Customer Reviews

Everything & Nothing

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

As usual, David Sylvian does it his way and his retrospective collection is aptly titled. For such a consistently fine artist, the question becomes what to leave out, and Sylvian walks the tightrope over his available favorites,( a number of which are among my favorites), and previously unavailable tracks. I really can't quibble too much with this generous offering, although I do agree with others who would love to have "Damage" and "The First Day"...both these gorgeous songs are only available to my knowledge on hard-to-find live recordings, and their exclusion on the retrospective album is a disappointment to this listener. Since this collection is Sylvian the singer/songwriter, instrumental and ambient works are absent...fair enough, as most of that material is readily available and may be the focus of another retrospective(!) This highly personal and by no means exhaustive set will keep fans happy for the most part, and is essential for those wishing to explore David Sylvian's unique talent. I highly recommend the import version, with 4 bonus tracks on a third disc...as well as the splendid song 'Brilliant Trees', it includes two versions of 'Scent of Magnolia' and 'The Blinding Light of Heaven' from the collaboration with Robert Fripp.

I'll get the unqualified praise out of the way first. David Sylvian possesses a generous talent, an uncanny way with beautiful melodies and one of the finest male singing voices you're ever likely to hear. His music is an enveloping cocoon of melancholy sound, quiet and reflective, with enough hints of hope and happiness to leave you feeling a little inner warmth amidst the chill. It's perfect for dark winter nights or quiet autumn evenings in front of a toasty fire.

However - see title above. Musically speaking, E&N is nearly perfect. As a compilation it sits on the fence between the die-hard fan camp and the newbie buyer, and doesn't ultimately satisfy either one. Several scattered tracks from all his post-Japan albums give a good overview of his career, but these could have made a single-disc package. Newcomers might not want to pop for this whole set. The already-converted will likely have at least half the tracks on other discs already. As introductions go, a single album would likely be a better choice: I recommend either Secrets of the Beehive or Gone To Earth. Damage (a live collaboration with Robert Fripp) is a fine choice as well: it's just different enough to make it a a little unsuitable as an intro to David's whole body of work, but it's more palatable to Fripp fans and those who like more hard rock.

And so we come to the reason I and many other completists had to have E&N anyway: the unreleased goodies. Why "Ride" ever remained unused for Secrets of the Beehive absolutely boggles the mind; it's eight minutes of stunning sonic bliss, heart-wrenching and performed with impeccable taste. After a year and a half it remains hands-down my favorite Sylvian track of all time.. it's only slightly rivaled by the light-techno "Scent of Magnolia," an unused leftover from Dead Bees on a Cake which beats the more well-known David Gray at his own game. Three additional Dead Bees outtakes are present, and I'm sure I'm not the only one to find them more worthy than much of the actual album. Just compare the evil soundscapes of "Cover Me With Flowers" with the thin and stretched "I Surrender." Other highlights: "Heartbeat" and "Bamboo Houses," a single and B-side with Ryuchi Sakamoto. "Some Kind of Fool" and "The Golden Way," gems from the vaults. The only real dud is the Japan-era "Pop Song," but four uninspired minutes are just a small fly in this rich buffet.

I suppose I've been nitpicking too much. Everything and Nothing works as a complete album in itself, something rare among compilations. These songs are a gold mine of musical beauty, no matter how they're arranged or compiled. I leave off a star because those nagging what-ifs still remain at the back of my mind, but for any serious music addict, this is well worth the few shekels it costs. I just suggest getting hooked on Gone to Earth or Rain Tree Crow first, and then deciding whether you want to come here for more.

I have always thought of David Sylvian's music to have an autumn feel to it...earthy, haunting, changing, shifting like a breeze. Everything and Nothing provides a beautiful cross-section of the career of a man who has delved in electronica, jazz, new age, pop and world music.

If you buy this at all buy it for the song "Ride", an umbelievable omission from SECRETS OF THE BEEHIVE.

Elsewhere is an omission from DEAD BEES ON A CAKE called "The Scent of Magnolia" with it's elegant electronic arrangment.

