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Son of the Velvet Rat music review |
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Son of the Velvet Rat
Playground
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Playground, by Son of the Velvet Rat is another example of a small, but growing trend of really profound music. The music does not reveal the secrets of the universe, but it exposes the things we all think while simply walking alone or anytime we begin to feel the constant, dull pain of being alive and all of the experiences that it entails. A great example resides in the line, "are you sad? - no not us we're just confused..... by love" from the song "Ready To Go."
Track listing:
01 Flower Song
02 Ready To Go
03 Sleeping Stars
04 Are The Angels Pretty?
05 The Sea So Blue
06 Everything's Calm (But My Heart)
07 How Can I Make Her Smile Again
08 Snow
09 Lungfish
10 She Floated Away
11 Blue Hair
12 I Am A Jet Pilot
13 Wait
14 When She Walks in the Room
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Some individuals are hypersensitive to this pain; they are not numb to it as most of us are, but they are constantly aware of this feeling that we all suppress in the back of our minds, and only glimpse now and again in our most solitary, private moments. Great artists such as Vincent Van Gogh, Jackson Pollock, Townes Van Zandt, Leonard Cohen, and Nick Drake all seem to possess this urgent need to convey, even project, the way they feel into the core of anyone who will listen. It is as if these artists want to wake everybody up to grim reality, so that we can understand why the artists are so melancholy.
One way to achieve this is to highlight the best times, then remind us of our mortality; a tactic used to perfection by Richard McGraw on his latest album, Song and Void. It illustrates how the bad times seem to be expected and the good times are phenomenal.
Now, with Playground, Son of the Velvet Rat brings about this understanding in a more subversive way. European singer/songwriter, Georg Altziebler accomplishes this by leading you into an interrogation room, and intimately singing his thoughts and feelings sweetly into your ear, and by the end of the album he has conveyed his message in such a way that you identify with every one of these 14 songs personally.
If I had to describe this album in one word, that word would be "haunting". Not that this album will haunt you, but it will cause you to be haunted by those times when you were small and the dull pain of living was feeding on your young fears. Like when you first thought of your parents dying, or your own mortality; the song "Are the Angels Pretty" does just that by leading you to the edge and watching as you tumble over by yourself. That is what I meant by subversive. It leads you to a thought, and then abandons you to think of past loves, mortality, your personal version of beauty, and unrealized dreams.
In the end, Georg Altziebler manages to put you in a certain mindset by using his thoughts to lead you through certain memories in a way that will make you identify with this entire album on a personal level. I found the song, "I am a Jet Pilot" very ironic, because as this album leads you along near its end, you hear the line "I am a jet pilot, I listen to voice from the tower, and not the voice in my head". As unsettling as this all sounds, it is a beautiful process and you will be grateful for the experience. My advice: listen to this album, then thumb through a Jackson Pollock book. Who knows? Maybe you will identify with a few of his paintings in your altered state.
-Jason Hall 06/23/06
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