Harps & Angels - Dark Publications

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
Randy Newman's first studio album of all new material in nearly a decade is, by turns, hilarious, poignant and scathingly satirical. Harps and Angels often has an easy going Crescent City feel, with Newman on piano fronting a small combo and revealing, as Rolling Stone put it after the Carnegie Hall show, his serious love and study of the New Orleans piano tradition.

Album Description
Randy Newman's 2008 studio album titled Harps and Angels. Produced by Mitchell Froom and Lenny Waronker, it contains seven new songs and three updated versions of previously released songs.

Customer Reviews: Read 54 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

A gem of an album : dark, cynical and very funny. August 5, 2008
57 out of 61 found this review helpful

Randy Newman is best known for writing songs for cute kids films like "Toy Story".
But don't knock it - the cash funds gems of albums like this. This is the real Newman - dark, cynical and very funny. "Harps & Angels" is only his third new album of non-movie music in 20 years as he's been busy scooping accolades for his Hollywood soundtrack work - but it's been worth the wait.
It's a winning mix of loping, Fats Domino-ish, New Orleans blues, topped off by Newman's sardonic slur.
The jazzy, bluesy instrumentation here is imbued with a blockbuster kind of magic. Newman is the man behind scores to "Toy Story" and "Monsters, Inc" after all.
Happily, he cuts through any cloying cutesiness with timely observational swipes - taking in such themes as 'terror', modern parenting and the economy, all delivered in his unmistakeably good-natured drawl.
The album consists of just 10 tracks, and has a running time that falls just short of 35 minutes, yet freights multitudes, musically and lyrically.
The title track is a gradually building, slowly sumptuous, New Orleans-flavoured jazz shimmy. Over this, Newman unspools the tale of a man sucking what he believes are his dying breaths on a pavement, only to be visited by an inexplicably Francophone celestial being who admits to the narrator that his time isn't up just yet - and, by way of atoning for the clerical error, offers some advice towards a better, more observant life.
"A Few Words In Defense Of Our Country" is the album's pivotal address: on this one, he's like a cross between Dr John and philosopher John Grey. A mid tempo bluesy country shuffle is the platform for a look at humanity's inhumanity and the decline of the American empire.
Randy's genius is to turn intelligent thought into simple words and complex, compelling, bitter-sweet American music.
Clearly, the early 21st century has provided rich fuel for Newman's self-styled American songbook.
Yet he's also capable of crafting a classy yet unreconstructed love song, as proved by the climactic melody "Feels Like Home".
It's sweetly sentimental enough to give you the warm'n'fuzzies - but this ol' teddy bear still has plenty of chutzpah and satirical bite.
"A Piece Of The Pie" makes you chuckle with swearing and jokes: he argues with a chorus of bellicose patriots and bickering Belgians, and pleads for deliverance by Jackson Browne. But the brilliantly sharp Weill-esque arrangement delivers a real sense of unease underneath all the knockabout. The world really is going to hell.
Newman is coming up to 65 now but he is not about to retire his lapel-grabbing melodies. Just when he begins to sound like a protest singer (even of the most elusive kind) he throws in a show tune such as "Laugh and Be Happy" or a conventional piece of Dixie jazz, in "Only a Girl.
The tracks that glide most assuredly into Newman's pantheon of classics are "Losing You", two minutes and 16 seconds of wonder, a deceptively simple, rueful, achingly beautiful ballad of bereavement that could equally have been written for Tom Waits or Frank Sinatra, and "Feels Like Home, beautifully crafted, precise and moving.
Both will have you in tears and both are among Newman's best songs.
"Feels like home" has been coverd by Bonnie Raitt on Michael: Music from the Motion Picture, by Linda Ronstadt on Feels Like Home, by Chantal Kreviazuk on What If It All Means Something, by Mario Frangoulis on Give US Your Poor, by Emmylou Harris on Trio II (Two) and by Soul diva Nita Whitaker on Life Stories.
By Newman's standards this is a good rather than great album.
But Newman's standards are very high. After all he's written some of the greatest popular songs of the past forty years.
There is much on "Harps & Angels" that will delight admirers of Newman's trademark sucker-punches, double-bluffs and irony-laden conceits.
Not for the first time, Newman is at his most affecting when he plays it mercilessly straight: his flickers of sincerity all the more beguiling for only appearing rarely.
My highlights : "A Few Words in Defence of Our Country", "A Piece of the Pie", "Losing You" and "Feels Like Home".
Have a great listening experience.

