Word: orpheus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...MUSIC | Orpheus and Dance NESE...
...hallucinatory hues. In Veld (1971), diagonal stripes in vivid green contain narrow stripes of white, bordered by infinitesimal lines of red - but you could swear the white was yellow. From jazzy stripes she moved on to paler, pastel ripples. Undulations of pink, lilac, jade and ochre make Song of Orpheus 5 (1978) positively pretty, even gentle. Inspired by a visit to Egypt in the late '70s, she returned to stripes. In works like Après Midi (1981), she recreated the palette of ancient tombs: terra-cotta, malachite, turquoise, ochre. Her next move, in the '80s, was to interweave...