9.1.11
Beirut's The Rip Tide is very recognizably a Beirut record, but it's probably his most likeable and accessible effort to date. If you're not a fan, this won't change your mind, but for newbies, this is probably the album I'm going to recommend they start with. So far there's nothing that grabs me like a few of his early songs do, but overall it's his most consistent full-length, and there's very little not to like if you have any tolerance for the Beirut sound. Also: it's not overstuffed at just nine songs, and they average about four minutes each. And more importantly, they never feel like they last longer than four minutes.

9.2.11
I got Male Bonding's sophomore release, Endless Now, and so far I'm underwhelmed. I was a little on the fence about ordering this one——I have their debut, and while I felt it was a little derivative of bands like No Age and the Japandroids, it like it well enough. But I'm not really sure where they were going to go from there, and after a couple of listens, I'm still not sure——it hasn't left much of an impression on me at all, which might be worse than if I just plain didn't like it.

9.6.11
When I first started reading Pitchfork several years ago, I liked 80% of the stuff they put on the Best New Music list, but now it's probably more like 25%. I go back there regularly like someone checking the fridge as if new food is going to magically appear, and I'll even go back and listen yet again to clips from some of the bands they are newly obsessed with, but very little clicks with me anymore. I don't think my tastes have changed for the worse——if anything, I'm more open to different types of music than I was a few years ago——I just think maybe their hipster obsession with the new and undiscovered has taken over for good judgment.

9.7.11
I got the Rapture's In the Grace of Your Love, and I don't love it even though I was hoping/expecting to. I don't even really like it, although there are a couple of promising tracks on it. I'll give this one a little more time to develop, but I'm a bit disappointed so far.

9.8.11
New Los Campesinos single, "By Your Hand", from their forthcoming album Hello Sadness. Download it here. This band is on the verge of becoming my new obsession, and I'm psyched to go see them down in DC in November. I'm also psyched that they're playing on a Saturday night so I can take the metro instead of driving and parking in that wretched city.

9.9.11
Watch the Throne is growing on me. It's still not anywhere near as good as My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, but if this had been the record that had immediately followed 808s and Heartbreak, I think it would be easier to see it as a real return for Kanye. But Fantasy raised the bar so high that I'm not sure if even Kanye's going to reach those heights again, even if he keeps releasing great records that still stand head and shoulders above what most of his hip hop contemporaries are putting out.

9.12.11
When I mow the lawn, I listen to a random mix of songs on an iPod shuffle, and it's my habit to have some water and sit on the back porch listening to these songs for 15 minutes or so after I finish my yard chores. This weekend when I finished, my wife had brought my son out on the porch, and when he saw me with the earbuds, he reached out his hand and said "ah-ooh", which is his way of saying "uh-oh", a phrase he uses for any general discrepancy between the way the world currently is and the way he wants it to be (and yes, he says it A LOT).

He's always really liked music——his favorite toys are ones that let him play music by pressing a button, and he also likes us to turn on the classical music station in his room when he wakes up in the morning——so I made sure the volume was really low and put an earbud in one of his ears. He immediately started swaying and making singing noises (which he does with his musical toys), and since the earbud wouldn't stay in his tiny ear on its own, I went and got a pair of lightweight studio headphones for him.

We sat outside together and he listened to my playlist for probably 10-15 minutes, with him gently swaying, clapping, and making rhythmic cooing noises the whole time. I don't want to push anything on him, but his mother is a really talented pianist, and I'm hoping that my love for music will combine with her technical abilities and turn him into a musician of some sort. I'm going to love him whoever he turns out to be, but it would be really cool if he happened to have the same passion for music that I do.

9.13.11
The Wild Flag debut album got here yesterday, but I still haven't listened to it. I'm not sure why——I like what I've heard so far, and I've been looking forward to checking out the full album, but it's just sitting there in my new stuff playlist, waiting for me to play the first track.

9.14.11
Got into a little run of Too Much Joy yesterday, after the shuffle decided to put two of their songs back to back. I listened to all the tracks that were on my iPhone from being part of one random playlist or another, and figured I'd go back and re-listen to everything else on my desktop to see if there were other tracks that should be upranked.

But there weren't; my ratings were pretty accurate, and the songs I had on my iPhone were most of the ones that I consider to be four stars or better. Fun to revisit their good stuff, though——somewhere in the DNA of Art Brut and maybe even Los Campesinos there are big blocks of genes that can be traced back to Too Much Joy, although it's entirely possible that neither of those bands has ever heard of Too Much Joy.

