Customer Reviews

Paper Tigers

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

 

 

I have to disagree with the more negative reviews and say that I love this album. It's not as dance-floor oriented as the other Luomo albums. Very soulful, a bit more freeform and experimental. It has the soundscape elements that I love about Vladislav's other work balanced with the more vocal Tech-House style of Luomo.

I would rank this as Luomo's best album.

I must say I was plesantly supprised to find a new Luomo cd - ironicly when i started to wonder what he was up to. With that said, this cd is absolutely everything I was hopeing for; just about.

To start, this CD sounds a bit like "The Present Lover", but in actuality I was hopeing it would. That sexy mystery singer is on the majority of this cd and as expected, her vocals are mind blowing. Literally every track on this cd is phenominal and lives up to Luomo's sultry, classy sound he is known for (atleast on this alias). The perfect cd for a lazy afternoon, or really anything. If you like Luomo, this cd belongs in your collection. Im almost tempted to say its just a tad not as good as his previous works, but whenever I listen to this cd in all its magnificience I am thrusted into a state of confusiion and bliss again. You will find yourself humming tracks from this cd without even realizeing it. So ill let you decide. But rest assured, this CD belongs in your collection. Simply amazing.

And whoever the singer is, she needs a nobel peace prize or something. Her vocals are just plain sexy.

Luomo, the housier side of Vladislav Delay, comes back for a third round with Paper Tigers, and even though he steers away from the 80s pop of The Present Lover, he doesn't totally abandon it either. The title track starts off on a spacey, glitch-dub tip. The house is deeper, although not quite as deep as on Vocalcity. "The Tease is Over" comes on like a torch song, while "Cowgirls" has a light, spry touch to it. But more than anything, I'd disappointed by the blandness of this album. It had none of the depths of emotion of Vocalcity or even the cheesy fun of The Present Lover. Indeed, it just feels a bit empty. Fine to listen to, but empty nonetheless.

With Paper Tigers, Sasu Ripatti has finally completed his lifelong quest of removing all the substance from his music. It's no surprise that his third album as Luomo is nowhere near his first (2001's Vocalcity, a fine work), but it's not even anywhere near his second (2004's The Present Lover, ingratiating but listenable club fare). It copies The Present Lover's structure and presentation, while removing all the tunes.

For instance, "Really Don't Mind" is basically a reworking of The Present Lover's long vocal tracks like "Talk In Danger" and "What Good." At least, it starts much the same way. We have some ambient keyboards, a club-style bass line, scattershot fragments of percussion and vocal lines. The keyboards hang invitingly in the background, as if portending a big danceable groove. But the main part of the song, the part in "Talk In Danger" where the groove would kick in and the rhythm and vocals would become steady and hypnotic, that part never actually arrives. The track just keeps on stuttering, falling apart, and promising to begin in earnest, for most of its duration. Take the intro to any song on The Present Lover, stretch it out to eight minutes, and remove the rest of the song entirely, and you have the sound of Paper Tigers.

And the thing is, there's nothing inherently interesting about the ambient intros to Luomo's songs, their only function is as a mechanism to prepare the listener for the main beat. The melancholy, trancelike grooves (with the unexpected addition of concise and danceable rhythms) were once the main attraction of Luomo. Without them, the ambient parts sound really boring. There is little recognizable music. A few synths suddenly pop up now and again, blaring or bleeping individual notes on a scale. But they do not form rhythms or melodies. It sounds like the notes were pasted together arbitrarily, possibly from different songs.

The vocals don't make any impression either, because they have the same stuttering quality. "Wanna Tell" keeps stammering a few disconnected phrases over and over. "Good To Be With" repeats, "I'm not so good, good, good, good, good, I'm not so good, I'm not so good to be with," taking forever to complete this one line. It's not that deep, man, we got it the first time. And it is hard to talk about the performance of Ripatti's vocalist, since these snippets of her voice aren't allowed to come together into a coherent performance. So there's no real difference between the vocal songs and the instrumentals. They all kind of blend together. On the plus side, at least Ripatti himself doesn't try to sing this time.

The one exception to the rule is "The Tease Is Over," which is built more like a classicist 1940s style nightclub song, but alas, it doesn't rank among Ripatti's best works either. For her sole complete performance on the record, the vocalist adopts a squeaky, saccharine tone of voice, set to an analogously saccharine, flat, beatless ambient backdrop. And Ripatti's writing is at its usual heights: "The tease is over, it's time to get slower," once, twice, thrice, again and again. When this sounds like a welcome change, it's a mark of how dull the rest of the album is.

Perhaps the only listenable song on the album is the instrumental "Cowgirls," with an appealingly dark rhythm section and a few actual melodic chords. It is vaguely reminiscent of "Could Be Like This" from The Present Lover, and could have sat fairly comfortably on that album. It's by far the best track on here, and the only track that leaves a positive impression after it has finished playing.

The other tracks occasionally sound all right ("Paper Tigers" finally introduces a steady beat, halfway in), but every single one of them feels like it's twice as long as it should be, packed with ambient filler and repetition of sounds that are not really interesting. Ripatti's tracks were always a bit too long, but before, they always had catchiness on their side, and sometimes he came up with shockingly original pop touches (the sudden about-face in Vocalcity's "Class" is the high point of his entire career). Alas, not anymore. Vocalcity is a very good listen in any setting, The Present Lover works in a club, but Paper Tigers isn't danceable, memorable, or even particularly enjoyable. Perhaps, sometimes, one should quit while one is ahead.

"Paper Tigers" is a good effort but if you are a fan of "Vocal City" (4 stars) and particularly "Present Lover" (5+ stars), you will be somewhat dissappointed in this cd. Those two others are so much better.

I wrote a much more detailed review but this silly review writing feature lost it and now you get the abridged version. Amazon, get it together!