Posted 11:44 AM by Gene

Just what I need, Terry: to buy another album I listen to once. Okay, this act with the cute name (and the cute album cover) may be all right, but for what CDs cost I want something a little more than cute and all right. I've bought enough CDs I've listened to once. So they do "a forty-minute-long multi-movement work for voice and bluegrass quintet that is through-composed" -- please! Plus you plant these guys in the same graf as three favorites of the tiny musical-theater cult, whose cast albums sell in the hundreds. (Can you believe Hello, Dolly! sold 80,000 units -- in its first week?) The republic swarms with regiments of musicians just above the level of anonymity: "accomplished" jazzers and "accomplished" rockers and "accomplished" bluegrassers and what not, all very good for what they do -- and because they all have high technical competence and low inspiration they'll stay there. They generally crib quite freely off one another and rely on their friends and their tiny fan details for support, which doesn't help. I do not like it that our culture seems to be devolving into these limitless glorified high-school cliques centered around glorified no-names. I want something good, and I want something I can remember. Maybe these guys are good, and maybe some other act you could pull from a hat would be just as good. But I've had it with this vast sea of gray -- I want some colors.