Musing

Hey Marseilles' Lines We Trace Editor's Note: This is the 9th in a quasi-weekly series of reviews marking my favorite ten albums of 2013. 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! It was a vicious fight between #1 and #2 this year, which has been raging for the better part of 8 months in my brain. It came down to a really, really picky detail to make my choice: that X-factor we call "The Closer." LWT stumbles just a little with the instrumental at the very end, only because before it's halfway over, we've already achieved the chilled out, post-album mindset that it aims to achieve (except that now we still have over a minute to go). But forget about that. If I were a co-awarding sort of guy, this would share the title with this year's winner. "Tides" is a stunning and enveloping opener that pairs well with the song that ...

Bell X1's Chop Chop Editor's Note: This is the 8th in a quasi-weekly series of reviews marking my favorite ten albums of 2013. 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! Another brief album, but another one that's kept to a tight, no-filler set of tracks that all play nicely together. This album shies away from the preponderance of blips, bleeps, and bloops that accentuated - and, in some cases, drove - the last couple of albums and hews a little closer to the straightforward reinterpretations that they employed on their acoustic tours (chronicled brilliantly by the Field Recordings collection). "A Thousand Little Downers" has been stuck in my head more times than I can count since the album first came out. It's definitely the most clever-in-a-classic-Bell-X1-kind-of-way song on the album. The first track channels a little bit of the s...

David Ford's Charge Editor's Note: This is the 7th in a quasi-weekly series of reviews marking my favorite ten albums of 2013. 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! I don't think any other album in the top ten has such a powerful four song start. "Pour A Little Poison" is a harmonica-drenched invitation to clap as if you have rhythm for almost three minutes (which is probably about as far as I can fake rhythm anyhow). "The Ballad of Miss Lily" is less about Lily and more about the guys that wile away their time and money on shallow dreams of shallow women, set ironically to a modern tango. "Isn't It Strange?" is just another one of those simple Ford tunes that make you think "Surely he couldn't write another song in this vein again that's this good." But you'd be wrong. And "Let It ...

Beady Eye's BE Editor's Note: This is the 6th in a quasi-weekly series of reviews marking my favorite ten albums of 2013. 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! Beady Eye straddles the line between far-out and over-long in this, their second full album with this post-Oasis lineup. It's not that there are too many tunes, or even that all of them are too long, but that a couple (I'm looking at you, "Soul Love" and "Don't Brother Me") have extended outros that are a little much. But when they keep it fairly succinct, this album rocks. The album proper is 11 songs long, with up to six bonus tracks, depending on where you bought it. Of those, only 2-3 are tracks I ever skip. The first single was "Second Bite of the Apple," which was quite a departure from the fairly straightforward rock that dominated their pre...

Frightened Rabbit's Pedestrian Verse Editor's Note: This is the 5th in a quasi-weekly series of reviews marking my favorite ten albums of 2013. 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! Like others on the list, Pedestrian Verse -- a surprisingly fantastic album -- was preceded in life by an album so mediocre that it didn't warrant a mention on any past countdown. The clever wit that made The Midnight Organ Fight such a brilliant success is finally back in form and matched with melodies and presentations that make each song stand out from one another. There really isn't a bad song on the whole album... ...except it's all so loud. I'm surprised I haven't read more negative reviews of the album's inability to produce sounds that are both loud and clear. You have "Nitrous Gas" at one end of the spectrum: a haunting so...

Half Moon Run's Dark Eyes Editor's Note: This is the 4th in a quasi-weekly series of reviews marking my favorite ten albums of 2013. 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! Instead of a random music blog or a truck commercial, I have a coworker to thank for turning me on to Half Moon Run. I did hear the first single, "Call Me in the Afternoon," the same way I hear most singles that first get my attention - standing at the urinal. After enough trips, I decided to look them up when I got back to my cubical. I mentioned out loud that I was looking up this song and as luck would have it, another guy had just bought the album and vouched for the whole thing. Turns out he was right. It's hard to say why it's special. Maybe it's just that it's really pleasantly chill. "Chill" doesn't always work for an album that...

