eMusic » ZZ

Stand-Alone Soundtracks

eMusic Editorial Staff — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 21:27:19 +0000

Though it’s often taken for granted, scoring a film is no easy task. Go too minimal and you risk killing dramatic tension. Too grandiose, and an entire film can become ham-handed. Striking the perfect balance is a feat few have truly mastered. Even harder, though, is constructing a soundtrack that stands on its own — creating a work that’s less a companion piece, more a bona fide, start-to-finish album. The 11 soundtracks in this list, remarkably, do just that. These soundtracks are full of music that’s compelling, engaging and entertaining, whether or not you’ve seen the movie it was designed to accompany.

The Point!

Harry Nilsson
2006 | RCA/BMG Heritage

Inspired by an acid trip in which singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson realized that trees and houses and more or less everything in some form or another has a point, this soundtrack to ABC Television's 1971 animated movie is presented as a children's bedtime story. Although the narrator-father's voice was originally supplied on TV by Dustin Hoffman (and Ringo Starr for home video), Nilsson here tells his own story about how even apparent outsiders... all fit into nature's plan: At one point, you can even hear him turning a page. Despite the running, punning theme, there are few hard edges to be heard: Whether speaking or singing, Nilsson is as gentle as any dad could be with his child, and the music – deftly arranged by early Nilsson collaborator George Tipton and executed by such studio session greats as Carol Kaye – ranks among his most melodious. That's a high standard indeed. — Barry Walters
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Trouble Man

Marvin Gaye
1998 | Motown

As a movie, Trouble Man is mediocre at best, but it'd have to be a stone-cold film noir classic to live up to Marvin Gaye's haunting, moody score. Gaye took the creative clout he earned from What's Going On and poured it into Trouble Man, giving a fittingly cinematic blues-tinged soul-jazz cast to compositions that incorporated sumptuous orchestral strings and cutting-edge synthesizers alike. While his voice is scarce on the LP, Marvin... makes it count: the title theme is one of his most moving performances, showcasing both his smooth falsetto and his raw power. — Nate Patrin
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The Master: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

Jonny Greenwood
2012 | Nonesuch

As long as PT Anderson is making movies about uber-driven weirdos, Jonny Greenwood's piercing, experimental classical compositions are going to fit the bill. And though Greenwood brings some of the same, eerie glissando effects to this film that he also contributed to There Will Be Blood, the sonic palette is a little broader this time around — as in the chamber lyricism of "Time Hole," or else "Alethia," where the gorgeously woozy... arrangement recalls some of Anderson's own attractive-yet-unsettling vistas. — Seth Colter Walls
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Paris, Texas - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

Paris, Texas Soundtrack/Ry Cooder
2001 | Warner Bros.

The soundtrack for Wim Wenders's 1984 Palme d'Or-winning existential desert noir Paris, Texas is as sparse and mysterious as the South Texas landscape from which Harry Dean Stanton arises in the film's opening shot. Composed by hired-gun guitarist and chameleonic solo artist turned soundtrack master Ry Cooder, his mesmeric bottleneck lines slither in the arid ambient space provided by accompanists David Lindley and Jim Dickinson, touching upon blues, folk, and rancheras. Evocative... with just a handful of notes, this is a stark, dustbitten classic. — Andy Beta
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Rushmore

Various
2011 | ISLAND RECORDS

Few directors define their characters through music as succinctly as Wes Anderson, never more so than when he pegged the Creation's "Making Time" to afterschool overachiever Max Fischer. Although it's heavy on the British invasion, Rushmore's soundtrack is as peripatetic as the film's beret-sporting protagonist, ranging from Yves Montand's Francophone croon to the mock-baroque contraptions of Mark Mothersbaugh's score. And yet it all hangs together splendidly, telling a story all of its... own. — Sam Adams
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Anatomy Of A Murder

Duke Ellington
1999 | Columbia/Legacy

This soundtrack for Otto Preminger's classic legal thriller isn't often placed in the front-rank of the Duke's output, which is natural for an album that features some cues meant to serve purely as background. But as moody, noir-ish accompaniment goes, this is hardly anonymous work: The band's swagger in "Flirtbird" and "Grace Valse" is unmistakable. The main title theme snarls with intrigue; when it swings into action, you'll perk your head up... (just like those who were in the film's first audiences probably did). Look for Ellington's cameo in the film, too, in the role of Pie-Eye: a character that inspired the pianist's catchy-as-hell "Pie-Eye's Blues." An early run-through (titled "More Blues") is now included in Columbia's remastered edition of the album. — Seth Colter Walls
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Moog

Various Artists
2004 | Hollywood Records

Synthesizer pioneer Robert Moog had an extraordinary connection with machines: "I can feel what's going on inside a piece of electronic equipment," he says in this 2004 documentary. This soundtrack brings out the human side of his creation. The space-oddity freakouts in Bootsy Collins's "When Bernie Speaks" play like unfettered stoner comedy, while the muted bell tones in the Album Leaf's "Micro Melodies" evoke late-night isolation. A second disc showcases the Moog's... place in rock history, from prog (Yes's "Close to the Edge") to new wave (New Order's "Blue Monday"), from cheesy (Gary Numan's "Cars") to sublimely deranged (Devo's "Mongoloid"). — Karen Schoemer
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One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

Various Artists
2006 | Fantasy Records

While this 1975 film from Milos Forman swept every category save Best Soundtrack (that went to Jaws), the score from Phil Spector and Neil Young associate Jack Nitzsche is a masterpiece in its own right. Nitzsche enacts musical mood swings that match the film's subjects. There are gentle orchestral strings that act as medicated haze, bits of sprightly Hawaiian guitar licks and marimba, and for the theme itself, a gorgeous amalgam of... orchestra with Indian tom toms and singing saw. Freak-folky, elegant and stunning. — Andy Beta
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The Fountain OST

Clint Mansell / Kronos Quartet
2006 | Nonesuch

It may be Darren Aronofsky's most (wrongly) maligned movie, but even those who flinched from his cosmic fairy tale can luxuriate in its score. Availing himself of the Kronos Quartet and Mogwai, composer Clint Mansell, who also penned the much-recycled theme for Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream, moves from melancholy strings through Tibetan chant and feedback storms, climaxing with the stellar sweep of "Death Is the Road to Awe." Both epic and... intimate, The Fountain's soundtrack goes around the galaxy only to find its way back home. —Sam Adams
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La Planète Sauvage (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Alain Goraguer
2011 | Master Classics Records / The Orchard

This strange and wonderful album didn't single-handedly invent trip-hop, but it could've: Air, Portishead and DJ Shadow all sound like it, while Madlib, Big Pun and many others simply sampled it. The soundtrack for a supremely trippy 1973 French-Czechoslovakian animated sci-fi flick, it's comprised of small but buttery-smooth and nearly seamless pieces by Alain Goraguer, former arranger for Serge Gainsbourg, France Gall, Juliette Gréco and other Gallic pop titans. His ability to... combine rock instrumentation, orchestral strings, horns, woodwinds, jazz-funk percussion, wordless choirs and avant-garde experiments with layers of audio trickery is so advanced that even now, 40 years later, the whole thing still sounds as though it seeped out of some fantastical symphonic synthesizer of the future. — Barry Walters
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Suspiria

Goblin
2010 | Cine Vox / Believe Digital

A creepy hybrid of up-to-the-'70s electric prog rocking and acoustic medieval evil, Italian group Goblin's expressionist score to Dario Argento's gory 1977 giallo masterpiece is as startling as the film itself. In addition to the film's memorable fourteen-note theme, keyboardist Claudio Simonetti (on Mellotron, Moogs and celesta) and company explore "Sighs" (acoustic guitars and heavy breathing), the mechanically motivated "Markos," and more orthodox jazz-rocking evocations of Argento's characters ("Black Forest") as... they are variously sliced, diced, and covered with maggots. — Richard Gehr
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Evita Soundtrack, Evita: The Complete Motion Picture Music Soundtrack

Barry Walters — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 15:28:06 +0000

More opera than rock, it's stronger in the film than on this lengthy, story-heavy album

Madonna’s stylistic conservatism continued from 1994′s Bedtime Stories to 1995′s surprisingly masterful ballad collection Something to Remember to this staid soundtrack for the 1996 musical biopic of Eva Perón in which she starred. As a piece of music, Evita — aside from its biggest hit, “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” — isn’t particularly accessible: Unlike composer Andrew Lloyd Webber’s earlier Jesus Christ Superstar, this rock opera is much more opera than rock. But its depiction of the famed Argentinian First Lady as a charismatic iconoclast dovetails with Madonna’s own mythology, a parallel that works much stronger in the film than on this lengthy, story-heavy album. She’s no Patti LuPone, but Madonna belts with impressive technical precision. Unfortunately, the singing lessons that enable her to pull off the sustained vowels that music theater demands subsequently messes with her pop singer diction. From here on, Madonna often sings “properly” — sometimes with a stilted, pseudo-English accent — even when a less precise, more natural delivery might better suit her material and message.

Madonna, Who’s That Girl Soundtrack

Barry Walters — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 12:15:09 +0000

Like a Madonna EP fleshed out with unrelated dance dreck

Ostensibly a soundtrack for the summer 1987 flop caper comedy in which she starred, Who’s That Girl is more like a Madonna EP fleshed out with unrelated dance dreck. (Scritti Politti’s delirious “Best Thing Ever” provides the sole non-Madge highlight.) None of her four contributions are remembered among her upper echelon of songs, although this isn’t entirely just: The Latin-inflected title track topped the pop chart, while the self-referential “Causing a Commotion” reached No. 2 and was a deserved club anthem in remixed form. Together with the murky, moody ballad “The Look of Love” they suggest the turmoil of her now-abusive marriage, and so there’s a weight here that’s often overlooked amid the filler. The melancholy bridge of “Who’s That Girl” in which this ordinarily steely superstar concludes, “No one can help me now” may be the first unguarded moment in Madonna’s discography. More would be revealed in Like a Prayer.

Interview: Alexandre Tharaud

Seth Colter Walls — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 14:06:31 +0000

Up until late last year, pianist Alexandre Tharaud’s biography was more or less similar to those of most contemporary classical music phenoms. Attendance at exclusive conservatories? Check. Strong showing in international competitions. Check? A diverse group of composers performed on a major label? Naturally!

But once 2012 was over, Tharaud’s resume looked a bit different — if only because he had managed to find himself associated with two (very) different cultural milestones. First, EL James selected one of Tharaud’s past recordings for the Fifty Shades of Grey: The Classical Album. And then there’s Tharaud’s acting debut, in director Michael Haneke’s Oscar-nominated Amour — a film about an elderly married couple navigating the increasingly difficult challenges of aging together. In Haneke’s script, the wife, played by longtime French film actress Emmanuelle Riva, is a retired piano instructor. Haneke had a bright idea for casting the role of her brightest former pupil: an actual pianist.

The relationship worked out: The film got a great soundtrack (and a key performance), while Tharaud found another way to distinguish himself. Just ahead of Oscar season, eMusic’s Seth Colter Walls chatted with Tharaud (whose English is also great, bien sur) about a busy year, and whether or not he’s got the acting bug for real these days.

