Word: dour
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...original lyricist Richey James, and This is My Truth, in equal parts political and passionate, picks up where the previous Everything Must Go left off. As you might expect from an album whose first single is called "If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next," it's a dour piece. The wrenching anguish in James Bradfield's voice combines with Nicky Wire's lyrics ("I've got to stop smiling it gives the wrong impression") to create an air of bleakness not unlike the vast empty expanse on the album cover. This slips into pretentiousness at times, such...
This is an album about loss: the passing of heroes, the withering of beauty, the end of an age--one song is titled Elegy for William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Despite the subject, the mood is never dour. Nearly every track has the liquid warmth of a freshly shed tear. This 28-year-old pianist is a wonder at weaving together musical traditions. On his last album, playing in a trio, he performed a moving jazz rendition of a song by the art-rock group Radiohead; on this CD, playing solo, he smoothly merges jazz improvisation with classical piano...
...tougher job, as this haunting first feature proves. Isa is defiantly sunny, her pal severe, volcanic. Isa tries awful things (like a job handing out flyers on rollerskates) because, hey, they could be "tres cool"; Marie endures awful things (like an affair with a bourgie creep) to confirm her dour view of the world. The stars shared the Best Actress prize at Cannes last year, and both are brilliant. But Bouchez's expressive face lets you speed-read each of a dozen moods in a few seconds. That's innate screen genius...
...pundits, mostly male, offering tired facts and not always enlightening insights about the past 10 decades. It is debatable whether a 12-hour examination of modern world history actually requires an entire 60 min. on Elvis. It is iffier still whether anyone watching the segment will benefit from a dour-looking David Halberstam explaining that "the King" was an iconoclast and a "forerunner to youth culture." And while we're on the tricky subject of inclusions and omissions, how did the producers justify an hour on the Iranian hostage crisis and not, say, on the creation of Israel...
...Zippergate burnout? Then read--in fact, buy--this brisk, witty, cheerfully dour screed by Shearer, the radio host (Le Show), protean voice (The Simpsons) and hidden national treasure of political common sense. Analyzing the hatred some people have for Clinton, Shearer ladles blame and caustic wit on the President, his G.O.P. posse and the moralizing TV newsies with their "hideously bad acting." It's a smart challenge to lazy thinking. Along with another acerb little volume, Gore Vidal's The American Presidency, it can be taken as an ideal chaser to the recent binge of Monicaholism. Hemlock, anyone...