Sunday, 18 October 2015

Alela Diane and Ryan Francesconi - Cold Moon


Rating: 4/5

Review:
A difficult album



I love Alela Diane's work to date, and I think that About Farewell was one of the finest albums of 2013.  I was really looking forward to this, but the truth is that I don't like it much.

My problem may be just personal taste, but the songs here lack the quirky but melodic lines that Alela Diane is so very good at, and lyrically they just don't reel me in as songs like Colorado Blue did (and still do).  I have tried, really I have.  I've listened a lot, I have tried to let it sink in and to find what I may have been missing, but it's just not there for me.  It all reminds me of Joni Mitchell's most difficult, tuneless songs.  I love and deeply respect Joni Mitchell's music but there is some that I just can't relate to at all, and I'm sorry to say that Cold Moon seems like a whole album of that sort of stuff to me.

I find it very hard to give a star-rating to this album.  On pure personal reaction it would be two stars, probably – but a review and a rating should be about more than just "I didn't like it".  It would be like giving two stars to some of Joni Mitchell's work, which is plain wrong: what it comes down to, I think, is that this album isn't to my taste but it's well done for what it is.  I can see that it has genuine musical merit and that others with different taste may like it very much, so I've given it four stars on that basis because I don't want to condemn it.  To be honest, I still don't know whether that's right, but it makes me less uncomfortable than a two-star rating and three stars would just be an insulting, wishy-washy cop-out..  My advice is to try it; Alela Diane is a class act and you may well like this.  It makes me sad to say that I don't.

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