dimblr.com Welcome Guest | Login or Register

It’s taken more than a decade, but Portishead have finally come out with a new album. Kevin Courtney goes beyond the press release to discover what took these slow-groovers so long, and wonders if this is the beginning of a rebirth for Bristol’s trip-hop scene
IT’S ALWAYS the way: you’re about to interview some band or pop star, when a twitchy record company executive jumps in front of you and says: “Don’t ask about the divorce/dead rock star husband/child molestation charge/plastic surgery/Johnny Marr/gerbil.”
There’s always one question you’re not allowed to ask, and the obvious one for Geoff Barrow of trip-hop legends Portishead is, simply, why so long? It’s been 10 years since their last album, twice the time it took for The Stone Roses to engineer their second coming. But this is the one question I’m barred from asking. Have Portishead gone all Courtney Love on us?
Nah, there’s a simple reason that the monumentally slow-grooving trio are in a hurry to skirt the subject: it might take up too much precious interview time when they could be talking about music and stuff. So they’ve prepared a handy press release that addresses the thorny issue of the band’s decade-long hiatus.
It says that following a hectic four years between the release of the Mercury Music Prize-winning Dummyin 1994 and the mixing of the Live at the Roseland NYC album in 1997, beatmaster Geoff Barrow, singer Beth Gibbons and guitarist Adrian Utley “went home, emotionally and physically exhausted”.
Geoff, the intense music-obsessive whose dense beats and brooding samples gave Portishead their signature style, took a complete break from music to “try and rebuild some semblance of a home life”. No abstinence for the other two, though: Adrian, the veteran session man whose r’n'b/jazz/rock guitar style brought a hipster aesthetic to the mix, kept busy with production, soundtrack and live work.

ireland.com

I am enthralled that the singer-songwriter genre has been rejuvenated and my love for acoustic, bare bones music has enough fodder to keep the burn aflame.
In retrospect, my fascination with this genre definitely started with my pseudo-obsession with Dashboard Confessional frontman Chris Carrabba in college.
Although, Carrabba is more known for popularizing “emo” and setting the stage for a whole slew of similar emo-hipster bands, his ability to make you feel his pain was incredible and I loved every moment of it.
Some of my relatives joke, “How can you listen to that, it’s depressing.”
My terse rebuttal is, “It’s not depressing. It’s real.”
Sometimes what’s real is not packaged in booty-shaking beats and sexy lyrics, but honest and pure music that erupts out of the soul.
To you, it may sound depressing, but to me, it’s beautiful.
From Dashboard Confessional it went to Howie Day and Griffin House. I loved the melodic chorus of “Collide” on Howie Day’s 2003 CD and it was the anthem of part of my sophomore year in college.
Then I met Damien Rice. He was playing on a CD in the background of a low-key New Year’s Eve party. I couldn’t help notice his brooding vocals promenading over violins in gut-wrenching lyrics.
In his songs, the emotion is so thick you could cut it with a knife and serve it on a platter.
And that’s what I did. I served it raw to my friends because his music was infectious. They loved it too and we would sit in my car and listen ever-so-closely to the intimate lyrics and try to figure out what every metaphor meant.
I am not one to have suffered soul-shattering heartache in my 25 years like his lyrics protest, but there’s something about being open that resonates with me.

jconline.com

Bernadette Peters: Her voice is still, oh, so sweet
Just-turned-60 singer Bernadette Peters brings her skilled musical crew to Cleveland on Friday
By Elaine Guregian
Beacon Journal arts and culture writer
Published on Thursday, Mar 27, 2008
Bernadette Peters is on the phone, and she sounds remarkably like herself.
Is it possible that the woman with the little-girl New Yorker voice straight out of a bygone era really sounds just like she did in movies like The Jerk or Pennies From Heaven?
Just as sweet, too.
The woman with the mane of corkscrew curls is coming to Cleveland on Friday night to sing at the Allen Theatre of Playhouse Square. The North Coast Men’s Chorus, which is presenting Peters, will sing in the first half of the program. Peters will sing in the second half, accompanied by the Cleveland Pops Orchestra and her musical director, Melvin Laird, who might also accompany her on some solos.
The North Coast Men’s Chorus calls itself Northeast Ohio’s largest gay chorus, with about 100 singers. Gay men are a large part of Peters’ fan base, as she well knows.
”They’re just a very sensitive group of people, which I just find so heart-touching. We’re all so careful about hiding our emotions. Gay people have to deal with what they’re feeling and decide whether they’re going to let it out or hold it in. It’s so wonderful that it’s becoming easier for them,” Peters said. ”My main concern is for young people, because you get into all kinds of trouble when you have to hide who you are.”
Peters, who turned 60 last month, was born in Ozone Park, N.Y., and got an early start in show business. She told the audience of the CD Bernadette Peters Live at Carnegie Hall, which benefited the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, that she was on tour, age 13, when she first met Laird, her current musical director and pianist. They met again later and began working as a team. Now they have been together ”for years and years,” Peters said.

