SOUNDTRACK: RAUL MIDÓN-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #23 (May 16, 2020).
Raul Midón performed a Tiny Desk Concert back in 2018. He was solo then (the blurb says he usually has a band with him) and he’s solo here now. So there’s not a lot of difference between the two.
Except that in this home concert he plays five new songs.
It kicks off with two tracks from The Mirror, an album released just as we entered our quarantine period in mid-March: “I Love The Afternoon” and “I Really Want To See You Again,” a song that poetically captures the joy of friendship.
For both of these songs, Midón plays a very percussive guitar. Whether it’s actually slapping the guitar like a drum to open the first song or the way he practically has the strings slap back against the guitar as he plays his complicated melody, there’s all kinds of rhythm going on.
He also has a light, fast, handpicking style. And in “I Love the Afternoon” he adds a trumpet solo just with his mouth.
Midón’s jazz-influenced vocal phrasing throughout comes to the fore with just his acoustic guitar as accompaniment, illustrating once again why he’s normally one of the bright spots on our musical landscape and even more so at this moment.
Introducing “A Certain Café” he says Boris Karloff played bass. Then he stops himself and laughs, Boris Kozlov–that’s from too much old-time radio. It’s a slower, pretty song with a much gentler playing style.
He says that “Disguise” has fluegelhorn on the record but he’ll replace it here with his vocal fluegel, which is pretty cool.
“You’re The One” ends the set with a beautiful guitar introduction. I was disappointed to hear that he raps the verses because the chorus is really catchy.
[READ: May 20, 2020] Five Years #5
This issue has two components.
In the first, Zoe is taken to see “Rachel’s” body. She fantasizes about killing Vlad in two spectacularly violent ways. Zoe obviously realizes the body is not Rachel and the morgue attendant signals her in someway–although I can’t decipher it.
As they leave, Vlad offers Zoe a job since she has so much talent and potential.
Then we see Tambi parachute out of the sky with someone (is that Kathchoo? It’s hard to tell).
They are at a senator’s house. It is palatial. The senator is an old man swimming laps in his home pool. She reaches in and pulls him up by the arm. He knows who she is and says he’ll for help.
She says she will break every bone in his body starting with “the hand you used to authorize the Phi bomb.”
He says they have no intention of detonating it–it’s just a deterrent. She responds name a weapon we haven’t tested.
Who knows if negotiation would actually have worked, but that’s not Tambi’s way. Blackmail works much better. And Tambi has people all over the place.
How can he wrap this up in five more issues?
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