2.2.15
"Postcard #5" from Jens Lekman's series of weekly songs that he's planning to release in 2015:

2.3.15
Modest Mouse have shared a third song from their upcoming Strangers to Ourselves, this one called "The Best Room":

This track feels a little aimless, and as such is in danger of being overly long, but there's something about it that allows me to get lost in it rather than bored with it. This is the closest thing to quirky, odd Modest Mouse that I fell in love with all those years ago that I've heard in a while——when they've gone for quirky recently, it sounds forced and lacking heart. But they sound like they've stopped caring so much (in a good way), and maybe that will loosen them back up to where they're actually good again.

2.4.15
Finally spent some time with M.I.A.'s Kala, and I have to say that after a couple of listens, the stuff I like the most is the stuff that she's clearly taking and reappropriating from other artists. I already knew about "Paper Planes" use of the Clash's "Straight to Hell", but "20 Dollar" features two prominent pieces from New Order's "Blue Monday" with a small dose of the Pixies' "Where Is My Mind?", and opening track "Bamboo Banga" borrows from the Sex Pistols' cover of the Jonathan Richman track "Roadrunner".

That's not to say that there aren't a lot of interesting things going on otherwise on this record, but the songs that stuck immediately in my brain were the ones that I already knew, and this somehow lessened my ability remember the tracks that didn't sample from material I knew. I think that will change the more I listen to it (and I will definitely be taking it for more spins), but I was surprised at how obvious some of the appropriated songs were.

2.5.15
I can't remember where I first heard about Chumped, but one listen to the tracks from their latest album, Teenage Retirement, posted to their Bandcamp page and I was hooked.

I'm assuming that very few people at this point remember Sarge, a pop punk trio fronted by Elizabeth Elmore, who, after disbanding the group, went on to law school and now works at the UN's International Criminal Tribunal. They only had three releases, one of which was essentially a collection of odds and ends (live tracks, demos, etc.), but their sophomore album, The Glass Intact, instantly became one of my favorite releases of 1998, and remains one of my most adored records from that time.

Anyway. Chumped instantly reminded me of all the stuff I loved about Sarge, especially because singer Anika Pyle sounds remarkably like Elmore. The band makes the mistake of letting one of the male members sing on a couple of tracks, but overall this is a very pretty good record.

I'm getting old enough that I can't identify with the lives chronicled by storytellers of post-teen angst in any way except pure nostalgia, but I still like it when artists can at least remind me of that overly-emotional and very formative period in my life. Chumped does that, and if the vision statement (seriously, I know I'm old) posted on their Bandcamp page, "We drink and write songs about feelings", has any resonance for who you are now or who you once were, you're probably going to like this band.

2.6.15
Now that my son is getting old enough to understand the words in songs and, more alarmingly, remember and repeat them, I need to find a way to do some censoring of the music I play in the car with him. Most of the time I play big shuffle playlists of all the 4 and/or 5 star tracks from a certain time period——the last two years, the last ten years, or the 80s, 90s, or 2000s.

I prefer to listen to more recent stuff typically, and my idea was to tag all the stuff that wasn't appropriate for him and then create duplicates of those playlists that automatically filter out the 4 and 5 star songs that are tagged as inappropriate for him. However, tagging them has turned out to be a pretty significant effort, and I haven't made a lot of progress on it.

Instead, I've resorted to a much simpler solution: just play the 80s playlist, when swearing was a lot less common. Every now and then one will still slip through, but it's relatively uncommon, and it's usually just a single instance in the song that can go by unnoticed.

I still want to put together the filtering method and make it a regular part of my rating process going forward, but I've been quite enjoying dipping back into the 80s in the car. And it's dovetailed nicely with a book I'm in the middle of: Mad World: An Oral History of New Wave Artists and Songs That Defined the 1980s. Which is actually a very good book, despite being incredibly Brit-centric. As opposed to many oral histories I've read, where people who were part of the scene but not actually in the bands are offering their recollections, this one has pieces from the artists themselves.

Anyway. 80s. That's what we're listening to in the car until I spend some time pruning my playlists for four year old ears.

