2.1.10
Writing an in-depth review for the new Vampire Weekend's Contra must be pretty hard, because it all boils down to: if you liked the first Vampire Weekend album, you'll like this one; if you didn't, you won't. I kinda like the first one, and I kinda like this one. The only real difference is that there are no obvious great tracks on the new one, but overall it's much more consistent with fewer weak spots than their debut.

2.2.10
Spoon's Transference might be my favorite Spoon outing since Kill the Moonlight, the first Spoon record I ever owned. It's a different vibe than that record, but it shares the same stripped-down, minimalist approach (although as rock bands go, Spoon is pretty minimalist in general). And now that they've achieved moderate success, it doesn't feel like they're trying so hard for a mainstream breakthrough——they seem much more comfortable simply being who they are.

2.3.10
Pitchfork is one of the few sites I visit on a daily basis that I have a mostly hostile relationship with, but every now and then they do turn me on to a band that I likely wouldn't have stumbled across otherwise. Surfer Blood is the latest of these——their debut album Astro Coast received one of Pitchfork's coveted Best New Music designations a few weeks ago——and while I'm not sure whether this record will make my top 10 for 2010 or not, it is a pretty good listen. "Anchorage" and opener "Floating Vibes" are particularly catchy, and the rest of it mixes in influences from Vampire Weekend to the current crop of noise pop bands like Wavves, No Age, and Japandroids.

2.4.10
I resisted the hype about the xx for a long time, but when I went and actually listened to a few clips from their acclaimed debut on iTunes, I decided to throw it into my recent Amazon music order. After a few listens, I think maybe it will just be a mediocre album for me——it makes a good first impression, with overtones of early Cure and some shared elements with Black Box Recorder (spare production, breathy female singer). But by the end it's already starting to sound like a cliche of itself, and while there are no songs that really annoy me, I haven't fallen in love with any of them either.

2.5.10
The new Magnetic Fields, Realism, is an all-acoustic, no-drums effort coming on the heels of the feedback-drenched homage to Jesus and Mary Chain that was Distortion. Although Stephen Merritt has been one of the flag bearers for chamber pop for years, at least since the seminal 69 Love Songs, the best songs on this record practically define the genre.

Interspersed with some great tracks, however, are some too-cute-by-half numbers like "We Are Having a Hootenanny" and——wait for it——"Doll's Tea Party". Still, aside from the closer, only one other song clocks in at over three minutes, and that one just does, so if there's a song you don't care for, it will be over soon enough, and you'll likely be on to a better one.

My only other quibble with this album is that the CD version I bought has only 13 songs, while the iTunes version has 14, and while the 14th is available as a single purchase (a lot of times, these so-called bonus tracks are bundled so that you can only buy them from iTunes if you buy the entire album), it's irritating to me to have to spend another $.99 after I've already spent more for a physical copy of the album than I would have if I had bought the 14 songs as a unit on iTunes. If the song was really a throwaway, I might not have been so irritated or felt compelled to buy it, but it's actually one of the better tracks——I would gladly have traded "Hootenanny" for "When Will You Love Me Again?".

2.8.10
Los Campesinos are a band you either immediately get and fall in love with or don't get and hate——I don't think there's much of a middle ground. I happen to love them, although I was worried that their schtick might start to wear a little thin by the third album, similar to what happened with Art Brut, another quirky British band with a very distinctive sound who I also love but who definitely failed on their third release.

The first couple of times through, I was worried that Romance Is Boring would fall short, but it really started to grow on me. I don't think it's their best effort, and there are fewer peaks than on their previous two, but it's consistentlt good to great, and while their signature sound remains intact, there are also signs of the growth that will be critical for them to keep their fans interested and win them new ones.

2.9.10
My favorite moment so far on the new Spoon record, Transference, comes at the very end of "The Mystery Zone". The song is chugging along, as it has for nearly five minutes, and it suddenly cuts out just as Britt Daniel is about to repeat the phrase "the mystery zone"——he gets through "the mys—", just enough of the phrase so you know what's coming, and then the song abruptly ends, like its hit a wall (it's comparable to the ending of the final episode of The Sopranos, although it's not nearly as wrenching, because you've only invested five minutes in the song, whereas fans invested years in that series).

