The band’s second album is a banjo-and-acoustic-guitar cornucopia, as frontman Marcus Mumford does his best Dave Matthews vocal impression, wailing on in such a way that those allergic to hip-hop and pop can insist this is “authentic” musical expression.
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In other words, it’s the kind of crap that Grammy voters always, always fall for - the sonic equivalent of bland, well-meaning Oscar bait. Perfectly disposable, the songs of Mumford & Sons traffic in genteel folk-rock filled with romantic themes and heartfelt emotional uplift. In Wilson’s book, he allows that her music “might be excellent for having a first kiss, or burying your grandma, or breaking down in tears.” Sure, but there’s got to be better music to soundtrack these moments.
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Combining arena-sized pop arrangements with bombastic belting, the album plays like the gaudy soundtrack for a future melodramatic Broadway jukebox musical. Wilson’s well-reviewed book helped make Dion cool - or, at the least, sympathetic - for a minute, but that doesn’t change the fact that Falling Into You is still incredibly hard to stomach. In 2007, music critic Carl Wilson published Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, an in-depth analysis of Celine Dion’s power-ballad aesthetic, taking the Canadian singer seriously in a way that most rock journalists never do. To celebrate, let’s rank the ‘Album of the Year’ winners from the past 20 years - the ones helped by the Grammys blue-ribbon panel. As a result, hipper, more critically-acclaimed and groundbreaking works (like Radiohead’s OK Computer and Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly) started to (finally!) appear on the nominees list.
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In the mid 1990s, frustrated that milquetoast records (such as Tony Bennett’s MTV Unplugged) kept winning coveted ‘Album of the Year’, the Academy started convening a secret blue-ribbon panel of 25 members who would sample the top 20 vote getters in the major categories - including ‘Album of the Year’, and then determine what the final nominees should be. This Monday night is the 2016 Grammy Awards, but it will also mark the unofficial 20th anniversary of an important rule change implemented by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, one that most music fans aren’t even aware of.