January 16th, 2008
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2:50 pm est
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Tim Sendra
Hey there, twee lovers! Now that we have cleared out everyone but the truly twee at heart, let’s break out the lollipops and get down to business. There were many contenders for the Twee-est Band of the Year honors this year but the clear winner is My Little Airport. The duo from Hong Kong (P & Nicole) run through all the hallmarks of the twee pop sound (cute-as-pie childlike vocals, simple melodies, clunky drum machines, rudimentary guitars and twinkly bells) in fine fashion on their debut album for Elefant, Zoo is Sad, People are Cruel, but one look at the song titles is enough to see that there is something special going on here. “Mountaintop, Doll, Lollypop”, “My Little Banana”, “You Don’t Want to Be My Girlfriend, Phoebe”…all classically twee titles with deliciously candy-coated songs to go with them; “When I Listen to the Field Mice” is even a heart-tuggingly sweet moment of meta-pop genius. My Little Airport are too cute, too twee, 100% ridiculous and their album is pretty much the silliest thing you’ll ever hear. For these reasons, they’re the Twee-est Band of 2007. (”When I Listen to the Field Mice” 
)
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January 10th, 2008
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2:00 pm est
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Tim Sendra
As 2007 fades into the distance, it’d be a shame to let some very good albums fade along with it unnoticed and unlisted. Here’s a few that didn’t make too many year end lists (amazingly enough, seeing that everyone and their kid sister published one this year) but almost made mine:
Citay - Little Kingdom
Citay’s second album is a guitar lover’s paradise. Ezra Feinberg (Piano Magic) and Tim Green (Fucking Champs) play a wide variety of acoustic, electric, and synthesized guitars on Little Kingdom and create a lush, layered sound that rewards close listening, or is perfect for letting wash over you like a stream of shimmering water. The record plays like a stoner version of a Fripp and Eno collaboration with the two guitarists trading licks and creating loads of trippy atmosphere. Read more >>
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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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