Brandon's Buzz

October roars to a close with a huge list of necessary tuneage, including a must-own new album from one of the best bands going. Dig in:

The year’s most hotly-anticipated theatrical event lands this week when This Is It — a film culled from over one hundred hours of footage of Michael Jackson’s final days, footage recorded during rehearsals for what were to be Jackson’s farewell concerts — debuts on three thousand screens today. To accompany the film, which is expected to be an epic, record-shattering blockbuster, comes an identically-titled 2-CD soundtrack, which contains a collection of Michael’s best-loved classics, as well as the Paul Anka-penned title track, which was discovered in a box of tapes in one of Jackson’s vaults this past summer following his passing.

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June kicks off with a pair of highly-anticipated returns and yet another dip into the catalog of an artist whose posthumous output has far exceeded what he managed to produce during his short time on this planet. Read on:

He only released one album (the amazing Grace) in his lifetime — he was recording number two when he accidentally drowned in Memphis at the heartbreakingly tender age of 30 — but his influence continues to be felt today on artists as varied as Rufus Wainwright, Radiohead, Duncan Sheik, even Kings of Leon. And in the year in which we commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of that one album’s original release, a new three-disc set, entitled Grace Around the World, arrives to reveal yet more of Jeff Buckley’s devastating brilliance. The collection’s first two discs document, on both CD and DVD, the highlights of the two-year world tour upon which Buckley embarked to promote the record, and the third disc contains the award-winning documentary Amazing Grace, which chronicles the enduring legacy of Buckley’s tragically brief career and life.

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So, we finally have a new president, which means we can finally get back to the important stuff: what we’ll be listening to when we realize that the cesspool of American politics will likely do to him exactly what it did to most of the rest of ‘em. Lucky for us, we’ll always have magnificent music on which to fall back.

Speaking of our new president, a compilation album which was commissioned Barack Obama’s campaign (and which, heretofore, was only available with a donation to the campaign’s website) has been granted a mass release.
Yes We Can: Voices of a Grassroots Movement features previously released tracks from Sheryl Crow, John Mayer, and Stevie Wonder, among others, as well as a new track from John Legend (an impassioned cover of U2’s “Pride (In the Name of Love)”) and a new collaboration — their second — between Kanye West and Maroon 5’s lead singer Adam Levine.

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