With the opening of the 2008-09 Concert Season, conductor JoAnn Falletta is celebrating her 10th anniversary as music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, an orchestra frequently shortlisted as one the best in the United States and which continues to thrive even as subscriptions are down elsewhere. Falletta's is a name also familiar from recordings; in just short of two decades she has managed to make more than 50 of them for labels such as Naxos, Koch, Delos, Albany, and others.

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Is the year 2008 a Bristol revival? First there's a new Portishead recording (Third), their first in over a decade, then Massive Attack finishes a new album (Weather Underground) and curates the Meltdown festival, and now, Tricky's released his finest record since Pre-Millennium Tension. Knowle West Boy is named for the Council Estates housing project neighborhood Tricky grew up in. This set is not shrouded in mystery: it's autobiographical. It's the first album of well-crafted songs he's come up with since Maxinquaye (but doesn't sound a thing like it).

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Thanks to George Orwell, 1984 seemed destined to be a gloomy, ominous year -- and there was some darkness, thanks to Echo & the Bunnymen and the Cure lurking in the background, but 1984 was much, much more than murky English mope rock. This was the year that gave us such blockbusters as Purple Rain, Born in the U.S.A., 1984, and Like a Virgin while also giving us such major underground touchstones as Let It Be, Reckoning, The Smiths, Zen Arcade, and Double Nickels on the Dime, as well as the first undisputed full-length hip-hop masterpiece, Run-D.M.C. — every one of them albums that defined the decade. But 1984 wasn’t just about canonical LPs. If anything, the singles of ‘84 were even greater than the albums, as this year saw a perfect storm of Top 40, album rock, MTV, and college radio hits, each one seeming better than the next.

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