Word: marias
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...Maria Borli Sivertsen was a complete unknown until a few years ago when she won a couple of Norwegian talent competitions, making her huge in Oslo. What's given Maria a surprising amount of buzz elsewhere, besides shortening her name to the punchier Ida Maria (pronounced Ee-dah Muh-ree-uh), is a reputation for staggeringly drunk live performances and rumors, often whispered for effect, that she has one of those voices. I can't speak to her stage persona--she cites Iggy Pop as an influence, though eyewitnesses report Dudley Moore--but Maria's voice will stop...
...debut album, Fortress Round My Heart, Maria opens with the perfect song for her aesthetic. "Oh My God" is basically just a few frantic chords and two repeated phrases--"Find a cure/Find a cure for my life" in the verse and "Oh my God" in the chorus. One lyric is a prayer for control; the other a realization that she has none, and Maria plays the former like someone meditating before a hurricane and the latter like the hurricane itself. She roars from the back of her throat, timing the G in God to the crash of the snare...
...problem is that Fortress follows that haymaker with another and another, until you realize Maria is adept at just one kind of punch. A few of these two-to-three-minute wraths ("Louie" and "I Like You So Much Better When You're Naked") are tuneful enough to stick with you, but they don't do much emotionally, and they all end up feeling numbingly similar, like fury masquerading as fun. As the album chugs on, it becomes clear that Maria hasn't quite figured out what she'd like to say to the world--"I know I'm always...
...lesson in how to put a great voice to good use, look to PJ Harvey's A Woman a Man Walked By. In 1992, Harvey debuted much as Maria did, as a young woman from a small town in rural England preceded by reports of otherworldly pipes. Now 39, Harvey's got a catalog of near genius records, largely because she developed a musical and emotional repertoire to go along with her talent. She can throw every punch there...
...suggest - I wonder if this score really belongs in the very top rank of American musicals. The jazzy, modernist, Gershwinesque rhythms of some of Bernstein's music - "The Jet Song," "America" - are still striking and original. But is there a duller love ballad in any major American musical than "Maria" ("Maria! I've just met a girl named Maria"), or its Muzak-ready twin brother, "Tonight" ("Tonight, tonight/ There's only you tonight")? Who would know that the lyricist would grow up to be Stephen Sondheim...