Quote:
Originally Posted by Aloysius
Interesting choice, and completely new to me. I've listened to some traditional fado so that's probably my closest reference. Like MicShazam I dig hearing sung Portuguese, although it's taken me a long time and lots of listening to Brazilian Chôro to warm to it. Portuguese has a huge number of vowels and diphthongs which give the singing flow an uneven texture, especially compared to Spanish which is pretty much the direct opposite (having no dipthongs and all vowels of equal length).
For me this album has some great guitar and singing, and songs that are simple and sometimes great in their melancholia (especially Afinal - A Minha Cançáo). That brings me to the thing that often killed it for me:
The synth. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge synth fan, especially when it comes to synths sounding like synths, but those cheesy string sounds - fair enough if it's 80s pop but this isn't A Flock of Seagulls. It might seem petty but the synth really killed a lot of these tracks for me. Even so, there was enough here to still give this:
7/10
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Never thought about that difference between Portugese and Spanish. In fact, until about a year ago when I started listening to a lot of Portugese vocals, I had thought that it would sound basically exactly like Spanish. Interestingly, my parents visitet Lisbon for the first time this summer and they were very surprised by the language. My mom said it sounded like everyone was speaking Polish
It is also interesting to me how differently people react to non-English vocals on this board. Personally, the more different sung languages are represented in my record collection, the better!
Oh and btw, I completely get what you say about the synths, but personally, I tend to like synthesizers and the fact that it does not convincingly register as real strings or horns here just adds to a particular kind of texture and charm for me. I take it as more of an interesting mix of soundscapes than a problem.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rubber soul
I wouldn't get discouraged, Mic. Everybody has different tastes. As long as you enjoy it, that's all that really matters.
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Oh I'm not discouraged as such. People even quite liked my previous pick. It's more that it makes for bad album club fodder when an album gets predominantly "meh" reactions. Something more uniformly loved, hated or more divisive really gets the club going. That's why I'll try to be less nice next time. With this album pick, I think I was trying too much to make it something tasteful and likeable.