Musing

Sea Wolf's Old World Romance Editor's Note: This is the 4th in a quasi-weekly series of reviews marking my favorite ten albums of 2012. The 10th edition is wrapped into the larger year-end post I call "The Ho Media Awards", which will be published just after the new year. Stay tuned! Sea Wolf's second full length was something of a surprise. It's far more approachable than Leaves in the River . Although it placed third in my 2009 countdown, it lost something of its luster over time. It started feeling like a sell-out effort, which made me worry about LP3. Apparently I was too quick to judge, because this third album - Old World Romance - starts taking cues from the first album and leaving the sheen and the theatrics of the second album in the past. LitR is another one of those albums I love to pull out on rainy days. OWR is similar, but darker and colder. More of an album for snow than for rain (listen to "Kasper" for example and try t...

Snow Patrol's Fallen Empires Editor's Note: This is the 3rd in a quasi-weekly series of reviews marking my favorite ten albums of 2012. The 10th edition is wrapped into the larger year-end post I call "The Ho Media Awards", which will be published just after the new year. Stay tuned! A Hundred Million Suns seemed to come and go with barely a ripple in the popular music pool. "Take Back the City" was a modest success on the radio at best, and I don't recall hearing another single off of that album. Although it gave us the gem "Lifeboats" and the three part masterpiece "The Lightning Strike," it seemed that their 15 minutes had passed. So when it came to the new album, Fallen Empires , I wasn't exactly beside myself with anticipation. FE doesn't push any new boundaries for the band, but I think it refines the sound of the last album a little more. It's a little safer that way maybe, which would be my one over-...

Gotye's Making Mirrors Editor's Note: This is the 2nd in a quasi-weekly series of reviews marking my favorite ten albums of 2012. The 10th edition is wrapped into the larger year-end post I call "The Ho Media Awards", which will be published just after the new year. Stay tuned! For a brief, weird moment earlier this year, I thought Sting had actually done something cool. Luckily my musical reputation was saved when I learned that this Sting sound a like was actually an Australian going by the moniker Gotye. Whew, almost lost all respect for my own musical opinion there... MM is already his third album, but it took the often parodied single "Somebody That I Used To Know" to garner him worldwide attention.  Sidebar: While Kimbra, Gotye's female foil in this tune has a very pleasant voice, her own album that came out this year is definitely not top ten material.  The album is eclectic without being off putting in a way that makes it hard to make ...

Ben Gibbard's Former Lives Editor's Note: This is the 1st in a quasi-weekly series of reviews marking my favorite ten albums of 2012. The 10th edition is wrapped into the larger year-end post I call "The Ho Media Awards", which will be published just after the new year. Stay tuned! We kick off the 2012 music season with the hardest-to-choose slot in the countdown. So many good records hit the stores this year that it feels criminal to pare it down to just ten. It took a wild combination of scoring methods (to be detailed in the final awards post) to get the top nine, but the tenth slot saw a 4-way tie that had me listening to the contenders repeatedly for two weeks. Ben came out on top. "Fun" isn't usually a tag that gets you very far in a countdown like this with me. My M.O. follows a melancholy track pretty much top to bottom - autumnal albums that warm the air of a drizzly day like sunlight filtered through those dark, rainy clouds. But th...