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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