“When everything is done \/ And everything is said \/ All the world is pain \/ It’s better to be dead.”<\/p>\n
Duncan Sheik has made a career out of not pulling punches musically, culminating in the multiple-Tony-winning Spring Awakening<\/i>, a musical drama about teen sexuality, hypocrisy, and Victorian morals. Because of that, he is one of the few musicians I consider qualified to handle the biggest question of all: Death, And What Happens Afterwards. And handle it he does on his latest offering, Whisper House<\/i> — the soundtrack to an as-yet-unproduced stage work, a collaboration between Sheik, Kyle Jarrow (A Very Merry Unauthorized Childrens’ Scientology Pageant<\/i>) and Keith Powell (30 Rock<\/i>). Dark, dreamy, disturbing, Whisper House<\/i> is the bastard offspring of Edward Gorey and Berthold Brecht, a Gothic poem about fear, death, reality, and persecution.<\/p>\n
Needless to say — but I’ll say it anyway — it’s also pretty damned good.<\/p>\n
Whisper House<\/i> is the story of Christopher, whose father dies in World War II and whose mother becomes unbalanced as a result. Christopher goes to live with his Aunt Lily, who is a lighthouse keeper on the United States Atlantic coast, searching for German U-Boats. The lighthouse is haunted — or is it? The ghosts, real or imagined, serve as a musical commentary on the drama of the living, people dealing with their wounds in a dark and paranoid time. (Much like now, interestingly enough. One of the multiple levels of Whisper House<\/i> is an allegory on our world of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.)<\/p>\n
The music is magnificent. Sheik is rapidly becoming one of the greatest composers out there, and his brooding melodies and lyrics fit the subject matter perfectly. (Sheik shares co-lyricist credit with Jarrow on several tracks, and they fit with the others seamlessly). Whisper House<\/i> is richer than Sheik’s past work, laden with a surprisingly well-suited brass and reed section (including a veritable festival of clarinets — bass, contrabass, and something called a ‘chalumeau’). Guest vocalist Holly Brook’s voice is chilling and precise. From the opening bars of “It’s Better To Be Dead” through the closing “Take A Bow,” Whisper House<\/i> never lets go of the listener. I have listened to this CD probably fifty times since I got it, and I continue to hear new things every time. I didn’t think that Sheik could top Spring Awakening<\/i> — and I was wrong.<\/p>\n
Whisper House<\/i> is both a parable for our dark days, a reminiscence of dark days in the past, and an eternal musing on the darkest topic of all — the final curtain call that in the end, we all have to face alone. I can’t come up with words to describe, in the end, just how good it is. Don’t miss it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":29808,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[7082],"rating":[5646],"class_list":["post-41423","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-duncan-sheik","rating-rating-a"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41423","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=41423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41423\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41423"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=41423"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=41423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}