This was pretty neat....

[ThePenguin]

http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/003475.html


A lot of these comments made me go 'hhmm.' Thought it was sort of interesting.

-Lis

[wondergirl9847]

Very interesting read, not your typical review. Thanks Lis!

[sparky]

This is excellent writing. A few strange mistakes with song titles and lyrics, but these guys know what they are talking about and how to express it.

[Johnny Stew]

I highly enjoyed 'I'd Rather Fleetwood Mac,' but make sure you also check out their review of 'Say You Will.'

[dissention]

Originally Posted by Johnny Stew

I highly enjoyed 'I'd Rather Fleetwood Mac,' but make sure you also check out their review of 'Say You Will.'

I enjoyed "I'd Rather" quite a lot, but that review for Say You Will made me cringe in agony. It's heinous.

Though I think he hit the nail on the head with Murrow and, especially, Smile At You.

[BTFLCHLD]

Originally Posted by wondergirl9847

Very interesting read, not your typical review. Thanks Lis!

LOVE your new sig

[wondergirl9847]

I was bored the other day and wanted to make one that said that. Plus, those are two of the best pictures I've taken....and I SUCK at taking pics.

[Johnny Stew]

Originally Posted by dissention

that review for Say You Will made me cringe in agony. It's heinous.

Why's that? I thought it was one of the better reviews I've read for 'SYW.'

[dissention]

Originally Posted by Johnny Stew

Why's that? I thought it was one of the better reviews I've read for 'SYW.'

It was as engaging as watching my uncle pick at his teeth with a metal fork during holiday dinners. It was a jumbled mess of pseudo-music aficianado thoughts, tossed onto his keyboard with reckless abandon. From reading that review, it doesn't seem like he could turn a phrase to save his, or his own mother's, life. I especially loathed how he tossed in Nina Simone when discussing What's the World Coming To, failed to make a substantial point, and then attempted to tie her back into the review at the end, failing miserably, and then ending it on a cliched "best pop songwriters today" note. It read like something an "intellectual" would have written into Teen Beat magazine. Gushing at it's worst.

[Johnny Stew]

Originally Posted by dissention

It was as engaging as watching my uncle pick at his teeth with a metal fork during holiday dinners. It was a jumbled mess of pseudo-music aficianado thoughts, tossed onto his keyboard with reckless abandon. From reading that review, it doesn't seem like he could turn a phrase to save his, or his own mother's, life. I especially loathed how he tossed in Nina Simone when discussing What's the World Coming To, failed to make a substantial point, and then attempted to tie her back into the review at the end, failing miserably, and then ending it on a cliched "best pop songwriters today" note. It read like something an "intellectual" would have written into Teen Beat magazine. Gushing at it's worst.

One of these days you're going to start opening up to us and letting us know how you REALLY feel!

I definitely see where you're coming from... but as a pseudo music aficionado myself, I dug it!

[amber]

This was wonderful, I'm so glad you posted it. Could I love this part more?

"But it’s Nicks who is the most sublimely, uncannily fascinating.
Stevie’s preoccupations are easily caricatured. Yet for all her rep as an ethereal, dippy hippie, Nicks’ femysticism is surprisingly material: her becomings-woman - always associated with physical instantiations (storms, oceans, birds) - invariably pass by way of becomings-animal to becoming-the-cosmos. The entity she invokes is less the Mother Earth of traditional feminine symbolism (whether on loan from the male imaginary or reappropriated by feminists) than what Can called Mother Sky, the great cosmic seducer who lures you into flight rather than roots you to the ground.

‘Rhiannon’ is her first anthem to this elusive, forever fugitive agent of female flux. The song - a paean to she who cannot be pinned down or defined, the temptress who ‘rules her life like a bird in flight’ - could be the female reply to The Stones’ ‘Ruby Tuesday’. Nicks renders it as a gentle taunt to Rhiannon’s male pursuers, those who would own or possess her: ‘Will you ever win?’ ‘Landslide’, elemental and occasionally elliptical, is an achingly pretty rumination on passing time."
and this part?

"‘Go Your Own Way’ is the sound of Buckingham warring within himself, alternately placating then damning his lover’s phantasmatic image, the verses supplicative (‘If I could/ I would give you my world’), the chorus subsiding into desperate anger, the song lurching between ‘I’ll love you forever’ and ‘**** you, it’s over’ before finally incandescing in an (instrumental) ecstasy of rage. I (don’t) want you back.

Stevie’s ‘Dreams’ responds not with anger, not even reproach, but anticipates the lover becoming snared in his own rueful memories which are destined to give the lie to any cheap conquests he might temporarily enjoy (‘Women they will come and they will go/ But when the rain washes you clean, you’ll know.’)

