Posted 2:39 AM by sport

Here’s an interesting review of Uncle. Dunno when it was first posted, but check it out.

Mike "Sport" Murphy's record Uncle is a concept record. It was made, one song per day, as a tribute to his nephew Peter, raised with Sport as a brother and killed in the attack on the World Trade Center. Its virtues include ingenious melodies, restrained production, flawless singing, relevance, and a lack of pretentiousness. Its drawbacks are mainly limited to a (self-admitted) lack of editing, although I suppose one could make a case for sentimentality, even then.

The existence of a work such as this, though, calls into question the very purpose of music criticism. Murphy himself describes it as a "public prayer" written "for an audience of one [who] will never hear it." I find the idea of judging a work so personal to be presumptuous in the extreme. A personal, unforced response to real death meets any standard of integrity so automatically and so thoroughly that its artistic success is guaranteed. It would be impossible for Uncle not to be good by its own standard, and any other standard is irrelevant, so my task is essentially reduced to convincing people that they should buy the record. OK, here goes: you should buy the record. It's the most honest, touching, and skillful piece of art produced for a "post-September 11 world" that I've encountered. And yet even that endorsement, infested as it is with the insidious cliche of American commentary, fails to do the work any real justice...hence this critic's dilemma.

sorry i've been out of touch with everyone. hope things change.