Musing

Radiohead's The King of Limbs Editor's Note: This is the 8th in a quasi-weekly series of reviews marking my favorite ten albums of 2011. New reviews go up every weekend through the end of the year. As I indicated in a post just after my first critical listen to this album, I was a little surprised at the direction taken with this album. The Radiohead Pendulum of Weirdness seemed to be swinging back towards something like "Amnesiac." In a way I was right, just not the way I expected. First of all, the disappointment from the short length of the album still hasn't worn off. Anything shorter than 10 tracks is still an EP to me. Several companion tracks have been released since the album hit the streets - "Supercollider" and "The Butcher" were emailed to all of the folks who pre-ordered the album through the band's site. "Staircase" and "The Daily Mail" were just released about a week ago as a one-off double A-s...

Beady Eye's Different Gear, Still Speeding Editor's Note: This is the 7th in a quasi-weekly series of reviews marking my favorite ten albums of 2011. New reviews go up every weekend through the end of the year. If there was an award category here in the Top Ten something like "Album That Gave Me The Most Relief After Fearing It Would Suck," DGSS would have won it. The first single, "Bring The Light," is a good track, but it's pretty standard Liam fare - short on imaginative lyrics and reliant on three chords or fewer. I think the idea that Noel was the only good songwriter in Oasis is blatantly false. All four guys have songwriting talent. Noel just happens to be the most versatile. After this first single, I was afraid the Beady Eye album would be 11 repetitive tracks. ("Ain't Got Nothin'" anyone?) So, after a good deal of brash build-up by Liam, DGSS hit early in 2011 to a lot of surprise. Those in the "Noel is GOD!...

Florence + The Machine's Ceremonials Editor's Note: This is the 6th in a quasi-weekly series of reviews marking my favorite ten albums of 2011. New reviews go up every weekend through the end of the year. As usual, it's hard to talk about the top few albums without talking about the reasons that they didn't make it any higher on the list. This year's albums fit themselves into three distinct groups. #8-10 are great, but not necessarily "must buys" for everyone. #5-7 should be picked up at your earliest convenience. #1-4 should be purchased before you buy groceries again. So Ceremonials finds itself right on the edge of transcendence. Why just the edge? Here's a better question. Why on the earth would such an enormously talented woman saddle her artistic statement with a song like "Never Let Me Go"? This is particularly astonishing when you listen to the b-sides that accompany her deluxe edition (I'm looking at you, "B...

DeVotchKa's 100 Lovers Editor's Note: This is the 5th in a quasi-weekly series of reviews marking my favorite ten albums of 2011. New reviews go up every weekend through the end of the year. Blech. If I read one more review about this being DeVotchKa's "Arcade Fire-inspired album," I'm going to be sick. AF doesn't have a monopoly on sweeping grandeur. This album deals in grandeur by the boatload and shows the sort of variety that AF can only dream of these days. I think what people are trying to express is the smooth sound of the album in general. Past albums have high and low points that look like a bad EKG. They were scattered all over their albums. Just when you though you were settling into a mariachi type of groove, you'd get whisked away into something far more gypsy and far more dark. This album still pulls towards a number of different points on the emotional compass, but it never pulls you out of your chair in confusion. This ...

Feist's Metals Editor's Note: This is the 4th in a quasi-weekly series of reviews marking my favorite ten albums of 2011. New reviews go up every weekend through the end of the year. Feist has a weird effect on me.  She's one of few artists who can give me shivers.  I'm talking about the kind of shivers that suddenly make you realize you've been holding your breath.  Not just a feather down your back, but a feather down your soul. Her last album, the world-storming The Reminder , was a fairly sunny affair.  There were a few light, atmospheric tracks scattered evenly across the track-listing, but it was upbeat and catchy on the whole.  Metals offers much less in the way of catchy tunes.  And, although this sounds like a criticism, I couldn't name more than two or three tracks on the whole album.  This isn't because the album is unremarkable.  It's actually the opposite - when you sit down to this album, you end up glued to the stereo for ...

