Janelle Monáe: The Electric Lady (2013)

(Bad Boy)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Janelle Monáe is something else. Three years after one of the most startling debut albums in pop history, The ArchAndroid, she achieves what one wishes so many artists did their second time around: she expands and builds on her prior success and newfound stardom while also refining her craft. This last point is especially important for a performer with such imagination and individuality -- ArchAndroid was less significant for its individual songs than for the dynamic and restless nature of Monáe's singing, performances, arrangements and the restlessness of her constant ideas. It was a record that meant to allow you to spend time with one consummate artist -- we can already say, one shaping up to be among the best of our generation.

That element is retained on the sequel, which also feels like a splendid evening spent at the best concert of your life. As before, the "concept" of the album -- something to do with Fritz Lang's Metropolis, a radio station, and lots of robot stuff -- is of little interest to those of us who never felt such things added much to anyone's records, whether the music was good or not. That is, except in the sense that it articulates Monáe's outsider status as a youth, vindicated now that she is celebrated without compromising her identity or her specific idea of integrity. She's a remarkable picture of the evolution in pop; her music isn't about the fact that she is a black woman who's staked out a unique claim on her own image, but that her music celebrates it to such a degree seems to indicate massive progress. She may be the first rock star to feel like a singular 21st century presence, futurism or no. This is cultivated in part by very old-world behavior on the part of her label, Bad Boy; with a type of confidence seldom now seen, P. Diddy and his staff deliberately conspired to develop Monáe slowly, to let her music progress with the years and let the audience come to her rather than the opposite. The gamble -- and it is a gamble now, even with so obviously luminous a talent -- paid off.

In Monáe's case, obviously, the music is frequently incredible, amounting essentially to a seamless coalescence of pop history in one riveting, magically wrought package. The major difference between this record and its predecessor is that the songs are stronger individually. Monáe cowrote and coproduced each one, and they are each designed as their own entity. They are backward-looking at times, but not in an obvious or tiresome manner. An admiration of Beautiful Music tentatively suggested on ArchAndroid permeates nearly every track, most prominently the Mancini suggestion on the florid noir-nightclub fog "Look into My Eyes" and the love theme that grows out of it, and the loving Bert Kaempfert arrangement on "Can't Live Without Your Love." The masterfully intricate production is equally varied but more seamless, moodier, with a clear progression from radio-friendly dance tracks to more eccentric but equally engaging material. Neither record stands out enormously in quality than the other, but that simply means that in 2010, she already had her ducks in a row.

One of the more interesting quirks of Electric Lady is how it handles Monáe's status in a world that rewarded her amply for self-expression three years ago but now expects even more from her as a result: you've proven yourself, in other words, now prove it more. The mainstream and mainline thought process of The Industry comes through in a myriad of guest spots, which are a testament to her status but also are -- fascinatingly -- burned through very quickly. Here's Prince (sounding better than he has in a while on the hard rock opener "Givin Em What They Love") and Solange on the slow but vibrant title cut that boasts pure-soul horns, closes out with a killer "wooo-hooo" chorus and namedrops Joan of Arc and Mia Farrow. Here's Erykah Badu again on the vibrant single "Q.U.E.E.N." that snakes around ballroom-style and hilariously, semi-sardonically deconstructs the gawking nature of excessive analysis over Monáe's tireless groove. "Is it peculiar that she twerk in the mirror," etc.

It's not as though these big, red-carpet pop songs aren't adventurous. In addition to lighting up any given moment, they're filled with verbal stuntwork, acrobatic vocals and a French Revolution shoutout; the first single descends into a meandering, bass-heavy horn freakout with hissing from Badu and Monáe for the last minute and a half. It's not as though Monáe wouldn't be good at a straightforward R&B album -- and frankly, I'd welcome something a bit leaner from her without the "suite themes" and weird radio-spot skits -- because we have the slow-jamming Miguel duet "PrimeTime" to show us all that. But intriguingly, all of these songs run one after the other for the first third of the album -- then with the guest stars out of the way, Monáe seems more than ready to move on. Without anyone else on the wings, she blows out into the stratosphere starting on the expansive "We Were Rock & Roll" and never looks back.

