![]() ![]() Perfection is hardly the goal, but there are moments that drag no matter how interested you are in the craft. This release invites us closer to Morby’s performances, trading spacious production for the immediacy of creation, so that we can almost hear him putting pen to paper. The album version, which was accompanied by a drum machine, anticipated the build, whereas the Little Los Angeles version maintains the illusion of spontaneity, recalling the moments of tension-and-release that he and his collaborators build so well onstage. “Don’t Underestimate the Midwest American Sun” is another standout, with its peripatetic piano keys and unexpected shifts: The lyrics transition from a pleading tone to a more defiant one, like we are alongside Morby, mustering our conviction in real time. The meandering guitar on opener “Campfire” is warm and beckoning, and Morby’s unadorned vocals have never sounded so winsome. This album forgoes any noodling or experiments and gets straight to the essence, so that several songs feel more arresting than their polished, studio counterparts. Lo-fi and languid, Little Los Angeles feels like being taken into someone’s confidence, although that intimacy works best when considered alongside the fuller renditions on Sundowner. Mail”), and they demonstrate the pleasure in the artistic process, as close as you can get to being in the room when the lightbulb goes off. Still, both records share a melancholy evocation of geography (Dylan’s “Goin’ to Acapulco,” Morby’s “U.S. But where their retreat felt like a rollicking group hang, Little Los Angeles is a largely solo affair, spartan in sound and provenance. An easy comparison is Bob Dylan and the Band’s classic The Basement Tapes, recorded in Saugerties, New York, and released at a similar remove after years on the road. Morby isn’t the first troubadour to escape the city and dig up roots, abandoning the metropolises that colored past releases like 2013’s Harlem River (New York) and 2016’s Singing Saw (Los Angeles) in favor of a Midwestern home with a hot tub and garden. It’s a well-suited format for such inward-facing folk music, twilight ballads that focus on loss and longing. These aren’t dregs from the cutting room floor but rather distillations, 10 pared-back recordings that often outshine the later iterations. This collection of 4-track demos recorded at Kevin Morby’s home in Kansas City offers a warm, fulsome window into the genesis of the music he would later sculpt with producer Brad Cook on 2020’s Sundowner. A Night at the Little Los Angeles is more than a series of sketches.
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![]() Once playing you can control playback via voice, which is handy when things get hectic in the kitchen or similar. TV shows and movies from Amazon’s Prime Video service work well on the 10.1in screen, with a relatively easy to use interface that can help you find the right show via taps or voice. Various video services work on the Echo Show, but most require using a browser on the screen, which is a bit clunky. Lastly, Alexa now has “routines” that can perform a collection of different actions with one phrase or tap on the screen, such as saying “goodnight” triggering off all the lights in the home to turn off. You can control devices from the Show’s screen with a couple of taps and swipes, and through the Alexa app on your smartphone, which has improved considerably in the last couple of iterations. Smart cameras and doorbells, including that from Amazon’s Ring and Google’s Nest, work particularly well, showing the live feed from your front door or elsewhere on command.īut voice control is only one part of the equation. The sheer number of devices that support Alexa integration is bewildering, which means whatever you want to turn smart in your home probably can be and therefore controlled via voice or taps on the screen. Otherwise the smart display operates like any other Alexa device, connecting to smart home hubs and devices via your home wifi network or the internet. It works well for simple things, but devices such as Philips Hue bulbs often need their dedicated proprietary hub to perform advanced features and updates. The new Show has an integrated smart home hub, which means you can connect smart bulbs, switches and other devices that use the Zigbee wireless protocol straight to the Amazon device without the need for another hub. You can control smart home devices via voice, or by using the touchscreen. But the Echo Show is one of the better-sounding smart speakers available, coming somewhere in between the Echo and the brilliant Sonos One or more expensive Apple HomePod. It doesn’t have really deep bass (you can pair a separate £120 Echo Sub with it if you want more bass) or any real stereo separation. It shows its weakness with high-energy tracks such as Daft Punk’s Derezzed, which sound somewhat flat, but Tycho’s more relaxed Jetty sounds great. Even classics such as String Quartet in E flat sound clean and precise. George Ezra’s Shotgun sounds warm and upbeat, Rita Ora’s Let You Love Me sounds sharp, while Smells Like Teen Spirit has the right amount of attack. Feed it a track such as Forgot About Dre and you get a punchy bassline that doesn’t bludgeon the lyrics. Tracks such as the live version of Hotel California from Hell Freezes Over by the Eagles have a far richer tone, better separation and sparkle than previous Echos. The two 2in speakers and passive bass radiator produce a wider soundscape than most smart speakers and can easily fill a room, sounding best at around volume level 5 out of 10. The Show is the best-sounding smart display currently on the market, blowing away Google’s Home Hub. The lump at the back contains the speakers, which like the screen are significantly improved but less direct than the front-facing speakers of the previous device. The speakers are now mounted in the fabric back of the Echo Show. Fortunately you only really need it for typing out passwords. You can swipe through various news, sports, reminders and calendar events, through the visual cards that accompany Alexa’s answers such as extended weather forecasts, and swipe to dismiss alarms and timers.Įven the on-screen keyboard works like a smartphone’s, although it quickly gets tiring to use it at arm’s length on the screen. Swipe down from the top to reveal a quick settings shade, including a smart home control panel, a place to trigger Alexa routines and one-tap access to alarms. When you do go to touch it, swipes and taps work as you might expect from a modern smartphone. If you never wanted to touch the screen beyond the initial set-up ,you wouldn’t have to. The Show is a voice-first Alexa speaker, with touch interactivity as an additional input rather than the core experience. Since the original Echo Show launched last year the software has been refined, but the experience is broadly the same. The new second generation Echo Show is bigger with a better display, but is size enough to keep Amazon ahead of stiff competition from Google? |
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