{"id":40919,"date":"2008-05-28T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-05-28T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/so-many-nights\/"},"modified":"2008-05-28T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-05-28T00:00:00","slug":"so-many-nights","status":"publish","type":"review","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/so-many-nights\/","title":{"rendered":"So Many Nights"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"MsoNormal\">There\u2019s a restaurant near me in Austin that\u2019s one of those giant Asian-style buffets. Its selling point is that it offers multiple cuisines \u2013 which would be fine, except that the name of the place ends up being \u201cChinese Japanese Vietnamese Thai American Buffet.\u201d Now, I\u2019ve never eaten there, but I have read the online reviews, and most of them read along the lines of \u201cyou try to do too much, everything\u2019s mediocre.\u201d<o:p><\/o:p><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Frankly, that kind of reminds me of the third album from Australia\u2019s The Cat Empire, <i>So Many Nights<\/i>. While there are things on it that are done well, in this reviewer\u2019s humble opinion, it\u2019s too big, too spread out, too all-over-the-place to really be effective. Again, you try to do too much\u2026<o:p><\/o:p><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">The Cat Empire cheerfully admits that their music has no real genre. At the band\u2019s heart, they\u2019re a jazz band, but they dabble in rock, pop, Afro-Cuban, Eastern European, flamenco, Tejano, what is almost klezmer on one track, and for all I know twelve-tone accordion. While on some tracks this creates an interesting, challenging, and uniquely delightful mix, on other tracks it just doesn\u2019t work. \u00a0When you factor in some weak vocals \u2013 the Achilles heel of otherwise interesting tracks like \u201cThe Ocean Takes Us All\u201d and \u201cVoodoo Cowboy\u201d \u2013 you have something that straddles the line between self-indulgent and ridiculous at times.<o:p><\/o:p><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Standout tracks include the danceable, manic \u201cFishies,\u201d which is by far my favorite track on <i>So Many Nights<\/i>; the gentle and beautiful harmonies on \u201cNo Longer There;\u201d and the downright funk of \u201cWon\u2019t Be Afraid.\u201d Unfortunately, they are marred by tracks like \u201cThe Darkness,\u201d which sounds like a horrible train wreck between a pedantic Goth band and a camper full of drunken Romany, and \u201cLonely Moon,\u201d which gets my vote for most annoying vocal of the year, hands down.<o:p><\/o:p><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><i>So Many Nights<\/i> might have been better off being <i>So Many Genres<\/i> &#8212; or, to turn the metaphor on its head, by being more by being less. As it stands, it\u2019s too much, too mediocre, and too unfocused to be a great or even good album.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":29355,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[8205],"rating":[5614],"class_list":["post-40919","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-the-cat-empire","rating-rating-c-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40919","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\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40919\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40919"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=40919"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=40919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}