This is when we get to the good stuff. Monáe's preoccupations manifest everywhere: as enterprisingly elaborate production, as passionate singing, as clipped and robotic singing, as every bold, fresh, adventurous, strange thing she can come up with, but the album requires no "kitchen sink" disclaimer, not when its gathering up of threads and memories in and out of Monáe's consciousness and her penchant for crowd-pleasing manifests itself so warmly. Much as she may talk about droids, Monáe's strength is that she is always nothing less than a human being who loves music and loves playing it. That no one else has thought of revising "Tequila" into some joyous breakout with a smash-smash-bang-bang chorus ("Dance Apocalyptic," of course) shouldn't surprise you but that Monáe is the one to do it should not.

Monáe had investigated seemingly everything by the end, which is not much of a feat; Beck used to do this kind of thing with far less heartfelt investment, right? But "What an Experience" is more than some Ariel Pink lampoon of soft rock -- it's an improvement upon the music it draws on because it draws equally upon her memories of that music and the attendant feelings. The same for the synthpop of the brilliant "Dorothy Dandridge Eyes," the lush easy-listening sonics of "Sally Ride." It wouldn't be reasonable to suggest that Monáe improves on Stevie Wonder's records, uncannily evoked (Fulfillingness era, no less) on "Ghetto Woman," ditto Michael Jackson's on "It's Code," but the implications of her ability to effortlessly conjure up both while maintaining her unmistakable identity are obvious.

What's happening here is that Monáe is going all the way with her career as an act of extended ownership -- that is ownership of herself and of her image, yes, but also ownership of the past and of her own iconography. She sees the past in the future, and the other way around. She sees herself as fully prepared to assert her own voice as having a place in this jumbled-up pop music continuum, and she has every right to do so. It's not that "It's Code" is even a precise Jackson revision, it's a complex and tentative love song that channels Jackson but also finds a perfect voice for complex emotions, so perfect it's almost emotionally taxing to listen to it. She loves what we love, but she's possessed of the voice and the genius to express and respond to it all, and with such detail! (There's so much to discover here, and already there are moments -- like her "let me hear you say naaaaa" as "Victory" fades out -- that one senses will be pored over and adored for years to come.) If she sticks to this, she will be perhaps the formidable talent of our time. It already seems just about impossible not to love every freaking thing about her. It's not wishful thinking to suspect that this boundlessly delightful album is only the beginning.

Okkervil River: The Silver Gymnasium (2013)

(ATO)

RECOMMENDED

While other "major indie" artists of the 2000s have settled into a holding pattern, Will Sheff of Okkervil River has only buckled down into ever-mounting focus, intensity and singularity, issuing two and a half albums now of calm enough drama but defiantly limited appeal. You almost certainly have to have already been a fan of his group to enjoy the extremely personal, nostalgia-rooted Silver Gymnasium -- but those who already love their work will find much to pick apart and discover.

This is another in a long line of albums about childhood in (where else?) the suburbs, but Sheff's idiosyncrasies fortunately are his alone, and he has the lyrical restraint to avoid becoming overbearing or mawkish. His was a privileged youth -- he went to boarding school -- but the focus is less upon his own life than the larger, more universal reality of growing up with secrets, oblique beauty and an increasing consciousness of one's own strangeness. He's less interested than was Win Butler in how this all impacts the way he lives his adult life, but Gymnasium nonetheless pulsates with loss like a latter-day Kinks album.

It's to Sheff's credit that this all isn't strictly nostalgia but often permeated with fear and darkness, although it's hard to see how any of this is up to the standards set by his band's best albums -- it seems, in its fashion, too narrow. Opener "It Was My Season" is as good as anything they've done, a rolling piano ballad that towers with gentle longing, its theme of hidden romance powerful at any age. Like several songs on the first half, it sounds vaguely like Suede or Big Country conquering Americana. The band is tightly focused, dedicated passionately to these songs, which grow cloudier and more wistful until the rousing "Stay Young" and the beautiful finale "Black Nemo."

Sheff's preoccupations with the past are widely shared by his generation and are an understandable groundwork from which to operate. But some will be alienated by his intense focus, especially those who don't wish to go "back there" -- it's that vivid, that devoted. More telling is Sheff's vocal performance, which is his most professional and restrained thus far; it seems that the more consumed he is by something for album-length, the less likely he is to really let go.

