O'Appalachia to O Seu Olhar

"O'Appalachia"  Baroness  Red Album
"O'er Hell and Hide"  Baroness  Blue Record
"O-O-H Child"  Nina Simone/Nickodemos  Remixed & Reimagined
"O Caminho"  Bebel Gilberto  Bebel Gilberto
"O Day"  Bessie Jones  Southern Journey, Vol. 1: Voices From The American South
"O Death"  Tangle Eye  Alan Lomax's Southern Journey Remixed
"O Estrangiero"  Caetano Veloso  Brazil Classics:  Beleza Tropical Vol. 2
"O Green World"  Gorillaz  Demon Days 
"O My Soul"  Big Star  Radio City
"O Seu Olhar"  Arnaldo Antunes  Brazil Classics:  Beleza Tropical Vol. 2

  With the exception of some cartoon characters from England, this entire set is from south of the Mason-Dixon Line.  (admittedly, this is not how one usually thinks of Brazil, but it is certainly true).

 I might be too old for Baroness.  My girlfriend has absolutely no patience for it.  In fact, one evening when I got home from work, she had been going through some of the new music I had gotten, and I was greeted with, "So . . . Baroness . . ."  That was really all that needed to be said.  I like it at times.  I don't find it that far removed from something like The Mars Volta or King Crimson (also guitar bands that wear on my girlfriend).  I think it is the growling metal vocals that give me pause.

  The Tangle Eye album is the best, most-focused and most successfully realized remix set I have.  (Girl Talk might rival, but he is more a mash-up artist).  I think a part of it is that the songs they chose were mostly a capella work, so the instrumentation is not replacing something, which often creates a disjunction.  The instrumentation here is also done by studio musicians - this is not to decry electronic music.  However, in this case, using Alan  Lomax's field recordings, the analog works better with the source material.  Also, because the music here is relatively obscure, the remix is not stomping on some more well-known work (see "O-O-H Child").

  Gorillaz is the best fake band ever.  They beat the Monkees because Noodle arrived by FedEx - more Mary Poppins than Mike Nesmith.  Yes, Steam gets played by every sports team in America, but they were a one-hit fake wonder.  Gorillaz has released three quality full-lengths (not counting The Fall which just came out last Christmas). 

  The inordinate number of Brazilian tracks in this set has to do with Portuguese.  The definite article is "O" so these three songs all start "The."  While iTunes strips that in English, it doesn't do so here.  (The same thing happened in reverse with "A Habibi Ouajee T'Allel Allaiya" - neither iTunes nor I know Arabic well enough to know whether that initial "A" should have been stripped as an indefinite article or not).  I don't usually sweat the translation much - if the music works it works and knowing what is being said is mostly gravy.  However, Caetano Veloso name-checks Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder, so I was curious.  It is because they, like love, are blind.  In the same verse he references "the albino Hermeto" whom I had never of before.  Hermeto apparently once belonged to a group called "Brazilian Octopus."  More will need to be found out about that.