Pablo : Half the Time

Live acoustic music always has a greater element that seems to be lost in the electric cables when recording. The picks of each guitar string as the hand strikes them, more in beat to the music they’ll be making in the future than a memorized set of chords, and the dancing vertical piano that jangles to each hard hammering hands against the ivory. The vocals are almost always a huge sign of live acoustics vs. studio recording. To shout above the energy of all of the instruments living large on stage, the vocals turn more into a wail instead of a whisper in the microphone, and the wail adds the human element to all of the energy, showing what we are capable of. Two can play at that game, but Pablo’s Half The Time doesn’t quite make three.

Half The Time is somewhere else in a category of its own because the nuances of live performance aren’t lost in the hi-speed sparks that streamline, stored in plastic-coated wire and transported from microphones to mixer. The energy of the performance itself sparks like fireworks and not electricity. It can scarcely be contained in the laminate cargo hold that is required of most recording, bursting through the confines of electric communication like a car explosion in a tunnel. It’s a mystery to how Half The Time was recorded with such exactness to the exuberance of live performance, but the fireworks are waiting in Half The Time for eager ears.

Fireworks come in a patterns, with explosions radiating or shooting from a center. Fireworks harness the evanescence and wild of fire, controlling the element like a shaman. Pablo keeps the energy of his songs within musical and metrical patterns in a similar sense, grasping and creating order out of the wild human ebullience that seems so illogical sometimes, wanting distraction when writing term papers and wanting corners to sit in in the nebulous mass of a dance party. Pablo cages the wild for all of our oohs and aahs and even for our celebration. It is surely quite the feat, but Pablo can still do so much with this animal he’s captured. He can step into the cage, stick his head in the lion’s mouth, and could even let the animal loose and see what the human anima does with out restraint. It could have a night on the town, or it could go much farther and climb the Chrysler Building. Something else could happen as well, but we won’t know till it happens.

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Pablo - Half the Time

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