trailing edge - episode 003 - february 2018 (VIDEO)

Yeah, bit of a rough round this time - thank god Eric Taxxon delivered quality, I really must say...

Anyway, next up is Screaming Females, so stay tuned!

the top 50 best songs of 2013 (PART ONE: 50-26)

Part One, songs 50-26! Enjoy, and stay tuned for part two!

video review: 'woman' by rhye (RETRO REVIEW)

Huh, almost forgot about this.

Next up... well, look, MIA's discography is taking longer to process than I'd like, so probably next up will be either a retrospective or the Flower Kings album. Also, discovered today that Gavin Degraw dropped an album last month, so I'll probably cover that as well. Stay tuned!

album review: 'woman' by rhye (RETRO REVIEW)

I mentioned back in my review of Janelle Monae's The Electric Lady that R&B doesn't tend to work for me as well as other genres, and for a long time, I've been struggling to figure out why. Well, I think I might finally have a finger on it and I'm going to try and articulate that opinion the best I can without offending anyone. So here it goes: R&B tends to work more on the stimulation of emotions rather than the stimulation of the mind. It's the difference between a great comedy film and a great arthouse drama - they both can be fantastic movies, but they're looking to appeal to very different parts of the human spirit, and their methods of appeal should not be used to denigrate the quality if they work effectively. And for me, I'll admit that music that has a more literate feel tends to stick with me a little better than songs just trying to tug my heartstrings. But the more I think about that, the more I realize that most of the music I love triggers a visceral emotional reaction regardless of written content, so it's got to be a little more than that. 

I think part of my problem with R&B for me comes down to subject matter and presentation. If you're looking at R&B, you're going to get various permutations of songs about love and relationships, and with few exceptions, you don't get a lot outside of that. But that's not exactly a bad thing, providing the presentation is interesting and unique enough and the songwriting and delivery is strong - these sorts of songs can still trigger that positive or negative emotional response, it just might be harder for me to articulate why. It's not a matter of reinventing the wheel or blowing my mind with high-concept theses about the human experience, it's about refining and perfecting material until it triggers the strongest emotive response from its listener. Okay, I can get behind that.

So with that in mind, I took a look at the mysterious duo Rhye that received some rave reviews earlier this year for their debut album Woman, and I figured they'd be an apt test for my hypothesis here. Did the album work for me?