Bought this along with the Meshuggah record. I don’t remember if it was on clearance or I had read something good about it. I’m sure I would have gotten Vol. 1 if they had it. Oh, but that Grammy sticker! The sweet siren call of something I don’t really give a shit about at all. (This might be the Grammy-winning last slack key album to win, btw. The Grammys no longer have a Hawaiian category.) I guess I’ve always been curious about what a decent example of genuine slack key guitar really is and a Grammy winner in the category must be somewhat legit. Probably safe and boring, but not total bullshit, right?

Right, exactly. This disc cleared a major misconception I had about the term; it has nothing to do with slide steel guitar, that really stereotypical sound that comes to mind when you think “Hawaiian music”. I was hoping for the “real” version of that, if there is such a thing anymore. But real Slack Key Guitar (on this CD, anyway) is simply an acoustic guitar using various open downtunings. Here, it’s literally one guitar: solo acoustic guitar tracks, different players, different tunings, but they just brought the guys into the studio to all play the same guitar. So it’s like they designed it for maximum sameyness. (Perhaps maximum Grammywinningness.)

This is some good guitar playing really well recorded, but it just sounds like an album of chilled-out acoustic instrumentals. And by chilled-out I don’t mean anything “cool” just s l o w. There’s nothing that’s like, “wow, tunings”! It’s all very subtle. This could be background music in a gift shop. It would be nice to have a tuning chart in the liner notes, supposedly each track uses a unique one. They all sound pretty similar. You got to figure these guys know each other and probably play together. Doesn’t seem like a competitive scene.

This is an album that nobody’s having sex to is what I’m saying. Or did that just come out of nowhere? Well it’s true. You could imagine old people hugging to this music and being like, “ok, that’s enough.” Hey, that’s the common theme of my music buying around this time; math metal, classical, wallpaper world music—total anti-sex! Sometimes you just wanna not think about it. I mean, it’s great, but sometimes you gotta get other stuff done. Like shop for grass skirts and, uh…coconuts? Actually this music does not conjure up any kind of image of anything Hawaiian at all. The only thing that seems Hawaiian are the names of some of the players. I don’t feel ripped-off by this aspect of it, in fact it’s exactly what I wanted: the real thing, not what I thought it was.

Had to listen on repeat a bunch of times to think of anything to say at all. The harmonics really are quite nice. Just noticed I forgot to include the disc itself in the picture because it was still in the player. It’s the same image as the cover, and I like the transparent case. So there. No photos in the booklet either. I’d like to see what the players look like. They are probably awesome dudes; even though their music is not very exiting, it’s not very commercial either. It’s not like it’s smooth jazz or something, that stuff doesn’t even sound like it’s made by humans. I guess you could have sex to it, but really only if you are making terrible softcore porn. And nobody wants that. %