#197 - Strange pickings from musicalia.

[reileen]

Oh, I love the sheer idiocy of this one.

Fandom Wank: The Battle of Versailles

So what happens when an obscure American musician finds out that a Japanese indie band that just might be less obscure has the same name as the one you've already picked. Well if the name is Versailles you copyright the name and threaten legal action against the Japanese band for stealing the name from you. Because you know there's no way that they could have been inspired by the French city the name comes from being as they are a visual kei band that uses the glory days of French aristocratic society as their band's theme.

I fear for the remaining threads of my sanity, so I'm avoiding looking at the comments on Versailles(R!!!!!!)'s MySpace. I am sorely tempted, though.

With regards to the chick's music, it's...decent, I suppose. I don't care for her voice, and the songs she's got up remind me of a more generically emo, downbeat Emilie Autumn - which is kind of stretching it a little and giving her more credit than she deserves. Versailles' lyrics aren't much to sneeze at, either.

***

Two things I've been pondering:

1) Gothic folk. Or folk gothic. I imagine these two would probably cancel each other out, but as someone who wanders on both sides of the road, I like trying to think about it until my brain fursplodes. Could gothic lyrics work with a more melancholy folksy sound? Vienna Teng's "My Medea" might qualify, I think, but since she uses piano she's wandering into classical influences that gothic music tends to exhibit anyway. I was thinking more along the lines of "Dar Williams and/or Noe Venable, but gothic." Gothic guitar, what? That would be...interesting.

2) A reversal of the "beauty and the beast" motif in gothic/symphonic rock, where instead of having a beautiful, soaring female voice paired with growling male vocals (which, as much as I do like it, has been done to death already), you have angry, semi-screechy, deep female vocals (maybe something like Emilie Autumn, particularly when she's in her Opheliac mode) with Il Divo-esque male vocals. Suggested name for this arrangement: "the harpy and the hunk."

If anyone out there can point me to actual examples of these in action, that would be appreciated. :D...

***

Hey, I didn't realize Vanessa Carlton had another music video out. Hands on Me is the second single from Heroes and Thieves, and is one of my favorite songs from that album.

This video, however, is not going on my list of favorite Vanessa Carlton music videos, or even on my list of favorite music videos, period. First off, the cuts are just kind of really weird and jerky. Secondly, the execution of the video's theme just doesn't work. Many of Carlton's songs from Heroes and Thieves give off an odd adolescent naivete for someone as old as she is, and "Hands on Me" is probably one of the biggest offenders in that regard. Which I mean in the most affectionate way possible, because like I said it's one of my favorite songs, and although I didn't like the direction of Heroes and Thieves at first, I've come to like it. It's grown on me, and is fuzzy and warm like mold.

But casting Carlton in the role of the lovestruck viewpoint in the music video for "Hands on Me" strikes me as a million kinds of wrong. She might sound like she's still in high school, but she definitely doesn't look like she is. If she had a face like Ayumi Hamasaki, who's about the same age as her (Carlton is 28; Hamasaki is 29), she could probably pull it off, but no, Carlton looks her age, or only a few years younger, which would still place her squarely in the twenties. So there's something disturbing and unnerving about watching a grown Carlton fidgeting on the bed as she's thinking about this love of hers. I think it would have worked better if they'd cast an actress to play a younger Carlton (which would be weird in its own way, because Carlton came into the mainstream as a teenager, and everyone knows what she looked like then) and then have the real Carlton acting as a commentator of some sort, as though she were looking back on her teenage years.

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I have a Twitter account. Yeah, that's right, bitches, you heard me: I has an account on a glorified version of the Facebook status feature. Whatcha gonna do about it, huh?

Also, anonymous commenting is turned on in this LJ now. If I've got any non-LJ readers out there, give me a holler. Just make sure to sign your name so I know who you are. o_o I reserve the right to screen/bahleet idiocy, though, because this is my LJ and I'll wank cry if I want to.

-Reileen
let's make this our story, let's live in the glory