New My Brightest Diamond - "Inside A Boy"

Download: My Brightest Diamond - "Inside A Boy"

It's been said that the only thing that really matters in life is the classical sauce. Because rock'n'roll is bogus, right, K.G.? Wrong. Dead wrong. Well, maybe not wrong (and certainly not dead wrong), so much as someone forgot to tell one Shara Worden that approaching rock and classical with equal abandon is apparently a zero-sum game. Not So! says Ms. Worden, whose nom de rock is My Brightest Diamond. Her band's debut album, Bring Me The Workhouse, combined styles such as rock, classical, opera, and cabaret in a manner that was tastefully performed and arranged--the results of such efforts being a legitimately well-crafted record.

Which, oddly enough, was its main problem as a record. For all its operatic bombast, Bring Me The Workhouse was a little too square-sounding and too carefully controlled. Playing music in an orchestral setting is about discipline, nuance, and maintaining a strident work ethic, whereas rock music is about being as reckless and irresponsible as one could arguably be. Workhouse would have been a much better record if the former could teach the latter how to fish, and if the latter would remind the former how to love and laugh again.





The title of MBD's second album A Thousand Shark's Teeth might sound like Warden's musical bark might starting to match her compositional bite. Instead, My Brightest Diamond gives us an epic track which makes great use of her lithe soprano and the kind of anxious melodiousness of Radiohead's best work. The song is called "Inside A Boy", and it is Teeth's first single. The song itself continues in the direction of Workhouse, but there's a wiser of guitars in this track--they help accompany Warden rather than stand awkwardly next to her. The result is a song much more pleasing that her last record--"Inside A Boy" sounds like the great addition to Hail To The Thief which never was written.

Listen to "Inside A Boy" at the top of the post.

A Thousand Shark's Teeth is out June 13th.

My Brightest Diamond MySpace Page

(Jonathan Graef)