This is a quite a first film-acting role.

Yes. And maybe my last role!

Why? You were great in the film, especially since you had to hold your own with some titans of French acting.

You know, my life is music, classical music — and…I thought I’m not a good actor. In this film I play my role — myself. My name is “Alexandre,” and it’s a story not far from the reality of my life! But I think as an actor there are four thousand young actors better than me.

Fair enough. But one doesn’t get cast in a Michael Haneke movie by accident. How did it come about?

At the beginning, Haneke wanted a pianist — a true pianist. Because, you know, in a lot of movies, you can see an actor imitating a pianist. It’s horrible! For me, it’s horrible. So Haneke organized a casting with 20 or 30 pianists, but it was not fine for him. Finally, his assistant called me, and I won the role. But I was not sure to I was such a good choice, because I am not an actor! Finally I said to Michael Haneke: “Ask me what you want and I will try to do it.” So it was…very simple for me. I’m a pianist so I’m used to playing on an instrument — the piano. But this time I was an instrument. It was very exciting!

How was it, working with actors as iconic as Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant?

For me, [Jean-Louis] is a god of the French cinema. And so I asked him and Emanuelle, I asked them, “Can you give me some advice, maybe? I’m not a good actor!” But they say all the time, “You’re perfect. Don’t change, don’t move; it’s perfect.” So they were very, very nice to me.

Did Haneke talk to you much about his selections for the soundtrack? The Schubert pieces have a quite prominent role in the film, and one suspects Haneke was quite set on them from the start.

He wanted this program. But he asked me if I wanted to change [anything]. And I said, “No, I want to be your instrument, so I want to go your way.” So during the recording he was in the studio. Like an artistic director, it was very interesting to work [through] the music with him. Because, maybe you know this, but he plays the piano; he’s a good musician. So it was interesting for me to record this CD with him; it was completely different.

Did he offer interpretive suggestions as you went along?

For example, the first impromptu by Schubert: I used to play this piece faster. And he wanted the tempo slower. And finally I choose his tempo; it was the first time in my life, to choose the tempo of another person! It was very interesting. But I think his tempo is better than mine!

Not to change the subject too drastically, but this was the second “soundtrack” of yours this year. A past Bach recording of yours was selected for the Fifty Shades of…

Hahahahaha!

OK, so you were aware of this.

Yes, I know of it. But I don’t know the book. [Pause] I’m not…the best person to read the book? I know that it’s…in France, a lot of women [read it]. I don’t know the story, but I know it’s a story with sex and allure — and so it was funny to be in the CD. [Laughs again.] Do you like this book?

No, I haven’t read it either.

Hahaha!

Are you at all excited to keep going with acting, if you can fit it in your touring and recording schedule?

Well, I don’t know if I’m the best pianist of the world — but I know I am not the best actor…Maybe if Spielberg or another great director called me — why not? But after Haneke, it’s difficult.

Alexandre Tharaud, Soundtrack “Amour”

Seth Colter Walls — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 14:00:40 +0000

A heavy and serious program that complements the film

Mere months after Le Boeuf sur le toit, the young French pianist Alexandre Tharaud’s strut through the jazz-classical repertoire of the “Swinging Paris” cabaret scene of the 1920s, comes something entirely different in mood: a heavy and serious program that serves as the soundtrack to the Michael Haneke film about late-stage love, Amour.

In the film, Tharaud offers a more-than-serviceable turn as a famed international piano recitalist, a surprising move that only confirms the musician’s range as an artist. You can hear the same range in this soundtrack — from his stark reading of two iconic Schubert Impromptus to the controlled surges of energy present on the three bagatelles by Beethoven (his first official recordings of that composer’s writing for piano). And while Tharaud recorded all of Schubert’s “Moments Musicaux” for another label in 2000, the third of the series has greater clarity in this new version.

That clarity extends to the soundtrack’s standouts, both here and in the film: The two Impromptus, specifically the first and third. Murray Perahia may have suggested a greater number of moods in his recording of Impromptu No. 1, but Tharaud’s weighty consideration here is reliably gripping. When playing the No. 3 in G Minor, meanwhile, Tharaud doesn’t overdose on the dreaminess of the initial theme like some pianists; there’s a darkness that he allows to creep in, but the beauty is still there even if it isn’t at the forefront. In that way, it’s a fitting complement to Haneke’s film, which hints at the qualities of a decades-long love story by emphasizing some of its bleakest hours.

Tharaud’s half hour of piano recordings for the film are so excellent that the closing snippets of dialog taken from the final edit feel tacked on and unnecessary (even if you speak French). While it could be of minor interest to have Tharaud’s big scene immortalized as audio, where he really speaks, naturally, is in his playing.

Various Artists, West of Memphis: Voices for Justice

Stephen M. Deusner — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 14:16:11 +0000

A celebratory compilation honoring the West Memphis 3

West of Memphis: Voices for Justice, which is not quite a soundtrack to the new documentary about the West Memphis 3, opens with Henry Rollins reading a letter he received from Damien Echols about 10 years ago. Echols had been convicted along with two other Arkansas teenagers of the murder and mutilation of three young boys, despite little hard evidence linking them to the crime. For nearly 20 years, they languished in state prisons, their appeals ignored by the very courts that railroaded them. Describing the inhumane conditions of a new jail cell and the disappointment of yet another legal roadblock, Rollins’s voice never boils over with anger or rage. Instead, he trusts Echols’s words to convey all the fear and misery of a falsely accused man who has spent most of his life in prison. It’s a harrowing introduction to West of Memphis, which surprisingly turns out to be a celebratory compilation defined by the relief of their freedom (all three were finally released in 2012) than by the grief of their wrongful incarceration.

The musicians who contributed to West of Memphis have all been deeply involved in the case for many years, and most of them have chosen songs that Echols listened to in prison, either to psych himself up for another appeal or simply to pass the time. Natalie Maines turns in a dramatic reading of Pink Floyd’s “Mother,” which is only somewhat sympathetic to the title character, and the White Buffalo eloquently countrifies Faster Pussycat’s long-forgotten L.A. Strip hit “House of Pain.” Other artists wrote songs specifically for the West Memphis 3: Eddie Vedder penned the simple, bittersweet “Satellite” as a love song for Echols and his wife in 2000. The music’s close relation to the West Memphis 3 lends this compilation a cohesive quality missing from so many socially and politically minded collections. While there are certainly a few skippable tracks (such as the cover of “Little Lion Man” by Johnny Depp’s band Tonto’s Giant Nuts), overall West of Memphis testifies to the power of music to comfort and console during even the most unfathomable tragedies and injustices.

Broadcast, Berberian Sound Studio

Luke Turner — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 15:08:47 +0000

A sublime, sad reminder of a remarkable talent lost

When it came to soundtracking Peter Strickland’s horror film Berberian Sound Studio, about a British sound engineer working for an Italian film company in the 1970s, there could have been no other name on the list than Broadcast. The band, aka Trish Keenan and James Cargill, were recording this album when Keenan died from pneumonia in 2011, age just 42, and it is a sublime, sad reminder of a remarkable talent lost. On their own albums, the pair’s haunting songs are constructed from elements that evoke half-remembered television themes, or a ghostly folk group transmitting from the future. It’s rare that a soundtrack album constructed from fragments of music and snatches of dialogue is a rewarding listen, but Broadcast — perhaps because they are so adept at creating otherworldly sounds from pop’s detritus — managed it beautifully here. Some of the tracks are genuinely unnerving, such as “Mark Of The Devil,” its mean electronic pulses and chants sounding like wraiths in charge of a power station, or the guttural gabbling of “A Goblin.” These terrifying moments are contrasted with pastoral instrumentals, built largely from flute, xylophone and organ, which could soundtrack a cold, misty morning as well as the original film. A bewitching last Broadcast.

Gabriel Kahane: Hipster Wistfulness

Justin Davidson — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 15:52:42 +0000

It’s a wonderful thing to be talented, versatile, 30-ish, well connected and living in Brooklyn, where your neighbors are likewise talented, versatile, 30-ish, and well connected — where you are, in fact, among their most fruitful connections. Despite the fact that the bio on his website opens with the words, “Gabriel Kahane is not part of a scene,” in fact he is. Kahane is a singer-songwriter-pianist-composer-lyricist with a distinguished artistic pedigree (his father is the pianist and conductor Jeffrey Kahane) and more creative friends than he could possibly have time to meet for coffee, let alone collaborate with. He should be writing music that brims with appreciation for the great good fortune of being him, right now. Instead, a nostalgic melancholy permeates his finely carpentered songs, as if he had never felt more comfortable than in the years before he was born.

It’s not that his style is antiquarian — a lively inventiveness bubbles up in every measure. Rather, he has figured out contemporary ways to describe memory in music. “Light Upon the Hill,” from the musical February House, has a fluid, conversational rhythm, like a well-rehearsed anecdote told against the cozy tinkle of a banjo: “Here’s to the driver who took me downtown when I got to New York/ I was glad for the ride/ How the buildings we passed were all gleaming/ I was dreaming a life I’d look out from the inside.”

The refrain (“In Brooklyn, there is light upon the hill/ It glows despite the storm”) sneaks out of the stream of words and notes, a moment of stillness interrupting the run-on verse and thickening instrumentation. The song evolves quickly, giving the music a narrative quality — this is theater, after all. But the words offer no story, just a succession of images from a fondly remembered life. The melody emulates the act of leafing through those snapshots by circling back on itself with Sondheim-like obsessiveness. The tempo trots along, with nowhere to go but the past, and the past is not a destination.

February House, which had its premiere at the Public Theater in New York, in May, 2012, recreates the sort of “scene” Kahane insists he wants no part of. The building of the title is a run-down Brooklyn Heights brownstone where in the early 1940s the editor George Davis played den mother for a highbrow commune that included W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. It was the perfect moment for Kahane’s sensibility: a gathering of talented, versatile, 30-ish, well-connected people living under the same Brooklyn roof. To Kahane, it is the aesthetic idyll that couldn’t last. The best and most elegiac number is “Goodnight to the Boarding House,” a mournful ode to the fragility of happiness, delivered in an upper register somewhere between a falsetto and a sob.

I was first drawn to Kahane’s lyric gift, and his sincere, slightly sandpapery voice, by Craigslistlieder, a cycle of songs set to personal ads scavenged online. “Neurotic and lonely, average height, brown eyes slightly disproportionate, Jewfro,” begins one, and the advertiser’s self-consciousness is reflected in the jumpy, slightly obsessive melodic line and anxious piano counterpoint. Craigslistlieder is a startling piece — smart, beautifully made, and darkly funny.

Since then, Kahane has sped off in a number of different musical directions, not so much eliding genres as hopping from one to the other. He has collaborated with the bluegrass icon Chris Thile and the jazzman Brad Mehldau, he has written an intense but somewhat inchoate piano sonata for Natasha Paremski, and he is now writing a cello sonata for Alisa Weilerstein. Carnegie Hall recently commissioned what it hoped would be a large-scale work for voice and string quartet. It turned out to be a suite of miniatures.

