Word: growls
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Noir! The very word sounds like a French lion's growl. In its undiluted form, film noir (named after Serie Noir, a French publisher's line of crime novels) is tart and murky, like cheap Parisian coffee, and as mean as any Marseilles street a gangster could skulk down. These dank moral tales are about the evil that taints everyone--especially the hero, who must end up dead or disgraced. This disqualifies Hollywood neo-noir like L.A. Confidential, where at the fade-out two guys and a gal grin as if they'd just seen Singin' in the Rain...
...outlandish videos. On his solo debut, however, the originality and energy of the image never seemed to match that of his music (except with the hit "Woo-Ha"). Although a creative lyricist, Busta delivered his fractured stream of consciousness flow in both a smooth sing-song and sonic growl with an energy that very few rappers can match. But none of this could disguise the fact that the music was weak and uninspired. On his second solo effort, When Disaster Strikes, Busta still hasn't completely solved the problem of finding beats to match his visual and lyrical audacity. There...
Each face carries a grudge. The men mutter and growl and get fall-down drunk. The women wheedle and whine. Or they knit furiously, like Lindsay Duncan in Grown-Ups, as if rehearsing to put her unloving husband's eyes out. Or they throw insults like darts. "Drop dead!" shouts the pretentious Beverly (Steadman) at her husband in Abigail's Party (1977); two minutes later, he does. The hate-filled wife in Home Sweet Home is an adulterer, but infidelity with her husband's best friend gives the woman no more pleasure than anything else in her sorry life. There...
...Looking for Mr. Goodbar: "She [says] she is insecure about her looks...[But] a listener can endure only a certain amount of this nonsense without contracting an enormous crush on Keaton. She marches sturdily into her sentences, pinafore starched and party shoes shining, then imagines that she hears a growl, stops uncertainly, scolds herself for being silly, collects herself and moves forward, uttering exhortations, and finally collapses, out of breath, on the far side of a not especially fearsome thought. She does not seem dithery or dimwitted, merely enormously vulnerable and utterly uncalculating." --Sept...
...that locates them firmly in Clineland. Barnett climbs inside them all, the jingles and the ballads, with equal agility. But the standouts are the torch songs. The opening cut, Planet of Love, has a blue-eyed bluesy aggressiveness that Barnett builds nicely from a throaty murmur into a dominatrix growl; it's an invitation to a dangerous liaison, delivered deadpan. A Simple I Love You has the same let's-fall-in-love message, this time sung not as a come-on but as a last chance for human contact. Barnett brings to this lovely plaint a maturity as amazing...