My post-Christian nihilist pop-opera, The Little Death: Vol. 1, received some end-of-the-year love over the last few days. Here are some of publications/sites that mentioned it on their “Best of” lists:
The Huffington Post included my song I Don’t Have Any Fun in their “Top 10 Alternative Art Songs of 2001-2010”.
Daniel J. Kushner writes:
A post-Christian nihilist pop opera sounds like a strange, nearly impossible amalgam to synthesize. But for Brooklyn-based composer Matt Marks and his chief co-conspirator, vocalist Mellissa Hughes (both raised in the Southern Baptist tradition), The Little Death: Vol. 1–which Marks began writing in the summer of 2007–is the result of relentless “tinkering” and indiscriminately drawing from a reservoir of dizzying musical touchstones and the moods and emotions they engender.
And when the influences include the classic hymn “Morning Has Broken,” gospel mainstays “He Touched Me” and “When God Dips His Love in My Heart,” Japanese pop (or J-pop), Christian counterculture musicals of the late 1960s and early 1970s, techno, the Moral Majority-tinged contemporary Christian vocal stylings of Sandi Patty and 1990s Point of Grace, and hip-hop–all filtered through Marks’s preoccupations with the horror genre, the sexualization of Christian iconography, and what he refers to as fundamentalist, roots-based religion and music culture taken to this twisted pop culture extreme–well, that’s a recipe for cataclysmic drama.
Time Out New York included TDLV1 as one of the top ten best classical albums of 2010:
Steve Smith writes:
Teen spirit—in both the spiritual and earthy sense—animated this flamboyant electropop opera, exuberantly voiced by Marks and soprano Mellissa Hughes.
Seth Colter Walls, writer for Newsweek and The Awl, included TLDV1 as one of his top albums of 2010
Magiska writer TishTash featured TLDV1 as the #1 album of the year.
Alt-Classical.com featured TLDV1 as one of the top albums of the year
Endless Possibilities called TLDV1 the “biggest surprise of 2010” and said “I wasn’t expecting to listen to an album that mentioned Jesus about 10,000 times on repeat, at all.”
Warm fuzzies. And as always, you can check out the dedicated website for the album/show here: The Little Death: Vol. 1
And you can purchase it here:
Happy New Year everybody! Here’s to some new dreams and realities! :)
Matt Marks Music 