Word: albumã
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...come. “You are all welcome / Let’s all dance because the fire is burning,” the song begins (in English translation) “Hey London!/ Hey New York! / Hey Paris! / Hey Lilongwe!” This song serves as the album??s thesis: the music is not about the past, its influences, or what critics will think; it’s simply about sound and enjoyment. It has no place—though sung in Chichewa and inspired in part by a variety of African sounds, it?...
...Chalo,” or “World,” continues in a similarly epic fashion, leaving no room for interpretation when it comes to questions about the album??s themes: love, truth, music, and other universals. The topics are sweepingly large, but The Very Best has the musical muscle to match. On the track, Mwamwaya spreads his bracing, multi-tracked vocals across the crisp, rollicking synths of Radioclit that would be equally at home in an ’80s pop hit. The song moves between the peaks of Mwamwaya’s choral cries...
...attack. Jokes that fall flat include “Stolen Pills” and, above all, the bonus track, which features an elderly British woman essentially doing a send-up of a Judi Dench accent while introducing the album. Yet these clunkers are more than compensated for by the album??s highlights: “Cold Change” and “Mighty Mighty Fall” are elegant and refreshingly melodic. Stephen Malkmus was generally credited with having the greater melodic gifts, but “Cold Change” is nothing like a Malkmus song...
Unsurprisingly, the album??s haphazardly culled lyrics often resemble an incongruous mishmash of words that aspire to poetry, but largely remain trite and poorly-culled from the original text. Even if one didn’t know the lyrics were patchworked from a novel, it’s easy to tell that the songs are at least somewhat internally disconnected, as each tune fails to tell a complete story and doesn’t quite form a lyrically unified whole...
...number of unskillful, uninspired songs demonstrate, the album??s collaborators largely failed at matching their individual musical strengths with the different moods of the album. Specifically, Gibbard’s sensitive and delicately emotive voice is best suited to melancholy and thoughtful melodies. By contrast, Farrar’s deeper, rougher twang enlivens gritty, hard-up tracks, but his nasally drawl drags down slower paced songs, making them sound whiny, not wistful. On the whole, this album, though fortified by a few well-crafted tracks, fails to adroitly engage its source text and the vocal talents...