Toad the Wet Sprocket's New Constellation Editor's Note: This is the 3rd in a quasi-weekly series of reviews marking my favorite ten albums of 2013. 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! Toad the wet what ? I remember thinking this when "Something's Always Wrong" became popular on the radio in the mid-90's. Today, that's probably the same reaction the band is getting from a new generation of fans, 16 years after their last album Coil . Maybe their name doesn't make sense, but the songs that these guys craft have never failed to grab me, mostly owing to the lyrical genius that fronts most of the vocals - Glen Phillips. Sometimes you hear a song at just the right moment in your life that it actually seems like someone's choreographing a TV-style soundtrack for you. "Throw It All Away" was one such time, where T...

Atoms for Peace's AMOK Editor's Note: This is the 2nd in a quasi-weekly series of reviews marking my favorite ten albums of 2013. 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! As a general rule, "albums" of less than 10 tracks irritate me. I realize we're a generation of short attention spans, but give me a little more credit than this. Exceptions can be made of course; this year, I actually have two albums with 9 tracks in the Top Ten. In at #9 is Thom, Flea, and Co. with the electronically spastic "AMOK". To rank higher, it would have had to be a perfect 9 out of 9, but the album isn't without mediocrity. "Ingenue" and "Dropped" both lose me towards the center of the album. They start to blur together a little. It's not until "Stuck Together Pieces" that it really grabs my attention again - ...

Travis' Where You Stand Editor's Note: This is the 1st in a quasi-weekly series of reviews marking my favorite ten albums of 2013. 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! It's really, really good to hear these guys back away from the sound of the last album. I was not a fan and I made that clear with the release of Ode To J. Smith . This is a decidedly more relaxed affair in which you can actually hear music instead of distortion. It's a little more lighthearted than I'd normally prefer; 12 Memories is one of my favorite albums of all time for its combination of the outright depressing and the negative-ironically-dressed-in-positive-shtuff. But it's hard to deny a song in any vein that comes with a video this awesome: Album Highlights: Mother; Moving; New Shoes

Indeed, the question which it is not safe to ask of any religion is just the one we are prone to ask first, namely, Is it true? A much safer question is, Is it saving? That is, does it hold men up to a higher standard of life and duty than they were otherwise capable of? Does it cheer and sustain them in their journey through this world? Could the religion of Greece have faced the question, Is it true? And yet the German historian of Greece, Dr. Curtius, says that the religion of Apollo "was nowhere introduced without taking hold of and transforming the whole life of the people. It liberated men from dark and groveling worship of Nature; it converted the worship of a god into the duty of moral elevation; it founded expiations for those oppressed with guilt, and for those astray, without guidance, sacred oracles." Can historical Christianity any better face the question, Is it true? Did all these events fall out as set down in the New Testament? Are they set in their ...

The blue circles were originally part of a flow diagram for a brainstorming session. I added the red lips on Tuesday of this week. As the week went on, different people added more embellishments until we got to this final state today. Creepy? Maybe. But it made people chuckle all week as it got more and more crazy. That's people management.

Website of the Year - The Wertzone Adam runs a great sci-fi and fantasy-centric blog that reviews both new releases and releases that are new to him. He's fairly even-keeled, which is really saying something for a Random Reviewer Dude With A Blog. It's always interesting to compare and contrast his reviews with Pat's over at the Hotlist . Book of the Year - Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Prisoner of Heaven Although a little lighter than its predecessors, this third volume in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books quartet finally starts bringing pieces together and giving us some direction for the fourth and presumably final book in the series. This lightness has been widely criticized, but personally at the point in the story, I'm not sure that an extra 100 pages of exposition would have added any value to the story. We know our players. We know the scene. We think we know the plot...but when your narrator is crazy, how far can you trust him? Maybe this boo...

Norah Jones' Little Broken Hearts Editor's Note: This is the 9th 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 within the next week. Stay tuned! Three albums in a row, Norah has disappointed me more and more. Not Too Late was a pale imitation of Come Away With Me , her outstanding debut. Feels Like Home was pleasant but unremarkable. And The Fall ...well, best not to mention The Fall . I've never lost respect for her talent, but I was afraid that she was drifting out into uninteresting territory over the last few years, so the new album was quite a shock. In fact I'd be so bold as to say this may, in time, eclipse CAWM . This album is very clearly a break-up album - "Little Broken Hearts," "4 Broken Hearts," and "Miriam" all make that very, very clear: I know he said it's n...