Before I popped this one into the deck, I had just finished
\nlistening to Ricky Martin’s
\nSound Loaded<\/i> and was in a state of high pissed-offness.<\/p>\n
Music Industry dudes… WAKE UP. WHY do you think Napster is so
\npopular? WHY do you think Napster-ish piracy practices are more
\ncommon than CD burning? IT’S BECAUSE YOUR ALBUMS ARE TERRIBLE. I
\nbuy an album after listening to “Nobody Wants To Be Lonely” on the
\nradio, buy the album, and get all this CRAP that goes with it for
\n115 Baht… enough money for three full meals in Thailand! Do I
\nfeel ripped off? Do I feel like running out into the Internet to
\ndownload a copy of Napster and never buy another album for as long
\nas I live? HELL YES.<\/p>\n
GET your act together. Figure out a way for us to listen to
\nentire albums at home before buying them (“Web Radio Sony” etc.) or
\na legal, reasonable way to get individual tracks in a CD-quality
\nformat, or better. Paradigms are shifting and consumers are less
\nwilling to EAT your filler-filled TRASH. GET with the FLOW.<\/p>\n
(Note:
\nSound Loaded<\/i> is not really a terrible album, I just don’t
\nthink I’m its target audience. Read our review on “The Daily Vault”
\nand proceed with caution.)<\/p>\n
I’m definitely the target audience for
\nAffirmation<\/i>. It’s a solid pop album with no false
\npretensions of being rock, alternative, R&B or hip-hop (is
\nJennifer Lopez making “Latin music”? Or is she simply a one-woman
\nDestiny’s Child?). Former writing and producing partner of Mariah
\nCarey, producer Walter Afanasieff spares us from his frequently
\nbanal songwriting by choosing to do only what he does best,
\nproduce. Combined with the tight, dramatic songwriting of the
\nDarren Hayes\/Daniel Jones duo of Savage Garden,
\nAffirmation<\/i> comes across as a sophisticated and honest pop
\nalbum that IS worth three main courses of Thai cuisine.<\/p>\n
The title song was performed to great applause at the 2000
\nSydney Olympics Closing Ceremony, and opens this album with an easy
\ndance beat and smooth production values, none of that thumping,
\nrepetitive stuff few excel at and many imitate. It’s still better
\nlive, but it’ll get you up in the morning. Such fast, smooth and
\nmelodic songs seem to be a stylistic theme for Savage Garden like
\n“Crash And Burn”, “Hold Me” and “The Animal Song” … all uplifting
\nand absorbing, without being tiring. They have the lyrical strength
\nof ballads and the emotional urgency of dance songs; in fact, it’s
\ndifficult to really decide whether a given song on
\nAffirmation<\/i> is a straight ballad or a straight dance
\nsong.<\/p>\n
Not that the ballads can’t stand by themselves. “You Can Still
\nBe Free” carries the tradition of the number one hit “Truly, Madly,
\nDeeply” in emotionally intimate ballads, and “Two Beds And A Coffee
\nMachine” misses being hokey by a hair thanks to its acoustic,
\nintimate arrangement. “The Lover After Me” relies on lyric hooks
\n(“without you I’m always twenty minutes late”), which is a nice
\nchange that might be missed in non-English speaking markets, a
\nproblem the songs “Gunning Down Romance” and the wonderful “I Don’t
\nKnow You Anymore” might also suffer from. Bummer.<\/p>\n
A few don’t quite work: “Chained To You” is probably better as
\nan outright rocker, and “The Best Thing” doesn’t seem to say
\nanything with its lyrics (implicitly or explicitly) which makes it
\nfall flat. There’s a similar weak-lyrics problem in the ballad “I
\nKnew I Loved You” (and is a mystery as to how this, the weakest
\ntrack on the album, manages to get released as the lead-off single!
\nI will never understand marketing).<\/p>\n
Lead singer Darren Hayes’ voice isn’t for everyone (personally,
\nvery personally, I love it) and audiences, especially American
\naudiences, might be turned off by Savage Garden’s somewhat
\nwhitebread sound that used to be such a hit in the ’80s. But if you
\nwere always a fan of Madonna’s pre-
\nErotica<\/i> vision (a strong pop album that is what it is), you
\nmight like
\nAffirmation<\/i>, if only because of the relief it’ll give you
\nfrom the tyranny of Euro-pop and the mythic Latin Wave.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":25808,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[6565],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-37014","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-savage-garden","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/37014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/37014\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37014"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=37014"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=37014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}