The indie rocker Sufjan Stevens brings a surprising and delightful buoyancy and sense of wonderment to his orchestral suite commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music to celebrate the 25th anniversary of its “Next Wave” Music Festival. The original debut performances were in November of 2007.
Icy cold vistas, shards of broken electronic glass, relentless thumping disco beats and possible mysteriously encrypted bits of dialogue may not sound like something that would be particularly inviting on a full range audio system, but somehow Fuck Buttons makes it so on this album of artificial mayhem and just plain noise.
The first Blood, Sweat and Tears group led by Al Kooper and including his former Blues Project bandmate Steve Katz, was the sophisticated assemblage that produced but one album. This one.
Was this the greatest rock and roll concert recording ever as some suggest? Is it deserving of deluxe box set status? The producers of this ultra-sumptuous box obviously thought so!
This album was issued back in 2008 but gets reviewed here because though the name Nada Surf has popped through my consciousness for years, I’d never heard them. I know, I can go online and listen and probably even steal all of their stuff for free but I’m not wired like that, so I actually went out and bought this album on vinyl without hearing a note.
Villa-Lobos’s folk-oddity “The Little Train of the Caipira” from Bachianas Brasileiras No. 2 is a delightful, evocative piece of music, as colorful as the cover artwork and a sonic spectacular guaranteed to delight even the most classical music-averse audiophiles.
(Corrected version: Elliot Easton is still with us. Ben Orr, unfortunately, passed away in 2000. I mistakenly said "the late Elliot Easton" in the original review. My apologies!)