They'renotmusic - Part 2: Bill Ricchini - Think of Me as a Place

On the opposite side of the musical spectrum, we have Bill Ricchini.

He managed to clean up his act for his second album, but his first, Ordinary Time, is a musical mess.

The drummer is terrible -- his consistency when it comes to timing is very poor, he's got only a handful of fill-in ideas and his overuse of them really sticks out, and he's got absolutely no dynamic sensitivity: no sense of how to fluctuate between loud and soft.

The bass player is even worse. I can get over the fact that he sticks mostly to root notes and that when he does venture away from them his ideas are really boring and elementary. But his tone totally blows. It's muddy and lifeless and is noticeable only when his hand slips and he plays a note conspicuously louder than anything else in the phrase (horn players refer to this as "tonguing"), which happens often.

The guitar playing isn't really mind-blowing either, but meh, whatever. It's good enough. Ricchini picks some nice chords. Grey and moody. There is one spot early on in the song "Like an X-Ray" in which he commits a subtle harmonic infraction (playing a Major 3rd of a chord in one instrument while playing the minor 3rd of the same chord in a different instrument). But it's not something the average listener would even pick up on, much less be offended by and the ones who would be offended by it have a real stick up their butt. So again, nothing special in the guitars, but nothing wrong either.

Unfortunately, the rhythm section commits so many unrecoverable blunders, most people want it shut off after about 10 seconds. This is what a band sounds like when its players have been practicing their instruments off and on for about a year and a half.


But then the vocals...

Brilliant.

I don't know how the hell he did it, but he hits an otherworldly chemistry of sound with the vocal harmonies. His common motif is to go for a lower "main" note (in quotes because neither note really sticks out as being the leader) and a higher soft falsetto harmony matching it word for word. The mixture of the two is delicate and plaintive. It's such a tender pairing of tones, it's almost hard to believe it was written by the same person who wrote the rest of the music on the album. And miraculously, the vocals are so pretty, they take all of those other crappy elements comprising the rest of the sounds and manage to make the whole thing sound totally charming.


"Think of Me as a Place," is about a college heartbreak carrying over into the winter recess. He plows into drinking and anonymous hook-ups to soothe his longing. The tone is irresponsible and sad, but with a nod to feelings of genuine caring and affection. "Think of me as a place, like a warm embrace you can run into; Not like someone you know, but somewhere you go when you get cold." The emotional pallete, lyrics and music, remind me of Holden Caulfield standing in frigid Manhattan, despising everyone around him, but guilty and knowing that there's something higher to reach for.


I want one of those hats.