9.15.11
Finally listened to the Wild Flag record a couple of times, and it runs hot and cold for me. I was hoping this would be a love-at-first-sight kind of record, but if I'm going to have a long-term relationship with it, it's going to be of the slow-grower variety.

9.16.11
Pretty good selection of albums from Amazon's monthly selection of 100 MP3 albums priced at $5 each. The must-haves if you don't own them already: the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' It's Blitz!, Cut Copy's In Ghost Colours, TV on the Radio's Dear Science, and Surfer Blood's Astro Coast. Also highly recommended: the Decemberists' The King Is Dead, which is easily their most succint and accessible record in years.

Wilco's Wilco (The Album) is also available, but even though I'm a big enough fan of the band that I've preordered their upcoming release even though I haven't really loved any of their records since A Ghost Is Born, I can't say that I really recommend that one. And if you like that sort of thing (and I can't make up my mind personally whether I do or not), there's the Pains of Being Pure at Heart's latest, Belong.

The only thing I would have considered buying myself was Stephin Merritt's new odds and ends collection, Obscurities, but I had already ordered a physical copy when I saw it on this list. If you're a Magnetic Fields fan, though, you might consider this one——the samples I've listened to remind me a lot of the stuff on 69 Love Songs.

9.19.11
I was really hoping that Lou Reed's surprising collaboration with Metallica would be, as he put it, "the best thing done by anyone, ever", but after listening to a teaser, I have serious doubts. Hear it for yourself:

9.20.11
Finally going to finish up the 1988 mixtape this week. Seriously. I mean it.

Anyway, here's the next entry:

Mixtape: 1988

Track 21
"Green Thoughts"
Green Thoughts
The Smithereens

The Smithereens had an illustrious start to their career with Especially for You, a retro throwback to pre-psychedelic 60s rock that sounded more like an undiscovered band from that period than a modern band aping the style. The critics loved them, their fanbase was growing, and they seemed like one of the few bands in heavy rotation on college radio who actually had a chance of crossing over to mainstream success in the pre-Nirvana era.

But with each successive release, their sound seemed like more and more of a shell of itself, until by album three (and for sure by album four, released in 1991), there didn't seem to be much point anymore. Not coincidentally, this is around the time that grunge went mainstream, which might have destroyed any relevancy they might have had left even if the quality of their music hadn't declined so steeply. Oddly enough, the band's Wikipedia entry claims that Kurt Cobain was heavily influenced by the Smithereens when writing Nevermind, something I had never heard before, and a factoid that I didn't read until after I had written the above paragraphs. I think I need to see a citation on this claim.

One of their problems, I think, was that the band started to believe in the possibility of becoming Rock Stars, which detracted significantly from their charm as a band, and certainly changed the tone of the songwriting and studio production for the worse. I saw them at the tail-end of their mainstream career, playing a decent-sized college venue, and they were doing all sorts of rock star shenanigans like running into the (mostly seated) crowd with their wireless guitars and trying to engage an audience that seemed more embarrassed for them than into their music. It was kind of sad, and if I needed any further proof that they were out of gas, that show certainly provided it.

Green Thoughts isn't too much of a slip, though——it doesn't hold up as well as Especially for You, mostly because of its bigger, slicker sound, but it holds up decently well, and "Green Thoughts" is a charming little slice of pop masquerading as a rock song. It might be the last great song they would ever write, so it's fitting that it not only closes out the last decent album they'd release, but is also the last we'll hear from them in this mixtape series.

9.21.11
New Jens Lekman EP on iTunes! Have I mentioned how much I love this guy? It's been a long time since his last album (2007), and it looks like his next one won't be released until early next year, but these five tracks should hold me over at least a little bit until then.

The EP is called An Argument With Myself, which is alos the name of the lead track. Favorite song so far: "Waiting for Kirsten".

9.22.11

Mixtape: 1988

Track 22
"A New Season"
Starfish
The Church

Back when I started writing the entries for this mixtape in November of 2005(!), I might have had different things to say about this band and this song. But after I saw the Church live earlier this year, my opinion of them changed forever, and for the better. I'm still not completely sold on their more recent stuff, but as a live act, they were one of the best I've ever seen, and Marty Willson-Piper's guitar work on "Aura" was mindblowing.

