I won this at the end of January this year, as a prize on Gideon Coe's Paintbox Jury competition. I've entered and won quite a few radio competitions in recent years, but Paintbox Jury is the best, and the hardest to win. Someone does an "artist's impression" of an album cover using a computer's drawing package, and you have an hour to identify the album. You can't cheat by looking it up on Google. Below is one I did myself. Do you know what it is? Answer on this page.
After I'd sent in the right answer forty or so times, and not won, I wondered if Gideon Coe or his producer had some strange grudge against me (was it something I said?). After sixty correct answers, this failure to win became funny and I declared my intention to try and get to 100 correct entries without winning. Happily Gideon played along with this. On the day I got to 100, I won the statutory three CDs and a picture of Gideon (not signed, of course). The Brave and the Bold was one of the three.
It's an album of cover versions, much looser and less dry than Tortoise can sometimes be. They're fairly obscure songs, however. I've only heard Springsteen's Thunder Road, Elton John's Daniel and Richard Thompson's Calvary Cross, and I don't know those at all well. Bonnie 'Prince' Billy (what's with the inverted commas? is he worried the Scots are going to sue him for infringement of trademark? they should!) delivers the lines in his curiously uncontoured whine, stripping them of whatever drama they might have had in the originals (and Bruce and Elton are both drama queens of different kinds). It's a curio, for sure. I'm not sure that I'll be going back to it a lot.
Meanwhile I've already notched up another fifty correct entries for Paintbox Jury, and am aiming for my double century, but probably not until 2007 at the current rate of progress.
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
|
Comments