[SEE ALSO:]
I Am Very Far (2011)
Golden Opportunities 2 EP (2011)

Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba: Jama Ko (2013)

(Out Here)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

As its accompanying press material is quick to announce, this album was made under considerable strife, in the middle of a military coup in Mali, the home country of Bassekou Kouyate and his band, Ngoni Ba. The lineup, which includes Kouyate's wife Ami Sacko and two of his sons, Moustafa and Madou, recorded the album in fits and starts as a nation fell apart around them, descending into chaos and oppression. This gives the terrific and beautiful Jama Ko an added pertinence, a grandness -- and a feeling of both unerring purpose and sorrow, fear of what is to come. As the existence of music itself is threatened in Mali, Kouyate and his family shine a light.

Anger is most evident on "Ne Me Fatigue Pas," fueled by a furious central jam by a plugged-in Kouyate. He is a master of the ngoni, a West African variation on the lute, and his virtuosity throughout this loosely, freely performed but tightly constructed album is never less than breathtaking. His solo on the brilliantly busy title track alone is more expressive than years' worth of guitar wank in Western music. But in the context of a band as well-traveled and intimate as this, his center-stage jamming is only a part of the influx of sound that reaches and instantly thrills the listener.

Many of the vocals here are provided by Sacko, whose wails of passion, anger and dread say everything one must know about the Malian plight and life under the threat of religious totalitarianism with or without a translation. Other vocalists come and go, including Kasse Mady Diabaté and the especially memorable melodic growl of Zoumana Tereta. With so much spontaneity driving the production, the vocals aren't at all smoothed over, which adds to the record's immediacy and underlines just how innately engaging it is. Even though the band's ferociously complex interplay is the main attraction, the songs each have a world unto their own as well -- you will, promised, be humming along by the second listen.

That's not to say the writing or blocking out of this music is simplistic. The first moments of "Sinaly" shift so quickly between menace, beauty, playfulness, solidarity of feeling and joy it sets the head to spinning -- conflicting emotions rule the day here, understandably. The long-prepared-for laying down of these performances onto tape is meant to be a joyous occasion, but the world intervenes and there is doubt. Kouyate and his band's achievement is to embrace the doubt, and the result is a genuine work of art: they have taken a fraught moment of disappointment and disturbance and defiantly captured it forever.

Does it matter if you know none of that? The thing is, you know something unusual is happening here spiritually whether you're aware of the relevant historical moment or not. But no, if you are interested in any kind of music meant to envelop and entice then you will respond with immense appreciation to the intricate wistfulness of "Madou," you'll feel the extended and delectably sustained groove of "Mali Koori" in your bones, and you will bob and shake along to the nasty straight-ahead blues of "Poye." This is a phenomenal, deeply affecting recording, an important one, but its essence is that it absolutely sears with intensity, grace, and the thrill of exciting music played with expertise and emotion.

Robin Thicke: Blurred Lines (2013)

(Interscope)

!! CAUTION !!

This album review prompts the first-ever Only Engine Music Blog sweepstakes. There is no prize, only the satisfaction of a job well done. Take a good long look into the luminous puppy dog eyes of the man on that hideously photographed album cover. Gaze into them, let them burn into you for a moment. Now, a question: do you think this man is concerned about the size of his dick? I know the answer, but to determine if your guess is correct you'll have to highlight the text below.

He is.

Robin Thicke is the rich American blue-eyed soul singer responsible for this past summer's major earworm "Blurred Lines," a toxic but undeniably infectious and endearingly weird plagiarism of Marvin Gaye's "Got to Give It Up." Lyrically, the song is a tiresomely simple-minded anthem of no-doesn't-really-mean-no, in which guise it's only slightly different from the average male-led pop hit about getting a woman drunk and leading her semi-involuntarily to your place, the operative phrase being "I know you want it," the implication being "I know better than you." That's bothersome, as is the giddily unbalanced video, but T.I.'s guest verse in which he imagines systematically ripping you to shreds is a lot worse, and Thicke is not the single person to blame for pop's weird "thing" about consensual sex not being sexy enough. For all its troubles, legal and ethical, it's the best song goofball loverboy douche Thicke will ever be involved with, so we hope he relishes his cultural moment.