The show I saw was one where they played three albums in their entirety, including Starfish. They played them from newest to oldest, so Starfish was the final record, and because "A New Season" is the penultimate track on that record, it was the second-to-last song that we heard. Even on this record, which might be the most stylistically diverse of their mainstream releases, "A New Season" stands out as something a little more off-kilter, a little more subtle than its companions, and hearing it live was as much a revelation as hearing the recorded version for the first time.

Three decades into their career, this band can still play——I can't emphasize how brilliant the performance was, even when they were playing songs that I didn't care for as much. But while what I know of their recent catalog is decent——not too removed from the sound they are known for, with some genuinely good tracks appearing now and then——I wish they could still write songs like this one. But even among the releases that I'm more familiar with and I like (the albums immediately before and after Starfish, along with the late 90s release Hologram of Baal), this song is pretty special.

9.23.11

Mixtape: 1988

Track 23
"Untitled"
Green
R.E.M.

This entry has unexpected relevance now, as R.E.M. announced this week that they were breaking up after 31 years. I'll write more about them in the coming days, because I have a lot of personal musical history with this band, but this entry, the final one for the 1988 mixtape, will serve as a small preview of my reminiscing.

Among my circle of high school friends, Green was the album that officially marked the transition from R.E.M. as a college radio/indie band to a mainstream rock band. They had had a college radio hit with "Fall On Me" from Lifes Rich Pageant and a minor top 40 radio hit with "The One I Love" from Document, but Green had several top 40 contenders, including the annoying smash "Stand" (which was their biggest single up until that point). Suddenly the little band that had risen from obscurity in Athens to become a dominant force in the college rock scene was an honest-to-goodness Rock Band with fans who had no idea that Green was their sixth full-length release in as many years.

I had seen them on tour for their previous two albums at Cameron Indoor Stadium, the relatively cozy basketball arena where the Duke Blue Devils play. But for Green, they moved over to the Dean Dome, a true stadium-sized venue that the North Carolina Tarheels call home. It's not like I had front row seats for the shows at Cameron (although I was on the floor), but I remember how far away they looked at the Green concert, where we had only been able to get seats in the upper section. It was almost like we weren't at an R.E.M. show at all.

One of my close friends went with me to the Green show, and I remember we played a game where we counted the number of Document and Green songs they played versus songs they played from earlier in their catalog. If there were more Document and Green, we were going to deem the show a bad show; if there were more songs from their back catalog, it would be a good show.

For a while, it looked as if Green and Document would win handily, but then they went on a tear through older material at the end, and the back catalog ended up winning by a single song. But it still wasn't a great show; it just wasn't the R.E.M. experience that any of their older fans were used to or prepared for.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that at the time, Green was somewhat of a disappointment, especially because as time went on, it's clear that it would serve as more of a template for their approach to songwriting than their earlier material. They still stunned me with Automatic for the People and the hugely underrated New Adventures in Hi-Fi, but this record was really the beginning of the end of classic R.E.M.

And while "Untitled" was different than almost any previous song of theirs, it had a simplicity and earnestness that recalled their earlier records; it left a good taste in your mouth even if the rest of the record didn't (although Green does have some other great tracks) and allowed you to hope that the band you loved wasn't gone forever.

9.26.11
To mark the official end of R.E.M. as a touring and recording concern, I'm going to spend this week recounting my most vivid memories of the band and their music.

Lifes Rich Pageant was the first R.E.M. album I ever bought, and I bought it on the dominant format at the time, a cassette tape. The tour for that record was the first rock show I ever went to unattended. I had never heard their music before I bought that tape——the way I discovered new music at the time was by looking at the college radio top 10 list in the back of Rolling Stone every week, and if an album showed up for more than two weeks straight, I would usually pick it up.

It was the Pretty in Pink soundtrack that did it; I was already a fan of Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark and INXS, so I picked up that soundtrack just for their songs, but I fell in love with New Order, Echo & the Bunnymen, and especially the Smiths. That's when I noticed that those bands were showing up on the college radio charts as well, and as I discovered more and more great music by buying whatever had staying power on those charts, it became my primary source for new music.