"The Mystery Zone" is one of the more repetitive songs on the record (which is saying something for a Spoon track), and every time I look at the song length, I think it's way too long, but I never feel that way when I'm actually listening to it. In general the songs seem longer than they need to be——on the similarly taut, terse Kill the Moonlight, the tracks were much shorter, averaging less than three minutes, whereas here they average four plus. But again, none of the tracks feels as long as they actually are, which is a neat trick if you can pull it off.

2.10.10
I'm really getting into Surfer Blood's Astro Coast, but the two standouts are the opener, "Floating Vibes", and "Anchorage". "Floating Vibes" is a great way to kick off the record——it reminds me of being on a speedboat and heading out of port towards the ocean, which maybe is something that won't resonate as strongly with someone who didn't grow up near the sea. But I bet most people will still think it's a kick ass song.

"Anchorage" might be my favorite song. There's nothing wrong with the first half, but a couple of minutes in and you wonder if they're really going to keep this up for six and a half minutes. Brilliantly, they don't——right around the halfway mark, the song uses a bridge to kick into another gear, and those last three minutes are about as close to pure bliss as anything that's been released so far this year.

2.11.10
My favorite Animal Collective songs don't usually start off with a bang, but somewhere in the middle they have a section that just kills me, that I can't get enough of. This is the case with the first two tracks off their November EP, Fall Be Kind, "Graze" and "What Would I Want? Sky".

The other three tracks on this release fall into the second category of Animal Collective tracks: not bad but nothing really heart-stopping or amazing. But I'm still wrestling with "On a Highway", which doesn't have a musical stretch that makes me rate it four or five stars, but there's a verse that gets me every time. The song is Avery Tare's stream of consciousness thoughts while on tour, driving between shows, and includes this gem:

On a highway
I'm sick from too much reaading
Jealous of Noah's dreaming
Can't help my brain from thinking

I've always had trouble sleeping in cars, and I can't read in the car because it gives me motion sickness, so those words have personal resonance. I don't know if they alone will be enough to lift this from a three star track to a four star, but they are the reason I haven't taken the song out of my daily playlist yet.

2.12.10
Being able to listen to music while I shovel snow makes it a lot more enjoyable experience, but those stupid little iPod shuffle earbuds fall out of my ears way to easy when I'm involved in strenuous activity. I would just go and buy a better pair to replace them, except the shuffle doesn't have any controls on the device itself, only on the wire coming from the right earbud.

I'm sure there are replacement earphones that come with the controls built-in, but I'm sure I'll also pay a pretty penny for a version with those controls versus the same headphone without. I guess it's not a huge issue, because the earbuds stay in fine on the treadmill and while mowing the lawn, and hopefully my career as a full-time snow shoveler is quickly coming to an end, but it is annoying how difficult/expensive it is to get better-fitting earbuds for the shuffle.

2.15.10
I still haven't written about the of Montreal show down at the 9:30 a couple of weeks back, so here we go. As any of you who read this blog with any regularity knows, I've been pretty obsessed with this band for about the last year and a half——just long enough to have missed their last tour in support of Skeletal Lamping. And given that their next album isn't due out until later this year, I thought it would probably be fall before they hit the road again.

So I was pleasantly surprised when they announced a quick tour up and down the east coast in January, especially when I emailed Sliced Tongue, who is similarly obsessed, and found out he would be able to attend the show as well. Here's the setlist as reported by someone else in attendance:

Suffer For Fashion
Mingusings
Forecast Fascist Future
Du Og Meg
Lysergic Bliss
Disconnect the Dots
Spike the Senses
And I've Seen A Bloody Shadow
Plastis Wafers
St. Exquisite's Confessions
Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse
Metal Finds Troll
An Eluardian Instance
Oslo In The Summertime
My British Tour Diary
A Sentence Of Sorts In Kongsvinger
She's a Rejecter

Encore
For Our Elegant Caste
I Want You Back (Jackson 5 cover)

This sounds pretty on target to me, but I think at least one song was left off——I remember them playing two unreleased songs, and there's only one on this list ("Metal Finds Troll"). I'm thinking it could be "Coquet Coquet", which shows up on some other setlists from this tour and doesn't appear in their recorded catalog.

