Word: riffs
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...Dixie Grill, a faux southern bar with big fish and stock-car racing signs, where the ensemble acting troupe spun its own live performances. Mandy Grunwald, sitting in the opening-night audience, got to see Carville, Stephanopoulos and Boorstin in Little Rock indulge in an eye-rolling exasperated riff at her expense as she tries to sell them on a campaign ad by speakerphone from Washington. "Were you guys embarrassed for Mandy to see you acting that way?" Stephanopoulos spun that one: "Not at all. It was James who was the jerk." And Carville had his sound bite ready...
...Ideas come fast to Joshua Redman. On The Deserving Many, a song from the young tenor saxophonist's fine new album, Wish, he starts off with a few buoyant, tinkling notes, then suddenly scatters them into a jagged, descending riff, surging along it at breakneck speed. Then, quickly interweaving a flurry of growling notes with an exciting upper-octave peal, he is swept up by a new set of ideas that carry him back to his original melody...
...Knox is just one guy, but he can be just as aggressively distorted as any six-piece overamplified noise band. Listen again, though, and the songs get very clear: over twenty of them, almost every one with its own simple chord structure, a single, simpler, cycling rhythm, and a riff likely to burrow into the average listener's inner ear and take up permanent residence. (Chris Knox himself favors disgusting metaphors, too--check out some of his cover...
...reverse this trend, Clinton struck notes ranging from passionate to pleading. Presenting the bill at a ceremony in Statuary Hall at the Capitol, Clinton began waving his arms and banging the lectern, first with a forefinger and then with a fist, as he slid into an ad-lib riff on the necessity for reform: the U.S., he cried, is "choking on a health-care system that -- is -- not -- working." The day after, in a speech to medical students and professors at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Clinton sounded oddly supplicating: "Please help us," he implored...
...something so ridiculously self-important about the clunky tempo changes of "Lizzy" that it's hard to give Houdini the benefit of the doubt, let alone the benefit of a second listen. And while Houdini does have one redeeming virtue--namely, "Honey Bucket," a song built around a tight riff and insistent drumwork--the album has little to offer except tired and huddled masses of guitar cliches...