Vocal

For more than 40 years, Neil Diamond has been a fixture on the world's music scene. He's had countless hits and hit records, been the butt of jokes and created numerous sing-a-longs that are heard just about everywhere -- "Sweet Caroline" among them.

Surprisingly, it was his 2005 album, 12 Songs, that brought him back up toward the top of the charts and his 2008 release, Home Before Dark, that scored him the first number-one album of his career. Many give credit for that achievement to uber-producer Rick Rubin who got Diamond to strip away all the glitz and glam and go the way of James Taylor. Diamond has recently stated that he'll work with Rubin on his next album, but that it will probably different from the last two.

"I wasn't aware that we were trying to distill the essence of my music when we first started recording this stuff," Diamond says during a recent conference call with journalists. "Rick may have wanted to hearken back to simpler days of my career -- he was shooting to capture that in the sessions. Basically, we were going in to kind of find out what these songs would sound like and what they would feel like in a studio setting with a couple of additional musicians aside from myself."

Diamond says Rubin never discussed any intentions in those first sessions and acted more as a casual observer to what the band would do in the studio space. Diamond says he went into the studio simply to "create something wonderful, something magical."

Pretty much any time a music critic of my, um, seasoning takes a stand against something trendy, he (she) runs the risk of being labeled an old fart. But I don't think I'm succumbing to old-fartism when I say that the rampant use of Auto-Tune in today's pop music is a scourge that I hope ends up in the dustbin of bad fads after a few more mouse clicks.

Auto-Tune? You may know it by its previous incarnations as a Vocoder or Talkbox. It's an audio processor developed by Antares Technologies that corrects vocal pitch, but its trademark effect is the robotic sound it can add to singing.

The main perpetrator of the scourge is T-Pain, a hack who sings, near as I can tell, everything through Auto-Tune. He's been highly rewarded for this gimmickry with several hit albums and a bevy of guest vocal appearances on hip-hop singles. In fact, Diddy reportedly paid T-Pain a royalty to work Auto-Tune "magic" on his new recording.

Few musical traditions are more peculiar and compelling than the katajjaq throat singing of the Inuit, a 25,000-strong native population concentrated in Canada's Nunavut territory. It's as much a game as a form of music: pairs of women face and embrace one another, unleashing a wild torrent of grunts, exhalations, inhalations, and all manner of guttural, rumbling low-end noises. Each woman rapidly follows her partner, so that their streams of sounds are almost like fun-house reflections of each other--this is made easier, one presumes, because the singers hold their faces so close together that they can use each other's mouths as harmonic resonators. A "song" ends when one of the women is reduced to laughter or simply runs out of breath.

A few years ago a singer calling herself Tagaq (aka Tanya Tagaq Gillis), who'd grown up in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, largely ignorant of the tradition, began to attract notice by radically recontextualizing katajjaq for the pop world. Homesick while attending art school in Halifax in the late 90s, her mother sent a care package that included some katajjaq cassettes that inspired to experiment with the style while in the shower. Over the next few years she refined her practice and eventually began performing, adapting the tradition for solo voice, with a DJ.

On his best-known material outside the film world, Randy Newman managed to largely cloak biting satire in hummable melodies and sing along choruses resulting in first-class bait and switches, the finest being "I Love L.A." The song is a fixture at Los Angeles sports arenas despite including such lines as "Look at that bum over there, man/ He's down on his knees."

 

On Harps and Angels, Newman's first proper album in nearly a decade, the acerbic singer/songwriter makes no effort to placate casual listeners, keeping the focus on the mostly misanthropic lyrics, which are more spoken than sung. Laidback, New Orleans piano and minimal orchestration accompany the singer. Newman, the fellow responsible for the atheist anthem "God's Song," starts the disc by second guessing his non-belief in the humorous title track.

A few years ago, North Carolina native Tift Merritt wanted to get away from it all for a much-needed, well-deserved break. Maybe it was exhaustion from touring or the business of music, but either way, she needed time off and Paris seemed to be calling her name.

She did a search on Google for "apartment," "Paris" and "piano" and found exactly what she was looking for. Her plan was to go for two weeks and see what happened. The result was more than three months spent living like a local, and inspiration that would lead to her latest album, Another Country.

Thursday night (Aug. 28th) wasn't quite business usual at Kirkwood Ballers Club. The regular cast and crew of local yokels twiddled knobs, bowed cymbals and plugged away to the sounds of vintage videogame consoles on stage.

Headlining act Hungry Bodies from Baltimore ended with a show of hypnotically amorphous beats and textures that melted-down the bass elements of hip-hop, drone and maximized minimalism into pools of liquid noise.

Welcome to the new Listen.com, your web hookup to local music scenes. Listen.com was reborn from a very simple premise: putting a world of music lovers in closer touch with what's musically popping in any given town.

Dig it: the Internet has already been instrumental in introducing musicians to fans looking to discover them. Too often though, it's either single-staff websites or single-minded bloggers calling all the shots. One set of biases = one set of recommendations. Don't get us wrong, these people have turned us onto some great tunes, but we figured there's got to be a better way.

Instead, we've gathered some of the best writers and bloggers from every corner of the country and asked them to forget the things happening elsewhere. It's all about what's happening in their own backyards: local shows, local bands and local clubs. For Listen.com, the local scene is life. So the more of scenes we know about (and the more we know about each scene), the more fulfilling our life - and your Listen.com experience - will be.

And we're not going to do it on our own! We'll be adding scenes from around the U.S. - and, hopefully, beyond - as you tell us to. Soon enough, you'll probably be covering your local scene better than we do - and we'll be the ones paying attention. (Go HERE to tell us which scene we should add next!)

So do what you've always done -- listen locally, rant globally. Check out how the new Listen.com does the same. Then tell us what we're doing right and what we're doing wrong.