RED
Songs From A Room (Rectangle International Ltd.)
Reviewed by Holly Day

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I suppose the best way to describe this thing is to have you imagine what it'd sound like if Tom Waits covered Leonard Cohen, except that it's not really Tom Waits-this guy (Olivier Lambin) just sounds an awful lot like him. Strangely, these Cohen songs, set to an odd backdrop of ghostly whistles, bells, and other strange keyboard samples, seemed to have had a lot of the emotive quality sucked out of them in these renderings, and instead of making them darker and more depressing-which I believe was the intent here-the attention has been drawn so far from the lyrics and into the soundscape that they might as well not even be there.

[Pick this up at rectangle.org.]

© 2002 - Holly Day