2.9.15
Jens Lekman's "Postcard #6":

This might be my least favorite of the tracks released so far, but that doesn't mean it's bad; it's just that some of the others definitely have potential as real album tracks, this one is clearly a b-side. Ironincally it's one of the most polished in terms of production, but that can't elevate it past its goodness into greatness.

2.10.15
Kendrick Lamar has shared a second track from his long-awaited new album, this one titled "The Blacker the Berry":

I definitely like this one better than "i", which he shared last year and which was way too peppy for my taste. But still, I'm not sure this measures up to the best tracks from his breakthrough album, good kid, m.A.A.d city, and I'm starting to wonder if this new record is going to be a huge letdown, especially after the massive expectations set by good kid.

Also: I can't believe Kendrick won two Grammys for "i". I mean, I'm happy that he's getting more recognition, but winning for this song feels more like the industry feels bad that he didn't win anything for good kid despite seven nominations and wanted to make up for it as soon as possible.

2.11.15
Hot Chip have announced a new album, Why Make Sense?, and shared the track "Huarache Lights":

I don't like much dance music, but I sure do like Hot Chip, and though this is a deeper, more relaxed groove than what they normally do, it's still very distinctively Hot Chip. And I love it. They haven't had a bad release in the near-decade that I've been buying their records, and this track points to another solid outing with Why Make Sense?

2.12.15
It's been a while since I've posted my recent purchases, so here they are: Sleater-Kinney's No Cities to Love, Belle & Sebastian's Girls in Peacetime Just Want to Dance, the Decemberists' What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World, Run the Jewels' Run the Jewels, Chumped's Teenage Retirement, and the Sidekicks' Runners in the Nerved World.

I think the only one of these I haven't written about at least a little bit is the Sidekicks record. I like it okay, but I like the first half (which reminds me a bit of Chin Up Chin Up) much better than the second half (which reminds me of the early, proggy Built to Spill records that I'm not as keen on).

2.13.15
Closing in on the end of their fourth decade of recording, Wire have announced a new self-titled album and shared the track "Joust & Jostle":

This track would fit in perfectly with any of their albums released since 2008's Object 47, and for those who like this burnished, gracefully aging, mellower version of Wire, that's just fine. I happen to be someone who does like this version of Wire (just as I like every version of Wire, aside from a slightly dodgy period in the early 90s which led to a decade-long hiatus), so I'm pretty excited about another solid release being added to their impressive catalog.

2.16.15
Jens Lekman's "Postcard #7":

Alright, we're on a definite downlward slide for the second week in a row. This track is one that I don't care for, the first in the series that I can say that about. Now, I can't get too upset about this, because if Jens keeps this up for the whole year, we're going to end up with a treasure trove of new material, much of which will be serviceable and some of which will be very good. But there are going to be occasional dips into mediocrity like this one that we're just going to have to endure during those weeks when his ideas aren't as solid and/or he doesn't have time to fully flesh them out given the constraints of releasing a new track every week.

Also, Jens seems to be making all these tracks available for download directly from Soundcloud, even the ones that weren't available as downloads when he first posted them. This reduces my stress quite a bit——I had managed to find MP3s of all the songs, but I'm really not good at finding this kind of thing online, so a great weight has been lifted knowing that this will not be a weekly scavenger hunt for the next 11 months.

2.17.15
Surfer Blood have announced a new album, 1000 Palms, and shared a track titled "The Grand Inquisitor":

Surfer Blood have become one of my favorite bands since they released their debut, Astro Coast, back in 2010, so I'm pretty excited about a new album from them. This track gets off to a weird start that I'm not convinced I'll ever like, but it picks up when they hit phase 2 with slightly over a minute left.

This last bit probably doesn't have enough to it to stand on its own, which is why they had to append it to another song fragment——I just wish it had been appended to a better song fragment, or better yet, that it had been the extended bridge of a fully formed song.

Still doesn't dampen my enthusiasm for this release. With any luck they'll also tour with a stop close to me——I've never seen them live, and I'd like to see if their show lives up to their recorded material.

2.18.15
The new Modest Mouse album is less than a month away, and the band have now shared a third track from the record, "The Ground Walks, With Time in a Box":

This one is almost weird enough to be good, and I have a feeling the frenetic busyness will continue to grow on me. Six minutes of this is a little hard to take, though, and while they do throw in a change of pace sometime around minute four, this still feels like a track that could have ended there instead of going on and no one would have complained. I imagine I will quite like this track live, however, especially if I've had a couple of drinks.

