Crushing Krisis

The Newest Oldest Blog In New Zealand

Archives for January 2011

Crushing On: Ricola Throat Drops

by

Up until about two years ago the only think I knew about Ricola were those old commercials. You know what I’m talking about.

Riiiiii-cola.

When something enters the public unconscious before I get to have a personal experience with it I tend to mentally write it off. Like, they’re just some stupid cough drops that blew their marketing budget on one big commercial.

Seriously, I have been like that since age six. Totally other story.

Anyhow, about two years ago E had begun equipping herself Ricola cough drops before rehearsals. I didn’t have an urge to try them, but in the way of our household eventually I was in a pinch and ferreted one away from her to try.

They totally taste like this looks.

Instant addiction. Even though they are mentholated, they don’t have the chemically menthol taste of other cough drops (like the Ludens I used to mainline as a kid). They taste like actual herbs and whatever else is included in the flavor you pick up, with just a mild radiating zing of menthol in the midst.

The flavor we’re specifically fixated on is Honey Lemon with Echinacea, which not only is a dead ringer in taste for the special voice tea that E makes us when we’re gigging a lot, but has the added effect of giving a teeny Echinacea immune-boost in every drop, plus some Vitamin C.

Placebo or not, I rarely leave home to gig or rehearse without Ricola in my bag. Even if it’s entirely my imagination, if the occasional ten cent cough drop helps soothes my throat after strenuous singing and keeps me in good health, I say it’s worth both the expense and the delusion.

So, I guess a bunch of yodeling dudes on television were more than just hype. Score one against the skepticism learned in my childhood.

Recommended: The Bird and the Bee – A Tribute to Hall and Oates

by

Krisis’s Recommended Releases of 2010:
The Bird & The Bee – Interpreting the Masters Volume 1: A Tribute to Daryl Hall and John Oates

I won’t lie – I immediately discount the quality of cover records.

As a musician I certainly understand the allure. Whether it’s the sheer joy of performing a favorite tunes or having a new interpretation on an old favorite, there’s something special about inhabiting someone else’s song.

The Bird and the Bee - Interpreting the Masters, Vol. 1: A Tribute to Daryl Hall & John Oates. Released 3/23/2010.

But a whole album? Arrangements, studio time, pressing CDs, promotion – all for someone else’s songs that have had that same attention foisted on them before? It takes a pretty special artist-and-cover combination to make it seem anything but indulgent.

Enter The Bird and the Bee, a duo producing delicate, lounge-tinged electro-pop, and their 2010 record indulged not on covering a bevy of favorite artists, but just one: Hall and Oates.

Daryl Hall and John Oates amassed a towering number of hits in the 70s and 80s that will strike you as instantly familiar even if you don’t recall them by name. Somehow, the pair of Philadelphia sons fell out of favor with the past two decades of rockers. Bird and Bee make amends for the oversight by re-recording nine of Hall & Oates’ biggest hits with an obsessive eye to detail on On Interpreting the Masters Volume 1: A Tribute to Daryl Hall and John Oates.

The markers of Hall & Oates are present on every song – articulate and playful lyrics, groovy bottom-shaking bass lines and shimmering multi-part harmony. Really, as you hear these versions it’s hard to imagine what’s missing from the originals, no matter how well you have them committed to memory.

The originals - Hall & Oates

That’s all well and good – reconstructive surgery, an exercise in mixing board plastics. They do it every week on American Idol and Glee, and it’s usually both as sweet and as substantial as cotton candy.

Are these takes any different?

Yes. Yes yes yes, a thousand times affirmative. Interpreting the Masters is cotton candy sweet but with a rock hard center that can last through endless replays. It is a record of lasting quality, and definitely not an indulgence.

The band pays deliberate, loving tribute to Hall and Oates with electronic arrangements that are elastic but not overboard. They stretch around the originals to cocoon familiar songs with subtle enhancements. “Sara Smile” is the same slow-dance, seductive ballad;“Maneater” barely differs from the original, still thrillingly sparse.

At points the fidelity is so close that it sounds like the originals were remastered, gleaming with modern production, only in the process a seductive female vocalist was discovered on the master tapes. But unlike a remaster, this isn’t just a nostalgia act for dedicate fans. Knowledge of the originals is in no way a prerequisite to enjoying these songs, each reimagined as a modern day pop masterpiece in its own right.

...and the interpreters - The Bird and the Bee

Vocalist Inara George brings so much depth to her delivery – much more than the detached croon she adopts on the band’s familiar originals. She plays the coquette only on “I Can’t Go For That,” a genius read on the aloof lyrics. The original groove is dressed up with trickles of organ and descending synthesizer riffs, all of which are torn verbatim from the original but given more weight here.

