11.1.13
New selections from Amazon's 100 MP3 albums for $5 deal. Must-haves are Pearl Jam's Ten, Tears for Fears' Songs from the Big Chair, and A Tribe Called Quest's The Low End Theory.

I'd also recommend Childish Gambino's Camp and OMD's most recent release, English Electric (but only if you're already an OMD fan).

I'm thinking about the debut album from the 1975, who I saw as an opening band a few years ago, and one or more of the several Johnny Cash records that are part of this batch of selections.

11.4.13
The James Mercer (of the Shins)/Danger Mouse collaboration Broken Bells has a new album coming out soon, and they are streaming the first single, "Holding On for Life":

This is one of those partnerships that seems like it could be perfect on paper, but I never warmed to their debut album, and there's not much in this track that gets me excited either. And is it just me, or is Mercer doing his best to imitate CeeLo, Danger Mouse's collaborator in the Gnarls Barkley project?

11.5.13
Okkervil River's The Silver Gymnasium continues to grow on me. I'm starting to think this might be the record of the year.

11.6.13
Speaking of record of the year...here, at last, when it's almost completely pointless to post it, is my list of the top 10 albums from 2012. The fact that there are 10 is purely a coincidence; I just worked through my list of 2012 albums and picked the ones that I really loved and the list happened to end up with 10 entries.

No ranking, just listed in alphabetical order by artist name:

Centipede Hz——Animal Collective
I like this album much better than I expected to, and I still can't quite pinpoint why. I've been an Animal Collective fan for a while, but I thought they were starting to run out of ideas. There's still no mistaking their sound on this record, but it feels like a step forward nonetheless.

The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than The Driver Of The Screw And Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do——Fiona Apple
Yes, the title is purposely irritating. But the songs are so, so good. The first few times I listened to it, I felt like it was too sparse and lacking the flourishes of extra instrumentation that could have taken it to another level——it almost felt like demos more than a fully realized album. But I was wrong, and even though there's a part of me that would like to hear a more fleshed out version of this album, there's really not much to criticize here.

Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors——Big Boi
You can't really compare Andre 3000's and Big Boi's post-Outkast output to determine who owned the more dominant creative force because Andre 3000 hasn't released anything while Big Boi has released two solo albums. But if Andre 3000 ever does decide to throw his hat back in the ring, he's going to have some serious momentum to overcome, as both of Big Boi's records rank among the best releases in their respective years. This is solidly in the rap/hip hop genre, but it's weird and a little bit crazy, and pretty unique in contemporary hip hop.

Breakup Song——Deerhoof
Best Deerhoof record in years. Just enough angular oddness to make the hooks even more addictive, and lacking some of the stranger noise experiments that can sometimes make listening to their albums a chore.

Swing Lo Magellan——Dirty Projectors
I could almost use the same description for this record that I used for the Deerhoof record. It's everything I loved about Bitte Orca minus most of the stuff that irritated me.

I Know What Love Isn't——Jens Lekman
I intially thought the long layoff——prior to I Know What Love Isn't, Jens hadn't released a full-length since 2007's Night Falls Over Kortedala——had made him rusty and only a imitation of his former self, but these songs quickly grew on me and I came to love them as much as anything else he'd ever released. Seeing him in concert certainly sped up that process, but I have no doubt that I would have come around even without the live performance to restart my love affair with his music.

Channel Orange——Frank Ocean
Part hip hop, part pop, part modern R+B, but totally unique. I still think his officially unreleased debut, Nostalgia, Ultra. has more consistently compelling songs, but honestly, we're talking about the difference between a 9.5 and a 9.9 on a 10 point scale.

Paralytic Stalks——of Montreal
Despite having one of the few songs I disliked enough to give only 1 star in 2012(the extraordinarily pointless "Exorcismic Breeding Knife") and ruining two other pefectly good songs by jamming them together and putting an equally pointless six minute long ugly instrumental interlude in between them ("Authentic Pyrrhic Remission"), I still kind of love this album. If it had been released in December, there was no way it would have made this list because it took several months for the beauty here to reveal itself, but it was released in February and so had plenty of time to work its way into my good graces.

Theatre Is Evil——Amanda Palmer
It's hard to describe this album, but just like the artist who created it, it's very sincere and lovable despite being embarrassingly awful sometimes. You'll either feel an affinity for Amanda and her work or you won't, but if you do, you're going to fall in love with both even though you probably hide your crush from all but your closest friends.

Young and Old——Tennis
Despite it's relatively simple approach of appropriating old girl group sounds and updating them with a little lo-fi edge (which is far from unique in today's indie landscape), this record became one of my favorites for the simple reason that it's filled with tons of undeniably great little pop songs.

