Word: lyre
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Ives considered himself a transcendentalist and intended the contrast of the soothing ephemeral strings with the sharp discordant winds to create what Thoreau called “a vibration of the universal lyre.” It was an interesting idea, but at least in this performance, it did not seem that Ives vision was realized...
Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus
Nick Cave’s newest work with the Bad Seeds, Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, is a daunting affair conceptually and lyrically. The two-disc affair isn’t simply a double album—it’s two albums stuck in the same box—and though it’s easy to see one as simply the “loud” one and the other as the “quiet,” the pairing is interesting at deeper levels as well. Central to both are various Western notions of theology...
This unclear sense of irony is only confounded all the more with The Lyre of Orpheus. Though intentionally opaque and periodically über-theatrical (especially in the opening eponymous track), Lyre is never quite too much to make you cringe or laugh. Indeed, part of what makes it so intriguing is its way of doling out just enough minimalism (“Babe, You Turn Me On” and “Easy Money”) to musically temper the fact that, lyrically, this is an album built from an erudite classical myth (fittingly, perhaps, about...
...already known to be missing. Among them: a 3-ft. carved alabaster vase, circa 3200 B.C.; a black, headless statue of the Sumerian King Entemena, circa 2430 B.C.; a Sumerian sacred cup, circa 2600 B.C.; a copper head of an Akkadian ruler, circa 2350 B.C.; and a gold lyre from Ur, circa 2500 B.C. What else might be gone is anybody's guess...