ohio.com

When you think of The Kills, the words “pizza, pizza, daddio” don’t readily come to mind. Maybe they should. Maybe that’s the problem.
At present, Jamie Hince (aka “Hotel”) is animatedly clapping his hands and singing a playground song to me, and it goes a little something like this: “What happened to your Uncle?/He died/How’d he die?/He’d died drunk!/He died drunk!”
That he is doing this at a hip hotel’s restaurant crammed into a snug bistro table during happy hour on Manhattan’s West Side makes the moment all the more significant. Despite his posh David Bowie-esque speaking voice, and the icy, aloof vibe he and bandmate Alison Mosshart (aka “VV”) can project on stage, they are anything but.
Let’s back up.
When I arrived for our scheduled chat, they were ordering cocoa (for her), and red wine (for him). Nevermind that the initial cuppa had a marshmallow that more closely resembled buffalo mozzarella than its intended presentation atop delicious hot chocolate, and nevermind that I, just moments into meeting them, ingratiate myself by pointing the culinary oddity out, to which Hince offers a deep chuckle and investigates the marsharella himself. Together, we dissect the foamy marvel, as Mosshart looks on and says, “ewww!”
The story surrounding Midnight Boom, the duo’s third—and arguably best—record since signing to Domino Records in 2001, involves playground songs, aborted studio sessions in Los Angeles, a hasty trip to Mexico during hurricane season, near-heart attacks, going broke, going for broke, and finally, a soul-saving return to Benton Harbor, a nowhere town in Michigan, where Hince and Mosshart found their bliss at the Key Club, a studio owned by Bill Skibbe and Jessica Ruffins.
“They’ve got dogs, and we’re obsessed with dogs, so that always helps. I can cuddle dogs at all hours!” Mosshart says. “It’s a really cool place, because you can work 24 hours [a day]. You live there, cook there, [and] don’t need to leave for any reason, and you kind of don’t. You can stop doing music and start doing collages, or you can go do this or that…everything is just really immediate. You become well-roundedly creative.”

sentimentalistmag.com

My mom rarely listened to music and rarely had an artist toward whom she felt an affinity. Throughout my childhood, our home would usually be filled with the sounds of silence or the odd adult contemporary radio station that would shuffle through the standard hits of Barry Manilow or Celine Dion at regular intervals.
There was one artist that would shake my mom from her musical slumber, however, and that was Anne Murray. Mom always perked up whenever Anne Murray’s recognizable contralto voice would come on the radio. The only album mom ever purchased herself was an Anne Murray album. To the best of my recollection, it was 1983’s A Little Good News.
Fast-forward 25 years to Anne Murray’s 2008 release of duets. Anne Murray Duets: Friends and Legends calls on a myriad of musical talents to help on 17 tracks of Anne Murray hits and favourites. Some of the combinations are rather strange, while others are more predictable. The album is among the most interesting of Murray’s career, but is still safe enough for dear old mom.
Anne Murray Duets: Friends and Legends begins with the instantly-recognizable “Danny’s Song.” Murray is joined by Martina McBride and the song is gently sweet and simple. The next track, “I Just Fall in Love Again,” is instantly striking with its familiar opening notes. Anne is joined by the now-deceased Dusty Springfield, one of Anne’s close personal friends. Emmylou Harris is next, joining Murray on “Another Pot O’ Tea,” a harmonious duet with tender twang.

read_more