10.1.10
I thought Soundgarden actually had a new album, not just a hits/rarities compilation. I mean, there's little chance it wouldn't suck given Chris Cornell's output since they disbanded, but I was a fan of a lot of their records and I'd at least have to listen to some clips if it was really a new release. But now that I know this is just rehashing their old stuff, I can save myself the trouble.

10.4.10
I wouldn't be surprised if my favorite track on No Age's Everything In Between, "Chem Trails", is Sliced Tongue's least favorite. And I wouldn't be surprised if his favorite, whatever that may be, is my least favorite. We're both fans, but we listen with ears tuned to very different frequencies sometimes. I guess it says something about the band that they can appeal to us both for completely disparate reasons.

10.5.10
Got some new CDs today: Marnie Stern's Marnie Stern, Tim Kasher's The Game of Monogamy, and Corin Tucker's 1,000 Years. I've kind of been in the mood to listen to stuff from the 90s, however, and since there aren't too many more new releases coming out this year that I'm interested in, it might be a while before I give any of these a serious listen.

10.6.10
So some guy is trying to raise $10 million that he's planning to use as a bribe to convince Weezer to break up. I'm certainly not going to put any money towards this cause but if it happened, I wouldn't be upset about it.

10.7.10
I'm not sure if I can convince myself to enter Belle & Sebastian's contest where you write 300 words about love, and if they think your entry is the best one, Stuart Murdoch will come visit you and write a song about you. But I have to say, it's hard to imagine a cooler prize than that.

And if you're looking for some inspiration, the new album is streaming over at NPR until the record's release next Tuesday.

10.8.10
I don't initially love the new Marnie Stern as much as I have grown to love This Is It And I Am It And You Are It And So Is That And He Is It And She Is It And It Is It And That Is That (you're damn right I copy-pasted that from iTunes), but it did take me awhile to appreciate that record, so I'm hoping this one will be a grower too.

10.11.10
There are still a few releases I'm looking forward to this year, but we're getting pretty close to that long, dark period between November and March when there aren't too many releases from indie bands to look forward to. So far this year there have only been a couple of records that really surprised me (in a good way), and I don't hold out a lot of hope that there will be any more between now and January. Not a terrible year for music, but definitely lacking a wow factor in terms of new artists.

10.12.10
New Belle & Sebastian and Sufjan Stevens arrived today from Amazon. I've been resisting the urge to stream Belle & Sebastian Write About Love on NPR to save it for release day, but I've been sorely tempted. Meanwhile, I have yet to pull the trigger on Sufjan's preview EP, All Delighted People, that was released a couple of months ago, despite the positive reviews it garnered, because I just couldn't get into the sample song clips. Hopefully that's not a harbinger of my reaction to the full-length, but mood-wise, I'm not sure if I'm really ready for a new Sufjan work.

10.13.10
I wasn't really that into the new Sufjan Stevens CD, The Age of Adz, the first time I was listening to it, and then I hit the wall: the 25 minute closing track "Impossible Soul". I stopped listening about halfway through, and although there's nothing besides the length that bothers me about the song, I don't know if I'll ever make it all the way through; I just don't have that kind of attention span. Call me shallow, call me impatient, whatever, but I live for the three minute pop song, and it's hard for me to imagine a single track taking up 25 minutes of my time at a stretch.

10.14.10

Mixtape: 1988

Track 14
"Ghetto Soundwave"
Truth and Soul
Fishbone

I've had writer's block trying to come up with something for this entry, and although it's not solely to blame for the long pause between this entry and the last one for the 1988 mixtape, I think I probably could have pushed through if another song or another band had been in this slot.

So let's just keep this short and sweet: I debated long and hard between this song and "Ma and Pa", and I'm still not sure I made the right choice. But they are both great songs from Fishbone's defining work. It's hard to put a lable on this band, but if you actually read this blog and haven't heard of them, at least take the time to listen to the two songs named in this entry to see if you want more.

10.15.10

Mixtape: 1988

Track 15
"Gigantic"
Surfer Rosa
The Pixies

I met Kristin Hersh at a surprise in-store record signing when I was a senior in high school. It wasn't really a surprise to me——the record store owner knew I was a big Throwing Muses fan and told me about it a couple of days ahead of time, and since there weren't too many other people around at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon at a small independent record store a few blocks from the campus of Duke University, a couple of my friends and I basically got an hour or so to hang out with Kristin and the Muses' drummer, David Narcizo.

