Saturday, May 2, 2009

Orchestral manoeuvers in my head

I know nothing about classical music.
I know nothing about orchestras.
I do not know woodwind from brass.
I do not know what a conductor is doing with his hands.
I do not know how to even begin to understand sheet music.
I do not know my e-bow from my oboe.
I do not know my arse from my oboe.

However...

I do know that, when certain good artists I like get a very large and very serious orchestra behind them to lay layers of massive sound over their wonderful music, it is as cool as fuck.

I am, once again, a philistine, and somewhat proud, or at least unashamed, of it.

This bout of unexpected railing against proper highbrow music unless applied in very particular circumstances where it is used as epic backdrop for some music I actually do like was inspired by the new Elbow CD/DVD box set of 'Seldom seen kid'. This version of the album was recorded live at Abbey Road studios with the BBC Concert Orchestra and an award-winning choir called Chantage. The box with this new version, by the way, includes both CD and a DVD of the performance plus a booklet and pictures; this clearly shows that the record companies were reading my recent post about how the Radiohead boxed sets were enough to get me buying CDs again by offering something fundamentally non-downloadable.

Anyway, Elbow (and oboes) in full flight in this session performing 'One day like this' can be seen here:





Just look at that! What an enormous group of musicians playing mysterious (to me) and somewhat outsized and outlandish instruments, building together a veritable cathedral of sound, flooding further beauty into the already vastly swollen grandeur of the original song. The unbelievably rich sound perfectly encapsulates and compliments the wide-eyed romanticism of the lyrics, with its beautifully captured images of someone realising one morning that life, and love, just doesn't come much better than this ('what made me behave that way, using words I'd never say, I can only think it must be love....'cause, holy cow, I love your eyes') and concluding that 'one day like this a year would see me right'. It really does feel like an ode to joy, especially when the choir just let rip towards the end and it goes on and on and round and round. I also love the look on the singer's face towards the end of the song, as if he is simply overwhelmed by the tidal wave of noise that he has been responsible for unleashing.

Of course, the orhestral bits still are a mystery to me; what is the enormous drumkit you get to see around 5 min 30 sec? Why do they need so many of the same-looking instrument? Why don't they just have one and make it louder (a variation on the Spinal Tap principle)? And what the hell is the conductor doing???

Anyway, moving along, the version of 'Weather to fly' from the same session is below; while not as naturally orchestral as the previous song, this is just such a wonderful song I had to include it.





Elbow's accompaniment included 52 orchestra members and 20 choir members; that is a lot (and I wonder if they all liked the album!).

However, it is admittedly not as many (when the final of the 'who can assemble the most ginormous orchestra for their song' competition comes down to the wire) as Sigur Ros assembled for 'Ara Batur' from their last album 'Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust' (and no, I have no bloody idea how to pronounce it, but it translates into English somewhat pleasingly as 'With a buzz in our ears we play endlessly'). The film below for this incredible piece of music, reaching a crescendo in its final minutes unlike just about anything my limited appreciation of such matters can begin to describe, depicts over 90 musicians giving it something of a lash, to put it mildly.





One of my other favourite bits of music which has clearly benefited from some serious accompaniment by proper musicians far more used to black tie dress and civilised galas than rock concerts is Suede's 'Still Life', the (presumably unofficial) video for which below allows us to gape in wonder at the moment at around 2 min 30 sec when the orchestra bursts into full flight, in a way that always makes me think of an image of running through sunlit meadows, but in a good way.





I will finish this post with two of my own poor quality clips of moments from recent gigs where strings and more have added something special. The first is from a Tindersticks concert in Cork in November 2008, where a string quartet (to left of stage) added a wonderful dimension to great songs like 'Buried bones' (from which this snippet comes).





Tindersticks' music has always sounded like they could hear an orchestra playing along, even if we couldn't, and their early live CD from the Bloomsbury Theatre where they actually did get such accompaniment for real is well worth a listen.

An artist less intuitively linked with such pomp is Josh Ritter, but he played a wonderful gig in Vicar Street in Dublin just before Christmas 2008 with a 24-piece orchestra behind him and his band, and it was quite magical, as the clip below of the start of an extra-special seasonal version of 'Kathleen' shows. Josh's sheer joie de vivre and adoring fans always make one of his shows a grin-inducing spectacle, and I look forward to seeing him (plus orchestra) again in Cork this July.






And finally, sticking with Mr Ritter, he can do pretty special things with just a String Quartet, as can be heard from the MP3s of 'Girl in the war' and 'Empty hearts' which can (hopefully still) be found here.

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