As scooped by Kevin in comments, Bounce.com also reports the release date for Utada Hikaru’s new album is March 19. The article doesn’t go into much detail, instead opting for a lot of excited language about how anticipated this release will be. No doubt EMI Japan is excited to have a big title ready for Q1 of 2008, given the woes of the recording industry worldwide. (The Economist says CD sales in Japan fell 9 percent in 2007. I guess that’s better than the 19 percent in the US.)
I’ve been enjoying the recent singles, but I know enough to keep my expectations in check. Ultra Blue has the kind of clarity that even the best artists achieve rarely, so anything that comes afterward will almost certainly pale by comparison.
"Flavor of Life" and "Beautiful World" maintain that ethereal sound she mastered on the last album, but it took a while for those songs to grow on me, which wasn’t the case with "Passion" or "Keep Tryin’". It’s almost the same kind of effort I had to put into "Be My Last", but neither song reached the same level of favor.
With two Japanese-language albums following her English-language debut, it makes me wonder whether any of this work spills over into her next English-language album.
[UPDATE, 01/28/2008, 21:05] Utada Hikaru’s official site announced the title of the new album is HEART STATION, making the upcoming single the title track.
I wasn’t impressed with 1986 as a year in music. It seemed all my favorite artists were floundering. Duran Duran went through a drastic membership change. Eurythmics were making great singles but not great albums. As iconic as Robert Palmer’s videos were at the time — and stillare — Riptide didn’t rock as hard as the Power Station. And follow-up albums from artists I liked at the time — should I really own up to listening to Lisa LIsa and Cult Jam? — fell flat.
The albums listed here pretty much represent all of the CDs from 1986 that I own. And I didn’t even include The Whole Story by Kate Bush.
I had fun listing all the reasons 1987 is my favoriteyearin music that I wanted to make Favorite Edition lists for other years. When I started compiling the lists, I ran across a number of problems.
First was the urge to revise history. I remember ranking a number of albums as year-end favorites, only to let them go as my tastes changed. (1997 and 1999 are very indicative of this.) As I’m exploring more catalog these days, I’m faced with the option of including titles I probably didn’t know about or wouldn’t have listened to at the time. I don’t think my high school self would imagine a day I would listen to — let alone like — the trio album by Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris.
So I’m throwing context out of the window and concentrating on two criteria — when something was released and how strongly I feel about it now, keeping in mind how strongly I felt about it back then. It’s an interesting exercise because there are albums I didn’t like in the past that I’ve grown to love, which is a situation that seems to be rarer than it should.
I’m starting with 1985 since that’s the first year I actually acquired enough music to craft a list of ten. Given my junior high and high school allowance, it’s not the bounty that a disposable income can provide. Nonetheless, I present …
I could just update the most recent "Looking Ahead" entry to include the items listed here, but it looks like the first quarter of 2008 actually looks promising. It’s far, far more interesting than what passed for a fall 2007 release schedule. When your Q4 hopes ride on James Blunt, something is really wrong.
Port of Notes commemorates its 10-year anniversary with a career retrospective titled Blue Arpeggio ~Own Best Selection~ to be released Feb. 2, so says Bounce.com. As indicated by the subtitle, the duo of singer Hatakeyama Miyuki and guitarist Kojima Daisuke oversaw the track selection of the collection. Each song will be remastered for the release.
Although the duo debut in 1998, the past few years have found them pursuing solo careers. The last Port of Notes album, Evening glows, was released in 2004. Hatakeyama last year released Summer clouds, Summer rain, produced by Jesse Harris, and Watashi no Uta, a collaboration with ASA-CHANG and the Blue Hats. Kojima has played solo as DSK and with a new band, MODEST.
Billboard.biz reports Sony BMG has signed on with Amazon to sell unprotected MP3 files. An exact date has yet to be set, the article says, but Sony content should be available later this month.
The Sony BMG merger in 2004 meant the consolidation of perhaps the two biggest classical music recording archives — CBS Masterworks and RCA Victor. It’s probably overly optimistic of me to think the full potential of this consolidation could be leveraged with the Amazon deal, especially given how well classical has done in the digital arena the last few years.
But I have to say, the Sony BMG holdout didn’t inconvenience me as much as the Warner Music Group holdout. I’m not as invested in the Sony artists in my collection, and if I did feel any longing, it was for BMG artists. A lot of Stephen Sondheim’s shows were recorded for RCA Victor.
I find it interesting that my interest in these deals extend to the catalog of the majors, not in their new artists. Curious?
Speedstar Records has announced the release of a live DVD from Cocco to be released in the spring. The DVD covers the last two dates of Cocco’s Kira Kira Live Tour 2007/2008, which actually ended yesterday in Japan. (It’s now Jan. 11 there.) The Jan. 9 set showcases her full band, while the Jan. 10 date is an acoustic. Footage from both nights will be edited and compiled on the DVD.
Back in November, Cocco reissued her Okinawa-only release, "Fuuka Fuusou", on DVD, once again restricting the release to Okinawa. I saw this news on Oops Music a few weeks back but forgot to post about it.
I wish her Spaceshower TV performance from 2000 would be released on DVD.
ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION releases its fourth album titled World World World on March 5, so says Bounce.com, which goes on to describe the album as "edgy" and "melodious". The article says the band has expanded its sound. Perhaps — I just remember not being able to tell Sol-fa apart from Fan Club. And I actually like Sol-fa — it’s terrific workout music.
A friend of mine at an afternoon work break mentioned how she’s been swooning over Joshua Bell recently. She read the Washington Post article where Bell busked at subway station and looked up his photo when the article mentioned he’s one of the babes of classical music. She said he’s got the Captain Jack thing going for him, referring to the gorgeous John Barrowman, who, by the way, has a new album out. My friend and I rarely ever agree on hot men, which surprised the rest of our friends.
So when we all went back to our desks, I continued the conversation in e-mail, directing said friends to Nathan Gunn, a favorite of the opera blog The Standing Room. Someone asked whether he poses for romance novel covers. Of course, I also had to point them to other "barihunks."
I mentioned my fondness for Kronos Quartet’s cellist, Jeffrey Ziegler. Another friend kind of thought David Harrington wasn’t bad looking. It’s too bad I forgot to mention Nico Muhly, who was featured in the Out 100.
In all the dire reports of classical music’s impending death, a lot of excuses seem to be bandied about the genre’s perception — it’s effite and elitist, saddled with a museum mentality, et cetera, ad nauseum. One thing that doesn’t seem to be mentioned is how sexless classical music can seem. My friend under the spell of Bell summed it up: "When I think of classical music, I don’t think of hotness."
SXSW Asia posted the line-up for Japan Nite 2008. The featured bands this year are:
Petty Booka
ketchup mania
detroit7
quartz-head 02
avengers in Sci-Fi
Sodopp
Click on the band photos, and a pop-up window links to their various websites and Myspace pages. After listening to the audio samples, I gotta admit — I’m not wowed. avengers in Sci-Fi comes close to sounding distinctive, but you could have easily put Electric Eel Shock or the Emeralds in place of detroit7 and noodles or any Benten band in Sodopp’s slot.
There’s nobody as freaked out as Kokeshi Doll, as brutal as Bleach or as theatrical as eX-Girl. And there isn’t anybody as marquee as PE’Z, Bonnie Pink or GO!GO!7188. I’ve been kind of broke this past year, so if I do manage to go to SXSW, it’ll be a luxury.
Many more bands will be announced in the coming weeks, so maybe something else might draw me in.