It was tempting to cut and past my comments on 'See My Baby Jive' here and just change the song title. Because most of what I said about Wood's favoured crush of multi-layered sound applies just as much here as it did there - as a producer, he seems incapable of jettisoning any one of his ideas and they all get mashed together in a smudged palette until Wood can't see the trees for the minute detail of the branches.
But I'm not that lazy. Or unfair. Because in the case of 'Angel Fingers', Wood hasn't just plastered a wall of sound onto whatever track he was working on at the time, he's actually taken Phil Spector's own songwriting approach as a template to fashion a song of fifties rock & roll nostalgia ('Will Dion still be so important to you on your wedding day'?). Appropriately subtitled 'A Teen Ballad', 'Angel Fingers' opens with the instantly recognisable 'Be My Baby' drum beat and builds to incorporate a yearning wash of hooks and motifs that recall - but don't plagiarise - every Spector, Brill Building, Leiber & Stoller, Red Bird Barry & Greenwich (et al) song you know or half remember.
It's a shadowy homage at heart, and a regret tinged longing for the past - 'How it lingers, Angel Fingers. That's why I fell in love with you'. This time though, Wood has sense enough to allow some space between the dense slabs of sound to give the emotion room to breathe. Which is why while 'Angel Fingers' offers up nothing new under the sun, it affects in a way 'See My Baby Jive' never could. Nostalgia rarely sounded as good.
But I'm not that lazy. Or unfair. Because in the case of 'Angel Fingers', Wood hasn't just plastered a wall of sound onto whatever track he was working on at the time, he's actually taken Phil Spector's own songwriting approach as a template to fashion a song of fifties rock & roll nostalgia ('Will Dion still be so important to you on your wedding day'?). Appropriately subtitled 'A Teen Ballad', 'Angel Fingers' opens with the instantly recognisable 'Be My Baby' drum beat and builds to incorporate a yearning wash of hooks and motifs that recall - but don't plagiarise - every Spector, Brill Building, Leiber & Stoller, Red Bird Barry & Greenwich (et al) song you know or half remember.
It's a shadowy homage at heart, and a regret tinged longing for the past - 'How it lingers, Angel Fingers. That's why I fell in love with you'. This time though, Wood has sense enough to allow some space between the dense slabs of sound to give the emotion room to breathe. Which is why while 'Angel Fingers' offers up nothing new under the sun, it affects in a way 'See My Baby Jive' never could. Nostalgia rarely sounded as good.
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