YAY! New Musickz Update PART ONE!

This is mostly a music blog... yeah, yeah I know we do the News Toilet but that's just to let you know what's going on in the rest of the showbiz world because if we just stuck to critiquing music, we'd post on here about once a year and that WOULDN'T DO, WOULD IT?!

Anyway... 2009 is already shaping up to be a quite good year for music!

One of the (small) problems with doing a collective blog is that there are obviously conflicting opinions and sometimes one writer will write about something that the other writers haven't even HEARD, but that's not going to stop me writing about the good albums released so far this year...

And no, I'm still not talking about Lily Allen (who's album, btw, is the same song sung 12 times in 12 different keys about 12 different things... but still... the same song with the same structure, same basic musical premise and same reliance on an insistant 'QUIRKY' sample)... ANYWAY.

Here we go:
This is Vienna's 4th studio album and until now she was sort of comfortably filling the niche of vanilla, inoffensive, cutesy version of Regina Spektor or Tori Amos. You know... pretty, crazy girl who makes piano music. She had some fantastic inspired touches on her older albums including a devestating song called Pontchartrain about the flood in New Orleans which saw her voice overdubbed to sound like a deathly choir, and a beautiful folk song sung in Chinese, but her main selling point was that her songs are often instantly memorable, catchy and contain dreamy piano riffs.

Anyway she also had some horrible miss-steps including forays into lounge jazz, a cringe-worthy acapella song about dying in a car crash and a horrible tendency to SOUND like a Christian artist, when we actually think she was aiming for Christian-related controversy a la Tori.

ANYWAY... her new album sounds like an entity in itself and some of the twee piano has been abandoned in favour of more interesting and varied production (it sounds more expensively produced, too). The more "country" touches may prove to be irritating with time, but for now this is an enticing and beautifully rendered little record, and her best yet.

Nice!

Also tickling our fancy recently is Trick by J-Pop Goddess Koda Kumi and Fever Ray (a.k.a. her out of The Knife)'s debut album... more of which later...