It was a pretty good show, although not nearly as theatrical as I'm betting their shows supporting Skeletal Lamping were. They did have a few guys in black leotards and masks who would creep around the stage acting out little vignettes every now and then, and at the end of the first set Kevin Barnes hoisted himself up onto a crucifix substitute, but other than that, it was a pretty straightforward show. They played a lot of stuff from the earliest part of my of Montreal collection, stuff from Sunlandic Twins, but they did play three of my favorite more recent tracks, "Oslo in the Summertime", "A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger", and "An Eluardian Instance".

I'd go see them again in a heartbeat, even if it was a relatively stripped down affair like this show, but I'm really looking foward to the tour in support of their next album, which I'm hoping will be a more elaborately staged event. Unfortunately, Kevin announced during the show that the new record won't be out until September, so I'm guessing that I won't get a chance to see them live again until next fall.

2.16.10
In a band like of Montreal, where leader Kevin Barnes has, for the last several albums, written all the songs, played and recorded each instrumental part in his home studio, and basically used the band as a touring vehicle, you might think that the other musicians in the band are less than stellar. But seeing them live, especially on this most recent mini-tour, you find out that's not the case at all.

The opening band was James Husband's (the drummer for of Montreal) side project, in which he plays guitar and sings. In addition, the bassist for of Montreal, Davey Pierce, plays the drums in James Husband's band, and also played guitar for a song or two (Kevin Barnes made an early appearance and sat in on drums when he switched to guitar). So that's at least three multi-instrumentalists in of Montreal, and even though I didn't care much for James Husband's songs, it's clear that he and Davey Pierce are way talented musicians who aren't just riding Kevin Barnes' coattails (although oddly, when comparing the three drummers we saw that night, James Husband seemed the least fluid and comfortable behind the kit).

2.17.10
One more note about of Montreal: if they want to make a lot of money quick, they should do a whole album of Michael Jackson covers. Their closing number in DC, as it had been a couple of nights before in New York City when Solange joined them onstage, was the Jackson 5's "I Want You Back", and it was incredible. The whole show was high energy, but that song just about blew the roof off the club.

2.18.10
There's an ad for AT&T that's running during the Olympics (it features American speed skater Apolo Ohno) that features the xx song "Intro". I've recently bought the xx's debut, which features this song, and I'm not that wild about it even though it's been getting rave reviews. There's a point in the ad, though, where they speed up the song, and I have to say, it sounds a lot sharper and more appealing than the album version (which appears to pick up the pace when it adds in drums, but which in reality keeps the exact same beat that it had before).

Not that this makes me like the album any more than I do after listening to it a few times, but the slow pace is something that wears on me with this record, and I wonder if a similar treatment to the entire thing would have made it more tolerable for me.

2.19.10
I'm stuck with rating the songs on Vampire Weekend's Contra. I feel like if I rate one of them a four, I have to rate all of them a four, because they're all of the exact same quality.

But I don't want to rate all of them a four.

2.22.10
Okay, this week I'm finally going to get around to my best of lists from 2009. I toyed with changing the format to one where I didn't rank songs or albums, I just listed all the ones I think are worth owning/listening to, but I'm not ready to scrap the top 10 format yet. Instead, tomorrow I'm going to list all the great singles that didn't make the top 10, with the limitation that each artist is only going to be listed once even if there are multiple great songs on an album.

Wednesday will be the top 10 singles, Thursday will be the good records that didn't make the top 10, and Friday will be the top 10 albums. And then we can get back to 2010, which by then will be on the cusp of entering it's third month.