Kahane keeps returning to the song form, where he has staked out territory as a hyperliterate bard of hipster wistfulness. The Carnegie Hall piece is called The Fiction Issue, a reference to The New Yorker‘s annual short story collection, and the score’s sensibility is not far from the magazine’s. Subtlety, complexity and wry humor are spiced with timely references and flecks of musical slang. Kahane draws a distinction between his pop songs and his “classical” works, but they often come tumbling indistinguishably out of the same fingers, and the same sensitive throat. His album, Where are the Arms is by a pop balladeer who can sing Schubert’s Winterreise as a party trick. In the album’s first song, “Charming Disease,” the cryptic phrase is fragmented into a Gertrude Stein incantation (What a charming what a charming charming little disease”). It hopscotches around the beats, momentarily blurring the sense of meter. The next track, “Merritt Parkway” opens with a pensive chain of piano chords that could have fallen out of Schumann’s wastepaper basket, but Kahane disguises their romanticism slightly with a string tremolo that shimmers dissonantly and the quasi-chanted words: “I was on the side of the road, / Shiny traffic beetling by” — and what a touch worthy of Lingua Franca, that word, “beetling.” Kahane no doubt has a future as a major musical figure in coming decades, and maybe also as a dramatic character: the slightly depressive elf in some future sequel to February House.

Various Artists, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

Michelangelo Matos — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 16:17:36 +0000

An oddly congruent cross-section of styles that effectively build a narrative arc

We can call the Quentin Tarantino soundtrack a legitimate subgenre of its own now, can’t we? After all, the director has said that he constructs his scripts partly by crafting accompanying mixes. Naturally, Django Unchained, the director’s eighth film, features an accompanying disc constructed of an oddly congruent cross-section of styles that effectively build a narrative arc. It’s also his eighth soundtrack album, and the fourth in a row — preceded by Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004), Death Proof (2007), and Inglourious Basterds (2009) — to prominently feature vintage pieces by the master Italian soundtrack composer Ennio Morricone.

This time around, though, Morricone dominates — as he should, since Django Unchained is a spaghetti-Western homage. And since so much of those films’ mood comes is set by the music, QT borrows heavily as well from vintage soundtracks by Luis Vacalov (the Rocky Roberts-sung theme to 1966′s Django) and Jerry Goldsmith (“Nicaragua,” from 1983′s Under Fire, featuring Pat Metheny). And since Django Unchained is also a Blaxploitation homage (aka a Quentin Tarantino film), it makes room for “Unchained (The Payback/Untouchable),” a no-brainer dead-guy extravaganza between James Brown and 2Pac, and John Legend sounding even more like an old soul singer than usual. It will make your local coffeehouse seem that much livelier.

The Hidden Genius of It’s A SpongeBob Christmas

Lenny Kaye — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 21:22:13 +0000

What do jingle bells sound like underwater? It’s A Spongebob Christmas Album answers that Zen-like question and many others. It’s also of the most sophisticated and creative elaborations on Yuletiding you’re likely to find.

Cartoon-based music is often discounted, overshadowed by surreal characters and sound-effects (this despite a long history of amazing orchestrations, like the ones Carl Stallings and Raymond Scott composed for Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies). What’s often overlooked is the fact that the animated medium can encourage both experimentation and avant arrangement like few others.

“We don’t approach them as cartoon songs,” says Andy Paley, who both co-produced and wrote the music for SpongeBob. “A good song is a good song, and it doesn’t matter if a cartoon character sings it.” His more immediate role model might be the timeless melodies sung by Disney characters – “Someday My Prince Will Come” from Snow White stands out – but his approach is enhanced by his love of Phil Spector and Brian Wilson. Paley has worked with both; he was produced by Spector when he was in the Paley Brothers, a ’70s duo with a distinctly pop edge; and later he worked with Wilson on his solo comeback album; he’s also collaborated with such timeless artists as Madonna (on the Dick Tracy soundtrack) and Jerry Lee Lewis. Also, he has a fine taste in novelty records. (Let’s put it this way: he was the first person to play me the Shaggs.)

But Andy’s first love is the glorious soundscapes created by Phil and Brian in their golden era. “Phil’s records are not just about echo,” he explains. “That’s a cliché about him. It’s more the layering of textures.” The same could be said of Brian Wilson, especially the works-in-progress on display in The Smile Sessions. A self-professed Beach Boys “freak,” Paley spent long hours untangling these sounds and learning how to make them; this album reflects that sense of care and obsession.

He first began creating music for SpongeBob with the 2006 song “Best Day Ever,” which focused on that jaunty never-say-squish optimism that is our hero’s stock-in-trade. His lyricist and co-conspirator is Tom Kenny – the music aficionado who voices Mr. Bob – and their teamwork is infectious. All the characters on the famed Nickelodeon series have very specific characters and personalities – the lovable and dimmish bulb Patrick Star(fish), the Krusty Krab that is Eugene Krebs, the ill-tempered Squidward and Sandy Cheeks, a squirrel who lives in an underwater dome – and their distinctive personas give each tune on this album its own spin cycle. That said, it’s not hard to hear these songs outside the realm of Bikini Bottom: the lyrics tend toward the universal, and could be sung by any artist – and hopefully will be in the future.

Different genres provide distinct settings for each track. Sandy does the Cotton-Eyed Joe to “Ho Ho Hoedown,” which not only name-checks Waylon and Willie and Flaco and Sir Doug, but also spotlights Jeremy Wakefield on non-pedal steel, giving the track a western swing flavor not seen since the heyday of Bob Wills and Spade Cooley. “Christmas Is Mine” takes Plankton’s abrasive Napoleon complex and places it against the grain of a pastoral setting reminiscent of the Carpenters, featuring Corky Hale (whose orchestral harp flourishings also decorated records by Billie Holiday and Liberace). “Wet Wet Christmas” is street-corner R&B doowop; “Hot Fruitcake” is nutty asâ€¦; Patrick is dazzled by the tinsel and the wrapping in “Pretty Ribbons and Bows,” underscored by a psychedelic garage-rock riff and electric guitar solo played by Jonathan Richman. (Gazing at the tree, he exclaims, “That star on top is blowing my mind!”)

The various elements of the project began to gather under the mistletoe a couple of years back when Paley and Kelly came up with “Don’t Be A Jerk (It’s Christmas).” In that song, SpongeBob hopes to have everyone remember the spirit of the holiday; “Christmas Eve Jitters,” a stomping slice of honky-tonk rockabilly featuring Big Al Anderson from NRBQ, thematically recalls A Christmas Story, that cinematic holiday perennial that embodies the fraught anticipation of the holiday.

The album’s most moving moment – and strongest contender for Christmas standard – is “Snowflakes,” in which a wistful SpongeBob looks out his window to a world covered in crystal-white and sings atop a swirling wonderland that recalls the Brian Wilson of “Wind Chimes” and “Vegetables.” Hale’s harp shimmers and sweeps and Tommy Morgan, who also supplied the bass harmonica on “Good Vibrations,” adds extra resonance. Paley is able to pick from some of the best and most creative studio musicians in the Hollywood area (guitarist James Burton and ex-Wrecking crew member Nino Tempo also appear) and the cumulative effect is far beyond mere cartoon music. Maybe that’s the secret. “Because it’s SpongeBob,” says Andy, “we can make records like this, that are very authentic and sound like they come from another era, to resurrect musical style that shouldn’t be forgotten.”

But the best is saved for last, an in-joke so obscure that even compulsive cognoscenti will throw their hands (or fins) in the air in amazement. Both Phil Spector’s classic A Christmas Gift For You and the Beach Boys’ Christmas Album end with small personal messages directed at the listener. When Dennis Wilson says, “If you’re happening to be listening to this record now,” in his closing remarks on the latter, he stumbles on the word “happening,” pronouncing it “Hap-happening.” When SpongeBob closes out his album, he also adds the extra “hap.” A little extra holiday treat for the true music aficionado.

eMusic’s Holiday Crowd-Pleasers

eMusic Editorial Staff — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 15:30:07 +0000

Looking for holiday music to appeal to everyone from grandma to your youngest cousin? Look no further than this batch of holiday crowd-pleasers, featuring roasted chestnuts by everyone from Rod Stewart to Richard Marx.

Merry Christmas, Baby

Rod Stewart
2012 | Verve
Christmas

Michael Buble
2011 | 143/Reprise

Elvis Presley Christmas Duets

Elvis Presley
2008 | RLG/Legacy

We've all had that moment, sitting around the Christmas tree alight with our extended family, when Elvis's Christmas album comes up on the sound-reproducing machine. You can be sure, if the nog is egging everyone on, that by the second chorus of "Blue Christmas," your aunt or uncle or even your red nose reindeer'd self will get up and sing along, perhaps adding a few swivel hip rolls and well-placed Presleyisms that... allude to the hound dog in all of us.

Christmas Duets — in space, through the miracle of modern overdubbing, if not in time — reprises Elvis's classic Christmas canon and places him in flagrante delicto with several jingle belles from the modern pop-country manger that is Nashville. The pairings seem particularly gift-wrapped, with Elvis's eye for the ladies winked in kind by such pearful partridges as Carrie Underwood, Amy Grant, Martina McBride, and Olivia Newton-John. The results are respectful and sweetly shy, with each gal perched on Elvis's knee and letting him know that what she really wants for Christmas is to hit a harmony note with him. The call-and-response is most effective when the given femme matches Elvis's sense of faith and believing — after all, many of these Christmas chestnuts are yuletide gospel — and I have a fondness for Sara Evans's coupling on "Silent Night" and Gretchen Wilson trading blues-fours on "Merry Christmas Baby." For that silk stocking placed on the chimney with care.
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Christmas with Scotty McCreery

Scotty McCreery
2012 | Interscope (American Idol)
Christmas Spirit

Richard Marx
2012 | TourDForce
NOW That's What I Call Christmas Volume 3

Various
2006 | SBME Strategic Marketing Group
Home For Christmas

Amy Grant
2007 | AMY GRANT / SPARROW
All Is Well - Songs For Christmas

Clay Aiken
EP/SINGLE
James Taylor At Christmas

James Taylor
2012 | UMe
Christmas Dreaming

Susie Arioli
2012 | Jazzheads
Tennessee Christmas - EP

Lindi Ortega
2012 | EP/SINGLE

Merry Christmas

Mariah Carey
2008 | Columbia

Merry Christmas, Mariah Carey's fourth full-length, at last gave the schmaltziness that defined the diva's early career a suitable venue. 'Tis the season to be broad and sentimental, and Carey happily unleashes her then-superhuman voice on a smattering of holiday favorites and new tracks. Not only is this a document of the woman's pipes in top form, Merry Christmas is also the perfect snapshot of the genre balancing pre-hip-hop Carey (along with... former writing/producing partner Walter Afanasieff) struck. These tracks chime, ring and twinkle at every turn, whether it's a poppy piano, soulful church organ or, in the case of "Joy to the World," stiff pop-house beats doing the driving. There's a strong preference for the Phil Spector side of musical cheer — Darlene Love's "Christmas (Baby Please Come)" is covered, "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" is in the style of the Crystals', and Carey's own "All I Want for Christmas Is You," is the greatest Spector track he had no hand in. This contemporary classic is worth the price of admission. As it's often mistaken for a cover, Carey loves to point out that she wrote it, seemingly oblivious to the compliment inherent in mistook nostalgia. Carey has become such a grande diva that it's hard to believe that a concept exists that's bigger than her persona; with Christmas, though, she met her match.
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Christmas Album

Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass
2008 | Shout! Factory

The year was 1968, and superstar trumpeter Herb Alpert rode higher than ever with his chart-topping rendition of Burt Bacharach and Hal David's devastatingly shy "This Guy's in Love With You." So Alpert, a Jew, donned a fake Santa beard and applied the equally ersatz Latin sparkle of his Tijuana Brass to a campy collection of Christmas classics where nearly every song sounds like his hit "Spanish Flea." This is a good... thing! West Coast jazz pioneer Shorty Rogers swings by with a studio choir to hang some vocal tinsel on Alpert's delightfully garish tree: Check how his serene choral interludes in "My Favorite Things" contrast with Alpert's holiday shopper bustle. The very year, the horn man couldn't get a hit, and wouldn't for another decade. Who says ol 'Saint Nick doesn't have a vindictive streak?
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Bing Crosby - Christmas Classics

Bing Crosby
2006 | CAPITOL

This collection of holiday favorites remains a good representation of Bing Crosby's many seasonal recordings. Among the highlights are a Nelson Riddle arrangement of Crosby's biggest hit, the perennial "White Christmas," as well as "Winter Wonderland," "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," and "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!" Any fan of Crosby, as well as good Christmas music in general, will want to hunt this down.

eMusic’s Holiday Essentials

eMusic Editorial Staff — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 15:12:41 +0000

We know how it is: You love the holidays as much as anybody else, it’s just all that schmaltz has a way of unsettling the eggnog in your belly. Sugar is fine in cookies and candy canes, but does it have to be in the carols, too? Fear not: We’ve compiled a hearty list of saccharine-free classics designed to get you through the holiday season with the minimum number of eye-rolls and toothaches.

Big Gifts

Silver & Gold

Sufjan Stevens
2012 | Asthmatic Kitty / SC Distribution

Brooklyn indie darling Sufjan Stevens will probably never finish his one-album-for-every-state project (48 to go!), but his holiday-music series seems unstoppable. By now, you should know the drill: Every year he gathers some musical friends and stitches together an EP to send out to loved ones. Some of the songs are standards, lovingly rendered. Some are standards, flipped into rock songs or spooky ballads. A lot of Stevens's holiday tunes are originals,... either sincere in their cheer or absurd, moody or baffling. ("Christmas Unicorn" is all of these.) Stevens's last five holiday EPs are finally collected in the new Silver & Gold: Songs for Christmas Vols. 6-10, a collection that's as upbeat and earnest as it is completely bonkers. Read here for a rigorously scientific unwrapping of the highlights of each volume, broken into statistical categories.
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Christmas

Low
2000 | kranky / The Orchard

Many artists — particularly those of the country, soul and pop persuasions — record at least one Christmas album in the course of their career. They're a sure-fire seller, guaranteed to move units. "Mom likes Tim McBride and he's made this holiday album, so OK, I know what I'm getting for her stocking this year." The way most of these are made, you can knock one of these out in just a... few days. Who doesn't know the music backwards and forwards already? All you need are the right people to sing your little "crossover duets" with. It's like making your own money.

Low's Christmas album is just called Christmas. It was made well before Sufjan made Christmas safe for indie-rockers, and is far more original and less cloying than Sufjan's holiday recordings, likable as those may be. There are four originals and three cover songs on here. It's just under 30 minutes — Beatle length — but it's surprisingly diverse. Some of the songs sound like they were recorded live in a living room while others employ a total, Spectorific, wall-of-sound approach. Instruments employed include an organ that sounds like a flute, guitars both strummed and fuzzy, and, naturally, a lot of bells. I wonder if half the bells sold in music stores aren't for people playing Christmas music. Some of the tunes are fuzzed-out and blissed-up, while others are these gentle little lullabies that you have to listen to over and over. True to the band's "slowcore" aesthetic, all the numbers unfold at an achingly, deliberately slow pace.

If you were anywhere near a TV set in the early '00s, you've likely already heard their take on "Little Drummer Boy." It was featured in an oft-repeated Gap commercial (umm, speaking of commerce). Theirs is the second-best version of this song ever recorded, in my own humble opinion (the first being the one by David Bowie and Bing Crosby, of course). Their dreamy molasses pop approach to the song advances toward the sublime on this song. I know that's a totally rock critic type thing to say but it's true! Their jazzy version of "Blue Christmas," which showcases Mimi's strong voice, is very nifty and you should put it on a mix tape for your folks right now. The take on "Silent Night" is solid too, though it's so stripped-down and earnest it might not merit as many repeat plays as the rest.

The original numbers are really the centerpiece here. In a just world, they'd have become standards already. The most controversial one is the slow-burning and lovely "If You Were Born Today." The song's opening lines go "If you were born today/ We'd kill you by age eight/ Never get a chance to say/ Joy to the world and peace on the earth." The tune continues with a handful of Christ's best-known sayings. Coupled with those startling introductory lines, the song can't help but remind the listener that Christ's messages of total love and the desire for peace can't help but be absolutely revolutionary, and so clearly at odds with the everyday machinations of our governments and our shopping malls. It's as if the song is there to remind us all that giving thanks for the birth of Christ is of course awesome. But don't forget, that hippie looking guy not only said "Blessed are the meek," but also "Deny the flesh" and "Deny all that's evil." What's extraordinary is that Low manage to say this in a delirious and pretty little song without any didacticism at all.

To blazes with a diamond! Low's Christmas album is the real gift that keeps on giving.
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CeeLo's Magic Moment

Cee-Lo Green
2012 | Elektra (NEK)
Holidays Rule

Various Artists
2012 | Hear Music

The New Possibility: John Fahey's Guitar Soli Christmas Album/Christmas With John Fahey, Vol. II

John Fahey
2006 | Fantasy Records

Arguably one of the greatest Christmas recordings of modern times, A New Possibility was recorded by just one visionary folk icon and his acoustic guitar — no overdubs. John Fahey accomplished a lot in his lifetime: he virtually re-invented the acoustic guitar as a solo instrument with his idiosyncratic and mournful style, and he founded Takoma and Revenant, two influential independent record labels. For a great many people in the... '60s and '70s, the bearish-looking dude also saved Christmas, rescuing holiday music from the schmaltz that so often drenched it.

Recorded in a beautiful, loping and often very simple style, the melodies resonate throughout the entire, unadulterated album. On the first three songs alone — "Joy to the World," "What Child is This?" and "Medley: Hark the Herald Angels Sing / Come All Ye Faithful" — Fahey's tone slips from joy to reverence and back again. As Fahey wrote in the original liner notes, "I hope that you like my new arrangements — they are not progressive; 'different' is the word — and I hope that you will celebrate Christmas with me." It's hard to think of better music to mellow out next to the tree with.
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Christmas In The Heart

Bob Dylan
2009 | Columbia

If you're scratching your head at the idea of this legendarily iconoclastic Jewish-turned-fundamentalist-Christian-turned-who-knows-what songwriter (with one of the unloveliest singing voices around) recording a Christmas album, look at it this way: Dylan loves the dusty old fairgrounds of the Great American Songbook, and the carefully crafted songwriting era that ended around the time he started making records. Dylan loves hokum and corniness and schmaltz. He usually puts quotation marks around them in... his own work, but he's always admired songs that tug at the heartstrings. And what Dylan loves most of all is flying directly in the face of whatever he's expected to do. At this point, what could be more iconoclastic for him than crooning "Little Drummer Boy"?

Assuming you can accept its premise — Grizzled Old Beloved Entertainer in a Santa Claus suit — Christmas in the Heart is a hoot, mostly because Uncle Bob is clearly grinning from one edge of his fake beard to the other. He sounds like he's about to burst into giggles when he rasps verses of "Silver Bells" and "Winter Wonderland" that everyone else has forgotten. And he's pulled up a fantastic selection of songs (to win friends and influence elderly relatives), including a handful of ace obscurities, like the Hawaiian novelty "Christmas Island." The album's highlight is "Must Be Santa," with its whirlwind polka arrangement based on Brave Combo's rendition. The album's effectively a Christmas-themed episode of Dylan's "Theme Time Radio Hour" program, performed entirely by the man himself.
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The Beach Boys' Christmas Album

Beach Boys
2011 | CAPITOL

A Christmas Gift For You From Phil Spector

Various
2009 | Legacy Recordings

Not since singing cowboy Gene Autry lassoed a batch of holiday songs did a collection make such an impact on the caroling canon. The Wall of Sound mastermind — now locked away behind a different kind of wall — corralled his stable of singers and musicians to produce 1963's breakthrough Christmas album, with a dozen tunes gleaming with the Phil Spector sparkle.

Included here are three originated by Autry: "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,"... delightfully delivered by the Crystals, with 16-year-old Lala Brooks singing lead; "Frosty the Snowman," courtesy of the Ronettes, featuring Spector's future wife, Ronnie, on exuberant lead vocals; and "Here Comes Santa Claus," one of two tracks by the album's sole male vocalist, Bobby Sheen, of Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, featuring the Blossoms on harmonies.

Blossoms vocalist Darlene Love transformed into Queen of Christmas, thanks to her memorable set (and as witnessed every year during her yuletide visit to the Letterman show). Her dramatic solo turns, particularly on the Brill Building composition (written by Spector, Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry) "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)," are spectacular. Ronnie Spector has also kept the tradition alive, performing annual holiday shows and releasing a new collection of Christmas songs in 2010.

Spector's murder conviction adds a pall to track 13, the album closer — his spoken narrative, backed by "Silent Night" *212; but sassy Ronnie spotting Mommy kissing Santa Claus (complete with the sound of a smooch) and Love singing of marshmallow worlds and winter wonderlands take you back to a more innocent time when all was merry and bright.
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Merry Christmas

The Supremes
1999 | Motown
Verve Presents: The Very Best of Christmas Jazz

Various Artists
2004 | Verve Records

ZE Christmas Album

Various Artists
2004 | ZE Records / The Orchard

Aside from James White's reliably angular and bad-ass "Christmas With Satan," the additions to the 1981 ZE LP A Christmas Record included on this "reloaded" incarnation are marginal. But that doesn't diminish the best of the rest: The Waitresses contribute their second-most-familiar cut, "Christmas Wrapping," which delivers their sly, hooky humor but actually ends happily, while August Darnell's "Christmas on Riverside Drive" similarly compares to his swanky Kid Creole hits.... Fueled by Detroit's crumbling economy, Was (Not Was)'s "Christmas Time in Motor City" swaps the usual seasonal fantasies for the dark humor of winter realism.
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Ella Wishes You A Swinging Christmas

Ella Fitzgerald
2002 | VERVE MASTER EDITION

A Christmas Together - John Denver & The Muppets

John Denver
Windstar Productions

Many have tried to sing with the Muppets. It's tougher than it sounds.

