What does the sea want, anyway?

Whenever I get a new CD I tend to play it over and over again until I kill it, and then resucitate it a few months down the track. At the moment, I'm slowly leaching the life out of Sarah Blasko's What the sea wants, the sea shall have , an album that Paulina recently nominated for the Worst Album Title of the Year awards. It's a bit clunky, sure, but the title encapsulates something I find intriguing about Sarah Blasko, which is her ability to give lyrics that are fundamentally quite empty the impression great depth and vice versa. Consistantly, they border on the edge of trite, senitmental or glib, only to be pulled back from the brink by some fucking great arrangements and kick-arse vocals.

'Queen of Apology' is a case in point - the lyrics are fundamentally quite cutesy, but they're overlaid with a thumping military beat and some great cymbalic drumrolls* and very restrained strings. 'Hammer' is pretty awesome also, with that same semi-military beat (I appear to have a weakness of military drumlines, which is why I love Edith Piaf's 'L'homme de la motto' and Outkast's 'Pink and blue' in equal measure) and according to iTunes I've been listening to 'The Albatross' and 'Planet New Year' more than the rest of the album. I only downloaded iTunes recently and feel a bit ambivalent about the fact that it is already keeping dibs on me.

Anyway, even though I know I am going to be thoroughly sick of this album in approximately five listens' time, at the moment I am fairly enamoured of it. But as the previous two passages so cogently demonstrate, I'm not a music critic, so what the hell would I know.



*I tried to describe the sound of drums with lots of cymbals and dissonance to Jono recently as "cymbolic". He corrected me, but I really like the notion of symbolic drums and plan to start a concept band around it. We would all wear black turtlenecks and smoke pipes and OMFG!!!1! we could be called THE SIN TAX!! Would there just be a picture of some drums, though? Or would there be a signifying guitar, and a signified bass as well?

Oh my God, I am far too excited about this idea.