Word: mandolins
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Highlights are sparse. The first minute or so of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is fine. There’s a nice little mandolin-based acoustic arrangement of the tune, and it plays upon that perfect two-note guitar twang from the core of the original...
...Arcade Fire's seven members took the stage looking as if they just had just ridden out a hurricane in a trailer park. Instruments, hair and clothing were strewn everywhere. The set list, culled from their debut, Funeral, was full of songs about death played on accordion and mandolin. Later U2's the Edge would create endless spaces between guitar chords, while Bono drove metaphorical trucks through them, but somehow Arcade Fire's patchwork symphonies roared almost as loudly. To hear the bands together was an education in the various ways rock music can be huge...
...trademark rolling piano line in the album’s first single “Once Upon a Time,” which is nestled between chiming synths and the singers’ accented English vocals. “One Hell of a Party” features a mandolin and vocals by Jarvis Cocker, the frontman of former Britpop band Pulp. The track underscores the decidedly un-boisterous nature of the album. Later, “Mayfair Song” follows with piano chords and an electronic beat slow enough that the song comes dangerously close...
...Saptaswara,” an understated and lovely blending of “Carnatic, Roma, Hindustani, Celtic and Western Classical” themes on guitar, mandolin, violin, tabla, and veena (an enormous stringed instrument), was also impressive...
...love, sprinkled with religion, politics and literary references to Shakespeare, classic poetry, and the Bible. Ritter also dashes in instrumentation unexpected for his genre, and with an impressive act of arrangement, it works well. The record-opener “Girl in the War” puts the mandolin to such use, while catchy “Wolves” follows up with guitar and piano, and “Monster Ballads” borrows a gospel feel with tasteful organ use. Ritter even allows the lyrics of “Idaho” to exist almost without accompaniment...