No. 1, no matter who you are, you won't be as charismatic as your co-star. Recall the tendency of reporters interviewing Henson and Kermit to put the mic in front of Kermit (Carson did it a couple of times). That, boys and girls, is star power.

Number two, it takes a certain kind of voice to make it work. Generations of... pop stars have tried hanging out on Sesame Street. It's an unforgiving place. Oh, everyone does OK, but it's rarely great. Sometimes it destroys the song entirely. For example, "I Don't Want to Live on the Moon," a Jeff Moss song sung originally by Ernie, is a complete showstopper, a simple ballad about traveling and missing home that will reduce grown-ass adults to tears. Amazing song in its original form. But add Aaron %$#@ing Neville in a duet and you have little but oversung mush. Bleh.

But John Denver...well, John Denver was something else. When people called him "the human Muppet," they were usually making fun of him. But Denver's let's-call-it-mellow vibe and patina of fundamental decency made him an ideal addition to Hensonworld, not to mention his telegenic look. (Think about how many really big stars you've seen on TV and how few of them you can describe in detail. Denver's look is etched in everyone's memory.) And his voice never overwhelmed the songs

All of which is why A Christmas Together holds up as well as it does. Denver and the Muppets crank through the "Twelve Days" (only slightly funnier on TV than on album). Rolf gets his best piano-bar hack on for a duet on "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" (Denver sounds like he's singing about ten feet from the mic). "Christmas Is Coming" is an utter head-scratcher, a Scooter/Piggy duet round with a weird island vibe. "Little Saint Nick" is as close to rock as we get, "Silent Night" remains orthodox and "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" very funny.
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One More Drifter in the Snow

Aimee Mann
2006 | Super Ego Records / The Orchard

Even among earnest singer-songwriters, Aimee Mann stands out for her unflappable solemnity. So it comes as no surprise that this woman who rarely cracks a smile has produced a Christmas album that sets the mood for post-holiday-gorge loafing, not a drunken office party. Fortunately, Mann knows how to choose classics that work with her natural aesthetic. When it comes time to liven things up with a Yuletide cartoon anthem, she opts for... one that's serious but fun, "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch," with Grant-Lee Phillips taking over Boris Karloff's narrating duties. In addition to the standards, One More Drifter in the Snow features "Christmastime," a song written by husband Michael Penn and frequent collaborator Jon Brion, which enters on a light-hearted mandola strum and quickly takes a slinking, minor-keyed turn. The singer's own "Calling on Mary" is a somber bit of introspection, the sort of brooding that naturally occurs every December, but which most carol composers choose to ignore.
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A Motown Christmas

Various Artists
1999 | Motown

Motown was as programmatic as it was genius, and this compilation is as programmatic as it gets: Jackson 5, Stevie Wonder, Temptations, Supremes, Miracles, more or less in that order, over and over, with Marvin Gaye snuck in at the end with the surprisingly sexy and raw "I Want to Come Home For Christmas." Sadly, this package doesn't include Gaye's other great holiday track, the luminous... "Purple Snowflakes," which released for years; the idea seems to be to stick with material from the holiday albums the label issued in its time.

As with Broadway, Christmas songs didn't tend to induce the best in Motown's glossy vocal roster. (Or its best vocalists, as the Jackson 5 cuts helmed by Jermaine attest.) Some of A Motown Christmas is pretty stolid — hymns make even Stevie and Smokey sound inanimate. (Broadway appears too, on the Supremes' "My Favorite Things" — someone interpreted "Brown paper packages tied up with strings" pretty liberally there.) But there is a good amount of charm on display here, as well as a taste of backstage wildness. The Funk Brothers tended to play looser than usual on tracks that weren't meant to be hits; you can hear that especially well on the lazy-stroke groove of the Temptations' "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" ("Hey, Rudolph! Won't'cha guide my sleigh?" as a sign-off mantra is a good idea, too) and the more charged, but still sleek, "Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town" by the Jackson 5. And the material — well, you know.
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Wonderland of Christmas

André Kostelanetz & His Orchestra
2011 | Sony Classical

A Very Ping Pong Christmas: Funky Treats From Santa's Bag

Shawn Lee's Ping Pong Orchestra
Ubiquity Records

If you're fed up with Yuletide records that put the "white" in "White Christmas," Shawn Lee's A Very Ping Pong Christmas might just cure what (wass)ails ya. Lee's previous Ping Pong outings have suffered from a paucity of memorable melodies, but here he applies his knack for funky beats and atmospheric grooves to twelve holiday classics, resulting in one of the cooler Christmas waxings in recent memory. There's a heavy '60s/'70s soul... vibe goin'on, and it's easy to picture Santa pulling up to your house in a red Cadillac with matching velvet double-breasted pimp vines to the tune of Lee's clavinet-stoked "Do You Hear What I Hear" or wah-inflected "Jingle Bells." His takes on "Deck the Halls" and "O Little Town of Bethlehem" would surely have Ramsey Lewis's 'In Crowd 'doin'it to death around the ol'Tanenbaum. Hopefully we'll get a Volume 2 in next year's stocking.
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Christmas 1979

Wild Billy Childish & The Musicians Of The British Empire
2007 | Damaged Goods / state51

A John Prine Christmas

John Prine
Oh Boy Records

Leave the Christmas carols to the gleeful crooners: John Prine is largely uninterested in regurgitating seasonal favorites on this eight-song collection. Though he takes "Silver Bells" for a swingin' ride and gets cheeky with "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus," the focus here is on Prine originals that have only tangential connections to holiday concerns. For example, "Everything Is Cool" (given the full-band treatment, compared to the stark solo version on Prine's... 1991 comeback album The Missing Years) starts with the couplet, "Everything is cool, everything's OK/ Well just before last Christmas, my baby went away" — but that's it for yuletide references. No matter, as it's a typically sublime Prine tune, mixing darkness with light: He sings of seeing 100,000 blackbirds flying in the shape of a teadrop that washes his sins away. Three cuts are live recordings, including "If You Were The Woman And I Was The Man," which has nothing to do with Christmas but does feature an angelic duet vocal from Cowboy Junkies' Margo Timmins, and "Christmas In Prison," which is as wistful and lonesome is its title suggests. The closing title track is mostly a spoken-word story from Prine's childhood, punctuated by a verse of "Away in a Manger" with a boisterous conjunto-accordion finale. You won't hear it like that at the candlelight service.
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A Classic Soul Christmas

Various Artists
2006 | Rhino Atlantic
The Ventures' Christmas Album

The Ventures
2008 | CAPITOL

Joe Gibbs Reggae Christmas

The Joe Gibbs Family Of Artists
VP Records / INgrooves

With a shared color schema of red, gold and green, it seems fitting that one of the greatest Christmas albums is also a stellar reggae album, cut by legendary producer Joe Gibbs. For more than a decade, Gibbs had been at the forefront of Jamaican music: rocksteady in the late '60s, then onto roots reggae, dub, and lovers rock throughout the '70s. There isn't a tree big enough to hold all of... the gifts that Gibbs had given listeners over the years: Culture's epochal Two Sevens Clash, Althea & Donna's brash cut "Uptown Top Ranking," and breaking the likes of Dennis Brown, Sly & Robbie, as well as producer Winston "Niney the Observer" Holness to the world.

Consider this the '70s version of A Christmas Gift for You From Phil Spector, a producer at the peak of his powers showering us with even more unbelievable aural treats. There's Horace Andy lending his angelic pipes to "O Little Town of Bethlehem" and an uptempo version of "Deck the Halls" that could even get Scrooge to skanking. Bookending the disc are two massive medleys featuring Gibbs and his stable of artists strutting through fare like "Joy to the World," "Deck the Halls," "Auld Lang Syne," and "Little Drummer Boy" with such audible joy that it turns these old musty chestnuts into an evergreen dance party.
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Bing Crosby - Christmas Classics

Bing Crosby
2006 | CAPITOL

This collection of holiday favorites remains a good representation of Bing Crosby's many seasonal recordings. Among the highlights are a Nelson Riddle arrangement of Crosby's biggest hit, the perennial "White Christmas," as well as "Winter Wonderland," "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," and "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!" Any fan of Crosby, as well as good Christmas music in general, will want to hunt this down.

A Jolly Christmas From Frank Sinatra

Frank Sinatra
1999 | CAPITOL

While this may be the only album on this list that doesn't deserve the phrase "masterpiece," it's far from a throwaway. Anytime arranger — conductor Gordon Jenkins wasn't being epically sad (as on Where Are You?, When No One Cares and All Alone) or "serious" (as on September of My Years) he could be downright corny. Not, as they say on Seinfeld, that there's anything wrong with that. This 1957 holiday album... (his second actually — he'd released a Christmas collection for Columbia in 1948) brought out the delightfully corny side of Sinatra — never more enjoyably than on the opener, Jenkins's gleefully dopey mock-doo-wop re-do of "Jingle Bells." Sinatra and Jenkins make beautiful music especially on those very touching "sad" Christmas songs, the ones about being separated from your loved ones during the holiday, like "I'll Be Home For Christmas" and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." This is what it's like, you imagine, to spend Christmas in a bar, hanging your stockings over a rack of Jack Daniels.
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Stocking Stuffers

Wishing You A Rave Christmas

The Raveonettes
2008 | EP/SINGLE
Sweet Christmas

Shonen Knife
EP/SINGLE
Christmas Tree On Fire

Holly Golightly
2006 | Damaged Goods / state51
A Christmas Duel

The Hives & Cyndi Lauper
2008 | No Fun AB / The Orchard
Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree

Daniel Johnston
2005 | EP/SINGLE
It's Christmas So We'll Stop

Frightened Rabbit
2007 | FatCat Records / The Orchard
Christmas with Grace Potter & The Nocturnals

Grace Potter & the Nocturnals
2011 | Hollywood Records
Christmas Spirit...In My House

Joey Ramone
2008 | EP/SINGLE
Carol Of The Bells

The Bird And The Bee
2007 | EP/SINGLE
Every Day Is Christmas (When I'm Lovin' You)

Charles Bradley (feat. Menahan Street Band)
2010 | Daptone Records / The Orchard
Christmas EP

Jesu (2)
2010 | Avalanche Recordings / TuneCore
Festivus

Various Artists
2012 | Highline Records / Redeye

Sufjan Stevens, Silver & Gold

Patrick Rapa — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 10:27:33 +0000

Brooklyn indie darling Sufjan Stevens will probably never finish his one-album-for-every-state project (48 to go!), but his holiday-music series seems unstoppable. By now, you should know the drill: Every year he gathers some musical friends and stitches together an EP to send out to loved ones. Some of the songs are standards, lovingly rendered. Some are standards, flipped into rock songs or spooky ballads. A lot of Stevens’s holiday tunes are originals, either sincere in their cheer or absurd, moody or baffling. (“Christmas Unicorn” is all of these.) Stevens’s last five holiday EPs are finally collected in the new Silver & Gold: Songs for Christmas Vols. 6-10, a collection that’s as upbeat and earnest as it is completely bonkers. Read here for a rigorously scientific unwrapping of the highlights of each volume, broken into statistical categories.