2.23.10
Here, in no particular order, are songs that I loved in 2009 that didn't make my top 10 list:

"Theseus"——Patrick Wolf
"Perpetual Motion Machine"——Modest Mouse
"Nothing To Hide"——Yo La Tengo
"Snookered"——Dan Deacon
"Aisle 13"——Built To Spill
"To the Dregs"——Wavves
"I'm Falling"——Robyn Hitchcock
"Wet Hair"——Japandroids
"Paper Lace"——Sunset Rubdown
"I Was Once a Loyal Lover"——Death Cab for Cutie
"Worried Shoes"——Karen O
"What Would I Want? Sky"——Animal Collective
"See You"——Dinosaur Jr
"First Time High (Of Chicago Acoustic Version)"——of Montreal
"Wilco (the song)"——Wilco
"Indiana"——Cymbals Eat Guitars
"Genie"——No Age
"Lost At Sea"——The Fiery Furnaces

Tomorrow: my top 10 singles of 2009.

2.24.10
Top 10 songs from 2009, in descending order from number ten to number one:

"God Help The Girl"——God Help The Girl
I love almost every song on this record, a side project from Belle & Sebastian frontman Stuart Murdoch, but I especially love the songs that feature Catherine Ireton on vocals. This record's not for everyone——it's not even for all Belle & Sebastian fans——if you had described it to me, I probably would have thought it wasn't a record for me. But I listened and fell in love.

"Rotten Mind"——Jay Reatard
Almost every song Jay Reatard's final album has at least a few lines that are a little chilling to hear in the context of his unexpected death in January of this year. This song's entry: "I see myself high up in the sky/People around me hoping I don't die." As with many of his songs, you'd miss the darkness if you just listened to the music and ignored the lyrics; he had a gift for writing incredibly catchy, minimal punk hooks.

"Simple As..."——Kid Cudi
There were lots of great choices for a song to represent this record on this list, but this is the one that probably has the most appeal on the first listen. The Lady Gaga-sampling "Make Her Say" (featuring guest vocals by Kanye West and Common) is the best known single from the record, but "Simple As..." is a better song. It's just harder to figure out where it would fit in the modern MTV/radio programming landscape.

"Now We Can See"——The Thermals
"Now We Can See" is the strongest track on an album so consistent that it's hard to rate any individual track lower than four out of five stars. There are so many good songs on this record, I could change my mind about which one is best tomorrow. But for today, this is the one I'm going with.

"Psychic City"——YACHT
I'll be honest, hearing this song used in a commercial for Dayquil a few months ago made me love it a little less. But only a little.

"The Rake's Song"——The Decemberists
I grew to love The Hazards of Love, the album that spawned this single, but never like I loved this song. This was one of my favorite Decemberists tracks from the first note to the abrupt ending, and it still gets my blood going months and dozens of listens later. I saw a concert where the performed the entire album in sequence, and the buildup to this song was almost unbearable. Not exactly typical for either the album or the band (and I say that as a longtime fan), but one of their best efforts.

"When We Swam"——Thao
Yeah, I know you've never heard of her. Now you have. Listen to this song and fall in love with her, buy her records and fall even harder.

"Lisztomania"——Phoenix
I wrestled for a long time with which Phoenix song to include on this list, "1901" or "Lisztomania". "Lisztomania" was my initial choice——it was the first song I ever heard by the band, and it's what motivated me to buy the full album——but I came to appreciate "1901" the longer I listened. Until it started showing up on all those ridiculous Cadillac commericals, which cooled my ardor for it a bit. The video of the band busking the song next to the Eiffel Tower almost brought it back around to the top spot, but not quite. So "Lisztomania" it is.

"My Girls"——Animal Collective
The refrain from which the title is taken is just magic. It will be stuck in your head for days, weeks, months, years.

"Hysteric"——Yeah Yeah Yeahs
I never thought they'd match "Maps", and I bet they didn't, either. But "Hysteric" comes pretty damn close. When I type out the words "You suddenly complete me", it has an uncomfortable association with Jerry Maquire, but I swear to god, you'll never think about that terrible movie once when Karen O sings them.

2.25.10
Here, in no particular order, are records that I thought were worth owning in 2009 that didn't make my top 10 list:

Bitte Orca——Dirty Projectors
Dragonslayer——Sunset Rubdown
See Mystery Lights——YACHT
Post-Nothing——Japandroids
Farm——Dinosaur Jr
Wilco (the album)——Wilco
The Hazards of Love——The Decemberists
Why There Are Mountains——Cymbals Eat Guitars
Popular Songs——Yo La Tengo
Wavvves——Wavves
The Eternal——Sonic Youth

Tomorrow: my top 10 albums of 2009.

