Cordavision Music Reviews

If you wanna know my thoughts on the movie itself, click here ! If you anything about director Baz Luhrmann, he’s always used music in his movies in relatively weird ways, whether you like it or not. A prominent example is his adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby , which has heavy involvement from Jay-Z, serving as an executive producer for the film and its soundtrack. Oddly enough, one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in a movie recently is Tobey Maguire narrating over “No Church in the Wild” from Watch the Throne . We now have a similar soundtrack for Luhrmann’s latest film, a biopic of music icon Elvis Presley. The movie’s fantastic, but since the music is so tied to it, it’s gotta be judged on its own. Let’s see how the ELVIS soundtrack does. There are a few distinct categories for the tracks: 1. Recordings of Elvis repurposed for the movie, 2. Austin Butler actually singing Elvis songs taken from the movie, and 3. Existing Elvis tracks being remixed by artist...

The double whammy of Dawn of Chromatica and this within weeks of each other is so funny to me. For those that don’t know, this album marks the end of an era for music. Because of his battle with Alzheimer’s, this is the final album of jazz legend Tony Bennett. To end his career on a high note, he’s decided to make another covers album with pop icon Lady Gaga. Their last album together, 2014’s Cheek to Cheek , ended up being a welcome surprise for fans of both parties involved. Now, with Love For Sale , we not only have a second helping of that but along with this being Bennett’s final album, there’s a lot of good expectations for it. Let’s just not waste any more time and get into it. Remember when I covered that Black Keys album earlier this year, which was covers of 50s-60s blues-rock tracks? These are essentially jazz/show tune covers, and really, what’d you expect? Did you think this was gonna be bad? Both Bennett and Gaga are very talented singers, and most of these songs (if not...

CLASSIC ALBUM #2: THESE ALBUMS ARE NOT RANKED OR SCORED BECAUSE THEY’RE, WELL, CLASSIC. Something I did this summer was binge the original run of the legendary Japanese anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion and its finale movie, The End of Evangelion . It really has been a pretty mind-blowing series, and with the four Rebuild films coming to the U.S. later this month, I decided I somehow had to get some of its music onto here. I’ve thought about reviewing the recent compilation, Evangelion Finally , which is essentially a greatest hits album, but the more I’ve thought about it, The End of Evangelion ’s score/soundtrack really deserves some praise and recognition. They might be the same in this case, but who cares, this is my website. Let’s get into what makes Shiro Sagisu’s score/soundtrack to The End of Evangelion a classic album. Let me just come out on record that this soundtrack has one of my favorite classical pieces of all time. It’s Sagisu’s rendition of Johann Sebastian Bach’...

An old car on a Black Keys album cover. What can go wrong? I’ve never really the biggest fan of cover albums. I don’t have anything against covers, though, they can be very fun. One of my favorite songs of all time is Frank Ocean’s cover of The Isley Brothers’ “At Your Best (You Are Love)” from his album, Endless. It mainly has to do with the ‘album’ concept of covers that I don’t really get. Looking at more recent examples, Weezer put out a covers album a few years back, their Teal Album , and it was fun and certainly was technically sound. At the completely other end of the quality spectrum, Glen Danzig put out an Elvis covers album. Sounds decent on paper, right? It was awful. Everything about it was bad, Danzig’s vocals and the production included. Hell, I don’t even pay attention to mixing on albums, but good god the mixing was bad. Now, we have a covers album from Ohio duo The Black Keys, which is renditions of blues rock songs from blues-rock artists that were around in the 50s ...