Word: hubbardism
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...lack of structure and amorphous aspirations to write love songs do not sustain this album. Hubbard traces some of her roots back to Tchaikovsky, and she has clearly picked up the less desirable traits of the late 19th century romantics from her years of classical training. Her piano style is heavy-handed, unsubtle and flashy. She alternates booming chords organized in the most predictable of charts, with grandiose runs up and down the keyboard which sound like pallid attempts to imitate Keith Jarret's flourishes. The arrangements do nothing to cover for Hubgaucheries. To evoke Arabia, Hubbard gives us Bedouin...
...album liner notes complete the grim destruction of subtlety. For every cut Hubbard has written a brief description of the precise scene she wants to create with her music. It would have been preferable just to read her notes and take the tedium of the album on faith...
...OPENS HER EFFORT with a tune called "Rose Coloured Lights." Like everything else on the album, it slides neatly in one ear and just as neatly oozes out the other. The proposed image was, as Hubbard notes, of "a yacht in the Mediterranean. Leaning over a rail at night thinking. The whole spectrum of love: the champagne of c'est la vie in a million stories...
...rest of the first side, graced by tunes like "Russian Roulette, 1st and 2nd movement"--the story of a Russian archduke who rides across Siberia, plays Russian roulette, dies and rises again from the dead. The death is heralded by crashing chords from Hubbard's piano, the ascension by a rising run on the bouzouki. As "Russian Roulette" gives way to "Dream #23," Clarke--in his sole appearance on the album--gives a grim picture of war-wracked Stuart England. His bass conveys depression and despair by a simple, minor sequence. Hubbard tries to flesh out the piece by drastically...
...Hubbard does not reach her nadir, however, until the second side of the album. The second cut, "Arabia," is introduced to us with the following notes...