There are the sounds of late autumn: the yack of jackdaws, a starling imitating a blackbird, a robin's thin song, the chatter of sparrows picking through a nearby gutter.
The execution is proficient enough, but everything about the album lacks character, from the anodyne production to the wafer-thin songs, which reveal what they're all about within the first verse.
This involved two-hour sets featuring new material and duets with Sinéad O'Connor on her song "Nothing Compares 2 U and Damien Dempsey on the Thin Lizzy song "Dancing in the Moonlight".
She had once heard the girl play, over the long-distance line, a thin sad song in the background at Martin's Manhattan apartment.
Even Lil Wayne's thinnest recent songs have featured some of the tossed-off one-liners that, in his tinny croak, sound more clever than they already are: "swagger just dumb/call it Kelly Bundy," "shoot you nine times just in case you got cat lives," "so misunderstood, but what's a world without enigma?" And of course, from "6 Foot 7 Foot," "real Gs move in silence like lasagna".
In "Rise Above," which Mr. Longstreth turned into the semblance of an inspirational reggae anthem, he thinned the song to a few seemingly stray guitar plunks and silences that encouraged a heckler, then calmly, gradually reassembled it atop the unheard beat.
That was the case with a terribly thin suite of songs for "Inner Voice" sung by Genevieve Labean, formerly of City Ballet.
For the last few years especially the masculinity crisis has been flaring up, leading to a spate of singers reduced to lightly felt songs thin on muscle.
Mr. Bowie no longer presents himself as the unearthly Ziggy Stardust or the unapproachable Thin White Duke; between songs, he joked about being jet-lagged.
Spawnsong is a (very) new music platform startup with a strategy to elbow into the crowded digital music space by focusing on a very thin wedge: individual songs.
I easily found every non-mainstream artist or song I searched for examples: The song 'Thin Line' by Jurassic 5 featuring Nelly Furtado, and Nick Cave's album 'Let Love In'.
