Day 32: Everything But The Girl – The Language of Life

Hoo boy, did I ever not like this at all. I had the day off and woke up super early and couldn’t fall back to sleep, so I’ve pretty much been listening to this nonstop since 7 a.m. and after an entertaining first listen it was rapidly downhill.

The Language of Life is a perfect example of what people are probably usually cringing at when they accidentally hear the words “soft jazz.” By this point, they had already put out four well-reviewed albums. They went from the intimate, stripped-down Idlewild to deciding to hire every 80s session jazzist their studio budget could grasp, and the result is positively dreadful. The album abounds with anachronistic musical ornamentation, every little slack breath in its tunes filled with shakers, windchimes, bongos, and everything else that has become synonymous with “smooth jazz.” The instrumentation ends up distracting heavily from Tracey Thorn’s warm voice, which thanks to the production fads of the era ends up buried beneath its own reverb and multitracks rather than whispering on the mic like it ought to.

The whole album is reminiscient of Sade, except a lot whiter. It’s not an unredeemable listen, honestly, but its good moments are exceptionally rare. The tinkling piano solo in the eponymous track is jazz-drunk lovely, antagonistically polyrhythmic, and manages to upstage the whole album on its own by pointing out that their particular blend of “soft jazz” has a surfeit of the soft but is bereft of actual jazz. Thorne’s lyrics and vocals are really quite nice, which is a big part of why this album is frustrating. If it were stripped to its core elements — the voice, maybe a piano — it would obviously be fucking lovely, and this turns out to be a clear-cut case of either “less is more” or “if you’re not gonna do less, don’t do so fucking much more”.

I don’t know why I found this so hard to listen to all day. I think I just wasn’t in the mood for it. The thing is unlike most of the albums I found really hard to listen to, there was nothing intrusive about this album. Perhaps that was the problem. I had a long day of idle time, and would have enjoyed having something to sink my teeth into. Instead, Everything But The Girl firmly rooted themselves in the back of my perception, trying to keep low-key. Hours could go by without me noticing the album had started over. It is passive to the point of being frustrating, buffeting every dramatic movement in their songcraft with huge snowbursts of frigid synth. I guess that’s what bothers me about soft jazz. I love jazz’s antagonism, its willful disregard of tonality, its hostile use of rhythm, and moreover, how much beauty people have managed to find in the conflagration of those factors. Music like this is, to me, the sound of jazzists dying on record, as they scrape together a rent check playing rote pop-music parts and making an effort to draw as little attention as possible. Even most of the solos (the saxophone in “Letting Love Go“) sound unspontaneous and disinterested.

Pure subjectivity, but I’m gonna be glad to fall asleep and be done with this one.

Day 15: Tony Bennett & k.d. lang – A Wonderful World

I was really determined, coming into this project, to find something to like in every album I got. I didn’t want it to become some kind of Man vs. Music where I try to keep from throwing up as I cram an album into my brain. I have every respect for music, no matter how terrible I might think it is. The fact that people can occupy themselves banding together to create sounds that bring (certain) people joy is just unreal. Absolutely unreal.

But then I get hit with an album like this and just have to try really hard to meter my words.

The album is a collection of Louis Armstrong-inspired tunes, performed by Bennett and lang, doing both duets and solo numbers, produced by T Bone Burnett and backed by some unflappable jazz session musicians that I’ve never heard, none of whom (with one exception) have Wikipedia pages.

Perception and how it varies has always fascinated me. Bennett and lang are both seasoned musicians who have been doing what they love for most of their lives now. Bennett, at least, has been in the business, singing jazz, since most of these tunes were written (I’m gonna be hella reckless and not even fact-check this statement, because I roll dangerous like that). It should be obvious that the two would have approached this project with a complex mixture of delight, nostalgia, and reverence for some legendary standards. The result is a Grammy-winning collection of classics done by a couple of masters just having a good time, clowning around with a producer who sweats gold records, a generous budget, and their pick of backing musicians.

To my ears, the result is something appalling. Bennett lazily croons over some paper-thin soft-jazz arrangements (complete with requisite sound-of-the-whales saxophone solos here and there) that are overproduced to the point of being bereft of humanity, as if someone wrote a computer program to create the most inoffensive music possible. It comes out sounding cavernous, and thanks to some production mastery, as slick as a wet porpoise. The whole thing is full of conflicting ideas. Bennett peppers the tunes with an aw-shucks shtick as he chats casually to k.d. lang (through a $9,000 microphone, no doubt, and coming across as pure smarm) and tremolos his voice just ever so, like a true master in command of the craft of phoning it in.

My mom used to work in a call center when I was a kid, and once got a negative performance review wherein her supervisor said she “sounded like she wasn’t smiling.” My mom was flabbergasted, thinking it an absolute bullshit claim, but no, I think it’s totally valid. You can completely hear how someone is approaching you from the tone of their voice, and on this album Bennett sounds like he is smirking the whole way through. And that is because thanks to k.d., he is getting away with repackaging some standards without bringing anything interesting or innovative to them whatsoever.

I’ve never listened to her before,  and if I have it’s news to me, but this album has sold me on her talent. Her solo tracks on this album are the sole redeeming factor in this day’s listening. On tracks A Kiss to Build a Dream On and That Lucky Old Sun, her voice is powerful and rich, full of soul. On those tracks the band behind her sounds completely different, and maybe she just got the good pick of the tracks, but if Bennett hadn’t been on this album at all I’m pretty sure it would have been much better for it. On the tracks they do as duets, she sounds out of place; her highly emotional voice completely overrides Bennett’s rasp, and often it just sounds like someone left the studio door open and recorded someone chatting in the hallway about which of the interns he wants to fuck.

If I sound bitter, it’s because of the title track. One of my favorite songs, one so dear to my family that my mom has urged me to have it played at her funeral, and it gets thrown into the T Bone Burnett meatgrinder and comes out as a gush of treacly sick. Pure calculation, music as a Starbucks-kiosk-bound product. I hate that this exists and I can’t understand why so many people liked it.