A most enjoyable find.
Don’t know why I picked this one over all of the other Tindersticks albums in my library. I just did… and I’m not regretting it.
Today the discovery listen prize goes to…
Strange I never have heard of this album here in Colombia; recorded in Cuba with the backing of Chucho Valdés and his band, this meets the local gusto quite well…
What a great funky listen!
Indeed I am.
Metadata says recorded in 2014 but released in 2022? Usually that’s a bad sign but this is a good listen.
Olivia Vermeulen, a mezzo-soprano from Holland who studied in Germany, has been gifted with a beautiful voice, and on this recently released album she has ample opportunity to shine with great vocal and musical versatility.
After their 2020 release Dirty Minds, the new release Hello Darkness is the second collaboration between Vermeulen and the German pianist Jan Philip Schulze. It’s somewhat of a tour de force of pieces about death in many forms, murder, murderers, etc… from Monteverdi’s Lasciatemi Morire from his lost opera Arianna, to songs by Billie Eilish, Nick Cave, John Cage, Danger Dan, Schubert, Schumann, Mahler, Alban Berg, and many others… The transition from track 1 (baroque opera) to track 2 (Billie Eilish’s Listen Before I Go) produces quite a shock. And there’s more of that on this album.
Fron an online review: Five centuries of death in 26 songs and nevertheless an album that is anything but depressing.