2.26.10
The artists on my top 10 albums from 2010 is strikiingly similar to my singles list; in fact, the only substitutions are Fiery Furnaces for Sunset Rubdown and Modest Mouse for YACHT.

I'm Going Away——Fiery Furnaces
Not as challenging and varied as Blueberry Boat, but their most consistent and pleasurable listen since that record. I'd almost given up on them after Rehearsing My Choir and Bitter Tea (Widow City was okay, but I never really took to it), but if an album of this quality is a template for the rest of their career, I'm in for the long haul.

No One's First, and You're Next——Modest Mouse
Technically an EP, these eight songs still clock in at around 34 minutes, just a couple of minutes shorter than Japandroids' eight song Post-Nothing, which is counted as an album. These are tracks leftover from sessions for the last two records, and by my account they're better than most of the stuff on those releases. "Perpetual Motion Machine" and "History Sticks to Your Feet" are two of the best songs they've released since entering their post-"Float On" we're-actually-a-popular-band phase, and I can only hope that they're harbingers of what's to come on the next full-length.

Now We Can See——The Thermals
Not as lyrically incisive or conceptually challenging as their The Body, The Blood, The Machine, their breakthrough effort, this is still a solid follow up with no throwaway tracks. I don't really understand how anyone who likes loud guitars and catchy pop hooks can not like this band.

Know Better Learn Faster——Thao
I was a fan of We Brave Bee Stings and All, but there was a bit more filler than I liked and too few blow-you-away singles. This record is much more consistent overall and has more memorable tracks, particularly "When We Swam", which at 2:59 is one second short of being the perfect three minute pop song.

Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix——Phoenix
Take out "Love Like a Sunset Part I" and this album becomes a lot more perfect, but it's pretty close anyway.

God Help The Girl——God Help The Girl
I can't really justify my love of this record, and I don't expect it to rank very high on many people's lists, even those who are die-hard Belle & Sebastian fans. Like most of Stuart Murdoch's releases this decade, there are definite weak spots that are almost so bad that they're embarrassing, and there's an earnestness that I'm sure sounds painful to some, but the overall concept works for me. I even think the two Belle & Sebastian covers improve significantly on the originals. Whatever becomes of this project in the long-term, I sure hope it's not the last I hear from vocalist Catherine Ireton.

Merriweather Post Pavilion——Animal Collective
I'm not going to say that Animcal Collective gets better and better or more listenable with every release, because they've been pretty consistently producing this sound since their early days. But I will say they seem more willing to latch onto a sweet spot in a song and hold on for dear life. They still don't really do choruses, but they're taking some of those perfect sequences and turning them into refrains, lending a little more structure to their songwriting and giving us the chance to dive back into the best part more than once a song.

Watch Me Fall——Jay Reatard
Even without the weight added by the accidental death of Jay Reatard earlier this year, his final record was a dark meditation masquerading as sneering punk. Musically, I wish contemporary punk sounded more like this and less like Blink-182 and Avril Lavigne. And I wish Jay wasn't dead.

Man On The Moon——Kid Cudi
It took me a few listens to warm to this record, but now I'm hooked. I don't think there's been a better hip hop release since mentor Kanye West's debut. I said it in my original review of this record, but I haven't thought of a better (or more complimentary) way to describe it, so I'll repeat it here: this is what it would sound like if TV on the Radio decided to make a hip hop record.

It's Blitz!——Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Not as loud as the title might lead you to believe, this is the band's finest and most consistent work to date. "Hysteric", "Skeletons", and "Little Shadow" rank among their best, and there's not a single clunker on the rest of the album. I'm starting to get the feeling that this band might become sort of a high-profile side project for each of the members, where they'll record a new album together, tour, make a lot of money, and then take three or four years off to do other stuff, so I'm not optimistic about getting another full-length from them anytime soon. But if waiting that long means we get more records like this, it will be worth it.