11.7.13
I think I would love this world a little bit more if the only sadness I could feel was the sadness that Jens Lekman sings about...

11.8.13
There's currently an Indiegogo campaign to fund the release of a two CD tribute album of Sparklehorse covers. Sparklehorse was the stage name for Mark Linkous, who committed suicide in 2010 after years of suffering from depression and physical pain. Sparklehorse was one of my favorite bands, and I felt a special connection to them because I was living in Virginia at the same time they released their first album (which was recorded in Virginia, where Linkous lived at the time) and they were introduced to me by a coworker who went on to become a dear friend.

The CD itself is called Last Box of Sparklers, and the project is being coordinated by Box of Stars (named after a Sparklehorse song), a nonprofit group that wants to raise awareness about mental illness, which Linkous suffered from all his adult life. Even though a lot of the songs have already been recorded, the project needs $50,000 to complete everything, and currently they are a long way from that goal with less than two weeks left. Give what you can; Sparklehorse released a lot of brilliant music, and Linkous left us too early. It would be nice if this album could see the light of day to help expand his legacy, even just a little.

11.11.13
I was making some other (non-music) purchases on Amazon, and I decided to also buy three albums I've been on the fence about: Cut Copy's Free Your Mind, Arcade Fire's Reflektor, and Sleigh Bells' Bitter Rivals. These are the latest releases from bands who have at least one record that I absolutely love, but none of these records was really all that appealing to me when I listened to samples.

Being the stubborn, too-loyal consumer that I am, though, I'm going to give them all a chance to prove themselves. I'm not expecting much, but I'm hoping that at least one of them will turn out to be a worthwhile addition to my music library.

11.12.13
I recently bought Tennis' new release, Small Sound, a five song EP that is a five song follow up to last year's full length, Young and Old, which was one of my favorite releases in 2012.

This release doesn't deviate significantly from the sound of that record, and you have to wonder why they aren't saving these to build a proper LP around, as most of them are worthy of that. Two probable answers: one, they have more songs for an album-length release that don't quite work with these songs, or two, this was all they could come up with in the past year or so but they needed to release something to keep a revenue stream open while they wait for next year's summer tour season. One of those points to more music from them in the next 6-9 months, and the other means it may be more like a year or two, but either way, I'm happy to have these songs now.

11.13.13
I also picked up an EP from Best Coast, the seven song Fade Away that seems like it could have been pretty easily stretched to a ten song full album. I have a real love/hate relationship with Best Coast's frontwoman Bethany Cosentino——I think she might be a terrible and/or pathetic person, but I like a lot of her songs, and I'm sort of fascinated in that can't-look-away-from-a-car-crash way with her relationship with Wavves frontman Nathan Williams (I mean, I assume we all believe that this is the unnamed guys she spends most of her time writing songs of unrequited love about, right?).

This mini-album is better than her last full-length, so maybe it was a good decision to not add three more songs just so she could call it an album (although there are still a couple of mediocre songs, so maybe she should have edited herself further and just released a four or five song EP). At any rate, even with the deadweight, it's worth the purchase, especially if you like sunny lo-fi power pop and don't have any issues with her personality like I do.

11.14.13
This ended up accidentally being the week for EPs——aside from the Best Coast and Tennis ones I've already written about, I also decided to check and see what was happening with Painted Palms, a group I saw open up for of Montreal a couple of years ago. At the time they only had one release (an EP, of course), and I wanted to see if they had gotten to a point where they could release a full-length or whether they had flamed out and that EP was all we'd ever hear from them.

As it turns out, they are on the verge of releasing their first proper album, but while reading their band page, I also saw that they had released a free EP called Nothing Lasts Long a few months ago to help promote the album. And while the Soundcloud page where you could download the EP was still up and streaming the EP, the download button was missing, and all the sites I found on Google that talked about being able to download it all pointed to that site.

I actually wrote the band to see what had happened, and they surprisingly wrote me back very quickly. It turns out that two of the songs that are on the EP are also on the upcoming album, so they decided to take away the download option for the EP on Soundcloud. I get why they would do that, but I wish they had made it so you could still download the songs that aren't going to be on the album, or at least made the EP available for purchase on iTunes or Amazon. As it is, there's no legal way to get these songs (and I'm too technologically inept to figure out how to get them illegally), and while it's nice to be able to stream the songs, I don't want to rely on that stream being active forever (and I want to know I can access the songs from a mobile device regardless of the status of my connection).

Based on what I've heard from the newest EP and how much I liked their first EP, Canopy, I'm going to preorder the record. I wonder if I wrote back and told them that I've already paid for their upcoming record, then maybe they could see fit to directly send me a digital copy of the EP. If I can't get ahold of it, it's going to be one of those little things that drives me crazy every time I think about the band, especially because I know if I'd just found the news about the release sooner, I could have gotten it for free and I just missed the window.

