Journal articles

Half bouncy and exciting, half pleasant and inconsequential. Like so much in life.

This album isn’t as good as I was expecting. About half the tracks sound like instrumental fillers from indie pop albums; they’re all worth a listen, but they don’t really hold the attention. Other tracks are better: there are a few energetic, lo-fi hip hop pieces with a bit of rapping. They sound old-skool in a good way to me, though why you’d trust the opinion of somebody who can’t even spell “school” is anybody’s guess.

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The first two songs on this album are so good that I can’t even remember what the rest of it is like.

Rufus Wainwright’s music had never really appealed to me before: what I had heard seemed a bit too earnest and folky. But last year I heard and liked a track from this album on the radio. Intrigued, I read some reviews and finally bought the album.

The first two songs are magnificent. Oh What a World interweaves its lament nicely with Ravel’s Bolero, building to a stirring crescendo. I Don’t Know What It Is is a lot quieter, with a nice quirky melody and toe-tappin’ rhythm. This was the song that had piqued my interest last year.

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It’s the blues, but it’s also folk music, C&W and rap. Buck 65 rhymes like an old-school MC, but has the lyrical sensibility of a beat poet and the voice of a grizzled old trucker. His hard-luck tales of life on the downside are backed by dark, country & western inflected hip-hop beats. Of course, this is an oversimplification: there are a lot of different sounds and styles in here.

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