The Decemberists' The King is Dead Editor's Note: This is the 3rd in a quasi-weekly series of reviews marking my favorite ten albums of 2011. New reviews go up every weekend through the end of the year. Colin warned us that this album was going to be something different. He wasn't kidding. This acoustically-driven bit of folksy Americana is the second half of the one-two punch that started with "The Hazards of Love." If you're looking for epic songs about being swallowed by a whale, you're going to be disappointed in this album. And at first, that's where I was. Usually I go to The Decemberists when I'm in the mood for something different, but this entire album is pretty radio-friendly. SiriusXM Radio won't stop playing tracks from it. The only problem with whale-proportioned tales is their size. Listening to "Picaresque" is almost exhausting (even though I mean that in a good way). But "The King is Dead" is...

Adele's 21 Editor's Note: This is the 2nd in a quasi-weekly series of reviews marking my favorite ten albums of 2011. New reviews go up every weekend through the end of the year. Letting my wife play the radio one night while we were out driving, I had to make an uncomfortable admission - whoever this girl singing about "rolling in the deep" was, she had some glorious pipes. I stored it in the back of my head until we saw her on television performing "Turning Tables" while we were in Rome. Another good song? One or two good songs can be luck. Three good songs on the same album is my minimum requirement to investigate a new artist. "Someone Like You" is a little sappy-sweet (or bitter-saccharine) for me, but I couldn't deny the talent. I got both of her albums this fall and gave them both a few listens. And while I still have a slight preference for 19, 21 is still a great album by an artist with serious talent. It sags a little in...

Red Hot Chili Peppers' I'm With You Editor's Note: This is the 1st in a quasi-weekly series of reviews marking my favorite ten albums of 2011. New reviews go up every weekend through the end of the year. It can't be easy to lose John Frusciante. Hardcore fans of RHCP went into a collective apoplectic shock when Frusciante announced in 2009 that he was splitting amicably with the rest of the band.  The Three Pillars of the Peppers were down to two.  Regardless of where you would rank John amongst those three, it's pretty evident that he's not on this album.  What can we say about the new guy?  Well...he does play a guitar.  But few guys can drop a solo like John. That's not to say this is a bad album.  It's making the top ten, isn't it?  I wouldn't cut any of the songs in the tracklisting off of the album, which is more than I can say for some albums that will actually be ranked higher in the next few weeks.  The disappointment comes, unf...

Conky is what Vista's Sidebar should have been - customizable at every level so that I can count on using as much (or as little) of my resource pool as I would like. It's not a required function by any means, but anyone serious enough to be running some version of Linux is probably someone who refers constantly to some form of a task manager. The OOTB configuration provides basic system information and the list of hotkeys. Grabbing weather forecasts is a popular request, but I couldn't find many start-to-finish discussions that ended with a satisfied user and script. The few such ones that I found were outrageously complicated. If I wanted something that bloated, I'd just run Vista! Below is my own script, which shows a few basic system statistics and works with www.weather.com to grab current stats and forecasts for today and tomorrow. Note that in the evening, the forecast for today is no longer a valid entry on weather.com, so the script returns "N/A...

If you dismiss this album after the first track as a poor-man's Oasis, you've fooled yourself out of something pretty special here. You only have to go one track farther into the album to hear something that heavy-handed Noel would have never allowed onto an Oasis album. I would have been shocked to hear any of these tracks on Oasis-LP8 barring four. There's a sense of variety-with-cohesion that was lacking in Dig Out Your Soul . More importantly, it makes up for another lack in the last Oasis album: production. High quality VBR MP3's of DGSS sound better than listening to DOYS on CD or vinyl; I don't want to see Dave Sardy's name in the liner notes for any album ever again. I'm excited to hear the whole thing at CD quality in a couple of weeks!

Well. That was not "In Rainbows: Part II". Yorke sings in much the same way that he did for IR, but it's over an electric mix that sounds like Amnesiac on steroids. Sounds like a blinding endorsement, but that first 15-20 minutes of frenetic toe-tapping starts to wear a little thin about halfway through "Little By Little." The back half is definitely slower. Maybe that was the intention - an uptempo first half and a more relaxed second half. Instant favorite? "Codex" is gorgeous. It has rightfully been called "Pyramid Song V2.0." It's too soon to talk about TKOL's rank amongst other Radiohead albums, but of their 8 albums, it's currently somewhere in the middle. The physical release might correct a couple of rough spots in the MP3's, and holding the so-called Newspaper Album might add some of the magic that strangely seems to be missing now.