Monday, February 25, 2013

#773 Billie Holiday - Lady in Satin

Look, I'm not a sexist guy. You might even be right to call me a feminist if we can agree on what the fuck that means. But as a matter of preference, I find myself pretty tough to please when it comes to female singers, and if they're warbly and inflected, doubly so. That's the heart of the problem here: the instrumentation is rich and nuanced and cool, but Holliday's nearing the end of her career by now and she doesn't sound great to me. Sacrilege I'm sure. Plus, goddamn, how many torch songs do you need to put on one album? It was truly another time, I'm often reminded.

As an aside, don't listen to those 1001 albums before you die. I was using it to get nudges on some early albums for a little while there, and it lead me to some pretty darn good albums through the 750's or so of this project. I even considered knocking off the rest of the list, but then I realized I'd only heard half of the entries, and I'm a pretty well-listened guy. Curious. I looked a little closer and read a bit and details like its inclusion of three (3) Pet Shop Boys albums and three (3) Dexy's Midnight Runners albums suggest that maybe I need not follow it to slavishly. Guess I'll have to find another way to decide how to die with some albums, and not others, under my belt.

Oh right, Billie Holiday. Classy lady, not my scene. Like aggressively no 1.5/5

No comments:

Post a Comment