Thursday, December 14, 2017

Band Review: DiElle


My primary feeling with DiElle is annoyance. That has been building up for a long time.

I have had her on the review list since January 21st, getting surprisingly close to a year. For some perspective, tomorrow's band was entered on June 28th. (I try to keep it within six months.)

That happened because when I first went to check out DiElle's site there was a very disjointed navigation process for listening to about 40 songs, and I didn't have time for all the clicking back and forth.

That only delayed her for about two months. Then when I gritted my teeth to get to it, I discovered that the vast majority of the tracks were just half-minute samples. You needed to pay to get whole songs.

I have a lot of sympathy for the need of musicians to make money. I support that. I still think if you are trying to sell 40 songs you can afford to have a small block of songs (I think 4 - 6 is optimal) for people to listen to together, letting them know if you have music they would be interested in. This is especially true if you go around following different accounts trying to raise interest in your work: provide some work! Some bands will send you some tracks if you subscribe to their mailing list; I don't love that either, but at least it gives you an option.

(If this complaint sounds familiar, I had similar issues with Prophecy of Sound.)

What DiElle gives you is two versions of the same song on Spotify, a list of four official videos that is really just two videos that play, one private video, and one short clip, and of course a page full of 30-second clips. What I mostly used was another play list - titled original material - which had some good recordings but also some with poor sound quality, some interviews, and more of the notorious short clips.

I remain annoyed.

Anyway, DiElle reminds me a lot of Adele. Her voice isn't quite as strong, but she doesn't take that hard edge Adele often does either, which may make her more palatable for some. However, unless you just want to assume you like and start buying tracks, listening to her takes an unfortunate amount of commitment.

But, except for a daily song down the road, she is no longer my problem, and that makes me happy.




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