“She brushes off comparisons to Billie Holiday,” according to Mobile Fidelity’s online blurb. Why? That’s like denying the elephant in the room. Peyroux’s squooshy vibrato and top of the throat delivery produce sly vocal timbres that just about channel Billie Holiday between your speakers. Even the miking and equalization have been carefully chosen to sustain the Holiday allusion and almost mimic the mellow recording quality of the time, just as the inner gatefold photography and Peyroux’s outfits reprise the visuals of the ‘40s. It’s canny but I find it distracting and mannered.
As old-fashioned ear candy, David Gilmour’s On An Island is difficult to beat. Produced by seasoned studio pros intent upon making you stop what you are doing and actually listen, the record is a rich minefield of sonic surprises and delights, beginning with impressionistic musical sound effects mimicking foghorns, sea-gulls and the like, after which enters Gilmore’s familiar feedback-drenched, crescendo-capped guitar, and archetypal mid-tempo woozy balladry.
Much was made of special guest star Diana Krall’s appearance when this superb album was announced, and while her reading of Cheryl Ernst’s lyrics set to a Jimmy Rowles’s composition is poignant and heartfelt, appropriately, it is Wilson who shines both as an arranger, comfortably in the grip of Gil Evans, and as a precise master of the hollow-bodied electric guitar.
Former child star and Rilo Kiley front-gal Jenny Lewis may present herself as a latter day Charo, but she’s not afraid to plant serious concerns within her art, both in Rilo Kiley and in this earnest solo setting backed by Louisville natives The Watson Twins.
After releasing two perfectly conceived and executed if somewhat campy albums of “country and eastern,” Gray DeLisle is back with an off kilter but no less enticing and superb sounding third effort.
Scoring a concerto for violin and cello provided pianist/composer Brahms with an opportunity to create a piano like texture by simultaneously using the low and high-pitched strings to create keyboard-like chords.
While Mercury gets all the 35MM audiophile glory, Everest also produced a series of sonically spectacular LPs, many recorded on 35MM magnetic film by the late engineer-turned audio columnist Bert Whyte. The advantages of sprocketed 35MM magnetic film are zero “print-through,” minimal “wow and flutter,” higher signal to noise ratio and wider dynamic range than conventional ¼” or ½” recording tape.
Presaging the "Christian rock" phenomenon of the 1990's, this Farfisa-filled fire and brimstone exercise in religious guilt asks where you will hide when Armageddon happens and your personal judgment day is at hand.
This Glasgow-based pop band, led by lead singer and songwriter Tracyanne Campbell produces breezy, tuneful string-driven pop confections bathed in near-cavernous reverb. So great is the reverb that what are real strings sound like synth ones. Oh, well.
The Graham Engineering 1.5 tonearm, originally introduced in 1990, was a thoughtfully executed design that logically addressed all of the basics of good tonearm performance—geometry, resonance control, rigidity, dynamic stability—with effective, sometimes ingenious ideas, while providing exceptional ease and flexibility of setup. Over time, designer Bob Graham came up with ways to significantly improve the 1.5's performance, including the replacement of its brass side weights with heavier ones of tungsten, an improved bearing with a more massive cap, various changes in internal wiring, a far more rigid and better-grounded mounting platform, and a new, sophisticated ceramic armwand. (The original wand had hardly been an afterthought: its heat-bonded, constrained-layer-damped design consisted of an inner tube of stainless steel and an outer tube of aluminum.) The arm's name changed from the 1.5 to the 1.5t (tungsten), then the 1.5t/c (ceramic), and on to the 2.0, 2.1, and 2.2.