December 24th, 2007
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8:00 am est
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AMG Staff
We’ve just placed the Allmusic Blog in a warm room with a five-disc DVD player stocked with Fireplace, Ambient Fire, Virtual Flames, Fireplace Lounge, and Ambience DVD Fireplace to keep it company by playing on continual restful loop until the morning of January 2, 2008, when it will resume normal activity. (The Allmusic editor who suggested Boxer instead of the DVDs has just been sacked.) In the meantime, the blog would love to have its archives scoured — there is extensive CMJ coverage, album reviews, crush bands, buried treasures, recent favorites, playlists, and so much more — and it does not want you to forget about all the in-depth roundups and bizarrely controversial lists of favorites from the Allmusic editors:
- Allmusic’s Favorite Country Albums of 2007, Pt. 1
- Allmusic’s Favorite Country Albums of 2007, Pt. 2
- Allmusic’s Favorite Electronic Albums of 2007, Pt. 1
- Allmusic’s Favorite Electronic Albums of 2007, Pt. 2
- Allmusic’s Favorite Hip-Hop Albums of 2007, Pt. 1
- Allmusic’s Favorite Hip-Hop Albums of 2007, Pt. 2
- Allmusic’s Favorite Jazz Albums of 2007, Pt. 1
- Allmusic’s Favorite Jazz Albums of 2007, Pt. 2
- Allmusic’s Favorite Latin Albums of 2007, Pt. 1
- Allmusic’s Favorite Latin Albums of 2007, Pt. 2
- Allmusic’s Favorite Metal Albums of 2007, Pt. 1
- Allmusic’s Favorite Metal Albums of 2007, Pt. 2
- Allmusic’s Favorite R&B Albums of 2007, Pt. 1
- Allmusic’s Favorite R&B Albums of 2007, Pt. 2
- Allmusic’s Favorite Reggae Albums of 2007
- Allmusic’s Favorite Soundtrack Albums of 2007, Pt. 1
- Allmusic’s Favorite Soundtrack Albums of 2007, Pt. 2
Most importantly, thank you all for reading and sharing your opinions!
December 21st, 2007
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6:00 pm est
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AMG Staff
December 21st, 2007
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5:02 pm est
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AMG Staff
Check out Part 1
Original Soundtrack – Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Australian buddies Nick Cave and Warren Ellis spent a lot of time on the prairie in 2005 and 2007, laying down music for (and even appearing in) the westerns Proposition and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. While the former relied heavily on Cave’s doom-laden vocals, Assassination focuses on fellow Bad Seed, Grinderman and founding member of the Dirty Three Warren Ellis’ violin and Celeste-tinged audio landscapes to color the “new” Old West. Like a music box tipped on its’ side in the desert, Cave and Ellis’ all instrumental soundtrack occasionally echoes familiar genre exercises (check out the Morricone-esque “Song For Jesse”), but it’s long, languid motifs are as spread out as the film’s 160-minute run time. Read more >>
Trevor Jones – Dark Crystal: 25th Anniversary
The fantasy film The Dark Crystal is a live-action feature performed entirely by puppets created by the Jim Henson organization, also responsible for the Muppets. As such, it is visually unusual, but Trevor Jones’ score is a traditional orchestral work in the Hollywood tradition. In Randall D. Larson’s liner notes to the 25th anniversary edition of the soundtrack album (reissued to coincide with a similarly commemorative DVD release), Jones reveals that the initial idea was to come up with music just as inventive as the look of the film, but that plan was abandoned when it was decided that audiences needed something to feel comfortable with in contrast to what they were seeing. Read more >>
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December 21st, 2007
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4:10 pm est
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Stephen Eddins
With so many terrific releases to pick from, these are my top ten vocal, choral, and opera releases on CD and DVD, listed chronologically. (Apologies to the great instrumental albums that are excluded, particularly pianist Andrew Russo’s Dirty Little Secret; the wind quintet Pentaèdre’s Mozart arrangement, Così: Un opéra muet; Yuri Bashmet’s recording of works by Stravinsky and Prokofiev for string orchestra; and Roman Kofman’s version of Silvestrov’s Sixth Symphony.)
