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| Artist: Randy Newman
Label: Nonesuch
Category: Music
List Price: £15.99
Buy New: £9.78
You Save: £6.21 (39%)
New (35) Used (5) from £7.94
Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 967
Media: Audio CD
Discs: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 5.6 x 5 x 0.3
MPN: 122812
UPC: 075597998931
EAN: 0075597998931
ASIN: B001AN5BNM
Release Date: August 4, 2008
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 6-10 of 10 | | « PREV | | |
 Reasons To Be Cheerful x 10 August 8, 2008
18 out of 18 found this review helpful
Sound The Trumpet ! Bang The Drum ! Mr Newman's Back In Town !
It's almost a decade since the pointed and poignant pleasures of
'Bad Love' filled The Wolf Cave with its' intimately bitter-sweet strains.
Make no mistake - 'Harps and Angels' is music that matters.
Music which truly does make the world, in a small but tangible way,
a better place.
It carries within it a warts-and-all jaded optimism born out of
a deep engagement with and understanding of his home country
and its' increasingly fragile place within a wider global context.
Whether in the big picture - 'A Few Words In Defence Of Our Country' -
a sweet and savagely ironic song which the maestro has been playing
live for some time now - or in the small tender snapshot - 'Only A Girl' -
Mr Newman's innate humanism is always present and warmly correct.
Dignity in the face of dissolution.
The big themes - growing older; ambivalence; love and family; prejudice
and injustice are all here, sewn together in a tapestry of scintillatingly
brilliant orchestral arrangements. (The band is a real wonder !).
It will make you laugh out loud - 'A Piece Of The Pie' and 'Korean Parents' -
but it will also touch your heart - 'Losing You' and 'Potholes' - and in the
end it may even just fill a small, vacant, yearning space in your soul.
With the closing number - 'Feels Like Home' - we find ourselves frozen
in the presence of true greatness.
A heartbreaking performance of a profoundly beautiful song.
The Wolf's album of the year. I am confident it will not be bettered.
Essential.
On a cloud passing you soon ...well worth keeping an eye out for. August 7, 2008
12 out of 15 found this review helpful
This is a review written by someone who tends to dip randomly in and out of Randy Newman's work so cannot be classed in any shape or form a Newman-phile. In truth I tend to find a lot of his work a tad too fussy and ornate for my taste , yet the universal positive reviews for Harps And Angels drew me in and I'm glad they did for this is, in the main ,a hugely enjoyable album . And being Randy Newman it has a lot to say about America as well and says it with his usual verbose wit and eloquence.
Most of Harps & Angels, like much of Newman's back catalogue is wonderful, if austere, whimsy. His excellent backing band, comprising producer Mitchell Froom on keyboards, Attractions drummer Pete Thomas, virtuoso jazz bassist Greg Cohen, veteran session guitarist Steve Donnelly and pedal steel player Greg Leisz, collaborate with a fulsome orchestra to produce country ballads, Dixieland balladry, oriental pop and even one song- "Laugh And be Happy"- that sounds like a 1930,s show tune, though I ,ve got to confess it's too capricious for my taste.
The title track is a jazzy piano led a tale of a man who believes he's drawing his last breath but us told by a celestial being that "Someone very dear to me has made another clerical error " . "Losing You " is a sumptuous ballad about bereavement that shows that Newman sticking to the simple things is probably the best thing of all. There is also the lovely closing track "Feels Like Home"( which first appeared on 1995's "Faust: Original Soundtrack", sung by Bonnie Raitt, and has since been covered by Emmylou Harris and Chantal Krevaziuk, among others) where his voice is really stretched to it,s limits. I also love "Korean Parents " , which far from being racist recommends that children be brought up by immigrant parents who are far more like likely to make a decent job of it. The oriental arrangement is beautifully observed.