After we got some posters signed and CD inserts doodled on, Kristin started telling me about this great band from Boston that the Muses (who were relatively established at that point, having just released a record on the semi-major Sire label) were all fans of. That band was the Pixies, who were the second American band (after Throwing Muses) to sign to the legendary British label 4AD.

I had heard of the Pixies, but I hadn't heard them, and with my limited budget in those days, I tended to stick to bands that I'd seen in concert or bands that I already owned albums for (no 30 second legal previews or full album free illegal downloads back then), and so I never pulled the trigger. But Kristin, who was the driving force behind my favorite band at the time, convinced me to give them a shot. And just in time, too: later that year the Pixies would release what might be the best record of the 1980s (although it really fits better into the 1990s), Doolittle.

So I never actually heard Sufer Rosa or "Gigantic" in 1988, but when making a mixtape about 1988, even one that's started out as a project to document what I was listening to those years, I can't ignore the Pixies. "Where Is My Mind?" would have been another great choice from that album, but Kim Deal is as key to the band as Black Francis, and this is her best lead vocal performance on any Pixies record.

10.17.10
Seventh anniversary of this site. Just marking the calendar.

10.18.10

Mixtape: 1988

Track 16
"Silver Rocket"
Daydream Nation
Sonic Youth

Most people think Daydream Nation is Sonic Youth's masterpiece, but on reviewing their catalog recently, I found myself thinking instead that their best album is this record's successor, Goo, which also happens to be their major label debut and which is therefore automatically excluded from consideration by some of their more militant fans.

But however you fall on the best album question, "Silver Rocket" and album opener "Teen Age Riot" are undoubtedly two of the band's best tracks, and having those two back to back to start a record certainly makes a statement. "Teen Age Riot" actually occupies a deeper place in my heart, but it's hard to envision sticking it in the middle of a mixtape, and it just wasn't the right way to kick this one off. So "Silver Rocket" it was.

Like Surfer Rosa before it, Daydream Nation is a record that I didn't actually hear until a few years after its release, which is going to become increasingly common the deeper we get into the year mixtape series. But it's almost impossible for me to pin down the exact date when I purchased an album like this (at least until the 2000s, when iTunes starts remembering pretty much everything I've done vis a vis my music collection).

I've tended to note when a song in this series was an exception to my original rule of only using songs that I actually owned and listened to the year they were released, but I think I'm done with that; all this stuff is in my collection and has been much-loved by me for a very long time, so it makes sense to just use the year of release as an organizing structure to frame my comments about my favorite music.

10.19.10

Mixtape: 1988

Track 17
"Anchorage"
Short Sharp Shocked
Michelle Shocked

I have a complicated relationship with artists who are generally classified in the folk genre. Even the ones I really like——Iron and Wine, Bonnie Prince Billy, and occasional dabblers like Bright Eyes and and the Decemberists——are sometimes hard for me to take in long stretches, and there are certain parts of their catalogs that I avoid at all costs.

Michelle Shocked definitely falls into this category. A lot of her stuff (and granted, my exposure to her is limited because I'm not a huge fan) alternates between too cutesy and too earnest, and it gives off the kind of vibe that might get played for laughs in an SNL coffee house skit. But every now and then she nails the sweet spot, and "Anchorage" might be the best song she's ever written.

In the past few years, Alaska has become known for crab fisherman and political lunacy, but back when I first encountered this song, I knew it mostly from my grandfather's tales of being stationed in Fort Greely, southeast of Fairbanks. It was a place where the everyday was not so ordinary, where a solitary day of fly fishing in the middle of a vast, unspoiled wilderness after being dropped off by a helicopter pilot buddy might be followed by a night of driving the kids down to the dump to watch the polar bears scavenge for food (my grandfather's wartime service was bookended by stints in the last two states to join the union; he was at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and he spent a couple of years in Alaska after serving in WWII and the Korean war).

All of that is to say that Michelle Shocked's recounting of a letter from a friend in Anchorage captures some of that same sense of wonder that I had for the state back when the only things I knew about it were my grandfather's tales. I'd like to think most people will see the beauty in this song, but it will always mean something more to me.

10.20.10
The new No Age record is really growing on me——as all of their records do——and I appreciate the fact that they generally kept the song lengths short, with no song going over four mintues and several clocking in at under three.

