Christopher O'Riley is on a roll. Recently he has parlayed his successful public radio gig into a public television gig; he also has two Radiohead transcription albums and one Elliott Smith transcription album under his belt (see below for a full list of Blogcritics reviews of O'Riley's albums). Now comes his latest transcription album, Second Grace: The Music of Nick Drake. For better or worse it's similar to the albums that preceded it: technically brilliant, undeniably deep in its understanding and love of the source material, but somehow less than compelling in overall execution despite some bright points.
The disappointment of this album is that the material O'Riley had to work with was so rich. Nick Drake, who has been wearing the "undeservedly obscure" label for so long that he's in danger of overexposure, produced both orchestral chamber-pop of high complexity and stark, isolated solo recordings before his untimely death after just three albums (official cause: overdose of antidepressants). The great thing about a Nick Drake song is that he could take that voice that ranged from low murmuring ("From the Morning") to high keening ("Black Eyed Dog") and his amazingly proficient acoustic guitar work and make songs of all flavors and descriptions come alive.
But -- and here is my bone with all Mr. O'Riley's pop transcriptions to date -- in his hands all Nick Drake's songs sound alike! Almost every track features the same curse: O'Riley's technically impressive transcriptions swamp the songs in complexity. Two years ago, I wrote of "Hold Me to This" that O’Riley's approach "too often ... yields a harmonically accurate overload of undifferentiated hemidemisemiquavers." Translated into plain English, I mean that the songs are occasionally in danger of losing their rhythmic integrity under the onslaught of rolling chords.
Exhibit 1: "Pink Moon." Made famous twenty years late in a Volkswagen commercial for its wistfulness, here it sounds hurried, busy, and way too cheerful. One supposes that the latter is unavoidable given the beauty and simplicity of the underlying melody; it is, after all, Drake's words ("And none of you stand so tall/Pink moon gonna get ye all") that carry the substantial menace of the song. But isn't this the job of the performer of a transcription: to bring across that unspoken menace through the performance, to compensate for the missing lyrics?
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1 - Connie Phillips
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