11.15.13
I got my first tangible benefit from being a Strangel (a shortening of Strange Angels, which is what Kristin Hersh calls her fans who send her a quarterly stipend to support whatever it is she's working on so she doesn't have to worry about being signed to a record company), which was a free download of the latest Throwing Muses effort, a double album named Purgatory/Paradise that is the first release under the Throwing Muses moniker in a decade.

It has been getting pretty good reviews, but I've only listened to it once so far and nothing on it has really grabbed me. And although the Strange Angels subscription is supposed to cover free physical releases of all Kristin-related recordings, this one doesn't, at least initially, because it's technically being released as a book with the recordings attached, and the cost of the book production and distribution would be more than a quarterly subscription (although she is doing a CD pressing of the album just for Strange Angels, but it won't be ready for another few weeks).

Being a Strange Angel for me isn't really about the free stuff anyway——the last album I've really loved from her was probably 15 years or so ago——but I'm just happy she's out there in the world, doing what she does, and I want her to continue to be able to do that.

11.18.13
I finally broke down and bought a single Sonos Play:1 (and got the Bridge component, which connects the Play:1 to your wireless network, for free as part of a special holiday deal). I've had it for about a week now, and having it set up in the kitchen means I can now use it to play music while I'm making dinner or while we're having dinner at the dining table, and we should also be able to use it to direct music to the screen porch when the weather gets warm again.

I'm pretty happy with the purchas so far——it was easy to connect it to my iTunes music library, the controller app for my phone works pretty well, and the bass from the unit is better than expected for a unit that small. There are times, especially when I'm not standing right next to it, when the lack of stereo separation can make the music sound a little flate, but that's easily remedied by picking up another Play:1 and pairing the two together, something I'll probably do in the next few months.

11.19.13
New Amazon MP3 albums for $5 selections for this half of the month. The must-haves are Modest Mouse's The Moon and Antarctica and Kanye West's The College Dropout, but there are several other records that are well worth picking up, including the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, Beck's Guero, Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero, Cut Copy's In Ghost Colours, and Eleanor Friedberger's Last Summer.

There are also a surprisingly large number of albums I've recently purchases that I wish I had only paid $5 for: Sleigh Bells' Bitter Rivals, of Montreal's Lousy With Sylvanbriar, Joanna Gruesome's Weird Sister, and Tim Kasher's Adult Film. Almost as if to make up for this, though, there are also two records that I've been considering buying for a few weeks that I haven't pulled the trigger on that I can now pick up cheap: Islands' Ski Mask and Crocodiles' Crimes of Passion.

11.20.13
Prince is streaming a new song, the old-school funk infused "Da Bourgeoisie", and as with the recent string of songs he's been sharing over the last year or so, it's a keeper that refers back to his early guitar-driven material that made him a superstar in the 80s.

You have to wonder, though: is he at all interested in releasing an actual album, or is his current career plan to keep generating headlines for a few weeks when he releases a new song and then get to work on the next single?

11.21.13
I don't think I have a final decision on Arcade Fire's Reflektor, but I like it better than I expected to, I like it better than their last album, The Suburbs, and there are moments on it that are as good as anything they've done since their masterpiece of a debut, Funeral.

But it definitely could have done with some editing. If they had cut this down to the ten best songs, I would already consider this to be second only to Funeral. And seriously, guys: when is an 11 minute track that was originally written for a film score and the last half of which is composed only of lots and lots of very quiet, very pointless instrumental pieces ever been a good idea?

11.22.13
Chvrches' The Bones of What You Believe is quickly becoming one of my favorite releases of the year. Makes me wish I'd been a little more aggressive about getting tickets to their now-sold-out gig in town next week...

11.25.13
So it turns out that I'm not too old and non-tech savvy to figure out how to find a copy of Painted Palms' free-for-a-little-while-and-then-streaming-only EP Nothing Lasts Long. I preordered their new record, Forever, as penance, and I'll also buy the EP if they ever decide to make it available for purchase. In the meantime, I'm enjoying getting them back into the rotation while I wait for the new record in January.

11.26.13
Frank Ocean has many great songs, but the one I've been obsessed with recently is "Forrest Gump". Initially I didn't like this song at all, but it slowly grew on me to the point where I think it might be the second most brilliant song on Channel Orange (because seriously, you can't beat "Pyramids") for the very reason that it didn't appeal to me at first: it's so simple and understated that it takes awhile to realize just how perfect it is.

We're coming up on 18 months since is last album. I sure hope we don't have to wait much longer for a new one.