Friday, January 25, 2008

THE END OF DAYS: WHEN THE FRENCH OUT COUNTRY OUR SINGERS

When I saw them for the first time, I really thought they were American...I saw a live acoustic version and the lead singer (her name's Rosemary) played up the twang. The Neil Young harmonica, the steel guitar, the stand-up bass...it tricked me good.

On the studio version, you can catch a couple of words that she doesn't completely manage to hide behind an affected twang (last time I checked grass doesn't have an "h").

Anyway, it doesn't really matter where they're from, I like this song:

"Jimmy" Moriarty

2 comments:

Jeff K said...

Okay, the music is fine and her voice is fine . . . but man, I hate this song.

In the first minute, she twangily sings "Jim" and "buffalo" about 10 times each--and it only gets worse from there. It's like a bad parody of an American folk song with some of the worst, non-sensical lyrics I've ever heard strung together. "The buffaloes used to say, be proud of your name, the buffaloes used to say, be what you are"? It's like poetry written by an 8 year old who read a book about a cowboy named Jimmy, during which the author used the cliché "where the buffalo roam", run through a translator and back again. Good god, it's atrocious.

And it's almost poking fun at country music . . . so I'm not sure why I loathe it so much. The painfully artsy video didn't help my appreciation of it either.

It's okay if you like it, though.

Kris said...

I actually posted this right after i had heard it...I've since heard the whole disc and learned more about them and you know what, I'm going to fall into your camp on this.

This is band that is being marketed to hell because some manager thought that the time was right for a band like this to launch in France. They've created this "American" idea of them (apparently one or two of them have parents that were American and another may have, once, set foot in Thailand). They even managed to fuck up the "Wilburying" of their names...At least The Traveling Wilburys went all out and renamed first and last...they just used their first names and added Moriarty to the end...

Their official bio says that they took the name from the New Mexico town...How much you want to bet they set around drinking [I wanna say whiskey, but I think the correct answer is] green tea all afternoon and threw darts at a board...Then they voted and hence "Moriarty" the marketed phenomena was born.

Oh and of course they're bleeding-heart liberals who have to coat every song with their humanistic utopian ideas of hell.

I may be getting a bit cynical in my old age (30 is only a week and a half away).