R.E.M.'s Lifes Rich Pageant was one of those albums that I discovered in Rolling Stone, and it was probably the loudest thing I owned at the time. I was living in Fayetteville, NC, at the time, and the closest show on the tour was in Durham, about two hours away, at the Duke basketball arena, Cameron Indoor Stadium. I don't remember how I got a ticket for the show——I guess maybe from the ticket counter at the locally franchised record store, because I can't imagine how else I would have gotten it. Given how big they were on college campuses at the time and how unorganized I must have been about getting my ticket, my seat was actually pretty decent, on the floor in a set of elevated bleachers at the back that gave me a good view of the stage. Not close, but not far.

I also don't remember the logistics of getting to the show. My grandfather lived in Raleigh, about half an hour from Duke, and he was the one who took me, so my mother must have taken me up to his house for a weekend visit. He sat in his car listening to oldies stations while I went to the show (when I think of this, I always flash to Homer Simpson sitting obliviously in his car in the parking lot listening to "The Girl from Ipanema" while the Spinal Tap concert Bart is attending is degenerating into a riot). He was waiting happily in the car when the showed finished a few hours after he dropped me off. He used to do the same thing when he would take my grandmother to church.

Let's Active, another band I had recently discovered (and whose 1986 album Big Plans for Everybody remains one of my favorites), opened for them, but honestly I don't remember any of their set. I don't remember too much about the R.E.M. set, either, except that it solidified my love for the band——I was a bit overwhelmed with the noise, the freedom, and all the people. It was sensory overload on many levels, so most of my distinct memories are of strange little details——the hair color of the girl sitting in front of me, who was cool enough to chat with me before the music started even though she was in college and it was pretty clear I was in high school; the lighting in the lobby where the merch table was, with its stern overhead flourescents in stark contrast to the cozy darkness of the venue; the souvenir button I bought, dark teal green with red text that read "A Pistol Hot Cup of Rhyme" (from "Swan Swan H").

I started going to concerts more regularly after that, although I can't remember specifically what my next show was. I do know, however, that I saw R.E.M. again at Cameron on their next tour in support of Document, and I remember that show a little more vividly.

9.27.11
By the time Document came out in fall 1987, I was in a very different place than I had been in 1986 when Lifes Rich Pageant was released. I had been accepted to the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in spring of 1987, and started attending when my junior year of high school began in fall of 1987 (NCSSM was a two year school, a public boarding school for the last two years of high school that had rigorous academic requirements for entrance).

As you can imagine, R.E.M. was pretty big on that campus, and since we were located only a few blocks from Duke University's west campus, where they were also pretty big, I was far from alone when I tromped down to the independent record store on 9th Street (owned and run by the bassist for local favorites the Pressure Boys) on the day Document was released to get my copy.

Since buying Lifes Rich Pageant and seeing R.E.M. live, I had purchased all of their back catalog (still on cassette, just like my original purchase of Document——it wouldn't be until spring 1988, when the Smiths catalog was released on CD in the US, that I would make the transition from tapes to discs) and fallen deeply in love. In comparison to their earlier full-lengths, Murmur, Reckoning, and Fables of the Reconstruction, Lifes Rich Pageant seemed relatively straightforward and less interesting, and Lifes Rich Pageant was still a great album. At the time, Fables of the Reconstruction was probably my favorite, but over time, Reckoning has turned into the strongest early recording for me. (Although I still love Fables, and Murmur...well, how can you not love Murmur? It kind of stands apart as its own little world in the context of both R.E.M.'s catalog and its contemporaries in indie rock at the time.)

Document was the official turning point from R.E.M. as quirky little hard-touring indie band to big rock stars with commercial radio hits, especially once "The One I Love" made the Billboard top 10 singles chart. Like most of their fans who knew them before that song, I bore some resentment for "The One I Love", the people who knew only that song, and the album that produced that song, so even though when I first heard Document I was mostly pleased (although it was still easily my least favorite R.E.M. album even before the hit single), my disillusionment with the band's imminent transformation into pop stars soured my relationship with the record at the time.

Now I can look back and see it as the last classic R.E.M. record, in the sense that it fits pretty neatly into the narrative that started with Murmur and continued through Lifes Rich Pageant. After Document, their sound and their approach to songwriting changed dramatically, and although they would produced two more classic albums and a few pretty decent albums before their career came to a close, those were all part of later acts of their career, when stardom transformed them (similar to the transition of U2 from The Joshua Tree to Achtung Baby——Joshua Tree is the clumination of the classic U2 story, while Achtung marks the first foray into a new world only tenuously connected to what came before it).

