| A Piano: The Collection (Spkg) | | Posted Wednesday, August 30, 2006 6:12:05 PM by BlogJeeves Team | | Intimate, confessional, poetic, and defiantly independent, Amos' songs touch on self, family, religion, femininity, pain, and love with a searching spirit that translates powerfully into songcraft. This momentous box spans the depth and breadth of her extraordinary repertoire, spotlighting both album versions and a sprawling tapestry of rarities. Disc A - Little Earthquakes extended Disc B - Pink And Pele Disc C - Pele/Venus/Tales Disc D - Scarlet/Beekeeper/Choirgirl Disc E - Bonus B-sides.... | |
| |
| | | Richard Thompson - 1000 Years of Popular Music (2 CD & 1 DVD Set) | | Posted Tuesday, August 15, 2006 4:11:47 PM by BlogJeeves Team | | As Richard Thompson explains in his typically droll annotation, 1000 Years of Popular Music came about after Playboy asked various musicians to rank their top ten songs of the millennium. While most dipped no farther back than a few decades--a century at most--Thompson's musical memory rose to the challenge. The result is this concert set's encapsulation of 22 songs that trace a musical progression from the Middle Ages through Britney Spears, with Judith Owen and Debra Dobkin providing spare instrumental and rich vocal support. Released as a concert DVD with two audio CDs, the selection is irrepressibly idiosyncratic, from rounds, madrigals, and British balladry that recall Thompson's early days in Fairport Convention through the music-hall singalong of "I Live in Trafalgar Square" to dips into the songbooks of the Kinks ("See My Friends"), Squeeze ("Tempted"), and Bowling for Soup ("1985"). Among the highlights are the soulful tenderness of the 17th century's "Bonnie St. Johnstone," a haunting "Shenandoah," a samba arrangement of Cole Porter's "Night and Day," and a deliriously rocking rendition of the Easybeats' "Friday on My Mind." --Don McLeese... | |
| |
| | | Doo Wop Box | | Posted Tuesday, August 08, 2006 2:11:53 AM by BlogJeeves Team | | The unwritten rules for doo-wop groups were deceptively simple: name your group after a bird (the Wrens, the Flamingos) or a car (the Cadillacs, the El Dorados), practice your two-, three-, or four-part harmonies on a neighborhood street corner or in the back of a candy store, and sing songs about how much you love your baby. It might have seemed like an obvious formula, but getting it just right was never easy. When it worked, that formula created some of the most joyful and unforgettable music of the 20th century. From the Orioles ("It's Too Soon to Know") to Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers ("I Want You to Be My Girl"), this four-CD collection is without a doubt the definitive introduction to the rock & roll vocal music of the 1950s and early '60s. --Percy Keegan... | |
| |
| | | Singer Sonu Niigaam to cut down on work, sets eyes on farming | | Posted Sunday, August 06, 2006 12:19:43 AM by BlogJeeves Team | | BOMBAY, India - Bollywood singer Sonu Niigaam plans to cut back on singing so he can take up farming. Niigaam told the Hindustan Times newspaper that he doesnt plan to give up singing all together, but will have to find time to sing in between planting seeds and tending crops in his new role as a farmer. He hasnt yet decided what hell grow or where he will do it, but he was quoted as saying by the newspaper that you will hear less of Sonu, yes, because I want to set up a farmhouse, live there, work from there and farm. Niigaam is regarded as one of the best male singers in a film industry that relies on song-and-dance numbers in movies to rake in box office receipts. The 33-year-old began singing as a teenager. Now, I dont want to do so much work anymore. Ive got fame and money.... | |
| |
