Word: matracas
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...last month's Country Music Awards, Matraca Berg picked up a Song of the Year trophy for Strawberry Wine, co-written with Gary Harrison. That was a ho-hum: the Nashville scribe has penned prime bedroom and barroom laments for Reba McEntire (Last One to Know), Trisha Yearwood (XXX's and OOO's), Martina McBride (Wild Angels), Patty Loveless (You Can Feel Bad) and other country thrushes. But that same night, Berg sang Back When We Were Beautiful, about a widow recalling her one and only love, and put so much ache and age into it you could hear...
...Loveless The Trouble with the Truth (Epic). The title may imply some kind of emotional hesitancy, but this hardscrabble country diva has no trouble whatsoever singing about betrayal, abuse, loneliness--and the against-all-odds will to survive. Her versions of nifty dirges by Gary Nicholson, Richard Thompson and Matraca Berg are less interpretations than rites of down-home exorcism...
What's a Loveless woman to do? Simple: stare back at the man who done her wrong and give him caustic advice. The album's first single, a cool Matraca Berg easy-rockin' plaint, says it tartly: "You can feel bad if it makes you feel better." That's the '90s cad for you. He'll take a little short-term guilt--and instant absolution from the woman he's left in the dust...
Listen to the Boomlay. The 38-piece orchestra included 16 native percussion instruments (with names like the pio, chocalho de metal, reco-reco and matraca) which thumped and clattered and clapped the rhythm. At times the music was full of melody, as melancholy as a native chant. Sometimes it bumped and blared like a carnival band. There were smatterings of dissonance and explosions of jungle jazz; and in one scene, Villa-Lobos had two different songs going at once, as skillfully laced together as a Bach fugue...
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