2007
CAD 2701 - Lisa Gerrard / The Best of Lisa Gerrard
Released February 12 2007
Gerrard's career takes in almost two decades with Dead Can Dance, award-winning motion picture soundtracks, and a series of acclaimed solo and collaborative albums. This 13-track survey offers a concise and convincing insight into the various strands of her musical output. This album was selected and sequenced by Lisa herself; it blends soundtrack work, Dead Can Dance highlights, and the pick of her solo recordings into a seamless and spellbinding whole. Deluxe 24-page booklet with translucent vellum pages. "Listening to Lisa Gerrard sing is a lot like watching actress Cate Blanchett sweep through the film 'Elizabeth' - it's a stunning, flawless performance, alive with the trappings of royalty and tinged with the aura of bygone times. Try as you might, you just can't fault it" - Paste Magazine.
CAD 2717 - Blonde Redhead / 23
Released April 17 2007
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With each album since Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons, Blonde Redhead has made huge strides forward with their sound. Misery Is a Butterfly pitted fragile melodies against dark, swirling arrangements, and its tragic glamour turned the album into a cult favorite. On 23, the band trades the cloistered chamber rock of Butterfly for tone-bending dream pop and subtle electronics; while the wide open spaces sound a little bare at first, this streamlined approach ends up making this Blonde Redhead's loveliest and most accessible work yet. The group begins each album with a bold statement of purpose, and 23 is no different. The epic title track's delicate electronic rhythms, swooping, shimmering guitars, and majestically bittersweet melody pitch it somewhere between My Bloody Valentine and Asobi Seksu, showing how a more restrained Blonde Redhead can still sound lush and haunting. "Spring and Summer by Fall"'s streaming, comet-tail guitars and "Silently"'s thorny melody hark back to Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons, while "Heroine"'s vocoders sound surprisingly fresh, giving the song a fairy tale-meets-sci-fi vibe. This more whimsical, if not exactly lighthearted, feel flows through much of 23, especially on "Dr. Strangeluv," which boasts playful percussion and sparkling synths, and "Top Ranking," which layers Kazu Makino's vocals into futuristic girl group harmonies. However, Blonde Redhead hasn't ditched the brooding beauty of Misery Is a Butterfly entirely. "The Dress" is just as darkly stunning as any song on that album, with looping gasps and insistent guitars circling lyrics like "the fear starts creeping up when you have so much to lose," while "SW"'s melody and psychedelic brass interlude have a Butterfly-esque intensity. And as always, Blonde Redhead has a flair for haunting melodies, particularly on "Publisher," the chorus of which sounds peculiarly like Aerosmith's "Dream On." 23 is stunning -- in fact, its only flaw might be that its track listing is a little top-heavy, resulting in an album with an amazing first half and a flip side that is only very good. Nitpicking aside, 23 is mysterious and modern, with an artfully strange beauty that is more memorable than perfection. - Heather Phares, All Music Guide
CAD 2732 - Beirut / The Flying Club Cup
Released October 08 2007
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Credit Zach Condon for not acting his age. While many 21-year-olds are working on finishing up their undergraduate years, Condon is making albums. And not just any messily-recorded-in-the-garage (or GarageBand) albums, but fully developed and composed and realized albums. His first full-length, under the name Beirut, Gulag Orkestar, with its Eastern European-inspired horns and strings, a kind of Neutral Milk Hotel-meets-gypsy field recordings, was adored in the indie rock world, and its successor, The Flying Club Cup, is an even more mature accomplishment. Though not as immediately catchy as his debut, The Flying Club Cup contains a sense of intrigue that pulls the listener in beguilingly, twisting and swaying and marching its way through the romanticized ideas of the Balkan town, the rustic Southern French village, the small Italian trattoria. It's elaborate New World indie pop that tries to touch the Old as best it can. Flügelhorns and accordions and mandolins line the 13 songs here like old bricks, Condon's voice rising elegiacally over in layered swells, tired and wise, inspired by, but not limited to, the rich French musical past, from Tino Rossi to Jacques Brel. Because Beirut plays music that feels like it's been reflected off a long and storied life, there's the possibility for unearned pretension to appear, but there's a real sincerity, and a sense of life, that finds its way into the songs here. Condon and his collaborators (which include Final Fantasy's Owen Pallett, who even sings on the lovely "Cliquot") have not forgotten the kind of jocularity and community inherent in the folk traditions they pull from, so even as violins, organs, and harpsichords play dramatic and acute melodies and the vocals ascend to a feverish intensity, that feeling of being in the back of some tavern, passing around dishes and glasses and singing aloud with your compatriots, is present, and keeps things grounded, more real. "In the Mausoleum" balances syncopated piano with minor melodies and an ominous upright bass, while both "Guyamas Sonora" and the title track use dramatic horns to convey a kind of triumph in the prosperity of the tradition. It's thoughtful and fun and sophisticated, utterly alluring, another fantastic success by Zach Condon. - Marisa Brown, All Music Guide
CAD 2733 - Johan Johannsson / Englabörn Released November 12 2007
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An important figure in Iceland's new music scene at the turn of the millennium, Jóhann Jóhannsson was mostly known as the co-founder of the production company-cum-record label Kitchen Motors until he released his first solo album, Englabörn, on the British label Touch. Words melt upon listening to this exquisite music, so simple yet indescribable. Written for a play by Hávar Sigurjónsson, it was reorganized for this release to stand on its own. It still wears an incidental gown, but its 16 short tracks do hold together nicely. Jóhannsson aimed for beauty in simplicity. Scored for string quartet, keyboards (piano, harmonium, organ), glockenspiel, electronics, and percussion, the music consists of slow melodies drowning in melancholia. Sad and profound, it could have sounded affected but on the contrary what comes through is honesty and a sense of light despair that has nothing theatrical about it. One thinks of Godspeed You Black Emperor! after the storm, Tibor Szemzó's use of strings (long fading chords in "...Eins Og Venjulegt Fólk" and many other places), or Boris Kovac's string quartets and stage music. Above it all reigns an immaterial Nordic aura, something the listener can instantly recognize as Icelandic in essence -- in the tiny trickles of glockenspiel, the solemnity of the sustained harmonium chords, the fragility and beauty that give this music its porcelain doll looks. Englabörn is tremendously cute on the outside, but the emotions it carries have little to do with sweetness. The listener comes out of it with a heavy heart, drenched, happy but surprised by the manipulative power the music had on him or her. Highly recommended. - Francois Couture, All Music Guide
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