Sui Vesan, "Merging with the Brook" (2005) [*]

I picked this album up a number of months ago. It was an employee recomendation at Amoeba, and it had a press clipping taped to the display rack. I imagined I might be turned on to an exceptional Slovak acoustic experimentalist. The clipping suggested a comparison to Bjork, which I focused on; there was a Tracy Chapman comparison which I chose to ignore.

Months later, I still have it. My custom is to keep my 'recently' aquired cds in stacks by the stereo and listen to them a handful of times before adding them to my collection or reselling them back to the store to help pay for new cds, in much the same way as the elderly are liquified to feed the newlyborn in "The Matrix".

I give this album a star because there is some interesting arrangement, instrumentation and singing, but on the whole, I think those things, along with the Slovakian vocals, allowed me to delude myself that this album wasn't the contemporary female singer-songwriter/world music album that it is. I won't be suprised if in the future I see this cd for sale on a rack in Starbucks. It's not an annoying album, I just feel like I'm betraying my musical values when I listen to it. Chalk it up to a strain of blandness running through it. And now the babies are crying for their black milk.