Thicke looks a bit like the idiot from Sugar Ray and the bigger idiot Vanilla Ice, and the great lesson he offers is that hollow big-haired pop star dreams aren't generational. He has better stylists than Jimmy Ray or else who knows where he'd be. Outside of the audaciousness of the title cut and a series of agreeably generic R&B tracks that reflect some nostalgic craftiness (with titles like "Ain't No Hat 4 That" and "Ooo La La," we're using the idea of craft loosely), he presents us with bargain-basement funk and comes on like the biggest insecure crybaby in your OKCupid inbox, the kind of guy who asks "does it feel good" in the same guttural monotone about eighty times and that's just during the foreplay. The actual sex probably doesn't start because he's too busy announcing that you're not merely "sexy from the back," no, you are also -- perhaps not coincidentally? -- "sexy from the front."

The guy's a banana popsicle with a face. He idolizes Marvin Gaye and Prince but he'll end up joining a thousand Billy Joels, Bruce Johnstons and James Blunts trotting out showstoppers like the scrunched-face emotional "Good Life" to a small army of county fair attendees in 2053. I'll be the guy in the crowd requesting "How Bizarre" because now that I'm an old man I can't remember which phase of my life which one-hit dipshit came from.

Here's your guide to the notable songs on the rest of this "album": "4 the Rest of My Life" is the stupid ballad. "Top of the World" sounds like Seal's cover of "Fly Like an Eagle" and is readymade for a Pepsi ad. "Good Life" is one of the worst things I've ever heard in my life. The first few songs are pretty good. "Give It 2 U" is the followup to one of the year's best singles that happens to be one of the year's most awful singles, a hookless plod of ego and schmoozing by Thicke and several storied guests who should know better than to encourage him. Want to hear the rest? Buy the rights.

Are you still reading this? Okay, summary: Robin Thicke's a drag. A well known drag. We turn the sound down on him and say rude things. He's the kind of guy who buys a black leather couch and is like "I love it." I bet he has a really big car though.

Over the Rhine: Meet Me at the Edge of the World (2013)

(Great Speckled Dog)

RECOMMENDED

Probably the best double album of the year. Yeah, including that one.

Once playful, erotic and even slightly jazzy, Over the Rhine have evolved into one of the softest, most polite things I listen to. Even though it means they're unlikely to really blow my mind again, I don't mind the change much; their songcraft is still impeccable, Karen Bergquist's voice is still as hauntingly Linda Thomsponesque as ever, and their albums have ample room to fall into and paint a room with both calmness and yearning. After their last album helped me cope with the death of a family member, I had the chance to interview them, albeit by email, and I'm here to tell you that they don't particularly like being told that their music has come to sound "hushed" -- so let's be clear: it's emotionally intense as always, just very controlled and very wistful and pretty. "Agreeable" doesn't necessarily mean "unoriginal," you know.

Perhaps the best way to define OTR these days is to listen to their cover of the Band's "It Makes No Difference" on this album. That's even though both of them are writing some of their strongest songs these days; the way they turn the Robbie Robertson song around into something so intimate, closed-off yet full of hope, reminds you why less is so often more, in and outside of pop music. Producer Joe Henry, who also handled previous LP The Long Surrender, is a perfect match for the band -- amping up their often minimal arrangements into a swooning, enveloping sound that doesn't resort to sap or adult-contemporary overreach. If more bands learned to strike this balance, there wouldn't be such a stigma around "growing up" in a rock & roll context.

All this time, Bergquist and bandmate-husband Linford Detweiler are in my head, residual from the one conversation we had, telling me to stop making them sound like old fogies who've somehow stayed relevant. They remind me a bit of the couple played by Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen in Mike Leigh's Another Year -- tweeting about the beautiful, middle-of-nowhere farmhouse they purchased a couple of years ago (which largely inspired the outpouring of creativity on this album) and the lovely nights and fireflies and moonlit tranquil romance of it all, recording songs that make no bones about being taken in by and subservient to this specific beauty and harmony: they come across as a happy brood who simply know how fortunate they are. As stated in the film, they've found some way of leading by example and becoming a glow in a lot of lives.

There are supposedly limits to what we can say about harmony, but OTR's songs are hardly one-note in their attitudes or concerns, and I've never truly believed that was the case anyway. Meet Me is divided in half but the songs blend seamlessly together as a singular, moving experience. Berguist's vocals stick to a stirring low register until she very pointedly bursts out into oblivion on track number four, "I'd Want You." The songs are built around the joy of the performance more than hooks, but they are nevertheless superbly crafted and memorable; the first disc closes with an emotional climax of sorts in Berquist's "Wait," but from there the album hardly meanders.