2.19.15
Passion Pit announced a new album, Kindred, and shared a track from it called "Lifted Up (1985)". And then before I could post and comment on that song, they posted another one called "Where the Sky Hangs". Both are embedded below:

These are both good Passion Pit tracks, and I like how the production sounds less cluttered than in previous releases——there's actually some space between the notes every now and then, even on the higher bpm track. "Lifted Up" is the more immediately appealing track for me, but that's not really a negative comment on the quality of "Where the Sky Hangs"——it's just that there are two tracks and I naturally have to like one of them better than the other.

Also: the slow motion videos for these songs, which both feature the same boy, are totally creeping me out. I've been playing them on a tab hidden behind my main window so I don't have to accidentally watch even a few seconds of them again.

2.20.15
Blur have announced a new album, The Magic Whip (their first since 2003's Think Tank), and shared a track called "Go Out":

At this point, Damon Albarn has been involved in so many post-Blur projects, and it's been so long since Blur existed as a collaboration between Albarn and guitarist Graham Coxon (he left the band during the recording of Think Tank) that it's hard to put this in any context of the band's previous output.

However, putting it in the context of Albarn's solo and collaborative work with groups like Gorillaz and The Good, The Bad, and the Queen, this is a nice little song. Not as Gorillaz-y as an actual Gorillaz track, but somewhere on that spectrum if you take away the overt dance/hip hop influences and a bit of the weirdness that is part and parcel of creating a cartoon band.

2.25.15
I'm not sure where I get my love of music from; there's no one else in my family who shares this obsession. Sure, most people in my family listen to music fairly regularly, and some go out and see concerts sometimes, but no one else shares my passion for it——waiting anxiously for the release date for a new album from a favorite band (or even being aware of upcoming releases); going to several shows a year, no matter what kind of venues the artists might be playing in; and certainly not writing about music.

This was also true of my grandfather, who passed away last Friday at the age of 94. As far as I'm aware, he didn't ever own any records, tapes, or CDs; I don't think he had any sort of music playback in his house for any of the many decades that he was part of my life.

Still, I have some unique musical memories tied to him. The first concert I ever went to on my own was R.E.M. in Duke's Cameron Indoor Stadium, with Let's Active opening (the first concert I ever went to was INXS with the Del Fuegos opening, but my mom took me and actually attended the show, although she was pretty good at keeping her distance from me). He lived in Raleigh, and so when the time came for me to travel from Fayetteville to Durham for the show, he came and picked me up, took me to the show, and then took me back to his house to stay with him for the night.

A couple of years after that, I moved to Durham to attend NCSSM for the final two years of high school, and I found myself suddenly on my own for the first time. He was similarly alone after my grandmother, his wife of forty years, had died from cancer the previous year, so we spent a lot of time together over those two years. At least every two or three weeks (and often more frequently than that), he would come and pick me up on the weekend and take me out to dinner before heading back to his house to spend a night or two. We would play cards and talk and just hang out; I always felt very comfortable around him, and he became an anchor for me during a time when I was going through a lot of changes that I didn't really know how to cope with. Looking back, I realize that I probably served the same function for him——he and my grandmother had been together since he returned from WWII, hardly ever being apart aside from his tour of duty in the Korean War.

I always liked to have music on in the car during drives back and forth between Durham and Raleigh, but since my granddad didn't have much interest in music, it took a while to find something that he could tolerate from my collection. Oddly enough, we settled on the Smiths' Strangeways Here We Come; at the time they were my favorite band, and my first true obession (and I still love them; I don't think there's been another band that even comes close to them since), but that would not have been my guess for what my granddad would have ended up liking (or being least annoyed by).

My granddad also became sort of a chaperone for my friends and me when we wanted to see a concert (well, mostly when we needed a ride to a concert——if it was a show in Chapel Hill, we could pretty easily sneak out of the dorms after curfew, take the shuttle bus from Duke's East Campus to UNC, and then find a random dorm lounge to sleep in after the show before heading back to NCSSM in the morning). Not only would he come to Durham to pick us up and take us to the venue, sitting in his car and waiting for us during the show the same way he used to wait outside the church while my grandmother went to the service every Sunday, but he would also sign my friends out and let us stay at his house after the show.

