Conventional wisdom says that decent music is rarely, if ever, released in January. We already knew The Boss was going to disrupt that assumption by dedicating his Jan. 27 release, Working on a Dream, to the incoming Obama administration. But was all the Obama fuss responsible for the sudden flurry of astonishing music releases in a bleak and broke January? Or was it music producers trying to get anything in the stores while consumers still had a few pennies left? In any event, the following releases are worth your time and attention:
Bruce Springsteen - Working on a Dream
Antony and the Johnsons - The Crying Light (Kazuo Ohno pictured above)
Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavillion
Bon Iver - Blood Bank EP
Andrew Bird - Noble Beast/Useless Creatures
Matt and Kim - Grand
Robert Pollard - The Crawling Distance
A.C. Newman - Get Guilty
Franz Ferdinand - Tonight
Jackie-O Motherfucker - The Blood of Life
The Shadow Ring - Life Review, 1993-2003
Astral Social Club - Plug Music Ramoon
Six Organs of Admittance - RTZ
I'm certainly not complaining, though my wallet is. Could indicate a bumper year for creative music.
6 comments:
I need to get the Bon Iver album.
I don't know if I'm just still full of gush, but I feel like something has shifted. Like something opened up. The sky, or something. Maybe creativity is going to flourish all around. For whatever reason.
maybe with the economy in the shape it is in, the music industry is going to use every day it can to get sales.
I love the music, it's too bad economics is in such control of it.
I am hoping for a wonderful year!, I'd never heard Astral Social Club, they seem interesting.
Astral Social Club is Neil Campbell from Vibracathedral Orchestra fame, and a few friends. They have a couple of widely available CDs, and about 20 or 25 insanely limited CDRs just labeled #1, #2, #3, with identical covers of a pub sign, but each numbered CD a different color. I never picked up on that series, though many of them are still at gemm.com.
music has been dead since the 90's.
The Seattle music scene was the last original music movement. Just as there have been no good movies in years, there has also been very little good music!
I actually find the current musical environment better in some ways than 50s, 60s, 70s, definitely 80s, maybe 90s, provided you don't listen to anything for popular mass audiences.
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