2 posts tagged “music”
Music-wise, what was the first 45, single or download you bought?
Submitted by Paddy Melt Wagon.
The Thriller album, of course.
Getting the "new" Sa-Ra full-length was probably the event of my week. Heard the whole thing on audioditions.com yesterday morning, and sure enough, the good folks of UPS showed up that afternoon with the copy I ordered from Amazon.
(Became impatient with the local record shop, which was slipping and sliding on whether they had it or not.)
I'd been listening to tracks from this group for the last two or three years. Of course, if you have a good number of songs floating out there for a while, the chances for heartbreak tend to increase. Too much expectation, especially if Talib Kweli, Bilal, Erykah Badu, Pharoahe Monche and the late J. Dilla are all showing up.
Overall, I would tend to agree with the assessment by Stone of Couch Sessions, which I would sum up by saying that the futuristic soul funk collective from both coasts may have tried to put on too many hats to please everyone, perhaps leaving everyone a bit dissatisfied. (At least those who have been following them for a minute.)
Another achilles heel might have been the group's possible inability to wrangle some quality tracks (heard here on http://www.myspace.com/saramusic) from other labels on which they've done singles. I liked the group's cover of its own song, "Hollywood", but I like the first one better. Unfortunately, that’s the way it goes.
However, as much of a sour-puss I seem, I wouldn’t equate "letdown" with "suckage" -- more quality than pap on the CD, definitely. It's just good to see them put the album out there and continue the momentum of the boundary-breaking soul music embodied by mainstream acts and producers like Gnarls Barkley, Outkast, Pharrell, and Timbaland, as well as some less-known entities like Madlib, PPP, Spacek, J-Davey, Nicolay, Viktor Duplaix and many others that probably deserve mention and are escaping my mind.