The track I’m continually drawn back, though, to is the closer, Nicks’ Gold Dust Woman’. It’s an ending to an album as suspended, as poised, as the dying shimmer of Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure. An eerily, ironically prophetic future autobiography of Nicks’ addictions (first, to cocaine and later to prescription tranquillizers: ‘rock on gold dust woman/ take your silver spoon/ and dig your grave’), the track wouldn’t be out of place on Tago Mago. The Gold Dust Woman, a ‘dragon’, a ‘spider’, is the female anti-type to Rhiannon: imprisoned and imprisoning, quite literally a femme fatale, a life-denier rather than a fleeing free spirit."

Oh, and this, of course:

"Once again, though, it is the contrast between Nicks and Buckingham that provides the album’s most compelling source of drama. Here, more even than on Rumours, the differences between male and female libidinal economies are exquisitely explored. Buckingham’s compositions – some of them less than two minutes in length - ejaculate to a hurried conclusion, while the typical Nicks’ song lingers for a good five, six minutes. Lindsey founds a bizarre microgenre with almost all of his songs, from the deranged dadaist hillbilly boogie thrash of ‘The Ledge’, ‘Not That Funny’ and 'That's Enough for Me' through to the gorgeous, nerve-taut Pet Sounds harmony-machines such as ‘That’s All For Everyone’ and ‘Walk a Thin Line’ and the howl-at-the-moon Partched blooz of the mournful ‘Save Me a Place’.

Where Buckingham burns, Stevie smoulders, surges and swell, shimmers and simmers.

Tusk showcases three of Stevie’s – and therefore anyone’s - best songs. [ ] Simon said everything that needed to be said about the enigmatic ‘Sara’: ‘Siphoning sheer nectar from her throat, Stevie is cradled in Buckingham's shimmerscape production--cascades of scintillating acoustic guitars, susurrating plumes of angel-breath harmonies, drums that seem to billow in out and of the mix.’ I certainly can’t do better than that!

You won't ever hear a more powerful song about the fading afterburn of a failed relationship than 'Storms'."
okay, so I reposted most of the article. so what. I love what he said about Christine's TUSK songs, too.

Oh, and this is perfect:

"Storms’ is about the moment when denial is no longer possible, when the endorphin rush gives way to a numbness, when your body’s no longer able to cry, when you have to take the first step towards on that always ghastly journey, ‘moving on’. ‘Every night that goes between/ I feel a little less…’

‘Beautiful Child’ is the third in this incredible triptych. As so often with Stevie, it's elliptical, elusive, but evocative. Its images and affects seem to lock in directly to the unconscious. The song appears to be about a slow-smouldering love affair ('you fell in love when I was only ten') - well, less an affair than a kind of fated betrothal, a Heathcliff and Cathy lifemeld, now ended - seemingly forever (because of death?) Musically, it's like a clockwork-machine gone awry (Simon: 'The effect is like the heart is literally broken, a clockwork device gone out of synch'), a staggeringly beautiful paean to regret and loss, Stevie's multi-tracked vocal haunting itself... "

and on the final note:

"She has always been a storm, indeed, and like the X-Woman, she is superbly impressive at marshalling and controlling her elemental power."
Sorry, loved this article, just couldn't help meself...

[shackin'up]

Originally Posted by Johnny Stew

I definitely see where you're coming from... but as a pseudo music aficionado myself, I dug it!

I dug it too, but that nina simone comparison IS ridiculous. The other comparisons were quite neet, I think.

But, in hindsight, I have to say that SYW loses it from Tusk in all aspects.

[dissention]

Originally Posted by Johnny Stew

One of these days you're going to start opening up to us and letting us know how you REALLY feel!

I definitely see where you're coming from... but as a pseudo music aficionado myself, I dug it!

It was just an incredibly bad piece of writing; simply heinous. A jumbled mess of thoughts with no real point other than to ramble and make comparisons to other artists on a superficial level, such as comparing Stevie's voice to Patti Smith. It was just dull and rather uninspired. No critic has objectivity, but good lord.

[blinker12]

Count me among those who liked this stuff... a lot. I thought both guys (the SYW reviewer and the other) had very provocative and insightful things to say about the Mac. It got me really excited about their music.

[amber]

Hmm, the "Say You Will" review wasn't that great....I do like this part, though...
"We recall as he sings “Everyone’s gone to the moon” how the late Nina Simone scared the **** out of the listener with her demented but highly meaningful cackle through that Jonathan King song in 1970. She cut through the Dylanisms and found the diseased patient underneath."
mainly because of the phrase "found the diseased patient underneath".