Aventurina King

Yesterday night, I went to see David Torn playing in 55BAR.

I equate the experience with listening to Theolonious Monk records.  Theolonious Monk is, to any jazz fan, a legend / genius / god etc. . .  Musicologists have analyzed his improvisations and gaped at the effortless complexity of his chord modulations and progressions.

I, in turn, tend to cringe.  My connection to art is over-simplistic and narrow.  It is emotion.  But emotions, apparently, are the wrong key to Theolonious Monk, and they are the wrong key to David Torn’s improvisations.  Their music is an intellectual delicacy.

So here goes my attempt at thinking.

David Torn, whose boisterous laugh and funky head nods don’t quite match the white hair on his head, played his guitar, nestled in a thicket of heavy gear, and flanked by a swift-sticked percussionist, a synth player and a towering saxophonist.  For most of the one hour gig, the saxophonist clutched onto the lead with a bogged-down version of Miles Davis. 

Beneath the saxophone’s nasal scale, David Torn forcefully coaxed ”magic”(as the woman in front of me at the bar yelled in her friend’s ear) out of his electric guitar and more so the huge stash of machinery with which he distorted his sounds.  This man-guitar-machine symbiosis originated interesting “textures”, ranging from rich and swamp-like moans and electric screeches to compact rock-hard spurts.

This was all punctuated by a frequent and enthusiastic “Wow!” from the giant beside me.  He was moving his arms and legs in cramped arrythmic motion and looked vaguely like the saxophone player.  I still haven’t figured out who he was wowing.

I was looking for it (to compliment my article on the pipa player, see previous) and I found it in the Chaoyang Book Market: an oriental score for pipa(chinese lute) compositions:

“the sun will shine on you again” sings Liam Gallager on Oasis’s new release, Don’t Believe the Truth.  These words are a fulfilled prophecy for the band.  For the past 8 years—since their fourth album, Be Here Now—negative criticism had clouded over Oasis’ music.  Don’t Believe in the Truth heralds the return of the band’s reign over the British rock scene.

The album will please those fans who had fallen out of the ranks after Be Here Now when Oasis withdrew from the hard rock and roll feel of its first releases Definitely Maybe and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory.  An influx of pop and experimental sound diluted the band’s initial rebellious streak.  Don’t Believe in the Truth picks up Definitely Maybe’s rock, but also takes it a leap forward.

The new album rocks harder than any of the others.  This is due to a raw, rough sound in which the incisive percussion beats as persistently as a heart and the acoustic guitars dryly hammer out the same heart beat.  The vocals (Liam Gallagher and an unprecedented three song contribution of the band’s song writer, Noel Gallagher) are tacked on top of the percussion and sneer with the same rusty voracity.  In the previous albums, all the instruments melted within each other, the limits of their voices became blurred, as that of shapes seen through the gauze of daydream.  The drums were always submerged in a cosmic wall of sound.  Here, the percussion bulldozes right through that wall.

‘Lyla’, one of the highlights of the album, begins with repeated guitar strums.  Liam’s voice then snarls over the drums progressive entrance: “calling all the stars to fall/ and catch the silver sunlight in your hands”.  On the refrain, the percussion whips up an exhilarating whirlwind of sound like that of Steppenwolf’s Born to Be Wild which conjures up the excitement of Harley Davidson treks across miles of desert highway.

The percussion is essential in ‘Lyla’.  ‘In Guess God Thinks I’m Abel’, the cucarachas and tambourines mimic a horse trot and accentuate the lyrics “Let’s get along, there’s nothing here to do/let’s go and find a rainbow/I could be wrong but what am I to do/Guess God thinks I’m Abel”. 

The lyrics/percussion synergy is at its most effective in ‘The Importance of Being Idle’, the album’s best track.  Vocally, the song departs from Liam’s raspy moans.  Instead, Noel’s voice effortlessly slides up and down the pitch ladder acquiring an operatic richness in his aerial high notes.  Acoustic guitar spurts topped by tambourine flicks underlie the irresistible self-derision “I sold my soul for the second time/cos the man don’t pay me…my girlfriend told me to get a life/she said “boy –you lazy””.