For someone like me, a hook-addicted lover of the three minute pop song, this is a godsend, especially in an age where CDs (and now digital formats) mean that too many artists don't feel the need to edit anything they do, and we end up with albums 1) that are three to five tracks too long and 2) where the average track length pushes the five minute mark. There's almost nothing I can't take for three minutes, which makes me more inclined to listen to the album all the way through instead of hitting the skip button, and that gives me a chance to get to know the album as a complete entity, which is increasingly hard to do in the age of the shuffle playlist.

My only complaint is that there are too many instrumentals here. I know, I know, I'm hopeless, but I have a short attention span when it comes to instrumentals, and nearly a quarter of the tracks here are instrumentals. Take those away, and you have a 10 track album that's pretty close to perfect in my eyes.

10.21.10
And speaking of artists who could use a little editing——trim Janelle Monáe's The ArchAndroid from 18 to 10 tracks by cutting out the two overtures, "Sir Greendown", "Neon Gumbo", "Mushrooms & Roses", and the final three tracks, and suddenly you have an album that just might make my top 10 this year, instead of a bloated album that interweaves a bunch of great songs with a bunch of mediocre tracks that seem more focused on advancing the plot of this concept album than they do in being listenable as songs.

I'd like to note for the record that my suggestions are essentially what she did with her live set when I saw her open for of Montreal. Granted, as the opening act with a shorter set, she was motivated to focus on her strongets material...but shouldn't she be doing that all the time?

10.22.10
The years go fast and the days go so slow...

10.25.10
I'm getting a little obsessed with this 10-track idea. Looking back at the records I've bought so far in 2010, there are very few that run longer than 10 tracks that wouldn't be made better by trimming back to 10, and those few exceptions include Big Boi's Sir Lucious Left Foot, Los Campesinos' Romance Is Boring, and (I'm sure this will come as no surprise) of Montreal's False Priest, all of which are highly likely to end up on my top 10 list for the year.

A cursory review of the many of the albums I've bought over the past few years where I've liked some tracks but where I've been unable to engage with the album as a whole tells me that a little editing would have improved these records immensely, making the great tracks stand out more and making the solid but non-single-worthy tracks more tolerable because there aren't so damn many of them to sit through while waiting for the next great track to come up.

I guess in the age of the iPod and shuffle playlists, artists just figure you'll do the editing yourself, and they aren't viewing the album as a complete whole so much as a collection of tracks that you will distill down to your favorites. But that shouldn't be my job as a fan; I wouldn't want to read a novel where the author was expecting me to exclude the weaker paragraphs or chapters, and I don't want to watch a movie where I'm supposed to cut out the weaker scenes. Why should I have to make easy and obvious edits (I'm betting most owners of these records would quickly come to consensus on the weak spots) when it comes to the music I listen to?

Tracklists for so many releases in the past few years have that throw-it-all-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks feel to them. The ability to self-edit is one of the most critical skills in an artist's repertoire, and it's high time that bands whose careers have started in the last decade learn this. 10 tracks is somewhat arbitrary, but it's more or less traditional for a rock release, and it's a good starting place if you need an artificial target to help reduce the glut of tracks on your record.

By all means continue to write and record 15 tracks, 20 tracks, 30 tracks, whatever. But just give us the best 10. You're supposed to leave us wanting more, not wishing there was a little less.

10.26.10

Mixtape: 1988

Track 18
"I'll Treat You Right Someday"
Monkey on a Chain Gang
House of Freaks

I actually owned this album in 1988, but not this song; I originally owned this on cassette, and it wasn't until the CD reiussue more than a decade later that this track was included (although a much different version was on House of Freaks' 1994 album Invisible Jewel).

If you know any song from this album, it's likely "40 Years", which was a college radio hit and even got some airplay on non-120 Minutes MTV (it's also, oddly enough, one of two songs on Monkey about the building of the atomic bomb, the other being "Dark and Light in New Mexico"). My favorite song on the original release, however, was "My Backyard", and in retrospect I can't remember why I chose "I'll Treat You Right Someday" for this mix over that song.

But I guess that's what I get for taking more than FIVE YEARS to write the notes for this mixtape. That's right, five years——I checked, and I posted the list of songs for the 1988 mixtape on October 17, 2005. I couldn't quite believe it myself.