Probably the most amusing track is "A Few Words In Defence Of Our Country" is a pedal steel enhanced errr defence of America , though that defence is basically constructed around the argument that "Now the leaders we have / While they're the worst that we've had/ Are hardly the worst this poor world has seen.". Now saying that Dubya and his neo -cons aren't quite as bad as the Caesars and King Leopold is a flimsy argument as I,m sure is the point but is also none the less funny.
Elsewhere he rails against the erasing of memory by age on the swaggering pomp of "Potholes" and on the overly frilly but comical "Piece Of The Pie" he fulminates against inequality in the U.S. but because "Bono,s off in Africa -he's never around" the country's saviour is Jackson Browne. "Easy Street" is a nice lugubrious swinging number and contrasts with the finicky arrangement of "Only A Girl" .
Where this sits in the whole pantheon of Randy Newman releases, well you will have to ask someone else . But of what I have heard this rates pretty damm high. Only "Sail Away: Remastered & Expanded " , "Land of Dreams" and "12 Songs" are on a par with Harps And Angels.On a cloud passing you soon. Watch the skies , keep looking .. The neck ache will be well worth
Another Newman Treat August 6, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
As soon as you hear the opening bars of Newman's rolling New Orleans piano you know you're in for another musical treat. Heavily influenced by Fats Domino, Tin Pan Alley and Dixieland his musical style allows no concessions to fashion but his great trick is to let the music accommodate and absorb his sardonic view of the world in general and the USA in particular.
Reserving much of his barbed wit for the Bush administration he does at least remind us, "In A Few Words In Defense Of Our Country" that George is not as bad as the Caesars, Hitler, Stalin or King Leopold of Belgium who plundered the Congo of gold, silver and diamonds and left the natives with...... malaria!
Then there is "A Piece Of The Pie" where "If you are living in the richest country in the world/wouldn't you think you'd have a better life" and observes that only Jackson Browne gives a sh*t.
In "Korean Parents" he shares his satirical view that American adolescents would have fewer problems and be less dangerous if they were brought up by Korean parents who seemed to have the necessary skills well honed which has a resonance with Asian parents in our own country.
But there are gentler numbers such as "Feels Like Home", "Only A Girl" and "Losing You" proving that Randy still has a sentimental side.
Produced by lifelong friend, Lenny Waronker, this album, his first studio effort in 9 years, has all of the strengths associated with Randy Newman: lush arrangements, full orchestral sounds, musically and lyrically astute songs, his shuffling, bluesey delivery and that wonderful stride piano.
Visited by Harps and Angels as he almost dies (due to a clerical error!) he says: "So actually the main thing about this story is for me/there really is an afterlife/and I hope to see all of you there/Let's go get a drink."
Amen to that, Randy.
 I hate to sound a negative note, but... August 3, 2008
7 out of 14 found this review helpful
...this album is over-short, over-produced and over-orchestrated. If you're going to put out a 35-minute album, then almost every track should be a 'killer', but this album is flabby in the middle ('Laugh and Be Happy', 'A Piece of the Pie' and 'Easy Street' are average songs that suffer from much of the over-orchestration that marred 'Faust'). And 'Korean Parents' definitely steps over the racist line, with its mocking oriental arrangement. I usually really like Randy Newman, and much of his wit is still intact here, but I don't like hearing it swamped by his own musical score (thank goodness, the lyrics are reproduced on the cover!).
STUNNING!! July 1, 2008
21 out of 28 found this review helpful
Randy Newman has surely made one of the great musical comebacks. Harps and Angels is one of THE albums of the year and one of the best albums of his fantastic career! Its full of the witty songs that he's renown for. "A Few Words In Defense Of Our Country" is up there with the best he's written,"Losing You" is an achingly beautiful song,"A Piece Of The Pie" goes straight for the jugular whilst "Feels Like Home" is the definitive version. This short (35 minutes) album is an absolute winner. Buy it, sit back and enjoy one of the worlds great songwriters at the top of his form!
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