i love your long shadows and your gunpowder eyes

I freaked out about right brain atrophy last week (too sunny here for anguish and art!!) and downloaded a bunch of albums, not new but 2009 albums, as if that would really stop the rot.

Here's one theme in the music I selected: I miss Freddie Mercury. I was looking for a new young thing eager to entertain, ridiculous and gigantic in costume and stage affect, theatrical, clever, playful, musically adventurous. Above all I wanted the voice. Here's a nice description of it, from Freddie's biographer via Wiki: "[it] escalat[es] within a few bars from a deep, throaty rock-growl to tender, vibrant tenor, then on to a high-pitched, perfect coloratura, pure and crystalline in the upper reaches."

(A sweet, pretty song that lets you hear his voice clearly.)

I know that hoping to find in new music what you already know and love is just a set up for disappointment (and stagnation), but nonetheless I hoped. I tried Adam Lambert's For Your Entertainment, Mika's The Boy Who Knew Too Much, some Lady Gaga, even Ke$ha's Animal, because apparently Ke$ha takes Freddie as an inspiration. These are all promising and talented musicians, even messy Ke$ha with her San Fernando voice and obliviousness to Mick Jagger's leather handbag-looks. Lady Gaga's awesomeness everyone has already written about, and I concur.

Mika is often touted as a Freddie because he is a white-looking brown British immigrant and flaming 'mo who plays piano and writes his own music and dances around energetically and has a fantastic vocal range, but tends to write perkier, happier tunes than Freddie. I like his promise. Often he goes to an irritating runaway falsetto, but it's still very impressive that he can do that.

Adam Lambert was last year's American Idol second place finisher. He's also a queeny male lead, emphatically sexual, like Freddie, with a nimble tenor and a show tune presence. But the album is not very good. Adam Lambert doesn't write his own music and his album was clearly churned out quick from the pop mill to cash in on his celebrity. It's catchy and danceable but totally unchallenging, which is a shame because he seems to have a lot of original personality, in addition to the talent, to tap into. Again I found myself wanting Freddie, who could write and perform weird-ass lines like, "Fear me you lords and lady preachers, I descend upon your earth from the skies / I command your very souls you unbelievers, bring before me what is mine":

(Oh dearest Freddie, what is all this nonsense about?)

But let's face it, when it comes down to it, Adam Lambert's facial expression on "once I'm in" at :50 could pretty much convince anybody to have hot gay sex.

And his album cover is perfect.

I also picked out some indie albums, including Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion, which I would have chucked onto Highway 101 had I not been concerned about traffic safety and letting phthalocyanine dye to leach into the bay. I got through four songs at a high volume with a heaving stomach. I guess they're supposed to be good for what they do, but hemorrhoid cream is good for what it does and I don't go around putting that shit in my ears. If I wanted to listen to the 200x amplification of burning embers, I would have stuck my head in a friggin fire, okay??

Also, Neko Case's Middle Cyclone. Overall consistent with her older stuff, but one song really stuck out to me. I liked the pulsing brush on the snare, the surf guitar, the vaguely Middle Eastern minor key, and the line she repeats twenty times, "I love your long shadows and your gunpowder eyes."

In an unrelated note, my recent viewing of Muppets Take Manhattan has me concerned that I am Ms. Piggy to S's Kermit.