Lead-off “Heard It On the Radio” received the most substantial reinterpretation, made aggressively modern and adorned with tiny blasts of electric guitar. George lets in a hint of weariness on the verses “Kiss On My List” before urgently confessing, “your kiss is what I miss when I turn out the lights.” “Rich Girl” has wheezing electronics that sound like cathode television sets blinking out over and over again. The song’s kiss-off sounded playful from Hall & Oates, but George delivers it with girl-on-girl violence – a subtle take on verses (with lyrics like “you’ll never be strong”) married to her pointed read on the chorus (admonishing, “it won’t get you too far”).

Interpreting the Masters Volume 1: A Tribute to Daryl Hall and John Oates is the best kind of cover album – it expands the palette of an inventive band, and finds ways to breathe new life into originals that never died out to begin with.

It’s hard to imagine the band mining any other pop catalog with similar results (adding a number to the title suggests a Volume 2?), but what non-Philadelphian would have guessed that they’d find such sure success with Hall and Oates?

bolt

by

The pressure on my chest has almost entirely subsided.

First, my life had to grind to a complete halt when I became actually too sick to go to work which was quickly followed up by the one-two punch of our snow-storm and losing my voice completely on the same pair of days.

That was unspeakably lovely, let me tell you.

Losing my voice is terrifying for me. You’d think as an only child with a constantly-running internal monologue I wouldn’t mind it so much, since I grew up entirely inside my own head. Yet, on some days my voice is the only thing in my life I feel like I have real control over. I know it can be quick and swishy when I’m talking at rapid-fire pace, but I’m a long way from the boy with no indoor voice or the guy who lost his voice after every big show. I know how to use my voice with intent now, and it’s a big part of my identity – even beyond singing

That’s why this week was so punishing – I didn’t do anything wrong, really, except sing lightly on it for one night, but my entire chest area was in an precarious enough state of affairs that that did me in.

The terrible thing is that in this new age of Peter when I lose my voice I go into this shame/self-pity spiral where I don’t want to do ANYTHING. I had planned to do a special recording project to promote the show last night (more on that tomorrow), and I couldn’t do that. Then I went into petulant mode, where I didn’t want to do anything for the blog because I was angry that being sick put me off my blog schedule.

I remembered a time before my voice really mattered to me – before I even had an inkling of singing and was still a neophyte on the stage. Back then my voice wasn’t what you’d hear out loud coming from my mouth. It was my words on a page. And, even being so hoarse that it hurts to squeak out a whisper can’t deny me that.

So, I started the next book of my NaNoWriMo project. Actually, more than started it – I wrote over 10,000 words in two days, a total bolt of plot I had only a vague idea of before I started.

Now I have my voice back (shockingly intact after last night), the start of a new book, and a chest newly free of pressure.

It feels really good.

pressure on my chest

by

I claim not to make New Year’s Resolutions, but that doesn’t stop me from taking on a slew of new projects every January and getting crushed under their collective weight.

They’re not resolutions, I reason, they’re fresh starts. Lots of projects, blogging, and singing in store for the new year that simply didn’t make sense to start in the bustle of December due to all the holiday downtime. It’s a wishlist of personal creativity, every successive idea mounting like a weight against my heart and mind, lest I let it slip away.

Not coincidentally, I have a similar streak of getting sick every January for the past few years, which leads directly into my debilitating, house-bound February Funk. It doesn’t matter if I get a flu shot, take my vitamins, eat well, get good sleep, and slam down OJ all day. Somehow, some way, a tickle of sickness finds its way into my throat until it becomes tightness in my chest.

I hate it.

First, because I am not that person. I don’t get sick. Or, I didn’t, but now I do with great predictable accuracy, and I hate it.

Even more, I hate that it completely derails my ambition for the year – playing gigs, recording projects, and new songs all go by the wayside while I’m hoarse and scratchy for half a month.

This week I started feeling that familiar, dreaded tickle and fought back hard.  More vitamins, more food, more sleep, and more OJ. I seem to have staved off the actual illness, but I’m still feeling the after-effects – the pressure on my chest.

I hate it, and it made learning vocals to our new Filmstar song hard, it’s going to make my rehearsal of our Garbage tribute set suck, and it transformed the advertising tour of the airport I just walked through into a special kind of marathon.

That’s all fine. It is not getting into the way of my plans for 2011. There will be no February Funk.