damien_rice werewolf give it a try 031110 ... mojo lied...uncut lied...they all lied... i did. i found damien ricecakes to be a bit like a bland cousin to david gray (who i find pretty uninteresting himself). after reading a fair amount of accolades and comparisons to jeff buckley and thom yorke, i thought i'd give him a try. i'm kind of sorry i did. i've certainly heard far worse, but come the fuck on! jeff buckley?! thom yorke?! that's just insulting. that lisa hannigan or somethingorother singing with him has a nice voice, but that's about all that appeals to me. i guess we've reached a place now where anyone who strays slightly from the typical cookie cutter pop shit and writes lyrics vague enough that they can be interpreted as soul-searching is automatically elevated to "brilliant" status. just wait 'til damien ricedude hooks up with hawksley workman, who currently seems to be enjoying the success brought on by completely dumbing down his once-kind-of-different-from-the-norm music. the music press will have a field day, ejaculating all over themselves and struggling to come up with lesser-used expletives and clever comparisons. "like the idiot offspring of brian wilson and nick drake!" "phil collins meets ornette coleman!" "it's got the envelope-shredding experimentation of radiohead, the melodic complexity of rufus wainwright and the immediacy of aaliyah!" i gotta stop before i fall over. 031110 ... stork daddy well...you've got a ways to go before you reach the annoying puns of a rolling stones critic, but you're close. anyways, i personally found that the album o's songs, have a nice combined effect. the songs work into each other and it's one of the few cds where i don't get anxious to skip to the next song. i don't really need music to be soul searching. honesty is fine. and if you're going to be honest, you're going to be vague. i mean, personally i find the music a little more melodic than a lot of great singer songwriter's music is. it takes more than a poet. if the lyrics are to be inspected for sould searching meaning, however, i find the line "it's not hard to fall when you float like a cannonball" can stand up to "maybe i'm just too young to keep good love from going wrong" anydays. anyways...it really doesn't have to be about better or worse. that's the worst of critical theory coming out. looking for a meta-narrative when really, some nice soft guitar music is just fine when the mood strikes you. 031111 ... stork daddy it really depends on what you want from your music. to which you respond yeah...whether you want it to be good or not. then we bring out names of musicians and dismiss or bolster them so that everyone knows how much we know. then when no one is looking, we listen to the songs we're supposed to hate. 031111 ... stork daddy actually, my honest assesment is this. while lines like "why did you fill my sorrow with words you borrowed" are pretty touching to me, maybe they are no dylan. i do hold however that by breaking out of the strictly genre defined cookie cutter pop a person is establishing themselves as in it for reasons other than success. strict music genres and their defining limitations tend to fall short of expressing the full range of the human heart, which is what music's appeal is in the first place. this is why there's a lot of dissonance when certain types of music are mixed with certain emotional themes. i believe an artist who tries to create fusion, who tries to above all party lines be more than the clown or the prophet or any single role, and instead speaks for the entire human heart is taking a step in the right direction towards brilliance even if they haven't arrived. artists like rufus wainwright, outkast, jeff buckley etc. are those who didn't limit themselves off the bat but looked at what music could do for them, not what they could do for music. peace! 031112 what's it to you? who go blather from