Word: sweete
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Vengeance is sweet, but Experience (Hyperion; 406 pages; $23.95), Amis' riveting memoir of his troubled past, wastes little space settling old scores. "Why should I tell the story of my life?" he asks rhetorically at the outset, and answers immediately, "I do it because my father is dead now, and I always knew I would have to commemorate him. He was a writer and I am a writer; it feels like a duty to describe our case--a literary curiosity which is also just another instance of father...
...most part, it's old-fashioned pop music. Belle and Sebastian blends guitars, pianos, violins, cellos, horns and whatever else is lying around into the kind of sweet pop pioneered by the Beatles, Love and Phil Spector. Lyrically, chief writer and singer Stuart Murdoch, 30, favors mournful, Smiths-influenced rhymes about the adolescent frustration that comes from desperately wanting to do something but not knowing exactly what. He's clever, but it's Murdoch's quavering falsetto that is the band's trademark. Earnest and prematurely wise, his vocals mix angst and nostalgia with a hint of optimism...
...Orleans is called cafe brulot: coffee mixed with spices and liquor, served flaming. Add a beignet, and you've got the culinary equivalent of the music of the New Orleans-based band Galactic: a brew of deep funk, acid jazz and stomping rock, with a bit of sugar-sweet melody. Not all the songs on Late for the Future work: a fair number lack rhythmic complexity, and these tracks wash out of the listener's mind quickly. But Galactic is a jam band that revels in the moment. The best songs on this album feel live and spontaneous, even after...
...piracy only looks like the free-and-easy island life. It's actually hard work, because it lacks efficient economies of scale. Once you start seriously churning out the product, you quickly become very visible: warehouses, trucks, employee payrolls--it all adds up. The sweet charm of piracy is free, daring little "us" vs. big nasty "them." But any "us" that gets large enough is automatically a "them." Bill Gates was once a hippie programmer, a college dropout from Seattle. But a hippie with a billion dollars is no longer a hippie; he's a billionaire. A hippie with...
Faith and Courage is one of the best CDs of the year. On her past albums, O'Connor's songs burned with anger. Her new album, for which she recruited a wide range of producers, including hip-hopper Wyclef Jean, radiates forgiveness, and the music is often as sweet and smooth as strawberries and cream. A few tracks, including The Healing Room, beam with sunny reggae rhythms. The album is dedicated to "all Rastafari people." In one song, What Doesn't Belong to Me, O'Connor sings from the perspective of God, rejecting the self-segregation in the world...