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Music Review
Rossini: Symphonies for Wind Instruments
Amazon.com
Barry Adamson's sophisticated adult indie pop is decadent, indulgent, and almost too smart for its own good. Adamson's lyrics owe a lot to the sly, dandy-headed work of Scott Walker and Serge Gainsbourg. The music on As Above So Below displays all the overblown brilliance of Burt Bacharach's best, although it's no retro pastiche. It sounds utterly contemporary and big, like the soundtrack to a big-budget feature flick. There's a reason Adamson's music is so often compared to soundtracks--those swooshing musical movements, that full orchestra of sound, and the way his music subtly conjures a place or tells a story. But he's at his best in the middle of a groove, as in the last minute or so of "What It Means," a big bad voodoo noir stomp. --Mike McGonigal