Mouth Off 10.04.09
Listen to the show right here:
Or use this link to download the mp3 and take it with you.
Around the Horn AcappellaFest, Whiffs turn 100, Basix was on TV (and so was Bill Hare!), Club For Five’s waygood new album, CNN and Washington Post and WSJ are talking about Glee, SoJam college competition vids are due!, Psych goes aca, 21 Tips for Ruining Your Rehearsal, Buble loves Naturally 7, DeltaCappella is honored, how to digitally market your aca music, the Real Group has a new Real Album and a Real Community. Really.Music from the Future Kendall Young from Kettering High School’s group Eleventh Hour is 17 going on 30. Her performance on their yet-to-be-released Bareilles track “Bottle It Up” is like whoa.
Song Suggestion Christopher wants someone to arrange Muse‘s “Resistance” and send it to him. Kthxbai.
Names You Should Know On the eve of Don Gooding‘s retirement from a cappella, Dave takes a moment to laud Don’s tremendous contributions to the a cappella community. And Don appreciates the compliment about his mustache.
Arrangement Spotlight Lilli Lewis‘ style of arrangement and performance is super organic, and it reminds us all that we don’t always need fancy tricks and jens and jos to make good music. Just clap yo’ hands and sing.
Album Review Hunky Danish sextet Basix has delivered a double-disc, all-original album for your listening pleasure. Dave loves the first disc, and especially the funky, groovy tracks; but he uses the boring songs on the second album to teach a lesson about editing yourself. Christopher had a few favorites, but the obvious song lyrics and faux boy band style sometimes felt like a big dude in the gym trying to express his feelings.
Comments
Leave a Reply
Visit Mouth Off on
Hey guys,
I just wanted to respond to your album review of The Basix by saying that I completely agree with you. While all original music is awesome, Duwende knocks it out of the park. The most recent Basix album is more like a sacrifice fly. The extremely compressed soul-less Euro boy band sound just doesn’t do it for me.
HOWEVER…
No studio producer or engineer can do the group justice compared to the energy and committment they give to their live audiences.
They came to Colorado last year to perform for 500 University of Denver students and their live show was absolutely amazing. The sound and energy on stage was unlike anything I had ever seen. (Groups I have seen: Duwende, Toxic Audio, Rockappella, Mpact, House Jacks, Naturally 7 etc etc)
Much like the live Naturally 7 show, their sound engineer was part of the band and their songs came to life for me during the concert. My perspective and opinion about their last album was completely transformed once I saw them perform and perhaps they will have the opportunity to win you over on some of their “less than appealing” arrangements.
Love the show and thank you for providing me with an hour’s worth of thought provoking procrastination.
Yes, but… Isn’t that just it?
This topic has been floating around in my head ever since I did S2N ’08. Recording “Say (All I Need)” with the gang was a major departure for me, because the group I’m in focuses exclusively on the live performance. In the meanwhile, here’s Bill, taking our sheet music for the week and throwing it out the window, at which point we proceeded, more or less, to IMPROVISE a recording, one that we wouldn’t've been able to perform live if we wanted to (Ricky RARB Reunion Tour ’10?). And then I found out that a lot of “real” bands record that way exclusively–go into the studio, invent the coolest, most elaborate tracks they can, and then dumb it down for the live performance. Evidently, “Bohemian Rhapsody” is the new industry standard.
The point is there is always going to be a huge discrepancy between the live show and the CD–one of the two will always be disappointing in comparison to the other. (Unless you’re the Stanford Harmonics. But they don’t count, the same way you excluse “God” from the World’s Strongest Man contest.) And yet the statement I made is not true, because, when you’re in the studio, you can COMPENSATE for however not-as-good-as-our-live-show the tracks end up sounding. That’s what a studio is FOR, that’s WHY we put on all the auto-tunes and reverbs and bass doublings and stuff like that–because a CD is a different animal than a live show, and is judged on different terms. Performing live is one thing, and there are plenty of excuses for mistakes there–like the perennial “13 people, 8 microphones” problem my group faces all the time. But if your CD sounds disappointing, it’s your fault, because you have complete control over it and any mistakes on it are mistakes you CHOSE to make. (And my group’s latest CD is FULL of chosen mistakes, so I’m not just saying that.)
Me, I prefer the focus on live performance; and I’m okay with the fact that, until I get my act together as a mixing / recording engineer, our CDs won’t sound great BECAUSE we focus on live performance. Evidently, Basix feels the same. But us making a mistake on purpose doesn’t make it any less bad. o_O
I completely agree with you about the basix! great reviewwwwwwww
I haven’t heard Basix, live or recorded, so I don’t know how to rate your review of their album, except to say that I was surprised how little thought or attention was given to the originalness of the project, particularly given how vocal Dave is about original music in a cappella, and particularly how much it was hyped as an album of all originals.
College a cappella is always starting from a position of strength, since they are ‘stealing’ hits that have been delivered to their doors on a silver platter. A typical a cappella CD is just a greatest hits collection from the last decade (or two or three depending on the focus), where every song is a great song. I would have liked to hear that addressed: most ‘real’ albums, even by the best bands in the world, will have several clunkers on them; many have mostly clunkers with a few radio hits. Wouldn’t it be more interesting to look at the album from that perspective instead of comparing it to the hundreds of a cappella retread albums?
How does the album stack up to other a cappella originals albums? Was Duwende Collective an aberration, or is that what we should expect from all pro originals albums? How did the writing stack up? Did the production suffer because they were original songs that they had no original to base it on?
My question I guess is, are you scaring people off from writing originals, something you claim to support the opposite of, by treating the album as a typical a cappella album instead of viewing it in a different perspective?
Love the podcast. Love Christopher and Dave. Love Alli. Also love how you are open to discussion. Rock on, Mouth OFF!