HUFFINGTON POST: The Top 10 Alternative Art Songs of 2001-2010
HUFFINGTON POST: The Top 10 Alternative Art Songs of 2001-2010
BY DANIEL J. KUSHNER
"A post-Christian nihilist pop opera sounds like a strange, nearly impossible amalgam to synthesize. But for Brooklyn-based composer Matt Marks and his chief co-conspirator, vocalist Mellissa Hughes (both raised in the Southern Baptist tradition), The Little Death: Vol. 1--which Marks began writing in the summer of 2007--is the result of relentless "tinkering" and indiscriminately drawing from a reservoir of dizzying musical touchstones and the moods and emotions they engender. And when the influences include the classic hymn "Morning Has Broken," gospel mainstays "He Touched Me" and "When God Dips His Love in My Heart," Japanese pop (or J-pop), Christian counterculture musicals of the late 1960s and early 1970s, techno, the Moral Majority-tinged contemporary Christian vocal stylings of Sandi Patty and 1990s Point of Grace, and hip-hop--all filtered through Marks's preoccupations with the horror genre, the sexualization of Christian iconography, and what he refers to as fundamentalist, roots-based religion and music culture taken to this twisted pop culture extreme--well, that's a recipe for cataclysmic drama."