Quote:
Originally posted by geemarty
Everything you say is right - everything everyone else says is wrong.
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Happy?
Feel free to exit the thread now.
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"I’ve given Cheek to Cheek several listens now—as many as I could force-feed myself. I have a complicated answer to that question.
The first thing you hear when playing the record is an intro from a well-trained, well-balanced band: the horns do what they’re supposed to do in the context of a traditional jazz arrangement, and the drums sit easily behind them both in volume and in rhythm.
Then Gaga’s voice enters virtually unadorned—sure there is some reverb, some delay, but no autotune—and a curious thought comes to mind: wow, she might actually be able to pull this off.
Her timing is spot on—which is to say slightly behind the beat—and her use of vibrato is exactly what you’d want to hear from a jazz singer: she keeps the notes straight and pure as she holds them out, then applies the least little touch of vibrato at the end to give the note some emphasis. This is a sign of maturity in a singer; this is a sign of sensitivity.
Indeed, if I heard some of this record on Jonathon Schwartz’s weekly survey of the American Songbook on WNYC, I wouldn’t think “oh, that’s Lady Gaga.” I’d think, “here’s a new interpreter of the American Songbook trying her best to sound smooth and mature, and succeeding most of the time.”
But as the album plows on, the returns become more and more diminishing. Harmonies grate on each other because Gaga is too loud or Bennett is too pitchy, or often enough, both.
Love duets begin to feel stranger, more uncomfortable, when you consider the age disparities of these two performers, clearly evident in the timbre of their voices: much of this album feels like watching an ugly-but-rich man trying to pick up a beautiful-but-money-obsessed teenager at a house-party: off-putting, vulgar, grimace-inducing.
But if pressed to say yes to the question of “is this record purely a stunt,” I would cite one specific choice made throughout the proceedings, a choice that regular readers of my column will not be surprised I’m harping on.
It’s not the arrangements, for they are nothing new or daring or needlessly novel; there are no EDM drops “I Won’t Dance”; there is no song whose title has been rewritten to proclaim “I Can’t Give You Anything but Dubstep.” Inasmuch as the arrangements feel like a stunt, they feel like a stunt in being too pat—too devoted to the Nelson Riddle style.
The performances of Bennett and Gaga have something to do with it, but they are symptoms of the bigger problem, rather than causes: one expects Bennett to be alternately swinging and pitchy; one anticipates Gaga making her voice smaller than it could ever be at one’s one peril. At any rate, there is something to be happy about in the performances: thankfully, there is very little scatting.
No, what makes this album feel like a stunt is the very mix of the material—the way it was engineered and the way it was mastered.
I know some of you might be sick of me going on about mixing engineers, mastering engineers, and the craft of rendering audio its very best, but unfortunately, the discussion is right at home in this subject.
So if you’re willing to see a breakdown of how the mix of this record reveals its stunts, please feel free to follow me to part two."
Um, yes, they did...thoroughly.
I mean, read the Forbes article. As discussed in my previous posts, there is always exposition for context in positive and negative articles. Fans just use that to discredit anything that follows if it happens to be negative. There's also the argument of when Gaga's status in pop culture declined, which was said to be following the BTW release (which I love, by the way) by many fans in the other thread today. But that is an argument I'm not going anywhere near.