Word: pianos
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...offering vague signposts to the musical trails the lads would later blaze. The first, In Spite of All the Danger, is a Paul-and-George ballad with John singing lead, the others singing doo-wop with a perversely rockabilly twist, and an anonymous pal banging out triplets on a piano. They imitate the Everly Brothers' tight harmonies on Hello Little Girl, Maurice Williams on Like Dreamers...
Mellon Collie is a sprawling album of many moods. The opening track (also the title song) is a quietly moving piano-based instrumental; by contrast, the next song, Tonight, Tonight, is an expansive rock anthem, complete with soaring guitars and a 30-piece string section. "Believe, believe in me," Corgan sings, as if pleading for listeners to trust in his band's huge undertaking. Many of the songs here--such as Jellybelly, Here Is No Why and Muzzle--have an appealing, loose, raw edge. Others, like the nine-minute-long Porcelina of the Vast Oceans, flow gracefully and naturally along...
Vanessa Daou's new album, Zipless, shows that it doesn't have to be that way. Built on piano, synthesizers and Daou's mesmerizing, Billie Holiday-like vocals, Zipless strikes an exquisite balance between pop and jazz by weaving together the strengths of both styles. With Daou's husband Peter playing all the instruments, the songs flow along on smooth, toe-tapping grooves punctuated by saxophone and piano solos and spiced with surprising touches like gongs and kettle drums. With Vanessa's limpid voice floating above it all, the music conjures the cool mood of an urban nightscape...
Claude Lelouch's film, which relocates the French national epic in the 20th century, mostly during World War II, also has all the defects those virtues imply. It is full of absurd coincidences, broadly archetypal characters and situations (yes, a Nazi thumps out a piano concerto while a prisoner is being tortured nearby), and a sentimentality that verges at times on the woozy. It's as if the writer-director, who in certain high-toned circles will never be forgiven for making A Man and a Woman, had never heard of modernism, let alone postmodernism...
...unfashionable virtues," says TIME's Richard Schickel. Claude Lelouch's film, the seventh screen adaptation of Victor Hugo's classic novel, relocates to the 20th century, mostly during World War II. "The film is full of absurd coincidences, broadly archetypal characters and situations (yes, a Nazi thumps out a piano concerto while a prisoner is being tortured nearby), and a sentimentality that verges at times on the woozy," says Schickel. "Yet, it's more sophisticated than the feelings it evokes, and infinitely more compelling than you can imagine a film derived from such a familiar source might be. How pleasurable...