Unwrapping Sufjan’s Christmas Gift

Patrick Rapa — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 21:47:11 +0000

Brooklyn indie darling Sufjan Stevens will probably never finish his one-album-for-every-state project (48 to go!), but his holiday-music series seems unstoppable. By now, you should know the drill: Every year he gathers some musical friends and stitches together an EP to send out to loved ones. Some of the songs are standards, lovingly rendered. Some are standards, flipped into rock songs or spooky ballads. A lot of Stevens’s holiday tunes are originals, either sincere in their cheer or absurd, moody or baffling. (“Christmas Unicorn” is all of these.) Stevens’s last five holiday EPs are finally collected in the new Silver & Gold: Songs for Christmas Vols. 6-10, a collection that’s as upbeat and earnest as it is completely bonkers. Below, a rigorously scientific breakdown of the highlights of each volume, broken into statistical categories.

Title: Volume VI – Gloria
Total tracks: Eight
Standout track: “Lumberjack Christmas / No One Can Save You From Christmases Past.” This indie-pop/Appalachian hybrid makes smart use of a wandering fiddle and one of the least annoying “ho ho ho” chants in music history.
See also: Stevens prides himself on diverging from classical Christmas carols, but the version of “Silent Night” that kicks off this collection is spookily, churchily old-school. Is that a choir of angels or cartoon ghosts backing him up? Voices waver and a singing saw warbles as Stevens pays proper homage to the original reason for the season. His take on of “Coventry Carol” also stays true to its earnest, 16th-century origins. And then there are tracks like “Carol of St. Benjamin the Bearded One” which starts out with an acoustic/pointillist take on “Carol of the Bells” before morphing into a folksy, uplifting original. And let’s face it, that song needed a morphing.
Sample lyric: “You, you must be a Christmas tree, a Christmas tree/ You light up the room,” from “Barcarola,” a real heartbreaker.
Good-Cheer-o-Meter: 7/10. Parental units will allow this to be played during the consumption of food and the exchange of benefactions.
Sacrilege rating: 1/10. Get behind me, Santa.
Preciousness gauge: 5/10. Totes adorbs, but not douchey about it.

Title: Volume VII – I Am Santa’s Helper!
Total tracks: 23
Standout track: “Christmas Woman” is a zig-zagging rock tune that mixes jingling bells and skronking guitars, heavenly voices and peppy synths, dissonance and euphoria. Nice shout-out to the pagans in this one, too.
See also: A lot of bang for your buck here: Some Bach, three versions of “Ah Holy Jesus” (regular, a cappella, extra reed-organy), and some crazypants song titles that only look like Tolkien references: “Lift Up Your Heads Ye Mighty Gates,” “Break Forth O Beauteous Heavenly Light,” “Mysteries of the Christmas Mist” and so on. Lively numbers like “Mr. Frosty Man” (an alternate-universe Daniel Johnston gem) define this volume, but don’t sleep on the warm and fuzzy instrumentals, including traditional Jewish hymn “Maoz Tzur” (sounds like a school piano recital) or the ethereal original “Even the Earth Will Perish and the Universe Give Way” (they have Christmas on Saturn, right?).
Sample lyric: “Baby Jesus is the king/ Jesus is the king-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling.” That’s from “Ding-a-ling-a-ring-a-ling,” a completely nutballs sing-along that embraces the spiked-eggnog silliness of the season. You can’t pull these sorts of shenanigans around Easter.
Good-Cheer-o-Meter: 9/10. Mazel Tov!
Sacrilege rating: 3/10. Nobody’s going to Hell for this, but you won’t hear it at midnight mass, either.
Preciousness gauge: 3/10. Charming and mysterious. More Dancer than Prancer.

Title: Volume VIII – Christmas Infinity Voyage
Total tracks: Nine
Standout track: Usually, “Do You Hear What I Hear?” is the black hole of the Xmas mall playlist: grim, inescapable, joyless, endless. Which is what makes Sufjan’s version – souped up with glitchy beats and robo-vocals – so brilliant. Once you accept the song as a self-perpetuating and godlessly sentient machine, well, it’s kinda fun again. Of course, our artificially intelligent narrator keeps wondering if we feel what it feels – all of creation is new to it.
See also: The retro-futuristic take on “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear” is mostly instrumental (just a brief Cylon speaking part at the end). “Particle Physics” sounds like a Dot Matrix printer trying to order itself more toner. “Good King Wenceslas” is full of alto angels and laser effects. Skrillex is so jelly right now.
Sample lyric: “No traffic jams/ No ice and storm/ Far in the house the fire is warm.” “Christmas in the Room” is a blissful and occasionally wayward anti-carol that dreams of a winter’s night spent snuggling up in front of the TV. (Just a heads up: Stevens was kind of understating the nature of fire. It is actually very, very hot.)
Good-Cheer-o-Meter: 6/10. This EP is exactly the sort of daring holiday highwire act we expect from Stevens. Older relatives will not approve. (Here’s where I remind you that Christmas is one of those things one might be accused of “ruining.”)
Sacrilege rating: 5/10. The “Angels We Have Heard on High” rewrite gives a shout-out to flying saucers, an offense specifically verboten by Vatican II.
Preciousness gauge: 1/10. Nothing too cutesy here.

Title: Volume IX – Let it Snow!
Total tracks: Nine
Standout track: Brooklyn indie-folkie Cat Martino, usually up in the clouds with the rest of Stevens’s angelic choir, swings low to sing the lead on a couple quietly fetching songs. “Ave Maria” is spellbindingly spacey while “The Sleigh in the Moon,” a Martino original, is utterly divine and peaceful. We should send her to the front lines of every war to sing this song. Later we can name a rec center after her or something.
See also: “X-Mas Spirit Catcher” is a wonderfully idiosyncratic pop number that spices Stevens’s smooth voice with spacious reverb. This volume also finds room for a few respectfully rearranged classics like “Let it Snow!” and “A Holly Jolly Christmas” to warm your heart and soften your nips.
Sample lyric: I’m not quite sure what guest singer/songwriter Sebastian Krueger means by “your holly hair and tinsel eyes” (on the final track, “Christmas Face”) but it’s wicked pretty. He’s making a golem out of old ornaments, maybe.
Good-Cheer-o-Meter: 9/10. This one’s lovely, light and deep.
Sacrilege rating: 2/10. Upping the moodiness on “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” is only a venial sin. Let’s go wallowing through the snow!
Preciousness gauge: 4/10. Gutwrenching sincerity cut with pangs Glee-ful buoyancy.

Title: Volume X – Christmas Unicorn
Total tracks: Nine
Standout track: This volume takes its title from Silver & Gold‘s most unflinchingly weird song. “Christmas Unicorn” is insane. It’s mesmerizing. It’s 13 minutes long and narrated by a mournful (and a bit deranged) mythical creature. What begins as a gentle lamentation evolves into a grand sing-along epic in the vein of Song of Roland or Snaildartha: The Story of Jerry the Christmas Snail. Strains of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” are mixed into some lush orchestral maneuvers, piling on the drama as we pick up steam. This unicorn has some grievances, man.
See also: The melancholic and minimalist “Happy Karma Christmas,” which delivers a real punch in the nuts of your soul. Similarly spooky is “Justice Delivers Its Death,” which summons the Lord’s wrath over acoustic pointillism. Good to see the vengeful Old Testament God get a walk-on.
Sample lyric: Gotta go back to the title track for this one: “Oh I’m a mystical apostasy/ I’m a horse with a fantasy twist/ Though I play all night with my magical kite, people say I don’t exist.”
Good-Cheer-o-Meter: 5/10. Sometimes Rudolph’s nose is a blacklight.
Sacrilege rating: 6.66/10. The false idols were hung by the chimney with care.
Preciousness gauge: 6/10. Unicorn mentions automatically set off the presh-o-meter.

Tig Notaro, Live

Anna Bond — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 13:00:21 +0000

2012 has been Tig Notaro’s year; 2012 has not been Tig Notaro’s year. Stricken by a bout of pneumonia that spiraled into a life-threatening bacterial infection, Notaro suffered the accidental death of her mother and a wrenching breakup before being diagnosed with stage 2 invasive cancer in both breasts – all within four months. But just as these tragedies piled up, so did her successes, as Notaro’s career began to ascend a steep trajectory.

Live – the title is the imperative verb, not the adjective – captures the now-legendary standup set Notaro performed at Los Angeles’s Largo only a few days after her diagnosis. “Hello. Good evening, hello. I have cancer. How are you?” The half-hour Notaro introduces thus is generous and revelatory, brilliantly counterpoising our human focus on the absurdly trivial with a laid-bare understanding of life’s potential for pitch-black irony.

But this set is so much more. As Notaro champion Louis C.K. has put it, Live is a rare reminder of what comedy can do at its most powerful. Live is the human condition, bone-weary and candid, placed before us without fanfare by one of our era’s most incisive and big-hearted wits; Live is the quietest triumph, a grief-borne obelisk displaying the strength of the human spirit better than any wilderness-survival memoir could hope to; Live is big-eyed, raw and grateful; Live is unbelievably funny.

Songs for Telegraph Avenue

Sam Adams — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 21:03:32 +0000

Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe, the central characters in Michael Chabon’s sprawling Telegraph Avenue, love nothing more than records; listening to them, talking about them, savoring the whisper of an LP as it slides out of its sleeve. But for all the music it name-checks the novel, which revolves around the two owners of Oakland’s rapidly obsolescing Brokeland Records, lacks its own soundtrack. So eMusic has thoughtfully provided one, syncing an album to each of the novel’s major characters (and a few minor ones).

Telegraph Avenue casts a wide net, encompassing cultural and generational shifts, the blurry line between urban renewal and gentrification, the politics of home birthing and the struggles of new (and not-so-new) fatherhood, so our musical choices are equally diverse.

