Word: vocally
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...payoff varies. When a performer's piece is largely autobiographical, like Shear's or Redgrave's (which ran eight months on Broadway and is touring the country), the theatergoer can get the illusion of making an instant friendship. When the show is a bravura display of physical and vocal transformation from one character to another, like Glaser's deft Family Secrets or Spring's intensely acted if mawkishly overwritten The Mayor of Boys Town, the pleasure is seeing the conjurer's trick. When the writing is ambitiously literary, as in Taylor's eloquent if not galvanically performed pseudo memoir Escape...
...physical Golden Knights and Saints decided to get into a "war in the trenches," as Tomassoni puts it--with the vocal hockey-loving student bodies of both schools watching with bated breath--there could be blood...
Bargainville opens with the catchy tune, River Valley." The strumming guitar rhythms provide the foundation, and the meaty, complex vocal harmonies coast along above as a cushion for the solid pop vocal of lead singer Mike Ford. The lyrics are a bit on the trite side, as Ford sings, "Me and Pete went swimming last night/ he's my friend from Boy Scouts/All the fish were floating uptight/we got scared and we got out... Who will save the river valley?" Yes, it borders on ecoconsciousness-raising music, but these guys do not take themselves that seriously. There is a naivete...
...genius. He sings about history and culture, and dying, and love, and open wounds. "Take me down to the ridge where the summer ends/We'll watch the city spread out just like a jet's flame..." from "No Life Singed Her" on Slanted is pretty fucking lyrical. His vocal delivery is also sublime: there is something in his voice--Roland Barthes called it the grain--which is just unbelievably communicative and charismatic. Like Lou Reed before him, he can't actually sing all that well, but it's those strange textures in his voice, the moments where it breaks, where...
...very best Sugargliders songs, the Meadows' vocal timbres aren't what holds your attention: the lyrics do. The last person to comment so incisively, and with such a sense of having been hurt, on boy-girl stuff may have been the early Elvis Costello; but where he always blamed his ex-girlfriends, the Sugargliders always blame themselves, which I find much more attractive. In "Will We Ever Learn" for example: "Do you think it's human/To except to be loved from foot to head?/Well my head's been on holiday/Since the day we met..." Or in "Ahprahran," for example...