The Beatles - Love - This is kind of an officially-sanctioned remix/mashup thing, in case you somehow were not aware of that. I remember watching a TV special a couple months ago about the making of Love, which had at least as much to do with Cirque du Soleil as it did with George and Giles Martin (what kind of a first name is Giles, anyway?). It was kind of annoying to watch George Martin and Paul McCartney pat each other on the back, congratulating themselves for having the brilliant range of vision to put the rhythm track from "Tomorrow Never Knows" underneath the vocal from "Within You Without You." ("Hey, you know those two really trippy songs we did? Let's make them into one really trippy song!") And you can just imagine Paul McCartney's joy at the thought of removing George Harrison's guitar solo from "Drive My Car" and replacing it with Paul's own solo from "Taxman." ("If I can overdub the background vocal, we can take George out completely!")
So Love is basically an exercise in pointlessness. There are probably five minutes of things worth hearing over the 26 tracks. My favorite moment by far was mixing the end of "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" with the end of "I Want You (She's So Heavy)." Adding some of Paul's vocal histrionics from "Helter Skelter" was the icing on the cake. Aside from that, there's nothing much worth mentioning. The songs are still the Beatles', and thus they are still brilliant, but that's not really the purported point of this release. There's the exact same a cappella version of "Because" that's on the 3rd Anthology release, a version of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" that's also on the 3rd Anthology, except with a pointless string arrangement. Other "brilliant" ideas: using the live Ed Sullivan intro to go into the studio version of "I Want to Hold Your Hand," reducing "Glass Onion" to 1:20 (actually, that does kind of help that song), flipping the tape of "Sun King" backwards and calling it "Gnik Nus," and awkwardly cramming the vocal from "Octopus' Garden" on top of the string arrangement from "Good Night." "I Am the Walrus" appears virtually untouched; I guess there's no point in trying to make that song any weirder.
Anyway, to finish my thought about the TV special: McCartney, Martin, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono, and a woman that I'm assuming was George Harrison's wife or girlfriend or something all showed up in Las Vegas for the premiere of the Cirque du Soleil show based on all this music. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it looked to me like Paul and Yoko still hate each other. That's what I call carrying a grudge.
Oasis - Stop the Clocks - This is a "best of Oasis" release. I'm not reviewing this. I'm not even going to listen to it. I just wanted to take the opportunity to talk about how annoying I find Oasis. These guys could have been legends if one of the Gallaghers had OD'd or something in about 1997. People might have even hailed Be Here Now as an ambitious masterpiece if that had happened. But instead we're stuck with the same old crap a decade on, where the brothers Gallagher start saying whatever comes out of their head to any tabloid reporter with a notepad any time there's a new Oasis release, and we all get stuck reading headlines like "Noel Gallagher: Radiohead are 'rubbish.'"
Also, Stop the Clocks is on two CDs. Guys, come on. If the Rolling Stones want two discs for their greatest hits, they can have it. Same with, say, David Bowie. Hell, the Beatles basically took four discs for their best of. You guys? I don't think so. You don't need two discs to contain your five good songs from your two listenable albums.
Squarepusher - Hello Everything - Oasis could use lessons in late-career management from electronic maestro Tom Jenkinson. Hello Everything is basically one of those albums that spans everything he's done over the past decade (not unlike Yo La Tengo's new album), and it works pretty well, even if it's not particularly cohesive in a way that earlier albums like Hard Normal Daddy and Music is Rotted One Note were. He still plays bass at about a million miles per hour, he still likes a lot of noise, and you'd still give yourself a heart attack if you actually tried to dance to this "dance" music. If you've never heard Squarepusher, I'll put it this way: Aphex Twin made ambient music before he heard Squarepusher. (Like anybody reading this has heard Aphex Twin but not Squarepusher. Whatever.)
No comments:
Post a Comment