A while back, I linked to a Washington Post article describing the apathetic relationship between classical music and the Grammys. Oddly enough, the classical categories are the only ones I pay any mind.
It’s because the Grammys have a particular irrelevance in classical music circles that makes me interested in the nominees and winners more. If the classical world doesn’t really care about the awards, who cares enough to nominate and to vote?
I’m also distant enough from the classical categories not to be so derisive of its nominees. I wouldn’t question eighth blackbird’s nomination as much as I would Fergie’s.
Most of the titles in this round-up are 2008 Grammy nominees and winners, while others I just happen to be listening to at the time.
There’s a lot of doom and gloom in the news about the US economy. The company for which I work actually told Wall Street it was going to dial down its expectations for the first quarter of 2008, and our stock price took a hit for it. (My options are, as usual, underwater.) It doesn’t help that this morning, I read an article stating the unemployment rate is rising faster than economists predicted.
So this first quarter is kind of sucking for American corporations.
But this site does not deal with matters of economy. It deals with matters of music, and the first quarter of 2008 has turned out to be quite fertile. I’m usually not impressed with the first quarter releases of any year, but this time, even albums I don’t absolutely adore are still really, really good.
The 2008 Q1 release schedule in Japan has been particularly notable.
hey willpower’s debut, Dance EP, was one of my favorite eMusic downloads of 2007. Imperial Teen guitarist Will Schwartz and musical partner Tomo channel a sincere love for radio pop into four songs devoid of hipster irony. These guys really do love their Rhianna.
P.D.A. was released in the UK in 2006, but it saw a stateside release in 2008. All four tracks of Dance EP appear on the album, which is handy since the EP itself doesn’t seem to be available in stores any more.
P.D.A. is perhaps the first album in a long time to make me smile.
I appreciate the Advocate for being perhaps the only publication to cover gay issues as hard news. I certainly wouldn’t turn to Out or DNA for that. And yet, I also turn to the news weekly to learn about gay musicians, which is kind of like turning to Newsweek or Time to figure out what the kids these days are listening to.
The magazine just published its 2008 music issue, and it’s got some terrific interviews with Broadway actor Cheynne Jackson, indie pioneer Bob Mould and dance music ally Moby. It also listed five emerging LGBT artists. Such recommendations tend to be hit or miss, mostly miss.
This time, the Advocate put its stamp of approval on the Shondes, Los Super Elegantes, Jake Walden, Team Gina and Steven Alvarado. So I did the 21st Century thing and jumped onto Myspace to check these artists out.
I wasn’t really thinking much about music in 1998. I was trying to navigate the uncertainty of living completely on my own for the first time, and the entire last half of the ’90s felt pretty rootless. A lot of crappy stuff happened that year, the worst of which was a burglary.
I thought 1997 was tough, but 1998 mopped the floor with 1997.
I wouldn’t really discover a lot of the titles on this list till the year after, when life started to suck a bit less. There’s a significant Austin slant since I was trying to figure out how much I liked what passed for cool among the city’s cognoscenti. I would later learn the popularity of Bob Schneider and Los Lonely Boys demonstrates Austinites can have terrible taste in music as well.
Quruli’s performance with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra gets a DVD release on May 21, so says Bounce.com. The DVD, titled Yokohama Winner, documents the band’s Dec. 12, 2007 performance with the orchestra at Yokohama Pacifico. A limited edition first pressing of the DVD includes additional footage from the band’s homecoming concert in Kyoto on Dec. 6, 2007, where only 250 fans were invited. Other footage includes Quruli’s Sept. 23 outdoor performance.
I was also browsing the AllMusic new release page and discovered US label Hacktone Records releases a LOVE PSYCHEDELICO compilation titled This Is LOVE PSYCHEDELICO on April 29. A website promoting the release has already been launched. The track listing looks like it’s taken mostly from the first three studio albums, with nothing from Golden grapefruit. Long-time readers of this site are probably very well familiar with the tracks on this compilation, so here’s a fairly inexpensive way to introduce your loved ones to LOVE PSYCHEDELICO.
It’s weird enough for the first quarter of the year to yield some really strong contenders for the year-end favorite list. It’s weirder still when many of those releases came out in January, a traditionally slow month where releases are concerned.
Something tells me some of these releases were squeezed out of the fall schedule. I think the fall schedule would have been much more interesting if some of these titles had been pushed up.
I don’t have very high hopes for the second quarter, but I very much enjoyed this first quarter of 2008.
Really — I tried to get into 69 Love Songs. I was impressed as everyone else that one guy would try write, record and essentially perform three hours of love songs, pared down from the original 100 planned.
At the very least, such an effort ought to be commended. Stephin Merritt wasn’t trying to go for some three-disc prog rock concept album — he just wanted to write 69 love songs.
Reviewers at the time thought the entire set was just pristine, but over time, I’ve found otherwise. I no longer have the albums in my collection because I only ever found about 23 of them very likable.
And thus established my relationship with the Magnetic Fields — a band upon whom I like to check from time to time, but one whose work I don’t actually whip myself into a frenzy to follow. Merritt comes up with some really clever ideas, such as writing songs where all the titles begin with the letter "I". But sometimes, the follow-through is less compelling than the concept, as was the case with said album i, the band’s first for Nonesuch.
Distortion promised an album "more Jesus and Mary Chain than the Jesus and Mary Chain". I’ve had only scant exposure to the Jesus and Mary Chain, so I don’t know how well Merritt keeps his promise. This time, I’m inclined to think the Magnetic Fields deliver the goods.
Waterloo Records holds two storewide sales every year — one after SXSW, and another before the Christmas rush.
Somehow, they seem to coincide with dry spells, when I’m not particularly covetous of anything in particular. When the sales are over, then I’ll realize, "Huh, I kind of wanted to get that." So I’m making a shopping list.
[UPDATE, 04/06/08, 11:26 PM] The sale is over, and I ended up with pretty much everything I wanted. Thing is, I didn’t actually buy some of these items from Waterloo. New comments are in italics.
The first version of this list, made at the end of 1997, looks vastly different from its current incarnation. Four titles from that list remain — everything else is a revisionist addition.
1997 was a transitional year for me. I wrapped up the final semester of working at the school newspaper, and immediately following, I moved to Austin for work. The lists from this year onward contain far more titles than ranking slots, on account of a disposable income. A regular paycheck does wonders to fix a collecting jones.
As a result, I would acquire a number of 1997 titles in subsequent years, but I’m ranking them anyway, regardless of when I first discovered them.