The only thing close to a falling out we had came a result of one of these trips. It happened during my senior year, and instead of him taking me to the show, I was going to have a friend who was a freshman at Chapel Hill take me to the show and then drop me off at my granddad's after the show. He was expecting me around midnight, but we met some other friends at the show and ended up going back to their dorm room to hang out. I was exhausted and fell asleep after a bit, and by the time I got dropped off at his house later on, it was around 4 a.m.

I didn't think this would be any big deal; I figured he had gone to bed at his normal time, well before I would have gotten there even if I had made it back by midnight, and I was getting to his house before he woke up, so aside from not getting as much sleep as I wanted, it was no big deal. But for some reason that night he decided to stay in the den until I got in, so when I arrived I found him dozing in a chair next to the door.

I tried to explain what happened, and instantly realized that the smart thing to do would have been to call him and let him know that I wasn't going to be there until later, but it was too late for that. He was very suspicious that I had been out partying and drinking and doing who knows what——the kind of stuff that I didn't really do but that it was perfectly logical to assume that a 17 year old out with college friends would be doing until 4 in the morning.

I could tell he was upset with me, but he also had to get me back to school in time for class that morning, so we didn't really get into it. About a week later, however, I got a letter from him——the only letter I ever remember receiving from him——saying that he would no longer be signing me out for concerts, including one that we had already bought tickets for a couple of weeks later where three of my friends and I were going to see the Sugarcubes at a little theater (coincidentally across the street from my grandmother's old Baptist church) and stay with him afterwards.

I felt terrible about this, even though in my mind I had just been stupid about communicating with him and not actually up to anything he would have disapproved of. I was upset about missing that show, but I felt terribly guilty about my friends missing it——we already had the tickets, and without anyone to sign us out and take us to the venue, we had no way of attending. I still remember that the tickets were $13 each, a huge amount for each of us at the time, and I never scraped up enough money to pay my friends back before I graduated.

I didn't blame him for this reaction, though, and although things were a little tense for the next couple of months, it was really just a bump in the road——we still got together pretty frequently after that, and I remained as close to him as I ever was.

I didn't see him nearly as often once I went off to college and subsequently moved out of state, but I never felt far from him, and he continued to be a big influence on my life. I named my four year old son after him, and although he'll never know his great grandfather the way I did, I'm glad that they got a chance to meet, and I hope that my son has seen him enough times to have some kind of memory of him that he can carry with him through life.

2.26.15
Jens Lekman's "Postcard #8":

This is my least favorite entry in this series so far, and continues the downward slide that started two weeks ago. This seemed like a brilliant project for the first five songs, but if we can't get back to more listenable material, I'm actually kind of hoping he'll call the whole thing off and focus on getting a new proper album recorded. If we get to week 10 and have a five week stretch that truly sounds like all throwaways, it might be time for him to reconsider.

2.27.15
Sufjan Stevens has shared a track from his upcoming album, Carrie and Lowell, and it's called "No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross":

I was a big, big fan of the music he made during the period when he was theoretically going to make an album about each state, starting with his home state of Michigan and moving then moving west to Illinois (the first music I ever heard from him was the outtakes from the Greetings From Michigan sessions the he released as a free download——"Niagara Falls" and the demo version of "Vito's Ordination" are still two of my favorite of his songs).

But the subsequent work has let me down a bit——Seven Swans was uneven, all of the Christmas albums were very hit and miss, and I just plain did not like his latest album, 2010's The Age of Adz——aside from the opening track and a 6 minute or so stretch in the middle of the 25 MINUTE CLOSING TRACK, I didn't find anything that I loved or even really liked.

This track doesn't give us a clear sense of what the direction of this album might be, but given that it's named after his parents and given the close, intimate, fragile feeling of this track, I can bet that there won't be any 20 minute plus monstrosities on this one. It might not break any new musical ground, but instead just be a nice solid album of Sufjan writing songs in the folk rock genre. And after years and years of declining interest in his work, that would probably be just fine with me.