Janelle Monae

ugh wack vid quality on that
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loLPh7y3eOY

"Down Here in Hell With You" is great! But so is this, which it's very much operating in the same territory as: http://www.56.com/u74/v_MTQ5MzkwMzE.html

That wasn't (quite) a value judgement.

vh's voice IMO is best when he sings at his full, or normal volume, but he spends too much of his albums trying to quieten it down and ends up with this sub curtis/pharrell/r kelly whisper thing. i dont know why hes opted for this as his main voice. it just sounds really feeble. like hes aiming too hard for delicate sensitivity. but it ends up sounding 'small' and weedy really and really exposes the limitations of his voice. his range isnt that good that he can sing in that register and pull it off.

or maybe he was just trying on purpose to emulate the weedy male R&B voice. not sure.

i dunno it really doesnt sound all that similar to me! i mean i know theres a prince vibe to dude's voice, but topically van hunt is going for something entirely diff

i mean lyrics are in an entirely different world

titchy, I agree with the general sentiment you expressed. However, you can't expect much from certain people who operate under the notion that current top 40 USA chartpop & shitty indie are, in point of fact, the entirety of the musical universe and are their only frames of reference.

That said, I think a lot of the people criticizing this album raise a lot of valid points. Many of them are not necessarily denying her talents & that she's capable of being fantastic, but merely disagree that this album is the best possible concretion of that potential.

To me, the album just seems weirdly detached compared to her live presence & stuff like 'Many Moons' & 'Sincerely, Jane'; like she isn't quite present in the music and she's waiting for something transcendent to happen with all these collaborators + predictable pomp kind of half-running the show for her. I'll have to listen to it more, but I think it ultimately fails.

xpost

true... but thats one of the things thats bugged me about van hunt lol. it seems like hes trying to be deep and meaningful too much (almost as if he heard dangelos root and thought he must attempt to channel that amount of earnestness and thesaurus-searching into every track he does!) and im not sure it always works. its a bit heavy handed. but i think i just dont have the patience for him. id rather hear eric benet (well, *old* EB).

"To me, the album just seems weirdly detached compared to her live presence & stuff like 'Many Moons' & 'Sincerely, Jane'; like she isn't quite present in the music and she's waiting for something transcendent to happen with all these collaborators + predictable pomp kind of half-running the show for her. I'll have to listen to it more, but I think it ultimately fails."

yes. though i dont think it ultimately fails, i think theres just something that doesnt quite engage about it. partly cos she HERSELF doesnt appear to quite engage with it. though i think that might partly be her vocal character (poise etc), or perhaps its just she hasnt quite found her own vocal voice as such yet.

I don't get the "too many collaborators" criticsm. Big Boi is totally expected and doesn't get in the way at all. Saul Williams barely raises notice for himself. Which leaves Of Montreal as the only other real collaboration? While I agree that there are one two many OM tracks here, that hardly counts as "all these collaborators".

Also, get real, this is way better than Metropolis, which isn't that good.

She also seems way more at one with the material here, too. The main criticisms here (other than "lol Of Montreal" obv) are basically completely opposed to my experience of the album.

It's not really about the collaborators, I agree. It's about how far down she disappears into the mix here. It's all huge, loud, & elaborate.

I agree that Metropolis wasn't that good, but it had a lot of potential, which imo wasn't realized on this album.

But hey, I'm glad you love it.

actually i dont think its that she doesnt engage, its more that its your standard first album performance, where the singer doesnt fully impose their vocal personality on the material (even if she does impose her personality in plenty of other ways). its sort of like hearing prince on for you compared to hearing prince later, on say, something like beautiful ones, where hes doing all sorts of weird shit vocally that could only come from him. but that might come later. or she might just be a song-first kind of artist, who tries not to do that stuff as shes more of a straighter singer and doesnt want to do R&B runs or act like shes beyonce who can fuck up a melody in 0 to 6 seconds.

Also why is Locked Inside so out of tune?

The main criticism is that the songs just aren't that good.

I didn't enjoy this album that much, but I really really wanted to.

Well, and the arrangements are frantic; I rarely feel as if she as a vocalist owns the material. Listening to the album by the pool today in one concentrated burst, I thought of Prince's Around the World in a Day: lots of good ideas -- an attractive miscellany -- but the songs were mostly no good and he felt like a visitor on his own album. It took Parade for me to go, "Oh okay, I see what he's attempting."

