Lhasa – Lhasa Review
The first song I remember was a Spanish song from her album La Llorona. The intensity of Lhasa’s voice starts soft with a crescendo, the rs roll out of her mouth, and the words tumble out of her with an emotional and passionate cry. I don’t know what she’s saying, but I can feel it. Then there were the French songs, and the English songs. It was a great album. Everyone I knew in the Plateau was listening to it with rapture.
This year, Lhasa released her third album. The biggest thing I noticed, right away, was that she’d forgotten or abandoned all but the English tongue. Somehow, I feel slighted. Though my French is still rudimentary at best, the Quebecker in me feels forgotten, abandoned, perhaps even betrayed by the absence of the other languages. That’s not to say the English songs are poor on the album. However, there is just something about the Romantic languages which cannot be reproduced in drunken German (English).
There are some interesting experiments, and the instrumentation is highly creative. I think if her first album had been exclusively done in English, it would have been a lot easier for me to give her all my thumbs and toes up to show my approval of the brilliant work she’d done. But there’s this language barrier that she’d obliterated in the first album, which somehow drags my opinion of it down.
Things that remain consistent throughout all the albums is the double base. New to the scene is a wonderful harp, woven into the fabric of the music. In “What Kind of Heart” I get treated to an incredibly rare dose of lute (unconfirmed). There is a surreal sadness and beauty to the album. In other tracks, we get a taste of experimentation – like Lhasa is saying “I’d like you to meet this blues guitar player,” or “Here’s my band on the slide guitar.” Then this somehow gets mixed into that Spanish style clack-clack on “Is Anything Wrong?” It has an interesting effect on the rythm for that brief moment – almost as if she’s saying, “Don’t worry, I still have a tiny streak of Spanish rhythm in my hair.”
The musical compositions are really genius, experimental, and the lyrics are poetic. As an artist, she has succeeded in producing her best English songs. Perhaps it’s all about the money in the end. There’s more money in the pockets of English fans, so maybe that’s why she’s abandoned her small crowd of fans on Montreal’s Plateau in the hopes of securing a stronger American fan base. It is work, after all, and we’re all in this business of making music for the money, right?
The CD is expensive at Amazon: for an astonishing $34.98, the CD can be yours. Alternatively, the album can be downloaded for a much easier to cough up $8.99.
In the mean time, while you consider whether your precious depression dollars are worth the cost of the album, listen to these wonderful samples which neglect Lhasa’s other tongues.
1. Is Anything Wrong?
2. Rising
3. What Kind of Heart
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Tags: album
