Posted in reseña, tagged Goo Goo Dolls, music, reseña on February 22, 2008| 1 Comment »
It’s not the best idea to get to know a band by way of a greatest hits album. It’s the Cliff Notes approach to music, worthy only to the degree that it leads to deeper immersion.
My son gave me this CD for Christmas. Prior to this, I knew the Goo Goo Dolls mostly via the preternaturally beautiful `Better Days’. But I’m beginning to get it. (more…)
Posted in reseña, tagged Damien Rice, music, reseña on February 8, 2008| Leave a Comment »
This stunning Damien Rice offering is by turns imperfect, soulish, quirky, self-absorbed, and fantastic.
Rice’s persuasive voice is complemented with uncommon tact by gorgeous female accompaniment. Though it never ceases to be a Damien Rice album, Lisa Hannigan and her friends are so good that they play a solid supporting role without which Rice would not be what he is. Almost the same can be said of the understated but skillful acoustic guitar that encircles Rice’s voice throughout O‘s tenspot of tracks. (more…)
Posted in reseña, tagged Daughtry, music, reseña on February 8, 2008| 1 Comment »
Like the mythological Athena, Daughtry seems have sprung full grown and fully armed from the head of his father, call him Music. I mean, where is the warm-up here? Where is the amateurish posing, the awkward yearning to be profound?
This eponymous debut album plays like a very strong sophomore effort, not the uneven first shot that one anticipates from a First Time Thing. The band’s sound fronts Chris Daughtry’s convincing voice and persona against the backdrop of tight vocal harmonies, crisp guitar and bass work, and unobtrusive but effective drumming. (more…)
Posted in reseña, tagged Johannes Brahms, music, reseña on February 7, 2008| Leave a Comment »
As an amateur music lover with only a spotty control of the repertoire, it always amazes me when it turns out that a composer whom I’ve come to know via the big works–his symphonies, for example–excels in the small stuff as well.
The Quartetto Italiano does Brahms proud on this Philips Duo recording of his complete string and clarinet quartets. Brahms the late Romantic composer sounds almost modern in these tight, diminutive, four-pieces. Something of the Modernist angst comes in to complement the celebratory reflex of Romanticism itself. One senses that we stand here at the hinge of two artistic eras. (more…)
Posted in reseña, tagged 24, film, reseña on February 6, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Let’s face it, you’ve heard the phrase ‘a new kind of television’ enough times to make you go numb in the buttocks. Every two-bit wanna’be Seinfeld pilot gets styled that way, too often to cover up a lack of talent with the siren song of novelty.
But you’d be mistaken to be dubious about 24. This show in its first season was about as new as television can get. (more…)
Posted in reseña, tagged Ann Chamberlain, fauna, reseña, Rhodesian Ridgebacks on February 4, 2008| 1 Comment »
‘Funny thing about Rhodesian Ridgeback books. It’s hard to tell the reader something he doesn’t already know.
That’s because this beguiling breed elicits such passion and understanding from its owners that most of us end up so attached to our dogs that we know their behaviors and temperament inside and out. As a result, we read about the breed while nodding our heads and commenting ‘Yup ….’, ‘Uh-huh …’ and the like. (more…)
Posted in reseña, tagged Fyodor Dostoyevsky, reseña on February 4, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Some literary works are so sweeping in their vision, so penetrating in their understanding of the human condition and its psychology, so inexhaustible with respect to their spiritual insight that a reviewer feels quite small as he turns the last page and takes up his pen to comment.
Such is Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Three Karamazov siblings, products of the unrestrained loins of the hapless Fyodor Karamazov, spend most of the pages alloted to them walking their ever diverging paths and become more and more unlike each other. Then, in a hundred or so pages, Dostoevsky all but forces us to see how alike they are. How alike we are, whether under the Russian sun or some other. (more…)
Posted in reseña, tagged Lifehouse, music, reseña on February 2, 2008| Leave a Comment »
It may well be that Lifehouse fired their three working bullets on the first tracks of this eponymous and excellent album.
Then again, maybe not. The rest of these tunes are pretty good work. It’s just a little tough keeping up with the right-left-another-right emotional impact of ‘Come Back Down’, ‘You and Me’, and ‘Blind’. Lifehouse could pull a Simon & Garfunkel and disappear after this album and we’d still warm to these first three exquisite and pathos-filled songs twenty years hence. We’d remember who we were when we first heard them.
That’s good music-making. (more…)
Posted in reseña, tagged music, reseña, Simon and Garfunkel on January 22, 2008| Leave a Comment »
This masterful album can only be called succulent. And that’s just to start with. The adjectives need to wax ever stronger in order adequately to describe the movement from one classic piece to the next in this eleven-track celebration of some of the 1970s finest music.
Like Seinfeld for the ears, Simon and Garfunkel’s music generates many of the lyrics and observations that are engraved upon the brains of us who grew up in that era and which spring almost unconsciously to the lips when circumstances beckon. (more…)
Posted in reseña, tagged Antoni Wit, music, Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, reseña, Tchaikovsky on January 21, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Russian romantic music performed like this in a 1992 recording by Antoni Wit and the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra is the reason the Naxos label came out of nowhere to the kind of well-deserved prominence that makes ‘budget music’ seem an irrelevant misnomer.
Tchaikovsky’s great Symphony Number 5 is played with exceptional verve. The stirring Andante tempo that predominates in three of the four movements comes off majestically. If Tchaikovsky teetered on the edge of madness, he managed to transpose whatever chaos gusted in his soul into memorable late romantic lines that occasionally make one almost shudder. This fifth symphony set him up for the unforgettable sixth (‘Pathetique’), in which emotion burst whatever dam was still standing as he wrote this, its precursor. (more…)
Canter Bridge 