Search - Inara George :: All Rise

Catchy, pretty stuff

Adr75 | The West Coast | 06/27/2006

(4 out of 5 stars)

"If you like Fiona Apple, Erin McKeown, Leslie Feist, The Essex Green, Keren Ann, then you should probably pick this up. If Cat Power decided she wanted to sound like stereolab it might turn out like this."

Very high-class melodic music making

Eric J. Anderson | Ankeny, Iowa | 08/25/2007

(4 out of 5 stars)

"I had heard several songs from this album over the past few months, but today I got the CD in the mail. Inara George and her co-writers and collaborating musicians have done some very meticulous work here. Inara's voice is sweet, solid, and always in tune. She can convey irony, sadness, humor with the slightest subtle inflection here or there -- she doesn't have to resort to screeching, bellowing, or moaning, or that bane of modern pop music -- melisma. (Bleah!)



What are these songs about? It isn't always so clear. To me, a bit of ambiguity and subtlety is a good thing, because it leaves room for a listener's interpretations. I suppose you could say these songs are sketches of the landscape of the heart. That'll suffice for a general idea.



I like the production. It isn't overproduced or underproduced. Fools in Love is carried mostly with guitar and voice, but listen carefully for subtle additions of bass and electric guitar to flesh things out. The same goes for Fools Work. Drums and bass are present on the up-tempo numbers, of which there are few. Delicate keyboards on songs like Good To Me bring to mind the harpsichords on Beatles songs like In My Life and Fixing A Hole. The point is, the soundscape is rich, but not cluttered.



Finally I want to complement the musical structure of the songs themselves. I hear so many songs that are so musically lightweight that I feel after hearing them once there is nothing more to be gained by a second listen. On All Rise, I want to listen repeatedly to hear the unexpected chord changes, and the way the songs are structured. (As I am constantly amazed at the chord progression in Inara's song Again And Again from her work on The Bird And The Bee album -- entrancing.) There's a lot of creativity in these compositions, to my way of thinking."