Word: blended
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Franklin's enthralling new album opens with a skit in which the gospel singer-choir leader is put on trial for blending the secular and the sacred. Unlike most skits on music albums, this one hits home: Franklin has proved himself to be a threat to musical orthodoxy. His blend of gospel, funk and hip-hop is ingenious and unique; and in pop music it's certainly harder to advocate positive religious values than it is to be Marilyn Manson. On this album Franklin has refined his sound further; his melodies are stronger, the vocal arrangements more graceful. Hard, beat...
...monologues (people were actually watching silently during "To be or not to be..." instead of mumbling along with the words.) Hamlet is such a complex figure that he can be played with any number of possible personalities, styles and underlying motives--Egan's seemed to be a rather ambivalent blend of melancholy, severity and occasional bouts of hysteria. His Hamlet also seemed to be thoroughly lacking in a sense of humor, which was too bad; it's often just that element of irony, of detached awareness of his own role-playing, which elevates Hamlet above being just another melodramatic hero...
...Good Humor, musical nostalgia is entirely the point, with the excellent and witty assistance of veteran Cardigans producer Tore Johannson integrating diverse genre elements and quotations to create the albums deliriously composite and cohesive sound. Good Humor is almost inconceivable: a broad, ecstatic blend of the pristine disco of ABBA, the elegant jazz pop of Steely Dan, the rhythmic bass throb of funk and the bleary-eyed cocktail electronica of trip-hop. The product is anything but tired; on Sylvie, for example, the rueful, cosmopolitan irony of the lyric is offset completely by a glowing arrangement. The overlay of subtle...
...President cast himself as the protagonist in Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler's 1941 classic about the victim of a totalitarian witch-hunt. Eight months later, in the pages of Kenneth Starr's report to Congress, Clinton finds himself the villain in a much trashier tale, a fetid blend of libido and legalese that reads like Jackie Collins by way of the Congressional Quarterly...
...prospect of finding a fresh pair of singers capable of tackling Wagner's most vocally demanding roles is only part of what's drawing opera lovers to the Pacific Northwest. This Tristan is being staged by Francesca Zambello, whose penchant for scandalizing stodgy opera buffs with a startling blend of flashy theatrics and unabashed feminism has made her the most controversial opera director of her generation. "Tristan's ship," Zambello explains gleefully, "is a huge ocean liner that has Isolde in the middle--as if she's in a womb or a prison--and the lower deck is an engine...