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Another Recommended Music Review

i keep trying to retire, really, i do. 

life in the Old Kinksters Retirement Home isn't all it's whip-cracked up to be, i must say. there are only so many times you can listen to Dom Raul cackle about the good ol' days before he spits up his breakfast mush onto the shuffleboard parquet. the days usually go downhill from there. 

the nurses are pretty, though, and most helpful when i have to open the recently-smuggled-in packages of new music. 

ah, music. one of the rare pleasures of life i can still enjoy here in the Moral Boonies of Advanced Decrepitude. and the point behind this email, no less (in case you thought arnora's doddering into some kind of febrile mindset; no, it's just the drugs). 

two new acquisitions this week worthy of reporting back to the land of the living (and since one of them scared the leakproof underpants of old Mistress Methuselana, i'd better review it before i get busted for sneaking up behind her and cranking her hearing aid right before i jammed the portable CD player up against her ear...) 

the first entry is the debut of an impish quartet of young string players who seem determined to turn the whole Classical Genre on it's ear. if you haven't heard of the Bond girls and their debut CD "Born" by now, you're obviously living in some deeper Dark Ages than even i do. 

oh yeah, it's all about the back beat, baby - even as your ear suddenly tells you this definitely isn't the same classical music your grandmother listened to (your grandmother says hello, by the way, and keeps whining about how you never come to visit anymore). all four ladies look like they were selected from some backstage trials for "Popstars", but don't let the stunning looks fool you. these women play a mean piece of cross-genre music, and what they offer on "Born" is nothing less than 13 tracks of Debussy-meets-Darude, with a hefty helping of the ambiguous "worldbeat" influence thrown in for good measure. 

the scary part is, it *works*. there isn't a single track on this debut that wouldn't cut it in a club under the blinking lights of the dance floor mega-mix. if there was ever a way to sneak classical music into an ungracious teenager's musical repetoire, Bond is the key. ok, so it still won't appeal to those die-hard Megadeath fans, but you can probably lure the odd Limp Bizkit groupie into the Bond fold simply by not pointing out there's classical music involved anywhere in the composition. 

if you're looking for something you can swing to, bop to, do the herbie-hancock-rockit dance to (good ghods, i *am* dating myself here, aren't i??), or scare yourself with at loud volumes, this is a disc you MUST add to your collection. do it. do it now. some of us aren't getting any younger, you know. 

the second entry is one i'm still not too sure about. a long while back, i reviewed a disc from various artists called "Wallpaper, Mach 1.5", a superlative disc of audio stylings best described as "technolounge". (Note to self: never use the back of the Geritol bottles for inspiration on descriptive text...). 

St Germaine's "Tourist" CD is in a similar vein, kind of a Moby-meets-Coltrane groove that's all about laying back the smooth sounds of a piano, high hat, and distant clarinet, and dubbing in some cool vocal loops. variations aplenty on the technolounge/jazz themes when the obvious synthesizers are added in. 

this CD has atmosphere, baby. when Uncle Kinkdaddy switches off your oxygen feed at supper because you scammed the last spoonful of mashed mystery vegetable, you can suck back a track or two of this disc and spend the night floating in trancetrax heaven. or you can use it as a lethal weapon to sever Uncle Kinkdaddy's catheter tube. the choice is yours. 

some of the tracks on this CD are a little harder to view as powering a public play party, but for a quiet, at home or low-key night of sexual depravity, *this* is the Soundtrack of Sexy, the Chorus of Cool, the Orchestration for Orgasm, baby. break out the leather smoking jackets and black berets - as soon as i fix my dentures, i'm going out to the Bingo Grannies and introduce them to Auntie Arnora's New Beat Poetry... 

(St Germaine's "Tourist" is available on the Blue Note label; Bond's "Born" is available on the Decca label.) 

arnora