Madonna, Amy Winehouse and Wolfgang

Sunday, June 8th, 2008

Mozart superposed on a car dash

It’s while driving that I’m most sensitive to music.

These past few days, I had 3 CDs left in my car that I listened, each a few times, in that order:

Hard Candy from Madonna
Back To Black from Amy Winehouse
A sampler of the Complete Mozart Edition

Hard Candy

I’ve got mixed feeling for this dance floor album. I expected more from the new-age Jew protagonist. The CD booklet is uninventive and its cover photograph is yelling you that Sex with you is so incredible. How refreshing.

Bubbly electro synths are plentiful as well as some stereotyped musical schemes like Spanish Lesson — that’s La Isla Bonita with some Wrap-style background vocals to make it in 2008.

Still, nice musical constructs are also plentiful. And, on the highway, I tended to increase the sound on 4 Minutes, Miles Away, and Give It 2 Me.

However, my top track would be Devil Wouldn’t Recognize You. Its intro is quite reminiscent of the Magnetic Fields period of Jean-Michel Jarre: urban desolation in some unknown future. But that’s Timbaland that helped produce that nice cut.

Back To Black

In 2007, this album has consistently figured in the numerous top charts because Winehouse is one hell of an impressive singer and also because it features the style of 1960’s pop soul brought to the 21st century in a fresh manner. As someone said appropriately, who needs love when heartbreak sounds this bloody good?

This is certainly an album you will like —the whole of it— since Amy is more than a one-hit wonder. Keeping on my driving experience, Me and Mr. Jones is outstanding, especially on the highway.

Back To Black is a top one on my personal chart.

Vesperae solennes de confessore

But recently, I felt somewhat tiresome and put that old sampler of Mozart music, feeling it would offset horns and those lights that seem stuck on the red forever.

Cutis Anserina, goose bumps, or more appropriately chill bumps. That’s what I felt when track number 5 started. I grabbed the sleeve for closer inspection and it indicated « Vesperae solennes de confessore (K339) ». What can I say? Maybe you could judge by yourself from that static video:

Well, this track on the video does not correspond to my sampler and it’s not hifi on YouTube, but you get the idea. I tell you, that man captured waves from the universe, deeped from the inside.

With Hard Candy, it’s the Disco Ball, whereas Amy’s soulful voice is dazzling enough on its own. But with Wolfgang, you are in a black hole — a region of space that has so much mass concentrated in it that there is no way for you to escape its gravitational pull. An extrasensory experience where you feel you could meet angelical creatures from outer space.

Köchel 339 has been written in 1780. And still, it resists with boldness and assurance the musical landscape of today.

Should you want hearing the real thing, here’s the info: