Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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43 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Joni Renaissance, 23 Sep 2007
Joni's first album of original material in nearly ten years was always sure to rouse excitement and curiosity as to whether she was able to match the intensity and originality of her previous albums.
Well 'Shine' does not dissapoint in either of these areas.
After announcing a so called retirement some years ago, it's clear Joni's quiet observation of the world around her has inspired much of what you hear on Shine, with the instrumental opening track 'one week last summer' easing you gently back to Joni's world and reminding you of what a talented musician she is.
Sure her trademark voice has deepened, but it fits the content and tone of the album perfectly. The stand out tracks of the album are the brilliant spine tingling 'Shine' in which Joni speaks of hope and fear for our planet in equal measure, and the brilliant re-interpretation of Kipling's poem 'If'.
'Shine' is sure to rank amongst the best of Joni's work to date.
Highly recommended!
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Beginning / An Ending (Or Something In-Between )?, 26 Oct 2008
A little late in the day to be sure sure but with good reason.
I wasn't sure I wanted to hear it but having bought the album
it then took me a good year to absorb its' wily charms.
'Shine' is a conceit of a sort you see.
The languidly marvelous orchestral excesses of'Both Sides Now' (2000)
and 'Travelogue' (2002) notwithstanding it has been almost
a decade since the last recording of new and original material and
'Taming The Tiger' (1998) could never be seen to have been a high point
in Ms Mitchell's long and illustrious career.
Having 'retired' from the business of strumming and singing in
2002 her muse lay dormant for a while but we can be glad that
she has set her paintbrushes aside and that those deep, dark internal
stirrings have once again percolated slowly to the surface in the shape
of 'Shine' - a late autumnal flowering and a far more worthy testimony
to the strange genius of one of the greatest writer/performers ever to
have blessed both our ears and our lives.
'Shine' is a very precious thing indeed.
Ten tracks - Eight new songs, an instrumental overture and one
canny reworking. Coming in at a little under 50 minutes the album
displays neither economy nor excess. Everything feels as if it is
in its' rightful place.
Environmental Destruction ( 'This Place' ); War ( 'If I Had A Heart' &
'Strong and Wrong' ) and Hope ( 'Shine' and 'If' ). Big Themes.
These compositions rank with the very finest she has produced.
The shuffling latin rhythm of 'Hana' ( a close musical cousin
to 1991's 'Cherokee Louise' );
the spare pathos and beauty of 'Bad Dreams';
the exotic, energizing grandeur of 'Night Of The Iguana';
the luminous relevance of 'Big Yellow Taxi' undimmed and undeterred.
Title track 'Shine' is nothing less than sublime.
This great lady's music had formed an important part of the soundtrack
to my life ( many of our lives very probably! ).
This latest installment represents a magisterial return to form.
Perhaps it may be too much to hope for further chapters
but we, like she, should always live with hope.
Essential.
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41 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The return of the canyon lady, 3 Oct 2007
A while back, Joni Mitchell announced her retirement. She'd found and become reconciled with the long-lost daughter she'd given up for adoption in the 60s, and had no more need to run the gauntlet of a corrupt music industry for the sake of writing songs. The composer of "Both Sides Now", "Woodstock" and "Hejira" fell silent.
However, her seclusion didn't last. As she told a recent interviewer, ""I tried to keep my legs crossed, but it didn't work." Enter an unlikely ally in the form of multinational coffee chain Starbucks, whose Hear Music label has recently tempted other ancient luminaries such as Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan into signing new album deals. The result is Shine, the delayed follow-up to 1998's "Taming the Tiger".
The album begins wordlessly. "One Week Last Summer" is an instrumental evocation of a numinous time when "the piano beckoned for the first time in ten years". But when the songs proper begin, Mitchell's words can still bite - "money makes the trees come down/it turns mountains into molehills".
There's little of the old romantic confessional in these songs of later life. Instead, she's decided to "put some time into ecology", as she hinted she might so long ago in 1976's "Song For Sharon". Like the wordless movie Koyaanasqatsi, "Shine" is a chronicle of a world out of balance: a world where technology threatens to vanquish nature, where "cellphone zombies babble through the shopping malls", where we are all but consumed in "the jaws of our machines". For Mitchell, we live on a planet we are slowly poisoning, and in "Bad Dreams" she expresses her deepening disgust in the vocabulary of a modern plague: "we live in these electric scabs, these lesions once were lakes". There's even a reworking of "Big Yellow Taxi", her 1970 warning against environmental catastrophe.
As always, her lyrics can read badly off the page but make sense in terms of a kind of musical conversation as soon as she scoops them up inside that voice. It's still the elastic instrument it always was, although its youthful purity has been roughened and aged by tobacco.
Her melodies are the strange and rambling things they always were, guided by her own individual logic: this time she's chosen to do all the arrangements herself, with just a little instrumental help from her friends - including ex-lovers James Taylor and Larry Klein. There's an endearingly eccentric (or is it ironic?) touch in her use of a drum machine which sounds as though it came out of the same technological ark as Atari and Space Invaders, but in her hands it somehow works. Such are mavericks.
Shine isn't perfection. "Night Of The Iguana"'s Latino jazz is a little too coffee-table and there are rambling moments elsewhere. High points include "Shine", the deeply compassionate title track, and "Strong and Wrong" - a wry, punning comment on conflicts such as Iraq. "Men love war/that's what history's for/a mass-murder mystery/his story"
All in all, though, this is a moving, subtle and clear-sighted piece of work. Mitchell remains thoroughly true to her past; still a lady of the canyon. If it takes the multinational coffee dollars of Starbucks to bring us integrity in these less than innocent days, well, then, so be it.
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