| | | Citizen Steely Dan: 1972-1980 | | Posted Saturday, August 05, 2006 2:11:41 PM by BlogJeeves Team | | As should be expected, Steely Dan's four-disc box set isn't like all the other rectangular pop-music retrospectives/tombstones. Not for Messrs. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen the typically bloated, ego-jacking crate padded out with childhood recordings, suspect cassette demos, and broken-down session takes, annotated by candid snapshots purloined from some distant relative. Nope, this is simply Dan Mach 1's complete oeuvre, from the craft-conscious pop of Can't Buy a Thrill to the jazzy torpor of Gaucho, laid out chronologically and neatly compressed into four discs, with not even a handful of "bonus" cuts (a live recording of "Bodhisattva," a '71 demo of "Everyone's Gone to the Movies" with Flo and Eddie on the side, "Here at the Western World," a Royal Scam outtake, and their obligatory soundtrack cameo, "FM") to color outside the lines. The liner notes are suitably smart, even if they occasionally strain trying to stay astride of B&F's patent sardonicism. For the aspiring Steely Dan completist, a fine place to start. --Jerry McCulley... | |
| |
| | | The Asch Recordings, Vol. 1-4 | | Posted Saturday, July 29, 2006 12:11:43 AM by BlogJeeves Team | | Poland-born, Brooklyn-reared producer and folk enthusiast Moses Asch maintained a suitably slack but ultimately productive relationship with Woody Guthrie. The notoriously unbound folksinger was free to stop by the New York studio unannounced and Asch would record whatever was running through the folksinger's fertile mind at the time. From the vast body of work the twosome came up with comes this cornerstone four-disc collection. All four CDs included in The Asch Recordings have been released individually--This Land is Your Land (something of a best-of set), Muleskinner Blues (a collection of the singer's old favorites), Hard Travelin' (a topical compilation), and Buffalo Skinners (Western-themed songs). If you have one or more of the aforementioned titles, finish off the set one by one. If you're interested in American folk music and you don't have the Guthrie/Asch collection, do yourself a favor and get it out of the box. --Steven Stolder... | |
| |
| | | Miracle (Special Edition with a 60 page version of the 180-page book) | | Posted Saturday, July 08, 2006 10:11:42 PM by BlogJeeves Team | | Celine Dion's straight-from-the-heart, sincerity-stung singing, woven together with Anne Geddes' visual gifts, perform a neat symbiotic trick. If you never quite got Geddes' photographs (not everyone can find artistic merit in lineups of sleepyheaded newborns dressed as bumblebees), or if Celine's vocals seemed over-the-top emotional, this package irons out the separate but unsinkable appeal of both artists with drawstring-like efficiency. On the DVD, Celine's vocals are the musical equivalent of comfort food, zapping the weirdness out of the babies-as-blooms sequences with raw maternal warmth. And Geddes' playful images--the title track tucks a newborn into a lotus leaf, and "What a Wonderful World" blazes to life in bouquets of red rose bonnets--leavens Celine's swollen-hearted delivery with whimsy. Miracle's subtitle is A Celebration of New Life, and while Geddes and Dion go at it with opposite M.O.s, they meet in the middle with a box set to be prized for its exploration of the shades of a parent's love. There are a couple of reasons not to keep this package cribside, though: For one, the urge to stare dreamily at a sleeping newborn while Celine's stunning rendition of "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" plays notwithstanding, her note-pounding delivery is at times un-lullaby-like. For another, the images gathered in the 57-page booklet that accompanies the DVD and CD are too captivating to risk dampening with drool. --Tammy La Gorce... | |
| |
| | | Hitsville USA: The Motown Singles Collection 1959-1971 | | Posted Saturday, July 01, 2006 10:12:11 AM by BlogJeeves Team | | Motown did so many things well in the '60s and early '70s that this overview of the label's smashes (and some lesser-known classics) practically demands four CDs. It gets them, too, filling them with single mixes of more than 100 tracks. That the running order begins with Barrett Strong's statement of purpose "Money (That's What I Want)" and ends with Marvin Gaye's statement of concern "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)" says a lot about how far the company moved in its golden decade--but no more so than what the same two cuts' differences in sound get across. The company was able to blend the smooth and the harsh in ways that few other pop entities have ever mastered, thereby getting over not only to the feet and the wallet, but to the heart. --Rickey Wright... | |
| |
| |
|
|
