Word: ballading
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...roiled waters. She was skittish, slightly wounded but also discreetly sexy in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. She was tough, omnicompetent and smart-mouthed as an FBI agent in The Interpreter. And she did the best she could to assert the reality principle amid the general incompetence of The Ballad of Jack and Rose. In 2005 Catherine Keener was everywhere, in big pictures and small, in hits and flops, quietly but insistently asserting her claim to being possibly the best character actress working today...
...sounding desperate or polemical, the best of these quiet, well- observed songs do something far tougher--create a mood. Lua, about seduction and loneliness, feels like a shameful walk home on a winter morning, while Landlocked Blues starts as a breakup song and meanders its way into an antiwar ballad. The link, at least by Oberst's reckoning, is futility, and whether you agree with his politics or not, his emotions are believable...
Unlike most country singers, Womack knows that ballad singing isn't an Olympian test of lung capacity. She hush-sings her way through Twenty Years and Two Husbands Ago and a delicate cover of Sonny Throckmorton's Waiting for the Sun to Shine, providing a much needed reminder that country, more than any other musical genre, still has the potential to offer instant intimacy...
...shocking as his Katrina-inspired "George Bush doesn't care about black people" moment during a TV fund raiser for hurricane victims or so original as the self-love/self-hate tightrope walk of his debut The College Dropout. But if you think you're invulnerable to an atmospheric ballad with Maroon 5's chirpy Adam Levine (Heard 'Em Say) or a song called Roses about a sick grandma, you will be shocked at the stealthy power of West's storytelling. As for the music, one listen to Gone, built around an Otis Redding sample and some ecstatic string arrangements...
...sounding desperate or polemical, the best of these quiet, well-observed songs do something far tougher-create a mood. Lua, about seduction and loneliness, feels like a shameful walk home on a winter morning, while Landlocked Blues starts as a breakup song and meanders its way into an antiwar ballad. The link, at least by Oberst's reckoning, is futility, and whether you agree with his politics or not, his emotions are believable. Best Tracks: Lua, Landlocked Blues, Road...