5 out of 5 stars

Compelling. A Grammy is in the cards ! August 5, 2008
55 out of 60 found this review helpful

Randy Newman has made a career out of being a very successful film composer (with 15 Oscar nominations and one win), who is best known these days for his "Pixar" soundtracks, including "Toy Story", "A Bug's Life" and "Monsters Inc".
But it is on his own albums, when he is not writing to order, that he really gets to let fly with as much comedic misanthropy as he can muster.
His last album, "Bad Love" was a brilliant black diamond of a record and his best for 30 years.
"Harps & Angels" finds him in a more mellow mood. But mellow is a relative term.
America, like all empires, has come to an end. This is the driving theme of "Harps & Angels", but Newman is a man of multitudes. He spits at US governance one minute ("A Few Words in Defence Of Our Country") and chokes up the next ("Feels Like Home').
The personal and political entwine lyrically with supreme cleverness, while New Orleans jazz, C&W, the Hollywood soundtrack are spitefully parodied. Classic Randy.
"Harps And Angels" is the first track and is about a man having a heart attack. The sound of harps and angels comes from God's backing singers as the judgment is delivered: "You ain't been a good man, you ain't been a bad man..."
Most of "Harps & Angels", like much of Newman's canon, is similar glorious, if bleak, whimsy.
His formidable backing band, comprising producer, time-served collaborator Mitchell Froom on keyboards, Attractions drummer Pete Thomas, virtuoso jazz bassist Greg Cohen, veteran session guitarist Steve Donnelly and pedal steel player Greg Leisz, conspire with a full-dress orchestra to confect country ballads, show tunes, Dixieland balladry, oriental pop and, on "Laugh And Be Happy", a groundbreaking enterprise in sarcastic Charleston. This has circulated in demo form before, and two other songs may also be familiar.
The closing cut, the gorgeous devotional "Feels Like Home" first appeared on 1995's "Faust", sung by Bonnie Raitt, and has since been covered by Emmylou Harris and Chantal Krevaziuk, among others. "A Few Words In Defense Of Our Country" was as an iTunes download - and New York Times op-ed - last year.
The lyrics of the latter made the op-ed page of the newspaper, but they work much better sung in Newman's lazy Noo Awlins croak - "the end of an empire is messy at best, this empire is ending like all the rest".
In "A Piece of The Pie", he hammers home his the-rich-get-richer theme with jagged, Kurt Weill-ish orchestration, while "Potholes" recommends creeping amnesia as a defence against painful memories. "Korean Parents", with its pseudo-Oriental flourishes, may be a misanthropic joke too far as Newman lampoons Asian families who bully their children to academic success, but he offers melodious balm with "Losing You" and the hymn-like closer, the aforementioned "Feels Like Home".
Fans of unfettered Newman have been waiting nine years for some new, non-cartoon material of this sort and will likely not be disappointed by this pithy ten-song collection, which indulges both his merciless wit and his softer, more sentimental side.
This album will only take up 36 minutes of your time. It'll make you laugh and cry.
After all, it's Randy Newman.
The fortuneteller says that a Grammy is...in the cards!
Toy Story (10th Anniversary Edition)
A Bug's Life (Two-Disc Collector's Edition)
Bad Love
Monsters, Inc. (Two-Disc Collector's Edition)
Guilty: 30 Years of Randy Newman
Faust (Dlx)

3 out of 5 stars

Still has arranging flair, but light on the melodies August 11, 2008
24 out of 34 found this review helpful

I did not expect so many of the songs on this short (34 min.) new offering to be raps -- Newman talks over his piano accompaniment with orchestral embellishment. Newman has used this technique effectively in the past, on "The Girls In My Life" from the Born Again album. The title track is a conversational rap, and it's a complete success. "In Defense of My Country" also works nicely as Newman talks, not sings, his lines.

