Del Coda – It’s Always Love
They hung up notices in music stores forbidding guitar players from blasting out the solo to “Stairway to Heaven.” But they couldn’t stop all of the guitar players from learning it. And look where we are now?
Some cranks who can truly appreciate the complexities of classical music worked hard to ban “Bohemian Rhapsody” from being played on the radio. But they didn’t try hard enough. And look where that got us?
Thankfully, Del Coda have stripped these sorts of rock epics out of their playlists, or, at the very least, have the good sense to ignore them. Rock operas have ruined many bands, unable to find one open road leading to their target.
Not Del Coda, though. They’ve found a little bit of magic, and they’re using it big time. “It’s Always Love” is your bare bones garage-rock tune that sits up like a lumbering giant learning to tango on the beach. There’s truth in those half-sung, half-screamed vocals and in the simple chord accompaniment. And if it should turn out that it was all just some fantasy, it was worth riding down this open road to the beach while we could.
Her Mountain Majesty – Medicine
Everyone sings once in a while, or at least mumbles the phrases of some song they heard long ago. Some people are able to very accurately reproduce the song and are able to sing in perfect pitch. But that’s not good singing. Not necessarily.
Some even manage to make a living off of it. There’s a market for this kind of thing, sure. You can take this to talent shows and get the approval of television audiences. You can use it as a way to get a job in a restaurant or to work on a cruise. But that doesn’t mean that it’s good singing. Not like Her Mountain Majesty anyway.
Nearly everyone has a voice, and nearly everyone who could use it opts to pipe down. Most of us are taught to be shy about our voices and about the things that make them unique. What the world gets instead are people who twist their voices into sounding like someone else.
Her Mountain Majesty sounds very much like herself. That’s because “Medicine” isn’t a performance designed just to be accurate. It’s a performance meant to be soulful, created to present the artist losing her way, fighting with herself and, ultimately, finding out who she is. All of this happens in the space of just a few minutes. And it’s all the whispering and shouting, the cracks, as well as the perfectly soulful vocals that make “Medicine” special.