"Thoroughly Lost in Logic" is a vocal piece with what sounds like a prepared piano ala John Cage. Being a fan of avant-guarde composers like Cage, Crumb and Usserchevsky, I honestly have to admit I really like this piece! Granted, it's art for art's sake...but who cares?

Other fruits from his orange period include early rare Japan material, dobro melodies, and what sounds like to me is a reworked background to "Heartbeat"

This is not a Greatest Hits package - no Forbidden Colours, numerous missing singles. Bereft of some of Sylvian's most sublime compositions, it is not a Greatest Songs collection either. Nor is it a Rarities collection - roughly half is comprised of readily available album material. While it is convenient to have hard to find material (such the caustic one-off single Pop Song) in one place, they do not necessarily reflect his best or most interesting work. And his tinkling with old recording masters - remixing and often resinging older tracks - yields mixed results. The charming (and oh-so 80s) Bamboo Music benefits from a warmer mix, but the one bonafide classic in the bunch, Ghosts, gets an incongruously languid, torchy performance on top of the unchanged and ornamentally rigid framework of the music. It's easy to see why the rambling Cover Me With Flowers did not make it onto last year's Dead Bees on a Cake, but less obvious why it was favored here over, say, Darkest Dreaming from the same album or The Ink in the Well from the all-but ignored debut album, Brilliant Trees. And why sacrifice his near-transcendental ballads with Robert Fripp (Damage, and The First Day) for the profoundly melody-challenged Jean the Birdman and God's Monkey?

However, there are three very good reasons to get your hands on this set, and they are all unavailable elsewhere. The first is the opening cut The Scent of Magnolia that shows Sylvian at the peak of his powers. With one ear to sampling culture - a sharp series of beats, masterly filtering - and another on Messian, it is a lush and heady amalgamation of his musical talents, and one of his most assured deep-amber vocal performances. The second is Ride, a track intended for the 1988 masterpiece, Secrets of the Beehive. It's a testament to that album that it doesn't suffer from Ride's exclusion, but the track is among the strongest Sylvian has written - an open vista beautifully shaded by Mark Isham, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Danny Thompson. Finally, the track that has most completists salivating is one left off Sylvian's 1981 album with his former band Japan, Gentlemen Take Polaroids. In retrospect it's hard to understand why: a sweeping ballad anchored by an unforgettable, almost corny melody, Some Kind of Fool was perhaps too much ballast on an already lugubrious album. Aided by some violin-noir and weepy orchestration, the song captures all the things that made Sylvian - and in many ways still does - a fascinating enigma: a contrary courage to marry pretension, experimentation and musical gifts in order to create something of lasting beauty. It is a pity more of his sublime work is not captured on this collection.

You either love or hate DS's music; you either get it or you don't. For those of you that do get it, this is a very good compilation that is very representative of his life's work to date and includes his time at Japan e.g. "Ghosts" as well as his collaborative work with e.g. Ruichi Sakamoto "Bamboo Houses".

These two tracks also happen to be my favourites but the other tracks are also very good and the track order makes for very smooth listening, so much so that for a newcomer, the album sounds very cohesive and is a good listen. DS has a very unique style and this is a very good album to get to get to know the man and his music. Recommended.

"Everything & Nothing" is Sylvian's "best of" collection of the last 20 years' work. It goes as far back as a couple of forward-looking tracks recorded with Japan (with newly-recorded vocals), including "Ghosts"; and encompasses out-takes from "Dead Bees on a Cake," his most recent album. It's a significant body of work by one of the most subtle, exploratory, and frankly spiritual singer-songwriters of our era. Many of the songs -- such as "Orpheus" and "Scent of Magnolia" -- engage issues of integration in the deep psyche in ways that Jungian thinkers like James Hillman and Marie-Louise Von Franz would have admired; several of the lyrics seem addressed to what Jungians call the "anima mundi," the Soul of the World -- often embodied in a beautiful woman (or in a fiery spiritual male figure, such as the "Riverman" in another tune.) Like Eno, Sylvian is a curator of sounds rich and strange, provided for the sessions by his old bandmates in Japan, as well as such illustrious guests as Jon Hassell, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Bill Frisell, Marc Ribot, David Torn, and others. One of the best tracks on this collection, "Cover Me with Flowers," teams Sylvian up with Steve Tibbetts, an ECM recording artist who should be more widely known.