"Finest Worksong" and "King of Birds" were and remain my favorite tracks from Document, and as time has passed and I've gotten less resentful about the band's success, I've been able to look at the record with clearer vision and find merit in almost all the tracks (although it remains my least favorite of their pre-fame releases). And I still loved the band despite my personal issues with this record——when they came back to Cameron in support of Document, I was just excited to go to the show as I had been the year before when I saw the Lifes Rich Pageant concert.

9.28.11
For the Document tour, it was easy to tell that R.E.M.'sfanbase was growing——even though they played the same venue I had seen them at on the Lifes Rich Pageant tour, they played it for two nights, and both sold out almost instantly. While reconstructing my early memories of R.E.M., I found this great R.E.M. timeline site that lists an unholy number of gigs, complete with their dates and setlists, and even though the setlists are very different for the two nights, I can't for the life of me remember which one exactly I saw (they both have moments that it seems like I'd remember, but I don't).

I do remember, however, that it was a much more theatrical performance than the first one I saw. The set was an elaborate backdrop that wrapped around the back half of the performance space and looked like the inside of a church except that there the windows were oddly shaped, like I imagine they would look like if they had been designed by Tim Burton. Stipe was much more of a performer in this one, too, gradually stripping away layer after layer of clothing thoughout the main set.

I had seen several more rock shows, both in midsize venues like this one and in clubs like the Cat's Cradle in Chapel Hill, since my first R.E.M. show, but I stil remember walking out of that one feeling very satisfied. It probably helped that I didn't go by myself this time, but rather with a group of four or five close friends from NCSSM who were just as passionate about music as I was.

9.29.11
The next time I saw R.E.M. live was on the Green tour. By now they had gotten so big they had moved from Duke's Cameron Indoor Stadium to UNC's Dean Dome, a true arena. I went with my closest friend from NCSSM, who had also gone with me to the Document show, but this time we were in the nosebleed seats, and it almost didn't feel like we were seeing R.E.M. at all——the band was so far away, it really could have been anyone down there.

I don't remember feeling much about this show, other than that I was pleased that they ended up playing a decent number of their older songs, as I was not as pleased with Green. I left feeling slightly disappointed, but not completely severed from the band, which is kind of how I felt about R.E.M. generally at that time. I wouldn't see them again live for a long, long time.

The only other detail I remember from that show was the t-shirt I bought as a souvenir. "Turn You Inside-Out" was one of the singles from Green, and one of the songs I liked from the album, and the t-shirt that was being sold on the tour for that single was actually a shirt that had been turned inside out before the graphics had been printed on it. I just couldn't resist.

9.30.11
Even though "Losing My Religion" from Out of Time would become R.E.M.'s biggest hit, and that would be their most popular album, it was my least favorite record to that point in their career, and I thought they might be done making good records. They surprised me with Automatic for the People, though, which is my second-favorite record of their post-fame period, and which is easily as good as some of their early works like Lifes Rich Pageant.

They followed Automatic with Monster, an album I loathed. Despite my renewed love for the band with Automatic, I didn't even buy Monster until many, many years later from a used bin (and more because I'm a completist than that I actually wanted to hear it). That was the first time I didn't buy an R.E.M. record upon release. Looking back, I'm not sure exactly why my negative reaction was so strong; I didn't like the lead single, "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?", but I don't think I have ever actually heard too much else from the record (looking at my iTunes, I haven't played it since I loaded it into there, and I couldn't tell you what any of the songs sound like). But that was my reaction, and I haven't gotten over it to this day (although perhaps it's time to actually listen to it).

They again surprised me with New Adventures in Hi-Fi, which I think is their best record of the last 20 years and which probably eclipses some of their early classic albums like Lifes Rich Pageant. It's a massively underappreciated record——I don't know of too many people who share my opinion of it——and it's also important because it's the last album they would record with drummer Bill Berry, whose departure changed them forever.

They would never record another great album, and it would be over a decade before they'd make another decent one. The ten years following Berry's decision to retire from making music found the band grasping for some new direction, some new meaning, and not hitting on anything worthwhile. Up, the record that immediately followed New Adventures, had some decent songs on it, but nothing that would deserve a spot on a greatest hits compilation. Reveal was even worse, and they seemed so out of gas that I didn't even bother with Around the Sun, only the second time in 20 years that I hadn't bought an R.E.M. album when it was released. This album remains the only studio release from the band that I still don't own.