Various Artists - The Unaccompanied Voice
(Secretly Canadian)
Okay, maybe I should have passed on the CD. It's not like that they're
hiding what it is. I should have known better and not paid the money. But
there are so many good artists, I figured I'd find at least a few
interesting songs. I guess that much is true, but for the most part
this compilation is just boring, thrown together toss-offs. Fairly
soon into the CD, I found myself tired of sitting through these
"songs" and just fast forwarding to the artists I bought this for,
only listening to the first few seconds of each track.
A lot of the songs just have one vocalist. Some are painful like the
the track by Appendix Out which is poorly recorded and barely listenable.
Some turn out okay like the two tracks that follow, the somewhat charming
cover of "La Vie En Rose" by Mia Doi Todd and the song by Mark Kozelek of
Red House Pointers.
Several songs use backing vocals in places where instruments usually
are. Drunk uses one voice for a plain drum-machine like beat. Pedro
the Lion uses a omming tone from a backup vocalist for an organ-like
note (actually one of the only decent tracks on this compilation).
What is sad is that few of these songs really play with the voice that
much. There are no choruses of voices. There is no studio trickery
to make collages of voices. There is not much interesting going on
here. About all we get is Mimi Parker overdubbing backing vocals
over her own main vocals, which is actually one of the better tracks
on the CD but still isn't that much fun.
The vocalists with good voices (which is somewhat different than "good
vocalists" as I originally worded the sentence) at least make songs
that cause the fast forward finger to hold back, but even those are
few and far between. The lyrics of the songs are no more interesting.
There is not much poetry here--way too many repeating choruses like
"Ain't No Grave Can Hold My Body Down" (Richard Buckner & P.W. Long).
This CD isn't really worth hearing. It doesn't even really stay 100%
true to its principle as there are a couple tracks with faint instruments
in the background (yes, I'm sure they're not just odd or processed voices)
and, gasp, hand claps. (And where is the Will Oldham track? You'd think
he'd be the first to sign up.) If a friend of yours was dumb enough to buy it,
you may want to skip through and give a listen to the Low, Pedro the Lion,
and David Grubbs tracks, but even that isn't necessarily a recommended
undertaking.
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