I'm not sure this album functions all that well as a "best of," in the sense of "If you own only ONE David Sylvian album, buy this." If you did that, you'd be missing songs that are at least as good or better than anything here, such as "Red Guitar," "The Ink in the Well," "Taking the Veil," plus many of the instrumental compositions that fleshed out his albums "Gone to Earth" and "Words with the Shaman."

The many out-takes -- comprising at least half of this 2-CD set -- raise an interesting question about Sylvian's artistic choices. Many of the out-takes from "Dead Bees on a Cake" are better than the album itself. Certainly "The Scent of Magnolia" is a more compelling song than "I Surrender," the rather smug, self-satisfied, and musically inert (that Sade guitar lick and all) single from that album that also appears here. "Cover Me with Flowers" is also superior to most of the "Dead Bees" tracks. The very best song recorded for those sessions -- a complex masterpiece called "Les Fleurs du Mal" -- seems to have suffered the fate of being just a B-side on one particular EP "I Surrender" release, and is not rescued from obscurity here. (It's worth seeking out!)

But there's a gravity and a powerful arc to this sequence as Sylvian has sculpted it. A bonus EP included with the import version only contains two different mixes of "Magnolia," with a great tune called "The Blinding Light of Heaven," as well as the title track from Sylvian's best album, "Brilliant Trees," with a slightly reworked vocal. Fans of Eno, Fripp and Hassell should check out Sylvian, and "Brilliant Trees" and this collection are fine places to start.

I can't say enough about the fragile track "Come Morning," which was featured on an album by Nicola Alesini, "Marco Polo." In a single verse, Sylvian attains the exquisite, compressed, profound insight of the great poets, with the sounds around him as perfectly arrayed as the flowers in a wild garden. It's hard not to weep from the beauty and wisdom contained in this one tune.

This is not a best of, this is a collection. There are some great collectable songs, some re-recordings and some classics.

New songs such as the infamously lost "Ride" make this CD worth buying for any Sylvian fan. True such classics such as Nostalgia and Red Guitar are missing, but the sublme beauty of the music is hard to ignore.

If you are a new inititiate into the world of David Sylvian, I would still recommend "Secrets of the Beehive". But as a fan, E&N is a CD I would not be without.

If you don't like the artist for whatever reason don't bother
with a review. David Sylvian is one of the most unique artists past or present. I love his work and really respect him as a musician and person for that matter. This compilation will not please everyone and is intended for "new" listeners as an introduction to David's talent, after all a true fan will already have these tracks found on his various cd's and other recordings.

Perhaps more than any artist of his time, David Sylvian epitomizes the description of avant-garde. With music ranging from shimmering gossamer to densly opaque, the thread of his creativity remains consistent. There simply is no one to compare him to - his nuance of sound and poetic eclecticism stand as a body of work that defines its own genre. If there is any downside to this compilation, it is the apparent effort to make his music more accessible by remixes that take the edge off some of his more experimental material. Though one could justifiably say that all of his music is, in any form, experimental. Nonetheless, followers of Sylvian's brilliance will not be disappointed. Those willing to expand their musical horizons can not help but find this work simultaneously challenging and engaging. In all his permutations, David Sylvian remains a true follower of his muse, rich with otherworldly spirit and anima, yet grounded in the here and now. Those not familiar with his work, and willing to embrace the unusual, will find in Sylvian a compelling musical adventurer.

A "Greatest Hits" collection this is not, rather a curious mixture of selected older material, rarities and a few newer, hitherto unreleased tracks. It all bears testament to how well Sylvian's music has stood up over time, as a common thread of subdued vocal accompaniment to eclectic and lush musical exploration runs back over a twenty year history. Perhaps the "First Day" era songs with Robert Fripp jar a little with the overall mood due to their guitar-driven agression, but they are only a minor distraction. A reasonably priced artefact for Sylvian's devotees and a superb introduction for those unfamiliar with the man's work.