Legs to Make Us Longer - Dark Publications

Location: Home » music » General » Legs to Make Us Longer

Similar Items:

•	Everybody Loves You
•	Until We Felt Red
•	Dreaming of Revenge
•	August Rush: Music From The Motion Picture
•	Beyond Boundaries: Guitar Solos

Editorial Reviews:

Amazon.com
Kaki King fulfills the promise of her debut, Everybody Loves You, with an album that stretches a guitar sound already torn between the compass points. A frenetic player, King is a musical descendent of Michael Hedges, though she usually cites the underrated Preston Reed. Both guitarists employed two-handed tapping techniques to whiplash effect. So does King, although her phrasing is more abstract and her mind still moves faster than her hands at times. Signing up guitar mutant David Torn as producer, King is clearly intent at defying convention. Joined by a sparse rhythm at times, her sound is taking on a slight country edge. You can hear it on "Doing the Wrong Thing," with King playing electric guitar (or a processed acoustic) using her 10-fingered agility to create a rolling melodic counterpoint to the drummer's train rhythm. She rips it up on "Magazine," literally pummeling the fretboard with her fingers, ripping out a mad dervish. She also sings, with a Chet Baker-fragile voice; pleasant, but nothing that makes want to hear that instead of her guitar. --John Diliberto

Album Description
Japanese pressing of the new-folk act's sophomore album, includes one bonus track 'Nailes'. Epic. 2004.

Customer Reviews: Read 48 more reviews...

1 out of 5 stars

Kaki King is the queen of acoustic guitar derivationism April 11, 2005
75 out of 95 found this review helpful

I have suffered through each of the Kaki King discs. I find her music intolerable. She was recomennded to me with such high praise, but both her titles are terrible disappointments. The praise turned out to be hype. These pieces are studies in guitar histrionics, utterly devoid of emotion. This music doesn't begin to rise to the high standards set by her predecessors and peers. She plays lots of notes, but it's a clattering, random cacophany; the techniques she uses look interesting, but only to those who haven't seen them employed by the myriad acoustic guitar visionaries who originated and developed them - most notably, guitar giant Michael Hedges, and the excellent Preston Reed. Unorthodox techniques may attract attention, but in themselves they signify nothing. Kaki King's music is trite, perfunctory, and mechanical. She is a fantastically unimportant guitarist.

For those who say, "do not compare Kaki's music to others," every clear-thinking person recognizes comparative evaluation as the bedrock of objective criticism. At least two Michael Hedges CDs represent the pinnacle of achievement in the acoustic instrumental guitar genre: "Aerial Boundaries," and "Oracle." Leo Kottke's riveting debut, "Six and Twelve String Guitar," is a credible contender as best solo acoustic guitar album ever recorded. Both Hedges and Kottke have elevated the world of acoustic guitar music with a most distinguished oeuvre, advancing technicality, yet exploding with originality and emotion. Their work is universally accepted and recognized as the standard by which everything else is to be judged.

The Sony Records / Kaki King publicity team shamelessly spews out the hype, but that's all it is. Hype. Kaki King is no original. She is no heir to Hedges. She has earned no musical inheritance. Hers is the sound of an immature, obnoxious, irrelevant derivationist - a petty musical shoplifter. Her music is piffle. It is disorderly and dissociative. It is not at all cohesive from a compositional perspective. It conveys no sense of emotional equilibrium or continuity: Ms. King often shifts gears dramatically within the same piece, but never for any discernable musical reason. Her so-called compositions are incomprehensible. There is nothing "modern," "post-modern," "pan-tonal," or "architectonic" about her structures. She is no composer. She is a hack. This is raw sound, compulsively slapped together with techniques appropriated from more advanced artists, with no understanding of how those techniques evolved (incredibly, she only recently discovered Leo Kottke and John Fahey), or more to the point, why those other artists felt compelled to develop and incorporate them. Ms. King's priorities are elsewhere; she actually stated in print that she believes she has given a good live performance when she has made a large number of audience members want to sleep with her. Many of her other comments are so offensive they cannot be reprinted here.

While Kaki King's music may lure neophytes unfamiliar with the genre, in no way is her work sui generis, nor does it exist in a vacuum. Michael Hedges may be gone physically but his recordings are widely available and selling smartly. There are literally dozens of other stellar acoustic artists, male and female, touring regularly, in the prime of their careers, releasing oustanding music. The world of instrumental acoustic guitar boasts a proud tradition of excellence, and is propulsed today by a new generation of exceptionally talented musicians. Ms. King's overhyped, smarmy, and disingenuous attempt to position herself among that rank is nothing more than a personally financed, shrewdly calculated, and boldly executed misinformation campaign designed to suppress the devastating truth: when all is said and done, her music simply fails to measure up.

