There are times at which music starts playing a different role than the one all of us usually know. There's a certain thin line between the relaxing, uplifting type of music, that we listen to only in order to forget about our mostly boring daily routine, and the pure sounds belonging to the music that doesn't simply stop at diverting us, but in fact manages to deepen our life experiences. A normal, happy guy would have mentioned just around here the name of U2. I won't.
Obviously, Brett Anderson isn't anymore the skinny, pointed face, sexually uncertain individual that years ago was indirectly begging the media for attention, through his excentric appearences. The change has been proved by his first solo release, and strengthened with Wilderness, last year. Those carefully planned orchestrations that made out of Suede the famous group that they were in the 90's, they gradually disappeared in his solo career. So comes that on Wilderness you can actually hear a certain noise in the recording room, before the piano and the violin, as single instruments, start constructing the track. With that in mind, the expectations for the next material were approaching to 'almost nothing coming out of the speakers, except maybe his breath'.
But Slow Attack only preserved the previous features, adding to them a drop of understanding. The radical sentences, pronounced for example in A different place, disappeared completely, being replaced with simple, epic descriptions of facts. One could say that, at some point in the year that passed between his latest releases, Anderson lost his rebel feelings and started to adjust himself to the fixed situations around him. Even so, there is still something to his music, so that, no matter how sad or depressing may seem at a first listening, will never get the listener deeper into these kind of feelings. The only thing his music deepens is the actual sensation of life, with its goods and bads. And that is what music, in general, should be all about.
Slow Attack isn't the kind of album for which you can make a track-by-track review, as it's more of a compact collection of songs. Of course, you can put yourself bits like The Hunted or Frozen roads in the cd player and wonder how a man can sing about these things in a way so natural that would make Bono choose a living in the mountains, but the full effect can be achieved only by playing all of the 11 tracks: life, at a lower speed, in order to give you the perfect occasion to analyse it.
To all Jonas Brothers fans out there, it's a good thing to realise that there is no greater proof of truthfulness in matters of music than giving a chance to the 'grandfathers'. You can ultimately do that by supporting Brett Anderson's slow attack. Literally.
"Slow Attack", Brett Anderson, BA Songs, 2009
*photo courtesy of brettanderson.co.uk.
Obviously, Brett Anderson isn't anymore the skinny, pointed face, sexually uncertain individual that years ago was indirectly begging the media for attention, through his excentric appearences. The change has been proved by his first solo release, and strengthened with Wilderness, last year. Those carefully planned orchestrations that made out of Suede the famous group that they were in the 90's, they gradually disappeared in his solo career. So comes that on Wilderness you can actually hear a certain noise in the recording room, before the piano and the violin, as single instruments, start constructing the track. With that in mind, the expectations for the next material were approaching to 'almost nothing coming out of the speakers, except maybe his breath'.
But Slow Attack only preserved the previous features, adding to them a drop of understanding. The radical sentences, pronounced for example in A different place, disappeared completely, being replaced with simple, epic descriptions of facts. One could say that, at some point in the year that passed between his latest releases, Anderson lost his rebel feelings and started to adjust himself to the fixed situations around him. Even so, there is still something to his music, so that, no matter how sad or depressing may seem at a first listening, will never get the listener deeper into these kind of feelings. The only thing his music deepens is the actual sensation of life, with its goods and bads. And that is what music, in general, should be all about.
Slow Attack isn't the kind of album for which you can make a track-by-track review, as it's more of a compact collection of songs. Of course, you can put yourself bits like The Hunted or Frozen roads in the cd player and wonder how a man can sing about these things in a way so natural that would make Bono choose a living in the mountains, but the full effect can be achieved only by playing all of the 11 tracks: life, at a lower speed, in order to give you the perfect occasion to analyse it.
To all Jonas Brothers fans out there, it's a good thing to realise that there is no greater proof of truthfulness in matters of music than giving a chance to the 'grandfathers'. You can ultimately do that by supporting Brett Anderson's slow attack. Literally.
"Slow Attack", Brett Anderson, BA Songs, 2009
*photo courtesy of brettanderson.co.uk.
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