Word: synth
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...David Lynch, as with Julee Cruise, or Gaelic-inspired words and melodies, as with Enya, this music shares a certain soulfulness that sets it apart. Showing up in soundtracks, advertisements and as background music to certain popular women's winter sporting events, these artists' combination of cryptic lyrics, cool synth sound and sighing vocals have made a market out of musical mediation...
...play "March of the Triumphant Elephants" live with guitars. But on the record it's not that; you wrote it as a synth thing and then learned to play it live...
...very pretty Gabriel-esque tune, "Lover." He sounds a bit like Pete, and breathes the lyrics with the same sense of urgency Many of the chord progressions and vocal shouts also sound like something from Gabriel's So. But add in some folksy guitar strums molded into a synth line, and the intensity loses out to a studio-induced banal sheen. This recurs on almost all of the tunes, for Peck's voice cannot seem to outsing the acoustic guitar and keyboard arrangements backing him. His voice tends to be too flat, lacking the depth that characterizes peter Gabriel...
...sorta well-known for their oddball instrumentation--live, and on their previous records, Rob Christiansen some-times plays bass, and sometimes instead plays trombone. But that's nothing compared to the "Day in the Life" style piling up of styles and timbres on this album: a smoothly anachronistic analog synth (could it be a Mellotron?) pops up in several songs, and so effectively each time that by the end of the 66-minute Exploder opus you'll probably have moved from wondering how anyone could use a Mellotron sound on a rock record at all in 1994 to wondering...
...album reveals several striking things about Prince's career. Musically, many of the earlier songs reveal that Prince could not escape the banal rhythms of early-eighties pop. On the one hand there is the almost Van Halenesque synth and sequencer bass of "Dirty Mind" (and the groove on "1999" sounds suspiciously like "Jump".) The other early sound is the still-lingering presence of disco. Prince often verged on club music, but his best work owes more to other commercial styles like hip hop, funk and even rock. And just when the sound of drum machines and synthesizers starts...