SOUNDTRACK: THE ACORN-“The Flood Pt. 1” from Viva Piñata! (2008).
The Acorn are a folk band from Ottawa. This song sounds a lot like later Talking Heads. Talking Heads are not really a band that many other bands sound like. And yet they have such a distinctive sound that when a band sounds like them it’s hard not to think “another Talking Heads.”
Having said that, this is a fun and interesting song. It has a world music feel in the rhythms. And the vocals are in the vein of David Byrne (but not aping him or anything like that). The big difference from the Talking Heads comes near the end of the song when a second voice (who sounds a bit like Bono) comes in to do harmonies.
All in all it is a very satisfying song.
[READ: March 20 2012] “Roy Lichtenstein and the Comic Strip”
This is the first of three new articles that my company send around as samples of interesting articles that we have archived.
I’ve always enjoyed Lichtenstein’s comic-book-style art. It’s kind of pop and very commercial, and I’ve always appreciated it, even if I didn’t really like the comics that he took his inspiration from.
Despite my enjoyment of his work, I never really bothered to investigate how he did it. I wasn’t sure if he just took a comic page and blew it up or added color or what. But it turns out that he did actually recreate the pictures from scratch. This article shows side by side some original cartoon panels and then Lichtenstein’s version.
In most of them he keeps things relatively the same. But even in those it is quite clear that he is redoing the art with his own lines and style–he is not copying the faces, he is simplifying them even further in some cases or making them more beautiful in others. You can see that he has changed little things to make them more artistically satisfying–stretching out a window to connect characters, removing background images or zooming in more in a frame to make the image more striking–although the are always recognizable as the original. The most drastic change, and the focus of the article, is his use of the balloon quote. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 