But within a few tracks, the percussion sounds like an annoying kid seeing how much noise he can make with the kitchen pots and pans.  The beats in ‘Mucky Fingers’ and ‘The Meaning of Soul’ are intrusive because of their disproportionate clout and excessive speed.  ‘The Meaning of Soul’ is as punk as a Sex Pistols manifesto—it has practically pitch-less staccatoed vocals over, or rather buried under, an even more staccato guitar.  It goes farther in the direction of rock than any other song of Oasis.  But it goes too far.  The lyrics lose their emotive impetus, their meaning is crushed by the percussion’s violence.  ‘Mucky Fingers’ caustic poetry–“You found your god in a paperback, you get your history from the union Jack .”–is erased through the same process.

But outside of these rare moments of tyrannical rhythm, the percussion adds a backbone to the catchy melodies.  Each track of Don’t Believe in the Truth is a sing along tune bundled in acoustic rock and roll.  It is the first time Oasis unabashedly pounds out a single signature sound making this album their most cohesive yet.

Don’t Believe in the Truth has shed the schizophrenia of the first albums where poppy tear jerking ballads such as ‘Wonderland’ and ‘Live Forever’ (a particularly effective one) vied with the psychedelic rock of ‘Roll With It’ and ‘Supernova’.  Later albums tossed other influences and styles into their froth.  Standing on the Shoulder of Giants borrows on Indian music for ‘Who Feels Love’ and inserts trance echoes into ‘Gas Panic’ and ‘Sunday Morning Call’.  Heathen Chemistry draws on Led Zeppelin, Nirvana and folk songs (there’s a jolly flute and tambourine in ‘She is Love’).  The die hard rock and roll is marginalized.

Don’t Believe in the Truth restores rock’s reign.  But whereas the variety of the previous albums leaves only a sense of scattered musical identity, this new found unity is also not without its drawbacks.  Don’t Believe in the Truth may have gone a little too far in one direction.  Its percussion has rolled over all the variety and smoothed out the album’s terrain so much that after hearing it the second time through, and even despite the quality of the individual tracks, it starts seeming as monotonous as a car ride through unchanging scenery.

Moreover, this new rock and roll has booted out most of the poppy ballads.  Even though they are sentimental stains on the band’s rebellious attitude, they are so irresistible.  For those who mourn them, the last track of the album will provide a moment of comfort.  “Let There be Love” is an arresting ode, a long awaited breath at the end of the exhilarating yet tiring journey of the album.  It remains much more acoustic than the previously produced ballads with a gentle guitar strum gradually completed by a harmonious synthesizer and the distant sound of clapping as percussion.

Martha Argerich and Nelson Preire performed 4 encores after their piano duo Wednesday night at Carneggie Hall.  The third was a two piano rendition of the “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy” from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker.  In the original, the bells and the wind instruments cheerfully echo each other.  But not in Argerich’s pianistic interpretation of it.  The chime sounds, which her wrists coaxed out of the higher keys, teased in a perverse manner.  Rendering the wind instrument’s part, she menacingly struck out the lower notes of the piano.

Argerich relishes in tainting initially light, innocent music with a dash of malevolence.  This characteristic quality of her playing appeared not only in the encores.  During the main performance, her interpretation of Rachmaninoff was far from the naive passion of romantic period music.  There again, her high notes teased like a human murmur.  The piece became suggestive, almost like one of Gerschwin’s songs. 

As for Nelson Preire, the second piano player, he gracefully brushed through the faster, more difficult moments of the program.  But his playing lacked Argerich’s expressiveness and he seemed more her accompaniment than her partner.

Don’t be fooled by the cover on Kelly Clarkson’s new album Breakaway.  She sure looks defenseless, like an innocent diva trapped in adversity.  But behind that doll face (and all that hair) is a tyrant who is going to rock the next few months in the wake of her new cd release.

Breakaway is a stunning departure from her previous dull work.  Its rock blasting tracks, incarnations of Clarkson’s liberated style, vie for supremacy. It could be a compilation of Clarkson’s greatest hits if it wasn’t just her second album, and if she wasn’t only 22 years old.

            The album extracts the true Kelly: a hard rocker as opposed to the American Idol diva. Discovered 2 years ago by this superstar-search-show; the Burleson, Texas native admitted not knowing what she was in for when she first auditioned. As soon as she found out though, she saddled the opportunity and steadily rose to the top. Along with her nomination as the first American Idol, came a one million dollar record deal and a tour schedule you could barely fit in an agenda.

She was given little liberty on this first album, entitled Thankful (after the producers rejected her proposal: “Pigeon Hole This”).  Two songs originally created for the show grafted themselves onto the track list.  And even though she proudly claimed to have co-written four of the tracks, most of the songs where written for her.

