Musing

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 - ...