Music – Page 18

Is it really The Best Damn Thing? : The Avril Lavigne album review

My rating of Avril Lavigne’s album The Best Damn Thing: 8.7 / 10

One more album to fill my HD up with, thanks to Prashanth. Maybe he’ll get a GQB award this year for Most Reliable Download and Data Storage Center. This time, it’s Avril Lavigne’s album The Best Damn Thing, released this year in April.

Trivia Trove 1 – Avril means ‘April’ in French.
Trivia Trove 2 – Deryck Whilbey, Avril Lavigne’s husband co-produced this album, along with others like Pink.

After a much-disappointing Linkin Park performance in Minutes To Midnight, this one was a good respite. The actual track reviews were written a few days ago when I’d come back after a day out, so I was pretty tired to type out comments on some of the tracks below, and feel too lazy to do so now. However, I do have my track ratings here.

Girlfriend (5 / 5): Nice track to start with, unlike some other albums I’ve heard recently. This song was the first to be released, and made it to the top of the charts in the US.
I Can Do Better (4.2 / 5): Hey, she’s right. She CAN do better. Why make a song which gets a 42 x 10^-1 rating? Jokes apart, I might have given this a higher rating, but I thought the rating would complement the title. 😉 The irritating bit? The giggles!
Runaway (4.4 / 5): Slow intro, which almost made me give this a low rating, and then the good bit kicked in and I wanted to give it a higher one, and just then it got slow again…oh forget it. Anyway, I hated the slow bits which interspersed an otherwise good song.
The Best Damn Thing (4.1 / 5): For an album titled such, I’d expected this song to be the best. But it wasn’t to be. Ironic, the title and my rating, isn’t it?
When You’re Gone (3 / 5)
Everything Back But You (3.8 / 5): Gets a lower score because the intro wasn’t that good; however it picks up pace later and redeems the song.
Hot (4.5 / 5)
Innocence (5 / 5): This one was so good!
I Don’t Have To Try (4.5 / 5): DON’T play this on a speaker in front of your parents – it uses MF at least 5-6 times.
One Of Those Girls (4.6 / 5)
Contagious (3.9 / 5): The last bit reminded me of one of my fave ads, but damn, I can’t recall the brand.
Keep Holding On (2.9 / 5): (Comparatively) monotonous lyrics.
I Will Be (3.7 / 5): It was pretty standard all through, until the last minute which was good. It was a pretty nice song otherwise.
Alone (5 / 5): Note that this is a bonus track released only in the deluxe version of the album.

Headphones-On Warning! Do heed the my advice and use headphones – some of these tracks can’t be played at full volume. Although it’s not the SoaD type ‘language issue’ which you might have with parents, it’s better to be safe in case your parents are conservative. MF is used quite a few times in some of the songs (and I don’t mean old bearded Indian exiled painters over here).

On the whole, this one was a major improvement over LP which I heard a few days ago, which might explain the high ratings, or maybe I really DID like them. Overall, I’d say this is much better off than Linkin Park. Note to self – watch out for Lindsay Lohan’s new album – she’s gonna start work on it in July (IF and WHEN she gets out of rehab / police custody), and would be out six months after that. Note to self 2 – need to get Hilary Duff’s new album too.

Oh, and why so many music reviews suddenly? Well, I’ve this list of posts to do which is around 42 ideas, and I was sorta getting bored of the topics which I take up to blog about generally, which include tech, Tech, tEch, teCh, TecH and tecH. Er, did I mention tECh?

