Word: mellowing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Like many young jazz singers nowadays, Dobson, 26, is trying for a mellow pop-jazz groove à la Norah Jones. Her plangent, almost vibrato-free voice rides over a mélange of island rhythms, bossa nova and folky acoustics, mostly in new songs she has co-written. They go down as easily as frozen margaritas, never more beguilingly than when she slips in scat syllables like "dit-doo, die-yah-da-doo" in Four Leaf Clover, or simply "ooh-ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh" in Cold to Colder...
...feral, conniving ex-wife (Jaime Pressly) and her sweetly spacey new husband (Eddie Steeples), he ineptly cuts a swath of penance through his small town. Earl is a cartoony fella--he perpetually looks as if he just lost a battle with the Road Runner--but Lee gives him a mellow decency. This story of a bad man going good badly is a redemptive riot...
...with his leg caught in barbed wire." It certainly was a prickly handful to kids raised on either the smooth Sinatra sound or the orgasmic church screaming of Little Richard. But to Dylan, barbed-wire vocals were an aesthetic and, as the French would say, a politique. Mellow was a lie; raspy was authentic. As he wrote in an early poem: "The only beauty's ugly, man / The cracklin', breakin', shakin' sounds're / The only beauty I understand." With extended exposure, his ugly became beauty. Intimate and accusatory, the voice twisted and tortured each word in a lyric, weirdly drawing...
...path of mostly-acoustic folk, fusing the singer/songwriter vibe with bluegrass and country-western. In this release, Ritter has built solidly from the down home sound of his earlier albums, and he has effectively expanded his lyrical and musical creativity without losing his distinctively homespun sound. His rendition of mellow folk music is reminiscent of early Johnny Cash; his lyrics, like Nick Drake’s, are literate enough to be considered vaguely poetic on their own. However, Ritter has a voice so emotive that these lyrics can become incomprehensible to the casual listener. One of the more Cash-like...
...raise your voice. The bass is just strong enough to give you a little kick in the pants. It is a superb place to hear unfamiliar bands. After the opener came the headliner: Starhick. They performed a set of excellent alt-country. ‘Twas laid back, mellow, yet rocking, and it went well with my Bass ale and mildly shouted conversations. The stage was a tad too small for a four-piece band—Starhick’s rotund bassist had to stand on the floor a couple feet below his bandmates. We left before they finished...