Customer Reviews

Room Tones (Dig)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
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When reading about an unfamiliar artist, one usually finds a lot of space devoted to how the artist compares with any number of famous people who have explored similar musical territory. Sometimes this is helpful, but in a few cases it can obfuscate more than illuminate. This is one such case. Despite the favorable comparisons, the truth of the matter is that these days, Chrisopher Blue sounds only like Chrisopher Blue.

After a decade of exploration and inconsistent releases, Blue has offered up a fully crystallized work of sustained brilliance. Moody and sinuous, the album seduces us into a world of regret, loneliness and hard truths sublimated into muted optimism. Room Tones is an honest recording in which pain seems to truly have been transformed into beauty without pretense or fakery -- the most difficult miracle an artist can perform.

That being said, the final song, Scarecrow, does invite comparisons, and in my opinion, it should have been left off. It is not a bad song, so much as it seems out of step with what has gone before it.

It is the slight imperfection that makes the masterpiece.

This man has the sexiest voice. Like Tom Waits on the nights he wakes up sane. "Equanimity," "The Moon I Dream Of," and "Mandrake" in particular have a dark haunting musical and lyrical beauty that makes me play them again and again.

when I first got this record, I liked it. Then I kept wanting to listen to it, and pretty soon I was obsessed with it. It's good!