Natalie Merchant Ophelia [flac] [h33t] [LoC Blazer]

Artist...............: Natalie Merchant
Album................: Ophelia
Genre................: Pop/Folk
Source...............: CD
Year.................: 1998
Ripper...............: Exact Audio Copy(Secure mode) & Sony CD-RW CRX230E
Codec................: Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC)
Version..............: reference libFLAC 1.1.2 20050205
Quality..............: Lossless, (avg. compression: 53 %)
Channels.............: Stereo / 44100 HZ / 16 Bit
Tags.................: VorbisComment
Information..........: To find my other releases, visit darksiderg.com, h33t.com, and demons-eye.org
Information..........: I am making this available in both .flac and .mp3 should you prefer the smaller version.
Ripped by............: LoC. Blazer on 3/28/2008
Posted by............: LoC. Blazer on 3/31/2008
Files................: 20 files (11 tracks/9 assorted)
Included.............: Info.txt, M3U, LOG, Cue, GhoulRelease.jpg, tracked by h33t com.txt
Covers...............: Front, Back, CD
Tracker..............: http://www.h33t.com:3310/announce
Hash.................: 66BBD93A3B03128013808AA4A82E11876CCD666A
1. (00:05:10) Natalie Merchant - Ophelia
2. (00:05:12) Natalie Merchant - Life Is Sweet
3. (00:04:08) Natalie Merchant - Kind & Generous
4. (00:05:23) Natalie Merchant - Frozen Charlotte
5. (00:05:33) Natalie Merchant - My Skin
6. (00:04:48) Natalie Merchant - Break Your Heart
7. (00:04:09) Natalie Merchant - King of May
8. (00:06:58) Natalie Merchant - Thick as Thieves
9. (00:02:30) Natalie Merchant - Effigy
10. (00:03:18) Natalie Merchant - The Living
11. (00:09:33) Natalie Merchant - When They Ring the Golden Bells
Playing Time.........: 00:56:43
Total Size...........: 302.87 MB
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Rolling Stone Review:
Natalie Merchant is an American original with a corduroy voice and an exalted sense of the everyday, a singer who can conjure rare atmospheres and get on people's nerves at the same time, all without finishing her phrases. Ophelia, Merchant's follow-up to 1995's Tigerlily, replaces the skintight band of that solo breakthrough with a shifting cast of players, reaching out to include brass and strings. Yet like the debut, Ophelia devotes itself to one quality above all else: the unstructured luxury of Merchant's sound.
That sound is the deliberate, depressed aural landscape – underlaid with acute singer/songwriter rhythms – of the same woman who, with 10,000 Maniacs in the Eighties, found nothing funny about glitz. On the title song, Merchant majestically shuffles her self-invented deck of female face cards; her singing continually slides toward lakes of unhappiness or dares to swim out of them. She fights: "Life Is Sweet," Merchant insists on one frightening little tune. She praises: "For your kindness/I'm in debt to you," she allows with added cheer and tempo on "Kind and Generous," the current single.
Over the years, Merchant has moved from the coffee shop to the Body Shop. As befits a socially committed superstar, on Ophelia she and guest guitarist Daniel Lanois get windy about the shortcomings of our ironic age ("Thick as Thieves"), and she climaxes with a stout hymn ("When They Ring Them Golden Bells"). But a four-song stretch in the middle of her album soars. It starts with the mazelike "Frozen Charlotte," Merchant's floating lines narrating a persistent dream of hungover desire. This bleeds into the piano-driven "My Skin," on which delicate complaints metastasize into gorgeous demands, before Merchant sings the light-filled "Break Your Heart," wherein she and a muted trumpet stare down the nonstop gloom. Then, everything crests on "King of May," an extraordinary elegy for an ordinary person. "Make a cardboard crown for him," she instructs. "Make a hole in the sky for him." She glides on a kaleidoscopic melody light-years beyond her words. This is Natalie Merchant in all her pestering glory.
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