So anyway. "I'll Treat You Right Someday" is the song I chose all those years ago, so it stays. But "My Backyard", in addition to actually being a track on the album when it was released, also touches more of the themes that House of Freaks would develop over their career——the tension between the community/family and the self, the idea of home and the longing for a sentimental past that never really existed, and how your personal history is always a part of the larger cultural history that preceded you.

I once wrote elsewhere about Bryan Harvey's lyrics that they're the closest rock music has ever come to Faulkner's gothic tales of the south, and I think that's still true (although relative newcomers Drive-By Truckers come pretty darn close).

10.27.10
Almost let another month go by without reviewing the offerings on Amazon's 100 $5 MP3 album downloads monthly feature. Here are the ones I would recommend, and if you want any of them, grab them quick, because there will be a new set on November 1.

Not a bad month overall. The clear standout is the Beach Boys' remastered Pet Sounds, but Duran Duran's Rio and Green Day's Dookie are also pretty high on my list (but let's be clear: Pet Sounds is one of the best rock/pop albums of the last century, and those other two are not). And I hate her recent offerings with a passion, Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville is still an amazing record that is well worth owning. Even though my ardor for him has cooled somewhat with his latest release, Sufjan Stevens' The Avalanche is certainly worth $5. Spoon's Transference is a pretty decent Spoon record, and $5 is a great price if you like them but don't happen to own this yet.

After that, there are a bunch of records that I can't personally recommend, either because I don't own them or because I don't like them, but which have been received well critically, including Gnarls Barkley's The Odd Couple, Girl Talk's Night Ripper, the Books' The Way Out, Caribou's Swim, Nick Cave's Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, and Antony and the Johnsons' I Am a Bird Now. And just to be fair, I'll mention that Arcade Fire's latest, The Suburbs, is also on sale this month. But man, I do not like that record.

10.28.10
So even though I've been reviewing Amazon's 100 $5 MP3 album downloads for the past several months, I have never actually bought an album. I've certainly been tempted to pick up a few classics that have never ended up in my CD collection or newer works that I'm not quite ready to invest the full price of a CD in, but I've never been able to pull the trigger because of my compulsion to own physical copies of my music.

Sure, I've bought digital music before, but it's been restricted to 1) singles and one-offs; 2) EPs, which are harder to find in their physical format and which are usually way overpriced; and 3) albums that just weren't available in physical format (for example, an album released in the UK with no US distributor and no planned US release). I've never bought an album on iTunes or Amazon's MP3 store that I had the option to buy as a CD.

But I've taken the plunge: after listening to all the song clips on a few of the records I was interested in on this month's $5 list, I purchased the Magnetic Fields' 1993 album Holiday and the Books' most recent, The Way Out. I wasn't willing to pay more than $5 for either of these to own the physical copies (Magnetic Fields because I've never really investigated his pre-69 Love Songs material and the Books because, well, I already own two Books CDs, and I'm not sure if there's enough novelty in the third to spend $13 for it). But $5 and instant access were too good a deal to pass up, and now that I've broken the ice, I'm hoping to pick up a few cheap downloads every month.

I'm still a long way from buying everything digitally——unlike my cassette-to-CD transition, where once I flipped the switch, I purchased one format exclusively——but if I can get used to this, maybe in a year or two I'll be able to seriously consider changing how I buy music.

10.29.10
Two physical CDs arrived yesterday from Amazon: Maximum Balloon's self-titled debut, and Clinic's latest, Bubblegum. Both have been sitting in my will-I-or-won't-I Save for Later section of my Amazon shopping cart for a while, and when we had to order some other stuff for the baby earlier this week, I decided to throw those in.

Maximum Balloon is the solo side project for TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek, and it features several of his former collaborators, including TV on the Radio bandmates Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone and Yeah Yeah Yeah's frontwoman Karen O, in addition to artists like David Byrne and Gorillaz' guest vocalist Little Dragon. I'm basically expecting TV on the Radio redux, but maybe with more electronica influences and a broader mix of vocalists.

I debated long and hard about the Clinic record. I'm a fan, but their sound evolves one RNA strand at a time, and you could hear a track from their debut album and from Bubblegum and you'd know within two bars that they are undoubtedly from the same band. I like that sound, but how many albums do I need to own in order to have my fill of it? I guess the answer as of now is at least one more; hopefully we'll see some stylistic growth that will justify this purchase.