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Luke Eberl 
11/13/2008

Val Emmich 
11/12/2008

Joey Arias 
10/29/2008

Cindy Guidry 
10/22/2008

Bart Yates 
10/15/2008

Kathy Griffin 
10/15/2008

Rufus Wainwright 
10/8/2008

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Girls and Boys
by Cabin 24

List Price: $11.98
Unavailable for
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Audio CD
Publisher: Cabin 24

Early on in "Breakable," from her excellent Girls and Boys, Ingrid Michaelson muses on the fragility of the heart, in both the literal and symbolic senses--"have you ever thought about what protects our hearts--just a cage of rib bones and other various parts… we are just breakable girls and boys." Ingrid Michaelson's songs have been featured on Grey's Anatomy episodes and Old Navy commercials, and there's a good reason she keeps getting selected for such high-profile exposure--the songs on Girls and Boys are an immediately appealing blend of pop song craft and vulnerable emotion. Michaelson has a more accessible voice and presentation than contemporaries like Feist and Regina Spektor, and her piano-driven arrangements hit all the right peaks and valleys, calling on a delicate acoustic guitar here, an overdriven electric there, to highlight her alternately joyful and mournful melodies. In short, she's made a fine pop album worth checking out, even if you're not a fan of Dr. Meredith and McDreamy. --Ben Heege


Customer Reviews:
 
I had given up on popular music until I found this
Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 
I was raised on singer-songwriters of the 60's and 70s'. When the 80's rolled around I left popular music for good. Hearing the stuff my kids were listening to lately didn't change my mind. Then I heard Ingrid Michaelson's work on a commercial, dug around and found that the great singer-songwriters haven't gone away after all. I bought the CD and enjoy it more each time I listen to it.

a good listen
Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 
An interesting style with many catchy rhythms and melodies. She can get a bit repetitive at times, but overall, still very nice and refreshing.

Once in a while you get a bad one.
Customer Rating: 1 out of 5 
This was a very hyped CD and for me with my middle of the road taste, found it to be the worse CD I have purchased, in addition to Blue Raincoat by Jennifer Warrens. After The Hunter with Jennifer Warnnes came out, Jennifer could have sold me an Edsel. What is her game plan? On Michaelson's album girls and boys I did like "The Way I Am". I do have a machine that will let me splice tracks together, so maybe I can salvage one song from the miserable album.

self indulgent pap
Customer Rating: 1 out of 5 
Blah Blah Blah, my wife got this for one of her friends that has questionable taste in music. This qualifies as the LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR of manufactured homogenized pap. It is so lame it even has a sticker on it that says as heard at Old Navy and on Greys Anatomy, as if that is a good thing!
I would recommend this for those that truly have no taste and like to be told what they should like.

melancholy, sprightly and melodiously quirky
Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 
Ingrid Mishaelson has been, as noted above, featured in Old Navy Commercials, and those emotionally drenched scenes on Grey's Anatomy and One Tree Hill. The New York based artist has a rather quirky feel to her music and on ocassions the festive lilt of the campfire chanteuse. Her songs are suffused by a poetic tension, and the lyricism is always smart and intuitive. She deftly applies caesuras, alliterations and the whole gamut of poetic devices. She was born in an artistic family, her dad Carl, a composer and her mom, Elizabeth Egbert, is the Director of the Staten Island Museum. Her trepidation and soulful plaintive dramatizations are offset by a brilliant wit that nourishes the strife with elusive bounds of genius. She sounds like Regina Spektor without the grit, and is as melodious as Bjork without the shrills of madness. Her songs lead a touted dalliance that gives these age old topics of love, love unrequieted, and broken hearts, an emtional cadance that betrays a sense of humor and tentalizes the listener by informing the conscience of the music with a dash of brio, enough to depict self-pity as both loathsome and sympathetic. This is best exemplified in her songs "Corner of Your Heart" and "Glass", the latter opaquely muddles the speaker who admits that "I see through you...as you see through me, as if invisible." However in other titles such as the more illustrious "The Way I Am" and "Die Alone" she surrenders her acts to a love that is sufficient and fulfilling. Her personae are vivid and colorful, startling and impregnated by dissimulating logic and orphaned sentimentality, which is not to say that this is a depressing CD. On the contrary it has an abundance of tracks that feature a joyous attitude, and her vocal prowess is used to pitch perfect adumbrations to cull such motifs with as much success as the more somber ones.
Her sensibility is tested somewhat in the 12th, and hidden track, "Far Away" where while performing similar antics to her description of the fragile psychological surrender evinced in, for example, "December Baby" where the speaker wishes to crawl back into her mother's womb, while in "Far Away" she diverts herself in a tuneful, sportive cynicism affected by the twang of country music. To what extent she succeeds is for you to decide, but it was recorded all in good fun. The emotional depth of the lyrics, the dramatization of each chracterization, the melodious bravado of the vocalizations and the instrumental rhythmic glaze is a sampling to entertain and astound alike. However the social maturity of a Natalie Merchant is still in its punk stage and the promise hinted in this compilation lends itself to appreciating a mind set for engaged art. Here the individual speaks but the social commentary is not far behind. All in all this is a virtuoso performance that delineates the straits of the melancholy stagnation, of lovers' neurosis and plaintive wistfulness while nourishing an inner void that is reactionary and quirky.
Awesome. The 2005 self-released debut, "Slow the Rain" had introduced us to a singer of an artistic flair whose intangibles are commercial and popular, however defined by a poet's lissome language. In her follow-up she assures us that the great marketing she has been favored by is not the sole force behind a artist we ask many more brilliant tunes from. Not since Jewel and , Natalie Merchant, Jill Sobule and Sarah McLaughlin have we seen such intimate rapport with the music, while being implicated by such a commercial influx. On the verge of 30 she is ready for more than just a breakthrough, she will give us pearls of wisdom to grow with.


Tracks:          

  • Die Alone
  • Masochist
  • Breakable
  • The Hat
  • The Way I Am
  • Overboard
  • Glass
  • Starting Now
  • Corner of Your Heart
  • December Baby
  • Highway



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