Trade Me

[talktooloose]

Sweet fucking lordy!

I found Joe Jackson Live in Tokyo on DVD used (for $11.99) at Second Spin and I asked them to hold it so I could find something to trade for it.

I realized I had Ani's Educated Guess on my desk at work and had only listened to it once in a year so I dived in to find out why that was.

The basic sound does not change from song to song... it sounds like she recorded this in her guest bathroom having replaced the potpourri with amonia florets. The songwriting (which is decent for the most part) is buried by the performance. The guitar lines are so angular as to be impossible to follow. She has a good lead vocal (though with too many gimmicks in general) and then layers of ridiciulous pinched high-whine backing vocals that skip all over the place and are crunched by compression into mosquitoe farts.

I bailed after two songs. Trade me, screams the CD!

Besides, I have her live DVD from the same year and the Educated Guess songs are way better there. I don't know what's up with Ms. D (and I haven't heard her most recent) but she sounds lost and alone. And like she doesn't want company.

Comments

[ashe-frost.livejournal.com]

"Lost and Alone and Doesn't Want Company."

That'd make a good name for an album. A long one, but a good one.

[ladykutenay.livejournal.com]

I can't deal with anything she's done since Little Plastic Castle. Moments of Revelling/Reckoning made me smile but otherwise....I dunno.

[talktooloose.livejournal.com]

I vant to be alone.

[talktooloose.livejournal.com]

Following Little Plastic, I loved Up Up Up Up Up Up (perhaps my favourite Ani album after Dilate), as you say some of Revelling/Reckoning, the double live set So Much Singing, So Much Shouting and Evolve. Evolve contains both the joyous collaborations with the band she had formed and the beginnings of the sorrowful, isolated introspection that became morbid with Educated Guess. The centrepiece of Evolve is a huge brooding solo piece called Serpentine. I hear a sad person trying to cope with a world of disappoint and I relate.

But with Educated Guess I think she's gone stir crazy in that little room.