Monteverdi Opera Cycle
De Nederlandse Opera’s seven-DVD set of the three surviving Monteverdi operas and a staged version of Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda represents a brilliant and conceptually unified approach to the works, thanks largely to the absolutely focused dramatic vision of director Pierre Audi and his ability to draw together some of the most gifted early music performers and most inventive visual designers to collaborate on a project. Audi’s approach doesn’t box his collaborators in; each opera has a distinctive look and sound, but they are united by the emotional integrity and economy of his direction, which emphasizes the humanity of the characters and the universality of the complexity of their relationships. For any opera to be fully effective, the singing must be superb, and the consistently transcendent vocal quality and idiomatically appropriate period practice are the other elements that raise these performances to the level of the sublime. Read more >>
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December 21st, 2007
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3:04 pm est
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AMG Staff
Apparat – Walls
Having made a considerable splash with the Ellen Allien collaboration Orchestra of Bubbles, Apparat returned to his own path with Walls, a remarkable album that ranks as his best yet. Beginning with the gentle string and vibes beats of “Not a Number” — which in its own melancholy way, combined with the title, suddenly sounds like one of the most humanistic songs yet recorded, passionate in its elegant sorrow — Walls takes a simultaneously familiar and unsettled path. While the continuing impact of disparate strands of music — the fallout of My Bloody Valentine and its many imitators, the electronic obsessions of Warp, the stadium-ready melancholy of early Radiohead and its own horde of followers — has resulted in a 21st century computer music of crushed sorrow; on Walls, Apparat transcends the downbeat limitations of the incipient form with astonishing grace. Read more >>
Burial – Untrue
Burial, the self-titled debut album by an anonymous dubstep producer from London, proved one of the more surprising success stories of 2006. It was voted Album of the Year by the influential experimental-electronic magazine The Wire and was fawned over by a long list of other media, from Mixmag to Pitchfork. Upon the release of Untrue, the second Burial album, the cycle of acclaim appeared likely to repeat itself. While Untrue isn’t likely to win many, if any, Album of the Year honors (in the wake of the debut’s acclaim, the novelty of Burial lessened considerably), the album’s arguably even better than its predecessor. Untrue finds its anonymous producer streamlining the varied approach of his debut, resulting is a uniform collection of tracks that are subtly evolving variations of each other. Read more >>
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December 21st, 2007
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1:22 pm est
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AMG Staff
In 2007, the music video continued to prove that the rumors of its death were largely, if not greatly, exaggerated. Creative clips abounded, from Justice’s ubiquitous — but still hypnotic — t-shirt worshipping “D.A.N.C.E.” video to Snoop Dogg’s retro-tastic “Sensual Seduction.” It was a year inspired by Grindhouse’s gritty, grainy style and grade-Z sci-fi; cannibalism was also big, as was the trend for layering live action and animation. After the jump, check out some our favorite videos from the year that was.
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December 21st, 2007
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11:20 am est
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Uncle Dave Lewis
1. La Quinta essentia
Paul Van Nevel, Huelgas Ensemble
Harmonia Mundi
This is the Renaissance period in a nutshell, as exemplified by three different mass settings by three radically different composers -– Orlandus Lassus, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and giga-obscure Englishman Thomas Ashewell, whose never before recorded setting of the mass accounts for one half of his extant output. The Ashewell work is quite amazing –- you will not believe that a choir is capable of executing such complex rhythms. The other two works — the stern and worldly Lassus and the weightless and serene Palestrina — perfectly bookend the realm of the Renaissance in a way never before achieved on disc. La Quinta essentia is the best way in the door to the least-known and well-understood historical period in Western music.
Huelgas Ensemble – Thomas Ashewell: Missa Ave Maria, “Sanctus” 
2. Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer: Le Journal du Printemps
Michi Gaigg, L’Orfeo Barockorchester
CPO
Just when you thought we had run out of orchestral masterworks from the Baroque Era, Michi Gaigg and L’Orfeo Barockorchester locate a key set of orchestral suites from among the earliest phase of the history of Western orchestras; Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer’s Le Journal du Printemps. Published in 1695, this work contains many of the hallmarks of what makes Handel’s orchestral music so appealing, but first appeared when Handel himself was only ten years old. This recording is likewise the result of an exceptionally fine bit of musical detective work, as the score does not provide a proper “recipe” –- i.e. an orchestration –- as much as mere serving suggestions. You would never know that from the performance, which is as natural and characteristically Baroque as Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons.
Michi Gaigg, L’Orfeo Barockorchester – Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer: Le Journal du Printemps, Suite No. 7 in G minor, “Passacaille”
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December 21st, 2007
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9:00 am est
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AMG Staff
Check out Part 1
John Anderson – Easy Money
Like many veteran country stars, John Anderson didn’t retire so much as fade from the spotlight as his new records slowly started to sell less and less. After an early-’80s peak, his hits started to dry up after the mid-’90s and while he continued to work, cutting records and playing shows, he slowly fell off of Nashville’s radar. Cut to the middle of the 2000s, when Big and Rich were major players in the Music City, and their key songwriter, John Rich, approached Anderson with the offer of producing and collaborating on a new record. Anderson accepted and the resulting album, Easy Money, saw the singer returning to his first major label, Warner, but it’s a homecoming in another sense, too, because it’s the biggest, boldest, and best record he’s made in a long, long time. Read more >>
Toby Keith – Big Dog Daddy
After he becoming a bona fide superstar in the wake of “Courtesy of the Red White and Blue,” Toby Keith refused to play it safe, blowing up his persona to mythic heights on 2003’s Shock’n Y’All, stretching his musical legs on Honkytonk University, and calling off all bets with the Lari White-produced White Trash with Money, where he got soulful and soft in equal measures. After that trilogy of exploration, Keith snaps back to the basics on Big Dog Daddy, his first self-produced album and his first album of nothing but pure, hardcore country since his star rose in the early years of the new millennium. This isn’t a retreat as much as it’s a reaffirmation of his strengths as a singer, songwriter, performer, and interpreter. Read more >>
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