Instrumental steel string solo acoustic guitar is a genre populated by a lineage of towering creative spirits, many of whom have set the bar extraordinarily high. The only reason Kaki King hasn't knocked it to the ground is because she has jumped under it.

1 out of 5 stars

a CD that must be heard to be believed July 26, 2005
50 out of 66 found this review helpful

Simply the worst solo acoustic guitar CD ever recorded.

No groove. No emotion. No excitement.

Just repetition. Total boredom. So what if she plays with her hands on the neck of the guitar? Who cares if she plays guitar with her feet, or with her elbows? The music is all that matters, and this music SUCKS.

1 out of 5 stars

please stop making CDs, and go away October 10, 2005
49 out of 69 found this review helpful

If this record wasn't so overhyped, it would simply pass unnoticed as a weak effort by a mediocre musician and that would be the end of it.

The trouble is that there is so much marketing money behind Kaki King. She isn't the first female to enter a male-dominated genre, trying to get by with the "I'm a girl who can really play" routine (most notorious being Candy Dulfer). Unfortunately, Kaki King really ISN'T a great player. She's not even "good." At best, she's barely passable. She sounds like a very watered down, dumbed down version of the artists she so brazenly copies. She's not only an affront to those of us who know and love the category of solo acoustic instrumental guitar, but she is an insult to those women who ARE great players, who rely not on being women, but the quality of their music, to sell CDs.

Kaki King is all hype. She's the Ashlee Simpson of the acoustic guitar world - an obnoxious, overexposed, egomaniac no-talent nobody who refuses to go away. The world will be a better place if this is the last CD she ever makes.

5 out of 5 stars

Better compositions; definite progression and growth. October 26, 2004
47 out of 51 found this review helpful

This was exactly the album Kaki King needed to make after her impressive but shapeless debut, Everybody Loves You.

On this record, her major-label debut, Kaki King has retained most of her wild experimentations but refined it with melodic and rhythmic progressions that actually take you to different places rather than aimlessly noodling. And this was exactly what her music needed. Now her compositions create moods and paces, colours and feelings, while her ear-grabbing techniques help to keep things fresh. Witness Solipsist, which sonically and instrumentally sounds a lot like the songs from her debut. But this time, the music moves forward and makes variations, rather than repeat a rhythmic motif (as most of the material did on Everybody Loves You).

Several of the tracks here remind me of Joe Satriani in a good way, in terms of their rock-based rhythms and melodies, and King's chordal harmonies have gotten lusher and more interesting, jazzier yet more engaging, with much better recording to back it up. "Ingots" is my favourite track, opening on a galloping tapped beat with the acoustic guitar entering with mysterious accents, followed by a propelling octave melody and then a nervous, almost unhinged melody based on string slides, ending on a crescendo, building in intensity as no other King track has ever done. The New Age "All the Landslides Birds Have Seen Since the Beginning of the World" is lovely and sparse, dispensing with King's signature rhythmic tricks (again, a great sign of growth, adapting techniques to songs rather than the other way around), and King even attempts to sing on "My Insect Life". Her vocals are really nothing to write home about, being breathy and thin, but just because her main tool is her guitar doesn't mean she shouldn't explore her other dimensions. Even Eric Johnson sings occasionally on his songs, and if it helps convey different layers in the music, all the better.

I see the detractors to King's style and this record, and I understand some of their points. But I'll also say that I love this record, and if you've read enough of my reviews, you know I'm not exactly merciful if I don't like something. To me, this record is a gem, the coming of age of an artist who is fulfilling her potential.

1 out of 5 stars

you call this music? August 2, 2005
47 out of 67 found this review helpful

This CD must be an aberration. Or else it must be a joke.

How this girl got a record deal is beyond me. I have heard high school kids who write better songs, and who have better knowledge of the instrument.

This CD is bogus. I think the people who think of Kaki King as some great guitar player know zilch about artists like Preston Reed and Adrian Legg. She is totally unoriginal. Her songs are unlistenable. Kaki King doesn't deserve to clean up the nail clippings of guitarists like Don Ross or Leo Kottke.

This is music for people who are musically illiterate.

I agree with the reviewer below who said this is the worst solo acoustic guitar music ever recorded.

Awful.

Avoid at all cost.

Powered by Associate-O-Matic

T-shirts, Posters

Pentagram T-shirts, bags, etc...

Gothic Posters