Word: balladic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ever heard from R.E.M. The first is "Everybody Hurts," a moving waltz that exceeds even Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water" and James Taylor's rendition of "You've Got a Friend" on the sentimental scale. Stipe's voice is surprisingly sweet and steady in this inspiring ballad: "When you feel like letting go/When you think you've had too much/Of this life/Hang on." A little sappy? Yes. But with Stipe's masterful voice, swirling strings and rich guitars, it's a powerful song nevertheless...
Singer-bassist Kim Gordon is at her irreverent best in the pulsating "Shoot" and "Swimsuit Issue." In the later, a loud ballad condemning sexual harrassment, Gordon squeals "I ain't giving you head/In a sunset bungalow" before belting out a dozen women's names and eerily murmuring "I'm swimming...
Though enchanting, Am I Not Your Girl is not completely a bowl of cherries. The instrumental arrangement of "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" is incongruous, But then so is the album. The requisite torch song, "Gloomy Sunday," is about suicide, and "How Insensitive" is a glacial ballad about those last beautiful moments of a relationship when you tear his heart into little pieces...
...slim vocal talents. Naturally, expectations were out of sight for Brown's latest solo outing, Bobby, which assembles the same producers as Cruel. The album, however, doesn't pack the wallop to distinguish it from other slick R. & B. records on the charts these days. Something in Common, a ballad Brown shares with his wife Whitney Houston is typical of the problem: short on juice but heavy on sap. New jack may not be exhausted, but right now Bobby is fresh out of new ideas...
...sure, he looked cool in those shades. As a musician, however, he was in way over his head. Of the two numbers he played, Clinton seemed more at home on Heartbreak Hotel; his growly sound suited the rhythm-and-blues genre, though his attacks were sloppy. Billie Holiday's ballad God Bless the Child was a mess. Clinton's phrasing was unsure, his tone thin, his melodic lines disintegrated into meaningless trills. But the audience loved it -- and maybe they were right. In a campaign dominated by sound bites, it is refreshing to hear a candidate come out with something...