Wilco will be on hand when Australia's award-winning Byron Bay Blues Festival makes its way across the Tasman Sea to launch a New Zealand offshoot in 2008 called BluesfestNZ (aka the Coromandel Peninsula Blues and Roots Music Festival 2008). The band will be joining the line-up for the inaugural event as part of its March 2008 tour of Australia and New Zealand.

The Star-News out of North Carolina says Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd  "deserves a wide audience." The Star-News review praises Burton for making "easily the best movie musical of 2007" and creating for it a concept that "works brilliantly." In the end, it's Sondheim's score that proves to be "the real hero of the show." In the film, "the music is powerful ... but what strikes you is how lyrical it is" and "far more complex and interesting" than your standard musical-theatre fare.

Wilco's Sky Blue Sky has made the Best of 2007 list from WFUV, 90.9 FM, in New York. "Another great album from Wilco," writes WFUV's music director, Rita Houston, "Sky Blue Sky doesn't hit a wrong note."

Alex Ross, the New Yorker's classical music critic, has posted on his blog, The Rest Is Noise, his Apex 07 list—some of the best performances and recordings he's heard this year. Among the best on CD: Wilco's "On and On and On," from Sky Blue Sky. And among his favorite performances of 2007 are the Disney Hall performance of John Adams's Naive and Sentimental Music by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the LA Philharmonic, and Audra McDonald in a Valentine's Day performance of Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny at LA Opera.

In an in-depth article for Wired magazine, David Byrne examines the history of music, recorded and performed, and looks ahead, offering six possibilities for what the future might hold for creators, distributors, and consumers of music in its many forms. Included with the article are a number of audio clips from his conversations on the subject with Brian Eno, label execs, and artist managers. In a separate article, Byrne and Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke chat about the interplay of business and art in music.

The LAist calls Tim Burton's film version of Sweeney Todd a "wonderful, hilarious, inspired" work. "[L]et there be no doubt that Tim Burton has crafted a true piece of musical cinema from Stephen Sondheim's bloody masterpiece." In the title role, Johnny Depp is "magnificent," his performance "so powerful as Todd that you eventually begin to relish his countless murders." Ultimately, "Sweeney Todd joins Ed Wood and Edward Scissorhands as Burton's finest work."

In his review of There Will Be Blood for Reuters news service, John DeFore writes that Jonny Greenwood's "captivating" score is an important player in the film, "greatly contributing to the sense that tectonic forces lie beneath the drama." 

The San Diego Film Critics Society has named There Will Be Blood the winner of four awards, including Best Score for Jonny Greenwood. Awards for the film also went to Paul Thomas Anderson for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay (based on Upton Sinclair's novel Oil!) and Daniel Day-Lewis for Best Actor. The San Diegan critics also recognized Sweeney Todd's Dante Ferretti for Best Production Design.

"[W]hen you hear something as audaciously new as There Will Be Blood," writes iF magazine, "it’s a listening experience akin to coming across an oil gusher in a movie theater—the kind that blows your seat (and ears) to the ceiling with the sheer, often-insane beauty of what you’re hearing." With an originality that "spurts in spades," Jonny Greenwood has created an "entrancing" score. "Greenwood shows he can do orchestra with the same innovative quality that he approaches Radiohead’s trance-rock with ... And like P.T Anderson’s best soundtracks, Greenwood achieves a musical f-you wallop that grabs our attention ... [W]e feel that Anderson and Greenwood have taken us on a journey into sound that’s truly new for film scoring." The film "offers a major discovery in the talents of Jonny Greenwood."

Giving Youssou N'Dour's Rokku Mi Rokka (Give and Take) four out of four stars and naming it the CD pick of the week, the Toronto Star says the new album is "another breakthrough" following Youssou's string of groundbreaking records with Nothing's in Vain and Egypt. Writes the Star's John Goddard, Rokku Mi Rokka features "rich, instrumental textures and soaring melodies" and should bring Youssou the "smash, crossover success" he deserves.

Sufjan Stevens, when asked at the PENultimate Lit event last night in Park Slope, Brooklyn, to name his top five albums of all time, named just one: Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians. The event was organized by the PEN American Center to examine the intersection of literature and the arts; hosted by Rick Moody, it featured a Q&A with Sufjan and fellow writer/singer-songwriter Wesley Stace (aka John Wesley Harding), as well as a performance by each. The "top five albums" question came from an audience member.

"Every time I’m about to watch a Daniel Day-Lewis movie," writes Variety's Stuart Levine on MSNBC, "I expect to be floored—to be brought into a world I’ve never seen and be enveloped by a character who I will undoubtedly obsess about for days, if not weeks ... Right now Day-Lewis is the Robert De Niro of the late 1970s-early ’80s, back when De Niro was a god among mortals." In There Will Be Blood Day-Lewis has made "as powerful and compelling a character as he’s ever created."