This didn’t stop “Thankful” from turning double platinum. But Kelly didn’t recycle the recipe for success. “Breakaway” couldn’t be farther removed from its predecessor.  For one, she has taken a relative possession of the album.  She co-wrote 6 songs out of the 12, and the rest of them were written for her by people she was working with (including Ben Moody and David Hodges from Evanescence).

The show was how she began. But this time, she broke away into something more personal as she confirms in her interviews. The appropriately titled record has sliced her artistic captivity.

All the songs on the new album promote freedom (from people, emotions, and addictions among others).  There’s none of the subdued contentment of her first release, which floated in a sea of lyrics so sappy it was hard to distinguish among them. In Thankful’s tracks, her voice riffed out one clumsily paraphrased “I love you” after another: “could this be the greatest love of all” “I never lived before your love”.  She wondered how she “ever made it through the day” before she met her love.

Breakaway’s lyrics thankfully flee from the first release’s triteness. Her verses slice through the superficiality, right to the painful core of all intense emotions.  Love is not a sunny bliss, it is a miserable addiction: “it’s like you’re a drug/it’s like you’re a demon I can’t face down”, she sings of her loved one in Addicted.  When she asks for it, she’s not just asking for “stupid love songs”. She’s asking for blood, death: “are you going to fight for me, die for me/…/cause if you don’t then just leave”, “I want your heart to bleed/and that’s all I’m asking for” she requests in Walk Away and Where Is Your Heart.

Each of the songs reveals a ferociously independent individual. Gone’s catchy synthetics spurt out the scenario of Aretha Franklin’s I Will Survive. Walk Away rejects an unworthy lover. With Breakaway, the helpless diva morphs into a tiger. 

In the background, an army of guitars (her new instrument fetish) add the weight of a musical apocalypse to her words. Farewell oh lithe violins of love.  She’s also dropped Aretha Franklin and her soul music influence.  Instead, she’s welcomed a punk-pop (a mixture of pop and heavy-metal).  “Breakaway” is basically a more recent, better version of Ashlee Simpson’s “Autobiography” or Blink 182’s “Enema of the State”.

The two musicians from the gothic metal band Evanescence, left their indelible mark. Hear me, a loud plea which (Clarkson claims) incarnates the essence of the record, reflects Evanescence’s Bring to Life.  Similar repeating piano chords gently transport the aerial voice through the first verse.  Then, a guitar and percussion explosion, namely the refrain, gloriously bulldozes through all the delicateness.  In 11 out of the 12 tracks, the refrain is loud.  The degree of rockness in the first verses varies though, from a whisper (Hear Me) to a confident and relentless accusation (Gone, Walk Away).   

Sometimes, Kelly delves further than punk-pop.  In Addicted, she practically grows metal spikes and a leather jacket as she blasts down into apocalyptic gothica.  Over a minor sequence of lashing guitars, she shouts/sings “it’s like I can’t breathe/ it’s like I can’t see anything/nothing but you”.  This gothica moment is short lived though.  She has other influences to squeeze in (including Avril Lavigne), and the album mainly remains in the punk-pop domain.

But there is one big difference between her and all the punk-pop artists out there.  (And I apologize for picking a fight.)  Kelly Clarkson actually has a voice.  She doesn’t need to hide incompetence behind exploding instrumentals. Her melodious cries soar high over them (and she masters that higher register like a Whitney Houston or a Maria Carey). Her voice pierces through and stretches out, clear and (even more exceptionally) on-pitch.

During moments of relative silence, her diva solos peak out. In Where Is Your Heart (the closest the new tracks ever come to the last album), her slightly breathless and rusty vocals melt over a handful of piano notes. In the live version of “Beautiful Disaster”, her voice bursts with an unprecedented richness and emotion.

 
Breakaway is Kelly Clarkson’s triumph over her past. It is a courageous refutation of what she was revered as and a bold statement of who she is.  She’ll be rewarded.

Woe to reformed feminists and replete man-eaters; to fiery misandrists washed cold with resolutions of maturity and tolerance!  As testimony to their bleak fate: an offering: Destiny Fulfilled, the fourth album of the Destiny’s child trio.  Stamped as one of the most ravidly pro-women R&B girlbands, their new creation relinquishes their hatred of the male sex and exudes an I’m-above-negative-feelings attitude.   