Pirates of the Carib: At World’s End Soundtrack Review

Music By: Hans Zimmer

The Curse of the Black Pearl (by Klaus Badelt, in collaboration with Hans Zimmer) was fun, Dead Man’s Chest (by Hans Zimmer) was silly, and now with World’s End, Zimmer rounds off his Pirates‘ bounty of soundscapes with a mega flourish-not always gripping, but mostly flourishy, silly and yes, with the swashbuckling swagger so important in a Jack Sparrow film. If ye liked the old themes from the Pirates movies, be warned, there aren’t many reprises of those. Heck, even the Jack Sparrow theme from Dead Man’s Chest makes just fleeting appearances in its original form. Forget about the Klaus Badelt themes, you really need to be alert to pick them up in I Don’t Think Now Is The Best Time and Drink Up Me Hearties. But having said that, these reprises are quite pleasing. Surprisingly, the Tia Dalma theme from Dead Man’s Chest gets more time than Jack Sparrow.
Moving on to original music written for this movie, Zimmer basically wrote two extremely lengthy themes-the Pirates Theme (based on the song Hoist the Colours) and the Love Theme. These, he broke up and wove them really well into the almost every cue. Personally, I found the Love Theme to be more heroic and flourishy than the Pirates Theme. Funny, considering that this was a Pirates movie, not a romantic caper. But, this theme lent the flick a certain grandeur and scale, missing from the first two movies. But then again, maybe this film is really about the love between Will and Elizabeth. Certainly fits in with the surprise ending, that you can see coming just before the climax.
The album starts with Hoist the Colours, which I think is a traditional pirate/seaman’s song (but since I was too lazy to actually check this up, I might well be wrong…), and seeing its use in the film, I get goosebumps each time I listen to it. This gets reprised a number of times, without the vocals. We then move on to Singapore, a pretty decent track which incorporates the East India Company/Beckett theme from Dead Man’s Chest with the theme for the new pirate character, Sao Feng. Multiple Jacks and the Brethren Court are equally silly tracks, having an “off”, out of tune rendition of Jack Sparrow. Seeing that they are for an extremely silly, self centred and moronic bunch of pirates, they actually do make sense in the movie and, on the soundtrack, they can be used to irritate someone, much like the Willy Wonka track from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
I Don’t Think Now Is The Best Time is the big action piece of the movie. Big, in terms of orchestration and length. At 10:46, it’s a wee bit too long. But then, it has good reprises of many of major and minor themes from the previous two movies and, woven exquisitely in to all this is the grand Love Theme. In the movie, it plays out during the climactic fight sequence (which, by the way, is very funny), it is quite brisk. Playing for most of its 10 minute running time, underneath the main orchestra, is a moving line, much in the style of Zimmer’s Da Vinci Code. It certainly adds a bit of extra motion to the whole track.
Drink Up Me Hearties rounds off the album with re-orchestrated He’s A Pirate theme from Curse of the Black Pearl (which, Dead Man’s Chest so sorely lacked). This blossoms into a beautiful rendition of the Love Theme, performed strongly in an epic manner. It comes to a close with final orchestral swell, and the album comes to an end.
Problems with the score: the lack of the reprises, and its slow/choiry tracks (the ones where the Tia Dalma theme gets inordinately long reprises). But mostly, one track: Parlay. WHAT THE HECK IS AN ELECTRIC GUITAR DOING IN A PIRATE MOVIE!?!!! And that too, in such a thinly veiled manner. It’s a western influenced track, an ode to Ennio Morricone, but still, you can’t just so blatantly have an electric guitar in a movie set so clearly in the pre electricity era. Dead Man’s Chest also had something like this-what everyone mistook to be electric guitars in the Kracken theme. Instead, it turned out to be a regular orchestra pumped out through a guitar amp. Besides the point. What I really mean is that that track used the electric amp effect so well. While in this, when I first heard it, I thought that something was wrong with PVR’s audio system, that music from some other movie was being played. And then, the dialogues begun, and horror, horror, I realized that that trashy piece of populist writing was indeed Zimmer’s, and that too, for this movie only.
Well, mostly the soundtrack was a pleasant listening experience, Parlay notwithstanding. Certainly not the best Zimmer effort, but quite good. It brought the swashbuckling pirates element (which really was missing in the first two soundtracks) into this franchise, and for that I’d recommend this soundtrack. That, and the amazing Love Theme….