Play
2 Credits
Telegraph Avenue

Michael Chabon
2012 | Unabridged

Archy Stallings

AH UM - 50th Anniversary (Legacy Edition)

Charles Mingus
2009 | Columbia/Legacy

On several occasions, Chabon likens Brokeland Records' co-proprietor to the great jazz bassist Charles Mingus, a resemblance that does not escape the character who calls him a "beret-wearing, soul-patch dee-vo-tay of Negritude, Charles Mingus-impersonating motherfucker." Mingus's 1959 album includes "Fables of Faubus," a protest against the Arkansas governor who attempted to thwart the integration of public schools in Little Rock, a struggle whose fruits are evident in the culturally mixed – but... emphatically not post-racial – neighborhoods of Telegraph Avenue. The elegiac "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat," a tribute to Mingus's late mentor, Lester Young, reflects Archy's relationship with his own surrogate father, jazz organist Cochise Jones, as well as the novel's preoccupation with the way memories are passed on through music.
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Nat Jaffe

Songs In The Key Of Life

Stevie Wonder
2000 | Motown

Like Archy, Brokeland partner Nat Jaffe is a music maker as well as seller, but where Archy is devoted to his bass, steadily keeping the beat as the world moves on, Nat's talents are more diffuse, proficient at many instruments but wedded to none. As a Jewish man steeped in African-American culture – he even cooks some mean collard greens – he's never quite certain of where he stands, especially as father... to a 14-year-old son he's beginning to suspect may be gay. So he might find inspiration in "Isn't She Lovely," the cornerstone of Stevie Wonder's crowning masterwork, Songs in the Key of Life. Like Nat, Wonder is a musical polymath, evoked by another of the book's characters as an exemplar of the days when black musicians created rather than remixed. ("Now, black kid halfway to a genius comes along? Like RZA? Can't even play a motherfucking kazoo.") As you might expect from a novel by the author of Manhood for Amateurs, fatherhood in Telegraph Avenue is a messy business, but the sheer joy of Wonder's song, a contrast to the singer's own messy personal life, could serve as a lodestar for the conflicted dad.
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Gwen Shanks

Betty Davis

Betty Davis
2008 | Light In The Attic / The Orchard

Archy's wife, Gwen, who owns a boutique midwifery clinic with Nat's wife, Aviva, has been tolerating her husband's wayward tendencies for a long time. But observing an encounter between Archy and a woman she correctly guesses to be his current mistress pushes her to the edge, and a confrontation with a condescending obstetrician sends her over it. Her overpowering anger, fueled by a deep sense of anger and confusion, finds an unlikely... counterpart in the on-the-warpath funk of Betty Davis, whose solo career began not long after her marriage to Miles Davis ended. As a wronged woman she's all fury and no regret, making the kind of music Gwen might use to rile herself up before making a hot-headed decision she'll quickly come to rue.
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Aviva Roth-Jaffe

Court And Spark

Joni Mitchell
1975 | Rhino

Joni Mitchell is more associated with Los Angeles than the Bay Area, but the combination of earthiness and whimsy in her music seems like the right fit for Aviva Roth-Jaffe, who, as Telegraph Avenue's conflicts intensify, finds herself putting out several fires at once. Gwen's outburst threatens to cost the midwives their privileges at the only hospital that will let them in the door, and her husband and his partner are troubled... by the planned arrival of a massive shopping mall that threatens to obliterate their old-fashioned business. Through it all, Aviva holds onto idealism of the kind so succinctly expressed in Mitchell's "Free Man in Paris," even when it threatens to cost her dearly.
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Gibson “G-Bad” Goode

The Blueprint

Jay-Z
2007 | Roc-A-Fella / Def Jam

Wrong coast, we know. But you have to cross the country to find a pop-cultural figure with the impact Chabon envisions for his football-star-turned-entrepreneur – at least, one who makes music worth listening to. (Sorry, Shaq.) Gibson Goode, who takes meetings in his own private zeppelin, embodies Jay-Z's classic boast, "I'm not a businessman – I'm a business, man," and the omnivorous sounds of his classic album embody the pancultural mixture to... which Telegraph Avenue aspires. G-Bad's own taste may run more to Minnie Ripperton than Hova, but the novel's lack of hip-hop reference points had to be addressed somehow.
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Luther Stallings

Trouble Man

Marvin Gaye
1998 | Motown

Like the absentee father that he is, Luther Stalling floats in and out of Telegraph Avenue, all but disappearing for much of the book's middle section. Archy's rarely seen dad is a washed-up black action star who's been on and off drugs for decades and is now in the process of purportedly cleaning up his act – the fact that said cleanup involves blackmailing an old acquaintance for money to fund his... planned comeback film is a regrettable compromise. Trouble Man isn't one of blaxploitation's crown jewels, but Marvin Gaye's theme is a stone classic. Gaye's relationship with his own father ended in tragedy, but Luther and Archy have at least a slim chance of settling their differences.
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Cochise Jones

Melting Pot

Booker T. And The M.G.'s
2007 | Stax

With closets full of eye-searing leisure suits, Brokeland regular and de facto father figure to Archy Cochise Jones is a living relic, a link to an earlier age who is literally crushed by his devotion to his music. His funeral marks a rare coming together of Telegraph Avenue's scattered characters, whose varied agendas are set aside just long enough to lay a legendary player to rest. Booker T. Jones shares a surname... with Cochise as well as legendary proficiency on the Hammond B-3 organ, and the sweaty, gritty soul the former made with the M.G.'s stands as an exemplar of the benefits of cultural collision. Half-black and half-white at a time (and in a place) where racially integrated bands met with fierce and sometimes violent opposition, the quartet's four members were trained and untrained, poor and middle-class, bound by common understanding and a willingness to let their music speak for them. Melting Pot, which Nat drops on Brokeland's turntable at a pivotal moment, was their most ambitious album, fueled by the collegiate music studies Jones had pursued on his days off, and the strain of recording it broke up the band (whose home base, Stax Records, was located not far from the motel where Martin Luther King was assassinated). Jones, seeking a change, left Memphis for California, where perhaps he met up with a long-lost uncle who shared his love of the Hammond.
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Sonny Rollins, Alfie

Britt Robson — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 20:22:53 +0000

A brilliant film score that stands alone on its brash musical merits, Alfie follows the dramatic arc of a young Lothario (played by Michael Caine) who eventually gets his comeuppance. “Alfie’s Theme” captures his raffish swagger with resonant flair — it is the jazz equivalent of “Shaft” and became a staple of Sonny Rollins’s live shows. The rest of the disc is likewise inspired, with a couple of poignant, midtempo ballads and an antic number appropriately titled “Street Runner with Child.” The estimable Oliver Nelson provides horn arrangements and orchestrations for brass that aren’t as prominent as you’d expect (a good thing). The core quintet includes guitarist Kenny Burrell and pianist Roger Kellaway as the secondary soloists, bassist Walter Booker providing that rubbery pulse Rollins prefers, and the leader utilizing that plush, slightly nasal tone through bold but self-contained passages on a project that meshed with his appetite for new forms of expression.

Megson, When I Was A Lad…(A Collection of Children’s Folk Songs)

Chris Nickson — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 20:57:55 +0000

Children's music for grown-ups, too

Stu and Debbie Hanna, the married duo from Teeside known as Megson, have been charming the British folk scene for nearly 10 years now. Their music always sounds as though it is sung from the heart, even on the traditional numbers that make up part of their repertoire. Over three albums, Megson have won acclaim (and awards) by taking old music and making it sound new, fresh and relevant. So perhaps it’s not surprising that after taking a year off when their daughter Lola Wren was born, they have returned with an album of old and new children’s folk songs.

The idea might sound twee, but the resulting album is surprisingly full of light and shade. There are references to drunkenness in “Dance To Your Daddy” (a piece that dates back to 1840), while the Megson-penned “All The Shops Have Fallen Down,” is about how the local shops on our high streets have been replaced by chains.

But there’s also the absurd joy of “Baby & the Band,” the soft lullaby refrain of “Bee-o,” and the rough and tumble of “Jenny Jenkins.” No children’s album would be complete without a riddle song and the one here (“The Riddle Song”) is a tender little teaser that dates back to 1430. “Oats & Beans & Barley Grow” is a fiddle-led hoedown, complete with a seed-shaker backing beat, while “My Father’s Farm” is a possibly a variation on “Old MacDonald.”

There’s genuine joy in every performance, as the two voices wind around each other playfully over a collection of acoustic instruments, from mandolin to shruti box. When I Was a Lad brims with childlike energy and joy. It’s children’s music for grown-ups, too.

Various Artists, Lost Highway Soundtrack

Andrew Parks — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 19:29:58 +0000

Who could forget the Rolling Stone cover that featured a young David Lynch and a Rasputin-looking Trent Reznor in a rare joint interview meant to promote Lost Highway? Lynch’s 1997 film worked partly because of the manner in which Lynch married Reznor’s soundtrack to his peerless visuals. Aside from featuring the greatest Nine Inch Nails song (the skittish beats and nightmarish melodies of “The Perfect Drug”) outside its own albums, we’re treated to the kitschy film score cuts of Barry Adamson (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Magazine, The Birthday Party) and longtime Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti; standout selections from Smashing Pumpkins, Lou Reed and Marilyn Manson; and an excuse for Reznor to give David Bowie a shout-out with his otherwise overlooked Outside track “I’m Deranged.” We could do without the Rammstein nods, but hearing Reznor develop a couple interludes with Peter Christopherson (Coil, Throbbing Gristle) more than makes up for it.

Michael Nyman, Nyman / Greenaway Revisited

John Schaefer — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 19:29:49 +0000

Concert versions of Nyman's Peter Greenaway film scores

English composer Michael Nyman can’t complain when people call him a Minimalist; after all, in his early days as a music critic, he helped coin the term. And since those days in the late ’70s, he has been perhaps England’s leading purveyor of that alleged style. While his later works – especially since the success of his score to the film The Piano – have been more Romantic, lush and orchestral, the “classic” sound of the Michael Nyman Band is one of primary colors splashed upon the canvas – the sound of single strings, lots of horns, keyboards and electric bass. That sound, which could be brash and exciting but also surprisingly poignant, was used to great effect in the films of Peter Greenaway throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, and this collection presents what Nyman calls “the composer’s cut” – i.e., concert versions of the film scores.

The performances are faithful to the originals, although the epic and emotional “Memorial,” featuring stratospheric soprano Sarah Leonard, is played somewhat more gently than the version that appears in Greenaway’s The Cook The Thief His Wife And Her Lover. (That piece began as a genuine memorial from this soccer-loving composer, written after the so-called Heysel Disaster in 1985, in which 39 fans died.) Highlights includeâ€¦well, it’s an album of highlights. But Nyman picks the hits from The Draughtsman’s Contract, inspired by the music of Henry Purcell; and Drowning By Numbers, based on a fragment of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in Eb for violin and viola, is ably represented by three tracks that will probably make you want to hear the whole soundtrack.

Various Artists, Natural Born Killers Soundtrack

Andrew Parks — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 19:27:38 +0000

In some ways, Natural Born Killers was a warm-up session for the David Lynch soundtrack (Lost Highway) that’d arrive three years later. This particular Trent Reznor production is much more scatter-brained however, reflecting Oliver Stone’s retina-singeing, ultra-violent images with more of a frenzied mixtape feel. Or as Reznor put it in an interview with MTV, “[I tried] to turn the soundtrack into a collage of sound, kind of the way the movie used music: make edits, add dialog, and make it something interesting, rather than a bunch of previously released music.”

Here’s a short list of who’s on here: L7, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Dr. Dre, Patti Smith, Patsy Cline, Tha friggin’ Dogg Pound. Not to mention a couple of Nine Inch Nails cuts that leave a mark for different reasons — the speaker-spraying fantasies of “Burn” and the dire comedown music of “A Warm Place.” Too bad Oliver Stone hasn’t made a movie like this since then.

