A new trend

I've long been fascinated with the growing trend of classical crossover artists - opera singers/operatic artists marketed as pop stars, all of them recording more or less the same songs. However the concept is beginning to grow old and I've started to notice another trend in the classical crossover field - choir boys (and in some cases girls) marketed as little angels, with a reportoire ranging from hymns to enya-like renditions of pop ballads. The result is squeaky clean, often very predictable, recorded with the reverb on 100% and dripping with candy floss sweetness.

My first encounter with this genre was through Aled Jones, because he recorded a lot of tracks in collaboration with a group of choir boys called Libera. I got their best of collection out of curiosity and I was fascinated by the genre itself. Because of the clearly exaggerated reverb effect, the songs seem like some kind of spiritual background sound for a church scene in a TV series. The focus is not so much on the voices in itself, as the spiritual meaning behind the sound as a whole - it's evidently supposed to sound like some distant, heavenly angel choir.

The "new age choir boy" genre also includes the trio that simply call themselves "The Choir Boys". The only remarkable difference between them and Libera is that they are fewer - the sound is pretty much the same. However it seems like imagewise, these young men are more marketed like pop teenagers instead of like angels.

And then we have Angelis - 3 boys and 3 girls, also giving the impression of being sqeaky clean pre-teen pop idols. The fascinating part is that they sound like the younger siblings of Amici Forever - it's just like the people who made a pre-teen copy of S Club 7 decided to make a pre-teen copy of Amici too.

Their sound and image seems like a desperate attempt to squeeze this genre even further - I am curious to see how far it will go before this trend too starts to fade due to lack of originality. There are only so many versions of Lloyd Webber's Pie Jesu one can take.