Word: riffs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...slips from quoting a standard hymn--"Just as I am, without one plea/but that Thy blood was shed for me"--almost straight into hip-hop: "Transform me/Translate me/I release you to rearrange me/Are you willing to be changed?" He does this without warning or acknowledgement. (If you miss one riff, don't worry, there will be another one along in moments.) And however leisurely Jakes' presentation may seem, each sermon eventually reveals itself as perfectly calibrated and balanced, cohering into an often exquisite extended metaphor...
...Goes Down sounds like any bad hard-core-rock ballad. The lyrics are cheesy high school poetry: "Will our 'twained lives split asunder?/ Will our love submerge and drown?" The vocals are often mumbled and atonal. And the instrumentals have all the professionalism of a Wayne's World guitar riff. But it's not every love song that features verses in which a man assures his beloved that "the color of our skin" will become "our uniform of war"--or every rock group whose name is short for Racial Holy...
Truck Volume, a track for The Wash, began with a Dre beat and an eerie keyboard riff played on an old Vox V-305 organ. ("I was watching VH1--The Doors: Behind the Music," he says, by way of explanation.) Dre then added layers of strings. Everyone from Eminem to Madonna has been known to beg Dre for tracks, but the Doctor decides who gets his music based entirely on feel. Truck Volume, with its exaggerated haunted-house vibe, seemed like a good fit for the exuberantly hoarse rapper Busta Rhymes. "Busta just sounds crazy to me," Dre says...
...absolute revelation; he is now my favorite musical theater performer. This was not the first time I saw Esparza on stage—I was impressed by his turn as Che in the 20th anniversary tour of Evita that played Boston two summers ago and was wowed by his Riff-Raff in Rocky Horror—but as Jonathan he displayed such vocal power and genuine vulnerability, that there was no way I could pull my eyes off of him. Esparza is a theatrical force to be reckoned with and I’m sure he will captivate in this...
...herself guests in minor roles on some of the juiciest, most attractive songs, like the sweet and sour “Traffic,” which revolves around an introspective bass riff and heart-on-sleeve lyrics by Bitch: “All we have is our love and our guts, baby.” The melody takes a back seat for much of the album though, in favour of repetitive bass lines and vituperative rap. Folk rap has becoming increasingly popular since tracks like Everlast’s “What it’s Like...