From famine to feast

kasey_chambers,
originally uploaded by mcmrbt.

After several months without much in the way of new music in the car, a flurry of recent releases and impulse buys means I've now got an embarrassment of riches.

Kasey Chambers is an Australian sort-of alt-country type artiste. Her material ranges from sublimely good ("The Captain") to self-indulgent and boring.

Her sound appeals to me only sometimes. I purchyased her previous two records and then sold them on. I may end up doing the same with this one. It's not half bad - I'd listen again, but I think the problem with people like this is that they write too much about themselves.

She's one of those women with a stud in her bottom lip (or between the bottom lip and the chin) - which for me means the kind of person I imagine would be a total nightmare of self-obsession and attention-seeking imagined crises. Hard work, in other words, and high maintenance.

In other words, not even a "1" on the scale - or, if a "1", then one with a paper bag on the head (to hide the stud) and a sock in the mouth (to stop the moaning).

So many of her songs seem to start with "If I was..." or "When I was..." etc. that I wonder if she's even noticed. Here's a selection of some of her opening lines:

I'm a little bit lonesome

If I fall like rain

Well I am a wayward angel

If I was in a movie

Well I don't have as many friends because
I'm not as pretty as I was

If I was good

If I could learn how to fly

Etc. Etc. So you can see it can start to grate on your nerves after a while. The other thing is, and I'm sorry to get back on my hobby horse, but it's way too long. When the Beatles put 14 tracks on a record, they were 2-2.5 minutes long, in most cases. 14 tracks of this self-obsessive rambling is just too much by far. By the time we're on track 11, I'm ready to open a vein, and I stop listening.

This modern trend for extra long albums is a pain in the arse - making all of them double albums really, and we all know how good they tend to be.