It's so damn consistent, as this band always is, that one could get too lost to even notice how different the songs are, especially when the record is sequenced so well. Lay the lilting, solid-as-a-rock ballad "Baby If This Is Nowhere" and the impulsively romantic "All Over Ohio" together and in a certain guise they'd sound like a different mood on a different day, but Meet Me as a whole strikes such an unerring chord that the progression is natural.

And you could easily object to the sentimentality in Detweiler's lyrics on the latter cut, but you'd be missing strong evidence that he is proving himself (along with his wife) one of the best living composers of true Americana -- the fact that it's often unclear whether he is singing about love of a human or of his home, and the metaphorical power of that confusion, is a suggestive and provocative enough element to exemplify how well Over the Rhine continue to make music that feels effortlessly comfortable and yet challenges and pushes artistically. You can't buy emotions, but this is the next best thing.

[SEE ALSO:]
The Long Surrender (2011)

Run the Jewels (2013)

(Fool's Gold)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The world's changed. This is an official studio album that was released for free onto the web; if you like it enough, you can buy a physical copy. With its slapdash artwork and casual attitude to its own importance, Run the Jewels is hardly devoted to impressing you or instilling bloghype in its built-in audience. The two performers involved, El-P and Killer Mike, are already established and successful, and seem to have created this primarily because they enjoy working together, as discovered when El produced Killer Mike's excellent R.A.P. Music in 2012. So this strange artifact slips out like some kind of afterthought, until people hear it -- if said people have ears, they're impressed.

But there are side projects -- generally the creatively less-than-stellar product of musicians who don't necessarily have chemistry enjoying one another, or a solo artist having fun doing something that isn't a particularly good idea -- and then there is serendipity. Run the Jewels requires none of the standard apologies for either a stopgap release or an underground freebie. The album is like a lightning bolt, blazing through thirty-three ferocious minutes before you have much time to register it. That feeling remains the more you listen to the thing and try to discover its subtleties. They exist, sure (that apocalyptic opening on "A Christmas Fucking Mistake," the wall of sound on "Sea Legs"), but the blunt force of this record is what makes one want to return to it immediately after it's over; how often does one really listen to a new album and immediately feel they want more, right then?

In contrast to so much of what's labeled "alternative" rap -- a classification secured by the presence of Brooklyn noisemaker El-P, though even Mike can hardly be called a mainstream player at the moment -- RTJ comes on truly hard: badass, brutal and quick. The pair spits out imaginative, playful, often angry and aggressive rhymes over El's booming, crunching, minimal but impossibly heavy backbeats -- building brilliantly on his work with Mike last year. It runs through its ideas and changes so rapidly -- every single time, I look up and I'm surprised it's halfway over -- it's hard to pick out individual tracks or moments.

It's cruel to even separate specific cuts -- this is one of the scarce modern albums, like good kid, M.A.A.D city, that demands to be heard complete and in sequence every time. The guest spot by Big Boi is bang-on and it's delightful to hear Prince Paul's cameo, but this is completely the show of the two stars. They bounce off one another like old masters, each playing up the other's best points and reining in their indulgences, though both are thankfully as unafraid of addressing politics as ever. Best of all, they almost never stop rapping -- this is true hardcore hip hop, not an elaborate production flavored by occasional rap music elements, and if your favorite thing about this music is hearing a beat enhanced or even entirely provided by an MC's emotional and nonstop delivery, an immediate download is advisable. This isn't the best hip hop LP I heard this year but it's for sure the heaviest moment-to-moment, and possibly the smartest.

It all goes to show that one rapper I don't like all that much (usually find El-P's rapping too busy and lightweight, though I've got mad respect for him and I enjoyed his last release, and obviously he's a great producer) and one I love but was once ambivalent about (think R.A.P. was the first record to really harness Mike's personality) working together when they're completely on their fucking game is preferable to two rappers I practically worship (Jay-Z and Kanye West) only half-interested in their own collaboration, the technically superior rapper (Jay) on an off-day and the more eccentric and playful Yeezy not fully able to pick up the slack or find the right context to be his real self. And take a look at the release pattern for these two records. How much money was spent promoting -- not even recording -- Watch the Throne? And this instantly appealing, lean, dross-free stunner just showed up suddenly and is available to you for free. Its artists unmistakably cared about the product, even though most people hearing it will never even be expected to pay a dime for it. I don't know what it means, but it's provocative.