Discovering Dan Deacon’s America

Laura Studarus — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 13:23:10 +0000

Despite boasting a classical education from the Conservatory of Music at State University of New York at Purchase, Dan Deacon doesn’t buy into the elitist implications of being called a composer. “I think that the least pretentious way you could think about a composer is someone who writes music for someone else,” he muses. “But some composers don’t write music for humans at all. So the definition is flawed. You could call a taxi driver a composer. Or a performance artist. Or a choreographer.”

Deacon’s new album continues his tradition of stretching the perceived limitations of the term. Over the course of nine caffeine-jacked compositions, Deacon stitches together a crazy quilt of styles, moving from dense electronic passages to lush string interludes and back again. Featuring fuzzed-out dissonance, frenetic chants and moments of stunning serenity, America is a colorful grab bag — much like its namesake.

eMusic’s Laura Studarus went on a musical journey through the 20th century with Deacon, visiting some of the unexpected inspirations for his new album, including a boxcar-riding hobo, a Beatles sidekick, and the one icon that no list would be complete without.

Laurie Anderson

Talk Normal: The Laurie Anderson Anthology

Laurie Anderson
2000 | Rhino/Warner Bros.

It was "O Superman" that I first heard. It's such a crazy use of voice. The way it's processed is so clean and clear. It's sort of like the voice you think you'll hear in the waiting room for heaven, when you don't know if you're getting in yet. It's a stress-filled calm. I ended up finding [Big Science] in a record store in a town near my college. I finally got... to hear the whole record, and it was so much different than that piece! It was jarring, but after multiple listens it made sense. Each one of the pieces had its own universe. That was also important to me.

I heard she was teaching at NYU for a while. She was teaching music history, and she was making it all up. For years! Maybe this is not true, but I love this story. I hope it is true.
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Harry Partch

The Harry Partch Collection, Volume 2

Gate 5 Ensemble
2004 | New World Records / The Orchard

I think my favorite thing about Partch other than the awesomeness of his music is that he was a boxcar hobo, and hopped trains for a long time, and lived in garages. He's such a real deal. When you think of American icons, I think he lived up to that really really well. He had the American dream really strong, but his American dream wasn't one that was put on television. The... fact that he was so passionate and articulate about his ideas was so vastly important.

Musically, his approach to music is theater. Beautiful costumes, the instruments being built and designed by him and his crew. Massively beautiful; the sounds that they made so foreign, but so rooted in nature. His ability to see the complete package was overwhelming.

I think it's important to remember that music is theater, and people are watching something. They're there to hear something as well, but they're also there to watch it happen, to unfold before them. They want to know how it happens, but they want there to be an air of mystery. There's got to be a mixture of both. A mixture of, "Oh, I can understand this," and also the thought of, "How did that happen?" Not in a "magic show" kind of way, more of, "I know how that happened, but I would have never thought of that," or "I wouldn't have done that," or "I wouldn't have made that choice." That's what makes a lot of music interesting, that it has that ability to happen in front of you. Even if the music isn't improvised, there's always an element of chance involved, because it's happening as it goes. That's what people want to see live. The more of that you can give, and the more unique experience you can provide, the more that performance can resonate within your audience.
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Karlheinz Stockhausen

Kontra-Punkte+Refrain+Zeitmasse+Schlagtrio

Karlheinz Stockhausen
2010 | wergo / Finetunes

One of my favorite things about Stockhausen is that The Beatles love Stockhausen. They were obsessed with him while they were making The White Album. Supposedly, they were going to do a series of shows where Stockhausen opened. Stockhausen agreed to do it, The Beatles agreed to do it. It was going to be in stadiums. Back then, the PA systems for large concerts like that were just through the public address... system. They had a couple of speakers, but for the most part it was nothing like we imagine today. There were no huge stacks of speakers. It was a very ridiculous production. Stockhausen was going to be playing his insane pieces through the public address system of Shea Stadium or something like that. That would have been insane. Kids would have gone there expecting to see The Beatles. But then they would have had to endure this set of sounds that they would have never in their lives thought that they would hear. Imagine how crazy different music would be if The Beatles had toured with Stockhausen. It would be fucking crazy as fuck! The tour was ill-fated. The Beatles stopped performing live, Stockhausen never got to open up for The Beatles, and the avant-garde sat in the cellar of 20th-century music.
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Cecil Taylor

The Complete Nat Hentoff Sessions (with Archie Shepp) [Bonus Track Version]

Cecil Taylor
2011 | Solar Records / The Orchard

He's one of those people who doesn't think of jazz as a genre, but as an approach. His music is jazz, but it's not what people think of when they think of jazz. When you think of music that's a form of populist communication or mass communication, you want people to be able to enjoy it who don't have an education. That was a big division between the avant-garde and the experimental... – who they're making music for. The avant-garde thought they should write for the most forward of thinkers, the way mathematicians make high-end math. Experimental musicians were saying, "Let's make music as weird as possible, but let's make it for everybody. If they don't like it, they don't like it."

What I like about Cecil Taylor is that he took the idea of jazz, jazz hands, big bands, and all of that. His approach to jazz, and the way that he uses jazz, the way he uses dissonance, and the way his music is still very romantic with grooves, it's beautiful. I can't describe it, which is why luckily it's music.
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Terry Riley

Terry Riley: In C

Terry Riley
2009 | Sony Classical

I think Riley was the composer that I most closely identified with and was influenced by in college. Writing music for myself as well as other people is very important for me. I was struggling with finding musicians to play my music when I was in school. It just seemed like a waste of time. Reading about Terry Riley and his music, where he was a performer, all of a sudden it... just clicked and made sense. Everything fell into place. It validated what I was trying to do. His music is really beautiful.

Later in life when I started hearing less of his overtly psychedelic works and started hear in his solo work reworked for other people, it opened up this very beautiful world of sound. Those radical, minimalist ideas were starting to emerge in pop music. I think why minimalism is so important in general is that it took classical music and brought it back to popular culture. People like Riley took everything that classical music was, destroyed it, and then started again and made it as unique as possible. If you look at the world at the time, that's what was happening. Europe was torn apart twice with world wars, there was a huge shift of power. So it didn't make sense to try to make music that was a reflection of that old world. The 1960s and 1970s brought in this new world. It was still based in war and pain and suffering, but it was also based in the comfort of modern technology and modern lifestyle. I think it was the mixing of those things that made everything so creepy and uneasy.
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Philip Glass

Steve Reich

Steve Reich: Different Trains

Steve Reich
2004 | naïve / Montaigne / Naive

A friend of mine in school gave me a copy of Different Trains. We were showing our pieces in class and he said, "If you do stuff like this, you should listen to Steve Reich." That's when I sort of lost the chip on my shoulder. The whole "I want to discover the new thing! I want to a 20-year-old genius!" A lot of people want to do that and be like,... "and then I made new art forms!" Well, you're a sophomore in college; you're probably not going to do it! I was a lot more open-minded with the sense of making music and not saying "I'm not going to write anything like this now because it's already been done!" If people focus on trying to make something 100 percent new, they're going to waste their life. It's like going to the bar every night, trying to find a soul mate. It doesn't work that way. You need to work with the tools of the past and try to make something new. You can't be like, "I need 100 percent original ideas and thoughts." When I heard Steve Reich it was cool. It's not the cluttered mystique of a lot of other music of that time period; it's sort of like, "Hey check this out, this cool? Check out what's going to happen now. I bet that you saw this coming, but it's pretty cool."

When we think about the masters of art or music, we're thinking about history's greatest hits. How many other great people who were like Bach who have been forgotten throughout history because they weren't as wealthy, or their work as preserved, or their work was lost in time? Or they just didn't have as good of a publicist?
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Prince

Sign 'O' The Times

Prince
2007 | Rhino/Warner Bros.

There's this one video of James Brown bringing Michael Jackson and Prince to the stage. They're both really young, I think they're in Minneapolis. Michael Jackson is like, "It's cool to be up here." When Prince gets up there, in his mind, everyone went to that show to see Prince. No one was there to see James Brown. No one was there to see Michael Jackson. It is about Prince. Prince... kills it! It's incredible. Seeing that video proves that he's the real deal. He saw the opportunity and didn't just grab it; he shoved it into the opportunity expander and made it so much more epic than it could have been. Prince has to be on the list. Can you imagine a 20th century without Prince?
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Lee Hazlewood, A House Safe for Tigers

Karen Schoemer — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 17:48:42 +0000

A weirdly ambitious and contrarian-as-anything soundtrack

The grizzled Lee Hazlewood loved to play up his beast status by pairing himself with beauties: from his late ’60s hits with bouffanted babe Nancy Sinatra through the accented hotties decorating his final album, 2007′s Cake or Death, he assembled an impressive multi-generational array of breathy sopranos to sweeten his grumbling baritone. But for an interlude in the mid ’70s, Hazlewood got down for some serious bro-time. Decamped to Sweden to keep his son out of the draft, Hazlewood paired with a beefy, bearded, booted-and-flared Scandinavian counterpart, the director Torbjörn Axelrod, for a TV specials, including the plotless, ruminative, lavishly scored A House Safe for Tigers in 1975.

Never before reissued, the soundtrack is as weirdly ambitious and contrarian as anything Hazlewood recorded, a Herzog-like, fractured exploration into time, place and brotherly love. The title track is a soft-rock shuffle that weds harmonica and mariachi horns with tidbits of Buddhist-inspired philosophy. “May warm fires find your flue,” Hazlewood coos. “May all your vines bear sweet wines, and your sons the hearts of doves.” “Our Little Boy Blue” is a half-spoken cowboy lullaby about a grown man’s forgotten toys; bass notes plod like heavy footballs as music-box keyboards plink and trill. The album’s centerpiece is “Souls Island,” a metaphysical ode to the awesomeness of being dudes together. Philharmonic strings swell and cascade; timpani roll. Axelrod chimes in with an untranslated monologue — cross-cultural references like “Alcatraz” and “Wounded Knee” pop out of the spew. He wasn’t as cute as Sinatra or Ann-Margret, but he charmed the lothario just the same.

Various Artists Set it Off – Music from the New Line Cinema Motion Picture

Hua Hsu — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 20:18:12 +0000

Soundtracks have always provided opportunities for labels and crews to test new artists or play with unorthodox styles between projects. For example, it’s where you’ll find some of Outkast’s strongest (“Benz or a Beamer” for the New Jersey Drive soundtrack) and most experimental stuff (“Speedballin’” for Tomb Raider and “Land of a Million Drums” for Scooby Doo). The soundtrack for the 1996 heist flick Set it Off featured a few classic Organized Noize moments. They collaborated with Queen Latifah on a really imaginative cover of Strafe’s “Set it Off” and Goodie Mob, Cool Breeze and Backbone contribute the haunting, graveyard banger “Angelic Wars.” But the biggest moment here — the one that helped the Set it Off soundtrack go platinum — was undoubtedly En Vogue’s world-conquering “Don’t Let Go (Love),” the Oakland quartet resplendent over Organized Noize’s tamed swamp funk. (Random trivia: the song was originally written for Mick Jagger.)