Music Reviews: Beastie Boys, Ben Harper, etc.

Here we go with another installment of the series. :)

This one won't be quite as long, so.. take heart!

Before I dive in, though, a quick review of the new operating system for Mac: OS X Leopard!

First impressions: cool box. ;) Easy install, although at least 2 hours long. Cool desktop graphics. Lame 3-D dock for the icons. Really good pictures for wallpaper and screen savers. :) Take-it-or-leave-it feature: icon stacks that fan out when you click the stack. Yeah, I guess so, but.. way over-hyped. Best feature of the lot, though... automatic incremental back-up (to an external drive - if you have one.) Verrrrry slick.

Okay, so here we go:

Beastie Boys - "The Mix-Up": Wow. I've always said that rap would be good music if you just got rid of the vocals. ;) This CD does just that. It's great! :) If you try to imagine rap vocals, you can hear how the instrumental would support rap or hip-hop. But forgetting the vocals altogether, and the guys can just flat play! Terrific music for studying to. All tracks made my playlist, no real standout favorites, all good. Thumbs up!

Ben Harper & The Innocent Criminals - "Lifeline": I first discovered Ben Harper through his fine 1994 track "Forever" (from Welcome To The Cruel World).. just a great love song for a long-term relationship (or.. a desire for one.) Put that track together with "Walk Away" from the same CD, and you get both sides of a love relationship. :) Both are good downloads from iTunes if you want a sample of him first. These songs, plus a feature article in Relevant Magazine.. and I wanted to see what he was up to lately.

This is a nice laid-back soul/funk/pop/blues CD with understated vocals and a smooth band. Good for chilling to - kind of makes you think you're at a club having a drink with a few friends. It's that kind of music that once in a while reaches out from the background and gets your attention, but otherwise is kind of unobtrusive, but good quality. Favorites: In The Colors, Say You Will, Brown Eyed Blues, Younger Than Today, Put It On Me, Lifeline. Two thumbs up. :)

Bjork - miscellaneous tracks: No single CD here, just a sampling of this Icelandic electronic music. The lead singer has a voice like Kate Havnevik. Do they just grow them like this in Iceland? ;) She also is reminiscent of both Emiliana Torrini and the lead singer of Mahogany - ethereal, soaring, more of a background voice than a lead. Her English is accented enough to almost sound like a foreign language. I can study to these without having the words invade my consciousness. On their track "Human Behavior", I love the way she pronounces "human"; it comes out almost like tschuman. ;) Cute. I guess their greatest hits CD would be a good place to start. Thumbs up!

Eddie Vedder - "Into The Wild" soundtrack: Really good movie (two thumbs up!) for both cinematography and the story. You really get inside the lead character's head and watch him deal with his past and resolve it in the end.. although not the ending you might have wanted for him. But the music - really good also, and who knew that Eddie Vedder (Pearl Jam) could do folk so well? The CD is too short to buy the whole thing, I think, but a few tracks are worthwhile to download: Hard Sun, Society, Long Nights, and Rise. One thumb for the CD, two for Eddie's effort on it!