One-sentence reviews #13

We're in the home stretch, I promise. 14 or 15 more full reviews and one more of these and then [throws papers out window] BYE YALL. 2013 list will be up some time after just about everyone else's. I'll do better next year.

Boards of Canada
Tomorrow's Harvest (2013)
(Warp)

Almost thirty years too late to make a "Boreds of Canada" joke, and they deserve better, but this is one of those lingering downbeat things that just blows right in and out of my apartment like an unnoticed breeze.

***

These New Puritans
Field of Reeds (2013)
(Infectious Music)

!! CAUTION !! - So so precious -- classical aspirations, vocals derived from 19th century Portugese music, more session musicians than the Wrecking Crew and Polyphonic Spree put together, and yet its labored foreboding and schmaltz just sounds like where we always knew British "art rock" was headed, doesn't it?

***

Midnight Juggernauts
Uncanny Valley (2013)
(Record Makers)

Sad about this one, because they're one of the bands I feel I'm always championing to deaf American ears who wonder what it would be like if Muse was in on the joke; it's not sonically all that different from the previous two, but the writing's taken a dive, even if the group's wicked sense of outsized fun remains -- but I was in the minority position on Tame Impala too so don't be discouraged from checking in.

***

Surfer Blood
Pythons (2013)
(Sire)

!! CAUTION !! - Slick to the point of barely existing, this is polished major label surf-punk pap and exactly the wrong direction for a band that wrote great songs and distorted the hell out of them with glorious abandon, were potentially the next Barracudas; I'm not slamming it because the kid turned out to be an asshole -- I'd feel a hypocrite given the kind things I've written here and everywhere about Phil Spector (convicted murderer), James Brown (definite batterer), Sam Cooke (possible batterer), John Lennon (self-confessed (in a Beatles song, for heaven's sake) batterer) -- but I don't mind telling you it, as an ancillary, feels sort of good not to be telling you to buy this.

***

Dent May
Warm Blanket (2013)
(Paw Tracks)

Dude, you are so fucking smart and talented, please stop writing the same song over and over.

***

Speedy Ortiz
Major Arcana (2013)
(Captured Tracks)

Not really qualified to offer an informed take on this because it's heavily influenced by a branch of alt-rock (heavy post-grunge; I'm not hearing the Pavement comparison) that never did much for me growing up -- it sounds remarkably like something I'd have turned on the radio and heard around '96 and then turned off to go listen to synthpop -- but it's certainly convincing, passionate and crafty, with special notice to Sadie Dupuis' captivating vocals.

***

Fuck Buttons
Slow Focus (2013)
(ATP)

!! CAUTION!! - Still empty, and whether you like their boorish meandering or not, this does nothing you're not expecting it to when you turn it on, and it does that nothing at length.

***

KT Tunstall
Invisible Empire / Crescent Moon (2013)
(Blue Note)

RECOMMENDED - Hey, I actually liked this -- a little goes a long way, but Tunstall's whisper and acoustic guitar meld into a highly specific sad that makes for near-perfect mood music at the right lost moment.

***

Julianna Barwick
Nepenthe (2013)
(Dead Oceans)

!! CAUTION !! - Goofy vocal layering and careful key-pressing is no different from a gazillion New Agers, but neither are Fuck Buttons; they just know their own audiences and take the one-note atmospheres to their groan-inducing, lofty limit, by now so indulgently that the results are simply asinine to anyone excluded from that audience.

***

Forest Swords
Engravings (2013)
(TriAngle)

!! CAUTION !! - Laughed a lot the first time I heard it, because I set this to play just after the above album and honestly had no idea that one had ended and this one had started.

***

Nine Inch Nails
Hesitation Marks (2013)
(Columbia)

Could honestly echo every word I wrote about The Fragile in 1999 (had been a massive fan at an age when the PMRC would have not approved of me listening to "Big Man with a Gun") if I could find it; the point was/is, he is a fucking master -- one of the best creators of sound in the business, ever -- and if he would stop his perpetually adolescent whine from playing over all of it I'd be onboard, subsequently proven in the wild by his film scoring, but it's clearly just a taste quirk of mine by now.