Is it a bad thing when listening to an album makes you want to listen to other, better representatives of the genre? Yeah, I think that's probably the one of the worst disses that can be leveled at the modern musician.
This is exactly what happened after listening to Berry's Blue Sky, Raging Sun. The promo tags it as "marrying meticulously detailed instrumentation with genuinely alluring pop..." Meticulously detailed instrumention, check. This thing's stuffed with tinkling barroom pianos, jangly arpeggiated guitarisms, grand horn arrangements and even an honest to goodness string section now and then. This is the sort of overstuffed bombast we're becoming more accustomed to with the likes of Grizzly Bear, et. al.
But where Grizzly Bear is marrying all their tympani mallets and banjo plinks to melodies worthy of a roomful of hard-working musicians, Berry is still searching for the "genuinely alluring pop" part. There's quite a few songs based on crescendo-type tension, but without the payoff of the big chorus or genuine hook. What we get instead is just more instruments veering off into meticulous arrangements, without any real songs to back them up.
Not to say that there aren't some decent moments here, but often for everything noteworthy, we get something to sink it. Case in point, "Beauty is All", which is indeed has a most beautiful wordless outro, featuring a genuinely lovely melancholy string section, all gauzy and ethereal. Unfortunately, the big chorus in this song that seems missing from the rest of the album is saddled with the unbelievably saccharine platitude "beauty is all/in the eye of the beholder." *Really*. Whatever emotional investment you might have made is vanquished in one fell swoop by a lyric you can't even believe being sung.
Now where was that Danielson CD? Oh, here it is... Ah...
--written by M@
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