It was only a few years ago that the band damned male lousiness and celebrated a life without the opposite sex.  2001’s Bills Bills Bills‘s mantric refrain fulminates against the unresponsible guy who shirks his bills by asking his girlfriend to pay them. In Survivor, Beyonce lashes out for female intellectual independence: “you thought that I’d be helpless without you but I’m smarter”she sings.

The message of these hits infuses the other songs on their albums.  Both Writings on the Wall(1999) and Survivor (2001) beat with this same urge to dominate the relationship.  1999’s track Say my Name may seem a girl’s desperate plea for her boyfriend’s attention during the refrains: “When no one is around you, Say Baby I love you”.  But its verses reveal a woman hardened by her partner’s infidelity as she imposes her ultimatum: “what is up with this, tell the truth who you with, how would you like it if, I came over with my clique”

            During 2002-2004, Beyonce, Kelly and Michelle each went their solo way.  Unfortunately, as cautionary-tale sticks which are stronger together than isolated, this separation brought instant subjugation to the previous male arch enemy.  Their solo career music pinned this individual from his impotent position onto a pededestal.

            Beyonce was the most successful of the three.  Suffice it to note that in her top selling album’s title track, Dangerously in Love, she coats the trite guitar strums with: “baby I love you, you are my life, the happiest moments were incomplete if you weren’t by my side”.  Michelle turned out her “Do You Know” album in January 2004, an impressive collection (from the quantitative if not qualitative point of view) of Dangerously-in-Love clones.  Last, and maybe most humiliatingly not least, Kelly Roland is pleased to share with us the only thing she thinks about, the rapper Nelly, her partner in the song Dilemma.  He provides her cutsy “no matter what I do, all I think about is you” with a not-so-cute “she got the hots for me, the finest thing my hood’ll ever see” (hood is derived from hoodlum and refers to the ghetto).

And here the three are, back on the same album.  But the sticks broke and the male idolatry of the solo years leaked onto their vehement feminism. The male partner is now treated with either awe, or benine indifference. The album’s ‘break-up’ song cluster—tracks that explore the my-boyfriend-is-cheating-on-me-theme (though god forbid it should ever be vice versa)—lacks a thrashingly man-hating masterpiece. In what seems a typical break-up track, If, the girls threaten to leave a cheating guy; yet listening to the track astounds.  Could this be the first instance of Zen R&B? Unheard of, Beyonce, Kelly, and Michelle “ain’t stressing about a doggone thing” (they sing).  They have transcended the pettiness of caring about what happens to the other party.

And as form inevitably reflects content (like they’ve taught you in your literature classes), mourn the departure of the fiery survival songs and fear the usurper: a meditative R&B, a hodge-podge of sappy violins and no-doubt expensive sound effects—like Bad Habits’s pervasive chimes, which are themselves a bad habit of the album—drowning the remnants of voices and beats. 

Aside from its first track Lose my Breath, the album is ill-suited for dancing (farewell rehearsed kung fu dances moves).  It’s a girl-sleep-over-party album.  Picture teenagers, hugging pillows, talking about guys (what else?), and sipping Coca- Cola until late at night with the CD on repeat. 

Thus, 10 out of the 12 tracks have drowned in the mild mixture.  Who are the two survivors?  The first one is T-shirt, a desperately sexy monologue of a girl who sleeps in her boyfriend’s shirt when he’s gone.  Spacy vibes ripple in and out as Beyonce half-whispers a faintly husky praise to her absent lover.  The following verse makes us wonder weather she could sing any slower.  Yet who could complain of her deliciously deep vibrato?  Beyonce brims the tempo with an unequal softness and sensuality as she moans “I couldn’t turn me on”.  Meanwhile, the other girls sigh the song into sexual fantasy.  The lyrics could hardly be more explicit.  They lead you straight through to the climax: “Ah, give it to me deeper” then “keep it right there, oh wait, yeah”.  Even though the song is their raunchiest to date, it touches through the sincere loneliness of its dreaming girl. 

I’m Through with Love, conjures the apocalyptical choir in its refrain.  Moreover it is reminiscent of the band’s successful Say my Name with the simple beats, the minor arpeggios and breathless lyric repetitions.  It’s still not quite as intense as Survivor unfortunately.  It more closely resembles an angrier version of Alicia Keys’ Falling.

Can these two songs justify the purchase of the album?  Yes, if you can wade through the remnant mixture and delight over the competent, though short riffs and accapella moments.  If not, pray that Destiny is only temporarily Fulfilled (I can’t even imagine what a Destiny Satiated would be like) and that their feminism—both beloved and dreaded—will soon be out to feast again.