With just one week left till the release of Laurie Anderson's Homeland comes the fourth in a series of videos featuring Anderson's male alter ego, Fenway Bergamot. Also new at nonesuch.com is an excerpt from the documentary included with the album, in which Anderson discusses the challenges of making the record and the invaluable support of Lou Reed. PopMatters calls Homeland "an incredible work of art pop of the highest order ... one of the most riveting and poignant accounts of post-9/11 America pop music has offered to date."
With just one week left till the release of Homeland, Laurie Anderson's first studio album in nearly a decade, that leaves just a few more days to hear the entire record streaming online at NPR.org, where Bob Boilen, host of NPR's All Songs Considered, says the project examines "the everyday, in new and inventive ways."
In that vein, Fenway Bergamot, Anderson's male alter ego, has been looking at various elements of contemporary life, everyday and otherwise, adding his own unique perspective to each, in the weekly video series on Nonesuch.com. Today's fourth episode of five, "On the Road," examines life on the road and how it affects one's perception of the world. See what he has to say at nonesuch.com/media.
Also new to nonesuch.com/media is a five-and-a-half-minute excerpt from "Homeland: The Story of the Lark," a documentary on the making of the project from filmmaker Braden King. The full-length, 41-minute film is featured on the DVD included with the album. In the excerpt, Anderson discusses the challenges involved in gathering the thousands of files she had assembled for the project over the years, the daunting task of creating a single album from them, and the invaluable support she received from her husband and Homeland co-producer Lou Reed throughout the process. Reed offers his perspective as well, as does album engineer Mario McNulty. Watch it now at nonesuch.com/media.
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PopMatters rates Homeland a nine out of ten. Reviewer Ron Hart says the album is "easily her most enjoyable and pop friendly work since 1982’s Big Science." Though the subject matter may be beyond traditional pop fare, "if you fully lend yourself to the mission of its message, you will be treated to an incredible work of art pop of the highest order," writes Hart, "loaded with about as many killer cameos as the new Roots album, How I Got Over," including Reed, Four Tet's Kieran Hebden, John Zorn, and Antony Hegarty.
The reviewer concludes that, "regardless of where you stand politically, theologically or environmentally, or even with regards to the challenging, avant-garde nature of her sound, you cannot deny the power of Anderson’s Homeland, one of the most riveting and poignant accounts of post-9/11 America pop music has offered to date."
Read the complete review at popmatters.com.
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