The new Neil Diamond album is seriously fantastic.
Granted, that might not sound like the first sentence of a blog post you'd read in 2005. [1]
And I confess, I've never been a really big Neil Diamond fan, but his new album, "12 Songs," is just amazing stuff. It's very stripped down & acoustic—just a guitar, a piano, some light strings, and that simultaneously smooth & rough Neil Diamond voice—though not to the point of being reduced to a requisite "unplugged" record, happily. But just to the point where it sounds like it makes sense, as if these are, somehow, the ideal arrangements for these songs.
And so it's much less melodramatic than the version of Neil Diamond that I have in my head, and all the better for it (it's no "America," in other words). And the first song, "Oh Mary"? This is some seriously haunting stuff.
It's apparently streamable on MySpace, but the Flash thing won't load for me. It also happens to be available on file sharing networks, but don't let that stop you from buying it when it's released on Tuesday.
[1] Well, yes, maybe it would on this blog, where talk of Clay Aiken and Selena is the norm. So there, I preempted your planned putdown!
Neil Diamond!! I bow to this post. You better put this album into your iTunes share.
Posted by: Krissy | November 08, 2005 at 08:12 AM