Miniatures is Ken Sharp's lockdown album. The album's title explains the concept, 32 songs in 41 minutes and largely acoustic. It is a marked departure from previous Sharp offerings which have been a bit common denominator Power Pop by numbers.
Quite a few of these songs have a gentle Psych Pop, even Baroque feel and that works really well. There are about a dozen songs here that are great and would be even better in expanded form. The front six in particular are splendid, but as soon as you get into them they are over and that's the problem really.
An album like this will potentially suffer from that problem. These are sketches and they don't really work in quantity. I love the Album Format and I am a great defender of it, but this is not the answer. Plus, it looks as though you've just thrown your demos out.
It can look like you couldn't finish the songs or they end too early or never begin. Towards the end of Miniatures you are thoroughly bored. You definitely wouldn't play it more than once, which means you may not buy it at all. By the end, the ideas have run out and song titles include Girls' names that are easy to rhyme.
It is a real shame really, because a dozen of these songs expanded would make a fine and very different Ken Sharp album that would be highly listenable and heavily lauded. I've not looked at other reviews, so I'm not sure if I'm alone in these thoughts, but they are a honest appraisal of an album that I'd like to like, but all seems a bit pointless.
The worst thing that you can call an album is boring and this is just that. I admire Sharp for taking chances, but this doesn't seem to work in any way. A band like The Armoires used the lockdown to come up with something hugely creative and wonderful. That should be the template.
/p>
You can listen to and buy the album here.
.......................
No comments:
Post a Comment