The Grammy nominations were announced today, and I was so ready to unleash the snark.
But as I scrolled through the bottom of the page, I made a startling discovery.
Evidently, Kronos Quartet shares the bill with a London troupe called the Tiger Lillies on an album titled The Gorey End. So I went to Amazon to listen to some audio clips.
Bizarre. One of the reviewers called it Tiny Tim meets Mannheim Steamroller. I knew Kronos was fair game for anything — hell, it slummed with Dave Matthews and Nelly Furtado — but something as unsettling as The Gorey End? It’s both unsurprising and startling.
And how is it I hadn’t even heard about this collaboration? For starts, Kronos doesn’t even list it in its discography.
Something else that surprised me — three of the nominees in the Latin Alternative album category are albums I reviewed favorably in Musicwhore.org, two of them esconed safely on my year-end favorite list.
(If you’re curious, the albums in question are Molotov’s Dance and Dense Denso, Caf
R&B had to become alternative with Outkast couldn’t be pigeonholed. (Note with irony that Outkast isn’t in that category and has, instead, been pigeonholed — wrongly in several cases — all over the shop.)
I was going to piggy this on to your previous entry about Black Alternative groups. I believe all if not most of these performers are considered alternative:
Kelly Rowland (I kid not, when it was announced that DC was doing solo recordings, that was the category she was in).
Kellis
Res
Lucy Pearl
Les Nubians
india.aire (that’s where she won her grammy for that album last year)
Versus the neo-soul of like
Jill Scott
Lamaya
floetry
Maxwell