Songs That Will Never Win a Grammy by The primeTime sublime Community Orchestra

Posted by Al Barger on August 21, 2005  

The Prime Time Sublime Orchestra aka Paul Minotto and his unindicted co-conspirators play/execute modern avant garde orchestral "music" with an emphasis on humor. I put music in scare quotes for the same reasons I would if I were writing about John Lennon's infamous "Revolution 9." They've created some interesting soundscapes, but a lot of this lacks the elements of melody, rhythm and harmony.

In theory, that's not good. Yet this stuff rather intrigues me anyway. There's a lot of thought going on in what kind of bits of found commercials and tv preachers and whatnot get put in and where. There's some strong force of personality involved in this.

Also, there's considerably more actual music to this than "Revolution 9." There are lots of pieces of melody and harmony mixed into this. They tend to get abandoned quickly to more seemingly random interjections, but there are definitely some significantly musical shards. You might even consider them as actual hooks. At least a couple of these tracks might reasonably qualify as "songs."

One particularly bad creative decision here was mechanized vocals. There are numerous vocal parts, but they are all performed by computer. That's unfortunate. Yeah, it's all avant garde, but it ruins them.

These CGI vocals are a gimmick that just doesn't work. CGI foolishness just isn't going to have the quality that even a mediocre singer could give. A human voice amidst all the electronica could really help put this over. It seems as if he's afraid to simply sing a perfectly good song like "Hannibal's BBQ." You don't have to be completely avant all the time.

Out of all this mess, the opening "Curb Your God" has the most compositional cohesion. For practical consumption, this and "Hannibal's BBQ" make listenable good texture in an iPod mix. I'm not sure how much repeated listenings you'll get from the rest of this mess, though.

 


 

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