So, no, I don't hate this album; it's an interesting misfire with several good performances.

I agree 100% with that comment.

i agree with the sentiment, but not the example. just cos around the world in a day has raspberry beret, pop life and paisley park on it.

and even condition of the heart and the ladder are good if you strip them away from their bloated arrangements.

xpost I love a lot of the songs on ATWIAD but agree about the suspected 'owning' of it. A recent poll thread shed some interesting light on it.

xpost gah titchy beat me to this on the 'other messages have been posted...'

Just a comment, expected this to be like Outkast's Stankonia crossed with Amerie's 1 Thing...maybe I should lower my expectations with these things a little..

ha I knew as soon as I wrote my post that there's lots of ATWIAD fans.

the 'owning' thing might come with time.

I'm totally looking forward to her next album already.

Ditto.

xpost as in more people getting past its reputation and listening to it properly? or in that it's a grower and it takes time for one to mentally stamp prince as owning the material in this state.

Fwiw, I didn't come into this with huge expectations. The songs aren't fantastic, but they're fine. The arrangements are fantastic though.

I've lived with ATWIAD for twenty years. It hasn't grown -- I have, about three inches.

The arrangements are my favorite thing about this album really, I am just totally in love with how rich and deep they are.

Well, also Monae as a vocalist is a total joy, too.

I know I mentioned Kid Creole earlier, but a lot of the arrangements make me think of how detailed and lovely Dr. Buzzard's Savannah Band's were (which, really Kid Creole was a step down from, or maybe the cd issues are just shitty)

What the hell? Metropolis is basically three great songs.

so xposted

I'm very satisfied with the way she flexibly adapts to the demands of different styles and moods here. If the vocals are so buried, why has this album imprinted on my mind mostly in the form of the vocal lines?

multiple x-post:

The arrangements are great. The orchestral passages work incredibly well. I don't know, I think the songs are pretty good too. What's weird is that sometimes it's not the song as a whole, but more the melodies running through the songs. This is very strong melodically.

xpost I know i've been derailing the thread here, but the two Darnell songs I really like are Grace of God and the cover of I'm an Indian Too. Does this record bring those to mind in particular?

Ha, Rev. I'm a Kid Creole >>> Dr. Buzzard guy.

I saw you mention them upthread, by the way. Can you expand on the comparison?

Davek: not really. maybe the later? there's nothing really that disco here, it's more the other influences of DB/KC that come to bear

Alfred, you break my heart with that KC>DB talk but let me get back to you.

I mean, I like Kid Creole but I love Dr. Buzzard's like few other things.

I guess it's only really "Faster" which in particular sounds like a Kid Creole & the Coconuts song, but more of the album reminds me of KC in small bits (like the background vocals of "Dance or Die") and in how it so omnivorous, but without seperating the components and risking pastiche.

As far as Dr. Buzzard's, it's mostly in how the arrangements are so detailed yet warm and lived-in. It never gets pompous in a way that arrangements so labored over would often risk. Maybe some kinship to Cory Daye as a vocalist, too? Monae is at least as good of a singer, too, which is high praise.

On a sidenote: am I the only one who thinks "Oh, Maker" is going to "Octopus' Garden" for about the first 3 seconds?

I'm going to need to listen to that track again right now.

x-post:

Still thinking about her allegedly not owning the songs. . . Does she fail to own "Oh Maker!"? Is she missing in action as a vocalist, or at least lost in the mix, on that track? I don't hear it. I'm not denying there are some tracks here where her vocals are heavily treated but I don't have a problem with that anyway. And I'll take a chameleonic vocal of Monae's stature over a bad or so-so vocalist with some clearly defined identity (is that the issue?).

Last minute and a half of Tightrope is straight-up amazing, like Curtis Mayfield amazing.

Just saw her performance on late night show and she was really really good.

Funnily enough I finally heard Dr. Buzzard's Meets King Penett and Goes to Washington for the first time today. Brilliant albums both.

Are there any samples on the record at all? The Wiki credits list an insane number of musicians...

Pretty sure there aren't. You'll notice some of the muscians credited have names like Eanom Ellenaj, though. ;-)

Noone else getting a David

ehem.... I was about to say:

Noone else getting a David Axelrod influence on some of the orchestration? A song like 'Wondaland' for example sort of sounds, at least to my ears, like David Axelrod providing orchestration and choral work for some eurodisco diva like Sophie Ellis Bextor or something.