie acoustic sound can be surprisingly effective, for what it's worth.
Free Music Review: London Falling Asleep
Hit: 3 Stars
More a one-off collaboration than a true band effort, this album tries to evoke a certain West London ennui. Almost all the songs have a nodding-off quality, like a blurry shuffle home after a visit to the kebab shoppe. Electricity is in short supply. It's no wonder many have commented that the music is uninspiring, even boring. And sometimes the allusions to the current "war on terror" seem a tad forced. These topical blurts make the songs "Kingdom of Doom" and "Herculean" (surprising singles) the worst of the batch. Meanwhile, the title song, which builds and builds to wig out cacophany, the piano on the verge of collapse, is equally exhilerating and annoying. It contains the fine line, "Don't kick the crackheads off the green, they're a political party." Other highlights include Paul Simonon's great dubwise bass (the late night spirit of The Clash's "Sandinista" pervades the whole album) and the infectious ditty "Northern Whale." In the end the industrious Albarn is right, Britain is a "stroppy little island of mixed-up people."Free Music Review: 1 hit +2 (B+) + 5 (so-so) + filler = average (or "muted overt power")
Hit: 3 Stars
Like Pitchfork, sometimes I think the listeners are better versed in writing than in, uh, listening. The listening seems to get filtered through a lot of labels and culture flash cards, like electronic cajun, whoo-hoo supergroup, dub inflected, polyrhythm (oh my, revolutionary), eastend vibe, organic folky roots... But when I close my eyes...average, and not that aggressive if they're trying to get across a musical supermessage, or ultravibe, or apocalypto-anarchic 19th century mesmerizing groove of knowingness.
Bottomline: 4 or 5 guys--like, whatever and who-the-f-ever--having a moment and then looking at their narcisstic selves in their shiny rearview mirror of Anything I Utter is Gold. Dig down, fellows, and tell us what you really think...er, feel. This is me being nice: 3.
I like the cover.