I can't be as enthusiastic about Easy Street (half spoken, half sung), or "Potholes" (mostly spoken). Nor did I find the melodies on "A Piece of The Pie" or "Korean Parents" particularly appealing.

Lyrically, Newman ruminates on the state of the nation, and some topics related to aging and mortality, love that you appreciate (Feels Like Home) and love that's lost (Losing You). It's sharp stuff, but not as sharp as the old days. Well, what can you expect but a slight mellowing from a Randy Newman who's on the cusp of Social Security?

The orchestration is lovely -- it will take you right back to the classic albums he did in the mid 70's. Laugh And Be Happy sounds a bit like burlesque show music, and A Piece Of The Pie is very theatrical. The other arrangements will sound very familiar to Randy Newman fans -- bringing to mind Ragtime-era turn-of-previous-century fare.

The sound quality is not so lovely. It favors the midrange, the dynamics are compressed. Such is the fashion in audio engineering these days, but it makes Newman's voice more grating and froggy than it should be, and Newman's voice doesn't need any help in that department.

The title track and A Few Words In Defense... are standout tracks. The one that tops them all is the final cut, Feels Like Home. I actually thought this song was penned by Chantal Kreviazuk. It was a bonus track on the American release of her album What If It All Means Something. The song suits her. As a bonus track, the liner notes were silent about the composer. It turns out Randy Newman wrote this for his Faust album, which I have not heard. Coming from the cynical Newman, this heartfelt love song seems out of place in this collection, yet Randy is just as effective singing this unaffected melodious confession as he is raising an eyebrow on American society. Feels Like Home has a classic, anthemic melody (especially anthemic in Chantal Kreviazuk's cover of it) that makes up for some of the lack of melody on the rest of the record.

While the songs on Harps & Angels all amused me as I listened to them the first time, I seriously wonder how many of them I will want to hear again, outside of the standouts I mentioned. That would be my only reservation about purchasing the album. So a final rating of three and a half stars for a record that is never less than good, and sometimes very good. Still, objectively it falls short of five star greatness.

3 out of 5 stars

Great..A real fun listen August 7, 2008
19 out of 24 found this review helpful

Randy and his usual brilliant, hilarious lyrics. He vocally plays it very loose on this album, seemingly ad-libbing lines - all to great effect. In today's market, if this were an unknown artist (and a minority) this could be album of the year.

The hits: Harp and Angels, Losing You, A Few Words, Easy Street, Only A Girl, Potholes.
The misses: Laugh & Be Happy, A Piece Of The Pie, Korean Parents, Feels Like Home.

Nothing here comes up to the level of "Good Old Boys' (1973) - but it's still worth the purchase. All feel-good songs, except the heartbreakingly beautiful "Losing You."

3 out of 5 stars

Not Quite August 11, 2008
19 out of 22 found this review helpful

Randy Newman gets a three-star head-start for being Randy Newman, but this is an oddly anemic effort. It's billed as an album of all new material, but it's not: "Laugh & Be Happy" was written for the Pixar animators easily 15 years ago in response to the Evil Mouse meddling; "Feels Like Home" is from Faust, also going back close to 15 years now. Several other songs feel like cast-offs from earlier albums/projects. Among those that don't, several of those feel like Randy Newman consciously writing Randy Newman songs, instead of simply writing songs.

Don't get me wrong, that three-star head-start comes with a lot of gifts: intricate internal harmonies, lush string arrangements, and a barbed, rambunctious and often simply hilarious sense of irony, in bold display here to an extent often nodded at but not usually found in such raw abundance on his records (as opposed to live performances).

And there are pleasures to be found here, to be sure, not least of which the twisted "Korean Parents," and the one-sided conversations that serve as bridges in several of the tunes. But if you're licking your chops waiting to get your synapses fired off by 9 years of deliciously marinating Newman tunes, I'm afraid you'll have to settle for a few light appetizers and an entertaining waiter.

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