Charlotte Gainsbourg - Stage Whisper

When you’ve seen someone drill a grindstone into Willem Defoe’s leg, smash his testicles then give herself an autoclitoridectomy it can be a little strange when you encounter them again.  But enough about my trip to California last year, this is about Charlotte Gainsbourg and her new studio/live double disk album release Stage Whisper.  I’m going to put my cards on the table here, I really liked this.  Insofar as genre goes, Gainsbourg bounces effortlessly back and forth from strange and discordant tracks like “Paradisco” to intimate, melodic acoustic ballads like “Memoir.”  Overall, this is not music to relax to like Bon Iver, nor can you expect to be challenged by the ideas and instrumentation as consistently as Pink Floyd.  Stage Whisper’s new music is the kind of music that would be played in a hip indie movie about sad people living in, let’s say, Brooklyn.  And in the same way, the music is interesting and delightfully strange.

As with most studio/live albums, the most famous tracks tend to be in the live albums, as the live sections of these albums tend to be a “Best of” collection.  However the studio albums section of the album would seem to be a better bet.  From her film work (mostly with Lars Von Trier, Antichrist and Melencholia), I assumed she had all but lost her native French accent.  Now, I see that she must have been working with vocal coaches during the recording of those films as well as the studio portion of Stage Whisper, because her French accent really comes out in a live setting.  They’re most severe in the first two songs and they’re mostly gone by “Heaven Can Wait” but they make those songs seem pretty stilted as Gainsbourg struggles to put the appropriate emPHAsis on the correct syllABle.  Overall, excepting those first songs, it’s a solid live effort, and worth your time.

Recommended tracks (studio): Memoir (highly), All the Rain, Anna

Recommended tracks (live): Heaven Can Wait, Just Like a Woman, The Songs That We Sings


- Peter Guilherme

Lana Del Ray - Born to Die

Lana Del Ray’s success among people who should know better baffles me.  Unquestionably, the best song on this album is her single Video Games, and that’s only because it has some pretty instrumentation.  Let me just say it.  Lana Del Ray isn’t bad because she’s a particularly bad singer, or because she’s offensive, it’s because she’s lazy.  Her songs are so lazy, that they seem to circle all the way around to actively lazy.  Let’s take a look at some choice examples from Video Games.

I'm in his favorite sun dress
Watching me get undressed
Take that body downtown

I say you the bestest
Lean in for a big kiss
Put his favorite perfume on

Now let’s ignore the fact that the song presents itself with no reason to listen any further musically.  The chords fully resolve themselves at the end of each triplet which gives us a perfect time to listen to something else.  Insofar as the lyrical content goes, not only do the songs suffer from a complete lack of cohesion, they are also written using painfully workman like diction.  Normally, I consider it the height of songwriting laziness to rhyme a word with itself, but the most egregious offender in this is her use of the word “bestest.”  I’ll just say this, I liked it better when Nicki Manaj used it in “Bedrock,” and keep in mind that in that song, she rhymed it with “asbestos” and that I consider “Bedrock” to be one of the worst songs I’ve ever heard on the radio.  For Lana Del Ray to attempt to rhyme it with “big kiss” is just lazy.  Lana Del Ray’s painfully repetitious word choice and dreary song structure make this one a definite pass. 

Recommended tracks: Literally anything else


- Peter Guilherme

KSUB Presents: Feet

February 3rd, KSUB hosted its weekly concert series, "KSUB Presents" with a band called feet.

Photos property of Bridget Elizabeth.