Trevor Horn’s Echoes: Ancient & Modern finds the veteran musician and producer attempting to recontextualize some of the biggest pop hits of the past 40 years within the sounds of contemporary pop and electronic music. At best the results are bland, and at worst they exemplify Gen-x nostalgia at its most saccharine.
The album opens, rather unexpectedly, with a cover of Kendrick Lamar’s “Swimming Pools (Drank),” featuring a characteristically impassioned vocal performance by Tori Amos. The arrangement and production, however, are so sanitized, so slick and gussied up with melodramatic strings and synths, that the point of the song—its central irony and message about the dangers of generational alcoholism—is swallowed whole.
Horn imbues the album’s 11 songs with a grandiosity that quickly becomes flatulent, with big orchestral swells and heart-tugging keyboards. By the halfway point, the material all starts to blur together, as the majority of the songs...
The album opens, rather unexpectedly, with a cover of Kendrick Lamar’s “Swimming Pools (Drank),” featuring a characteristically impassioned vocal performance by Tori Amos. The arrangement and production, however, are so sanitized, so slick and gussied up with melodramatic strings and synths, that the point of the song—its central irony and message about the dangers of generational alcoholism—is swallowed whole.
Horn imbues the album’s 11 songs with a grandiosity that quickly becomes flatulent, with big orchestral swells and heart-tugging keyboards. By the halfway point, the material all starts to blur together, as the majority of the songs...
- 1/14/2024
- by Thomas Bedenbaugh
- Slant Magazine
Tori Amos and The Buggles’ Trevor Horn have teamed up for a cover of Kendrick Lamar’s 2012 single, “Swimming Pools (Drank),” reimagining it as a moody, modern piano ballad.
Amos and Horn’s take on the song arrives as the opening track on Horn’s new covers album, Echoes: Ancient & Modern. Built around a subdued piano and colored with silky strings, Amos’ multi-layered vocals lead the tune, placing Lamar’s lyricism in a new context. In the liner notes for the new album, Horn explained: “I thought of it as a kind of literate, modern American standard, a rap song open to reinterpretation. I wanted something distinctly 21st-century with original, eloquent lyrics, and my longtime engineer Tim Weidner suggested this.”
Continuing, Horn praised Amos’ creative contributions. “Tori Amos took the idea of adapting Kendrick Lamar’s psyched-up swagger in her stride and made it intensely cinematic,” he said. “I listened...
Amos and Horn’s take on the song arrives as the opening track on Horn’s new covers album, Echoes: Ancient & Modern. Built around a subdued piano and colored with silky strings, Amos’ multi-layered vocals lead the tune, placing Lamar’s lyricism in a new context. In the liner notes for the new album, Horn explained: “I thought of it as a kind of literate, modern American standard, a rap song open to reinterpretation. I wanted something distinctly 21st-century with original, eloquent lyrics, and my longtime engineer Tim Weidner suggested this.”
Continuing, Horn praised Amos’ creative contributions. “Tori Amos took the idea of adapting Kendrick Lamar’s psyched-up swagger in her stride and made it intensely cinematic,” he said. “I listened...
- 12/1/2023
- by Jo Vito
- Consequence - Music
[Warning! Although all reviews contain information that the listener will not know until they hear the album, this review (which is actual a preview, since the album will not have been released at the time of posting) is highly detailed. If you are a Marillion fan who would prefer not to be "influenced" specifically in any way prior to your first listen, suffice to say that I am giving the album 4.5 out of 5 stars.]
"The cold war's gone, but those bastards'll find us another one They're here to protect you, don't you know? So get used to it - Get used to it!... The sense that it's useless, and the fear to try Not believing the leaders, the media that feed us Living with the big lie."
("Living With the Big Lie," from Brave)
In the 27 years since Steve Hogarth took over as lead vocalist for Marillion, the band has had only one bona fide concept album: the aurally and emotionally stunning Brave (1994). Using as a starting point the (true) news story of a young woman found roaming around an area of England -- who did not know who she was, or where she had come from, and even refused to speak to the police or the media -- the band created a fictional "back story" for her, which included some fairly "dark" elements,...
"The cold war's gone, but those bastards'll find us another one They're here to protect you, don't you know? So get used to it - Get used to it!... The sense that it's useless, and the fear to try Not believing the leaders, the media that feed us Living with the big lie."
("Living With the Big Lie," from Brave)
In the 27 years since Steve Hogarth took over as lead vocalist for Marillion, the band has had only one bona fide concept album: the aurally and emotionally stunning Brave (1994). Using as a starting point the (true) news story of a young woman found roaming around an area of England -- who did not know who she was, or where she had come from, and even refused to speak to the police or the media -- the band created a fictional "back story" for her, which included some fairly "dark" elements,...
- 9/15/2016
- by Ian Alterman
- www.culturecatch.com
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