Every once in a while you hear a jaw-dropping composition that you just find so darn amazing that you want the entire world to know about… and that’s when you go home and blog about it. :-)
This is what I call the acoustic equivalent of love at first sight, and Joe Hisaishi’s oh-so-romantic-I-gonna-melt “Rain” from the "Kikujiro no Natsu" album is a piece that I have first associated the term “Love On First Listen” with. Well, time to acknowledge a few other Love On First Listen pieces that I have been listening over and over again in the past months.
Bruno Coulais’ “To Be By Your Side” from “Winged Migration”
Whoa, Minh listens to songs with vocals besides symphonic film music? Yes, I indeed do, but frankly I stumbled on this when I was listening to the music of the famous bird-documentary “Winged Migration” (which I have yet to see). Bruno Coulais’ “To Be By Your Side” is a fascinating piece. While it’s partly because of the combination of a great choice of voice (provided by Nick Cave), the well-versed lyrics, and how well Coulais adds the sound of birds throughout this entire piece, I am mostly intrigued by the voice of the cello/violin in the background. It perfectly accompanies Nick Cave’s voice, but at the same time has as an element of its own as it dances with the rhythm. Ah… love on first listen.
Rene Dupere’s “Love Dance” from “Cirque Du Soleil: Ka“
Cirque Du Soleil has always benefited from great composers, and make no doubt about it, the music is such an important element to the success of Cirque Du Soleil. I stumbled on “Love Dance” when I listened to the Ka CD in the O-store at Bellagio. It’s quite a majestic piece using strings as main instruments. The piece starts out with a single violin playing the melody in classy and exquisite loneliness, and then all the other string instruments then take over the lead in playing the same melody majestically over and over again, and the piece ends with the lonely voice of a young boy and of course the single violin again. Ah… love on first listen.
Hans Zimmer’s “Chevaliers de Sangreal” from “The DaVinci Code”
From the most anticipated-movie this year comes an album that I personally wasn’t anticipating at all, for Hans Zimmer is to me quite… well, the same Hans Zimmer. That is not to say that he’s bad, for I do like his action-sequences, but Zimmer is just Zimmer most of the time, as you can recognize his style in a heartbeat, even if you’ve never heard the piece before, but this piece from the “The DaVinci Code” album is quite not the usual Hans Zimmer. The “Chevaliers de Sangreal” piece was used during the closing sequence of the movie that gave “The DaVinci Code” such an excitement as Langdon is about to reveal the mystery of all mankind. It’s one of the pieces that starts out quite and slow, and then gradually picks up with a Philip Glass-like violin zig-zag rhythm in the background, slowly increases in volume and ends in quite refreshing and majestic sequence. Within the last minute of the piece, you keep on thinking that the music is so climatic that it can’t possibly pick up any more momentum, and yet it simply does. Ah… love on first listen.