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...Volt and Uncle Tupelo fame—collaborate to craft a soundtrack to an upcoming documentary about Jack Kerouac’s 1967 novel “Big Sur.” Lyrics for the soundtrack are entirely drawn from the novel’s text, but while the project’s concept is intriguing, the album itself proves disappointing. Though certain tracks skillfully utilize the duo’s unique vocal talents, featuring pleasant enough instrumentation like rich piano and sultry bass, the album suffers from poorly chosen and sloppily crafted lyrics, which are often weakly delivered over...
Unsurprisingly, the album’s haphazardly culled lyrics often resemble an incongruous mishmash of words that aspire to poetry, but largely remain trite and poorly-culled from the original text. Even if one didn’t know the lyrics were patchworked from a novel, it’s easy to tell that the songs are at least somewhat internally disconnected, as each tune fails to tell a complete story and doesn’t quite form a lyrically unified whole...
...melodies. By contrast, Farrar’s deeper, rougher twang enlivens gritty, hard-up tracks, but his nasally drawl drags down slower paced songs, making them sound whiny, not wistful. On the whole, this album, though fortified by a few well-crafted tracks, fails to adroitly engage its source text and the vocal talents of its creators...
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...raincoat, they are not individualized. There are no “left-handed” umbrellas or “gluten-free” umbrellas. They are the everyman of protection from the elements. Consider the case of a lost pencil. You are rummaging in your bag to surreptitiously text someone, but then your eyes dart to an abandoned light-green pencil right under your seat. Of course you take it. Who is going to frantically come running into the classroom bawling over a lost pencil? Umbrellas and pencils both belong to that anonymously ubiquitous class of items; umbrellas simply...