Led Zeppelin Reunion Concert: NME's Review and Photos

NME (New Musical Express) blogged the Led Zeppelin reunion concert live, song-by-song, and as promised they've posted a review of the show. (They claim it's the first review of the Led Zeppelin reunion show, but of course I have no way of knowing if that's true. But they did pop it out pretty damn fast.)

Here are the links to NME's Led Zeppelin reunion concert review and to their photos of the event.

Bottom line from the NME review: "If there were sceptics here tonight - there weren't but just for the sake of argument consider it - Led Zeppelin silenced them and banished any rotten memories of their shambolic Live Aid reunion."

I was a huge fan of the Led Zep in my formative years, when they were one of the biggest acts in rock. Here's hoping that this reunion concert is the start of something like a tour, if even a small one, rather than just a one-off.

Hey, when another of my childhood favorites, Cream, reunited at Royal Albert Hall they did a couple of shows at Madison Square Garden later on, and I was thrilled to attend. Maybe I'll have the same luck with the Led Zeppelin reunion.

Led Zeppelin Reunion Concert is Tonight

After a delay caused by a finger injury to Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin is ready for its delayed and much-anticipated reunion concert tonight, December 10th, at the O2 Arena.

Guitarist Jimmy Page tells the NME not to compare it to Led Zeppelin shows of the past (but how can anyone not do that?).

NME will apparently be liveblogging the show, posting song-by-song updates throughout the concert. (Link has been fixed; sorry for the bad link before.)

[UPDATE: NME has indeed provided the songs in the setlist, with commentary on how each one sounded. And they've promised to provide a review of the Led Zeppelin concert as a whole soon.]

Led Zeppelin has returned to the public consciousness in a big way recently, with this concert being discussed for months before it happened, as well as the band making all of its music available in Apple's iTunes music store.

Grammy Nominations Out; Problem Children Score Big

Being a temperamental, or downright self-destructive, artist seems to be no obstacle to racking up Grammy nominations. Kanye West, who likes to take the stage to voice his displeasure when he doesn't win, scored a total of 8 nominations for the 2008 Grammy Awards, while train wreck Amy Winehouse, who seems to see how many times and ways she can mess up her career and life, racked up 6 nominations.

I have to admit I haven't heard all of Amy Winehouse's much-praised album, “Back to Black.” The song rehab I found to be catchy upon first listening, but now I find it tiresome. I like the old-style soul sound of her CD (from what I've heard of it), but I'm not sure whether credit should go to Winehouse or to her producers and her outstanding backing band, the Dap-Kings (who are also the band for Sharon Jones, a journeywoman soul artist who gets about 5% of the attention the tattooed, drunk-and-disorderly Winehouse garners).

I'll need to look over the 2008 Grammy nominations in more detail before deciding how good a job the Grammy folks did in their picks. I was glad to see one of my favorite singers, Feist, nominated for Best New Artist (even though she came out with her third album in 2007), and to see the Albuquerque-born band The Shins nominated for Best Alternative Album.

Best CDs of 2007 ... It's That Time of Year Again

I've never really been into creating lists of the top 10 (or whatever) CDs of a given year, because any number you choose is going to be totally arbitrary. And with some years having an abundance of riches and others being pretty thin, the quality can vary widely from year to year.

So while I won't be picking a certain number of best CDs, I do offer my votes to a variety of online lists, so that the CDs I like best can be tallied in the totals. One of my favorite radio stations, New York City's WFUV (90.7 FM), lets you choose five CDs and three songs. So here's what I put down on my WFUV list, along with other favorites... keeping in mind that that the 10th CD I put on the list may be as good in my eyes as the number 5 CDs.

WFUV makes the task easier by providing a list of the CDs that game out in 2007, fallling into the station's broad category of Americana/folk/singer-songwriter category. And I have to note that although I'm a big music fan, there are many acclaimed CDs that come out each year that I just haven't heard enough of to consider them for a best-of list (or a worst-of list, for that matter).

Here's a list of some of my favorite CDs of 2007:
Arcade Fire, Neon Bible
Brandi Carlile, The Story
Bruce Springsteen, Magic
Feist, The Reminder
Jonatha Brooke, Careful What You Wish For
Kelly Willis, Translated from Love
Kim Richey, Chinese Boxes
KT Tunstall, Drastic Fantastic
New Pornographers, Challengers
Suzanne Vega, Beauty and Crime
The Donnas, Bitchin'

I'm sure I'll be adding to this list in the days to come as more CDs come to mind. What are your favorites?

And of course, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that in 2007, as in the previous two years, many of my musical discoveries were made through podcasts, from the CBC Radio 3 podcast to Morning Becomes Eclectic to the live concert downloads offered by All Songs Considered.

Podcast Review: Filmspotting Offers Movie Reviews and More

It would be easy to say that the movie review podcast Filmspotting is a thinking man's Ebert & Roeper, but that might make it seem pretentious. Rather, it's a more thoughtful, in-depth look at current movies, but with extra features for movie fans.

Adam Kempenaar and Matty Robinson's podcast takes the format Siskel & Ebert established many years ago--two critics with different backgrounds and opinions offering their takes on movies--and gives it a more detailed treatment, and while these two critics are considerable younger than Ebert and his co-host Roeper, they have a decent grasp of cinema history, and a good handle on film history in the last 20 years or so.

Kempenaar and Robinson discuss two or three main movies each week on the show, but the "extras" in the show are what make it really enjoyable. They usually have a "Top 5" list that ties into one of the main films under discussion (top 5 films about brothers, etc.) They also have an ongoing series of "marathons," in which they decide on a genre or subject to tackle--Westerns, silent films, documentaties, etc.--and choose a half-dozen or so films in that genre to review, considering one per week. (Following the death of Ingmar Bergman they embarked on a Bergman marathon, still in progress at this time.)

Filmspotting also includes other fun features, including "massacre theater," in which the hosts read lines of dialogue from a well-known movie and challenge listeners to identify the film, with the chance to win a DVD of their choice. Feedback from listeners is another regular feature, and Filmspotting also includes snippets of several songs from a particular independent musician each week--a good chance to discover some new or lesser-known musical talent, such as Alejandro Escovedo or Calexico.

Filmspotting is a very enjoyable podcast for movie watchers of all interests and backgrounds.

Suzanne Vega Returns to New York

Although best known to most people for her 1987 hit song “Luka,” singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega has had a long and varied career for more than 20 years. Her concert at Manhattan Center on Thursday was a great chance to see this native New Yorker performing in her hometown, playing songs from her very New York centric new album, Beauty and Crime.

In some of the new songs Vega harkens back to an earlier era in New York, and this look is also captured on the photography for the new album, and in her appearance onstage. For the entire show Vega wore a trenchcoat that would have been at home in a 1940s filim noir, with one side pulled down seductively to reveal a bare shoulder. And when playing several songs from Beauty and Crime she donned the type of old-fashioned hat you'd expect a hardened noir detective to wear.

The songs she played from Beauty and Crime talked about New York City of the past—New York is a Woman (“But not always a lady,” she noted), Edith Wharton's Figurines, Frank and Ava (about the stormy romance between Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner). But one poignant number, Angel's Doorway, tells the story of an NYPD cop named Angel who worked at Ground Zero.

While Vega's early work had acoustic roots, calling her a folk singer vastly oversimplifies the many styles she's worked in over the years. She showed this range during the concert, from the remix dance-pop version of her a capella hit Tom's Diner to the clanging industrial sound of Blood Makes Noise to the jazzy bossa nova feel of Caramel.

The Manhattan Center show was a fitting example of the many styles and faces of Suzanne Vega.