Musing

This has to be a rather brief summary of both the 2024 and 2025 awards, because I'm a slacker. 2024 Album of the Year: Elbow, Audio Vertigo 2025 Album of the Year: Doves, Constellations For The Lonely 2024 Song of the Year: “Things I’ve Been Telling Myself for Years” 2025 Song of the Year: “A Drop in the Ocean” 2024’s near-miss for AOTY was The Decemberists’ As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again which is a fantastic album marred by a rollout that included the wrong digital files multiple times, vinyl albums using the wrong mix, and CDs with an unknown mix/master. “Joan in the Garden” – are you kidding me? 19 minutes and 20 seconds of prog bliss. Really the only other new release in 2025 that is worth mentioning is Lord Huron’s The Cosmic Selector, Volume 1 . This one channeled a lot of Strange Trails energy and includes the wild back-to-back combo of “It All Comes Back” / “Used to Know”. They also put on a hell of a show in Indy over the summer. Easily the...

2023 made it easier to break out the tiers as I've done in the past.  I also need to close the loop on the ones I mentioned last year that I didn't get around to - nothing terribly special there.  There's one hold over that I didn't know had finally been released as it had been delayed a few times and that's the Fort Frances album below, but I learned about it this fall, so I've had time to think about it.  I didn't know about Half Moon Run's "Salt" until just a couple of days ago, so I'm not ready to weigh in on that yet.   Great albums:   The Veils, ...And Out of the Void Came Love Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds, Council Skies City and Colour, The Love Still Held Me Near The National, First Two Pages of Frankenstein Andrew Bird, Outside Problems Fort Frances, Look At What Tomorrow Brought Us    Meh albums:   Bell X1, Merciful Hour Local Natives, Time Will Wait For No One   WTF? albums:   The National, Laugh Track Dave Matthews ...

2022 almost got it right.  A grand total of 21 new releases - one short of perfect - crossed my desk last year.  It was enough that I couldn't even get to all of them.  So with apologies to Turnover, Jaws of Love, Richard Edwards, Trampled by Turtles, and Beirut, their albums aren't going to feature in this post in any other capacity.  I've probably heard half of the Turnover album already just because they released so many singles, but I haven't found the right moment to sit down with this one and all of the other mentioned. The full list of eligible albums is:   Florence + the Machine Dance Fever Glen Phillips There Is So Much Here Collective Soul Vibrating Charlie Winston As I Am Death Cab for Cutie Asphalt Meadows Muse Will of the People Embrace How To Be A Person Like Other People Hanson RGB Liam Gallagher C'mon You Know Andrew Bird Inside Problems Shearwater The Great Awakening The Smile A Light for Attracting Attention Bear's Den Blue Hours Arcade Fire WE...

Even now, I'm not sure if this is an entirely fair assessment. I'm quite behind on all of the things that came out in 2021.  Since my reading schedule was mainly long and challenging works, I couldn't do a lot of simultaneous critical listens to new albums.  Anything that isn't mentioned below is probably missing because I haven't yet given it enough time.  As for the rest: These 13 by Andrew Bird & Jimbo Mathus This one's a lot of fun. I'm more partial to Andrew's voice than Jimbo's, so there's what I would consider an unfortunate number of Jimbo-lead songs here. The recording itself is very loud and can be harsh on the ears at times. I understand the artistic decision there, but it's still regrettable. How Long Do You Think It's Gonna Last? by Big Red Machine BRM's second LP is a solidly progressive step forward from the first album. Sprawling across 64 minutes, it feels like maybe they pulled in some of the Volca...

Honestly I expected more of 2020.  I thought that a year when everyone is expected to stay home would see a whole host of projects released for consumption by all of those bored, quarantined consumers, whether it was a music album or a book or anything else.  I heard a variety of reasons tossed around as to why it didn't happen that way, although they didn't all hold water. So in large part, it meant I continued working hard on the TBR pile of books in SF/F and assessing the music collection where it stands.  I was able to purge quite a few of the 62 books I was able to finish this year, but the CDs are about as trimmed as they can get.  The reading focus moves to general fiction and the philosophy/theology bookcase this year.  Though those collections are smaller, there are books that have been there since college that I've meant to read but just haven't bothered with yet.  The rule here is the same - every book I don't need to take across the country to ...

There were quite a few "big names" in my library that released new albums this year.  For the most part, everyone's effort was appreciated.  As usual, we have the Outstanding, Good, and Eh? groups of albums. Outstanding: Violet Street by Local Natives Local Natives went a bit sideways with their second and third albums, so I wasn't really tuned in to their 4th album's recording status.  They recorded videos for several tracks that were recommended to me through YouTube; luckily I trusted the system enough to click and watch.  Not only is the album Album of the Year, the song "When Am I Gonna Lose You?" - video below - grabs Song of the Year. Consequence of Sound has a great track-by-track breakdown of the whole album by the band that talks about the evolution of each final song that's really interesting.  There's also a "leftover" that was just released called "Nova" that's really good. My Finest Work Yet ...

[I'll never figure out why scheduled posts don't work for me.  This should have posted on NYD.  Sorry.] I honestly didn't think I'd be able to name ten albums that I listened to this year.  If last year was mostly pleasant surprises, this year was mostly bland disappointments from established favorites.  Discovery artists carried the year. Animal Spirits Vide Noir Post Traumatic I'll Be Your Girl  Always Ascending Wildness High as Hope   Square 1 Wrong Creatures Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino The Other Side of Blue Delta   Come Tomorrow Thank You For Today Simulation Theory Love is a Basic Need  My New Moon Although it doesn't quite match the start-to-finish awe of Strange Trails (but really, I doubt they'll be able to capture that lightning in a bottle again), Lord Huron's Vide Noir gets the nod for Album of the Year.  It rocks harder than we're used to hearing these boys rock, and "Never Ever" comes m...

New Year's Resolution 2018:  Post more than I did in 2017.  Sorry. This year's eligible album list is: Ah, The World! Oh, The World! All This Life As You Were Who Built The Moon? A Blaze of Feather Blindfaller Crack-Up Everything Now Little Fictions One More Light Lemon Cotton Candy Sunset Pleasure Red Pill Blues Wonderful Wonderful It's mostly a list of surprises.  The Gallagher brothers both did the unexpected - Liam released something that sounds fresher and more genuine than anything he's sang in over a decade while Noel released a mostly upbeat album.  The Killers almost did well enough on Wonderful Wonderful to make up for the atrocity that is Battle Born .  I didn't know what to expect from Richard Edwards' solo album, but I was definitely pleasantly surprised.  Tom McRae released an extremely chill and heartfelt album in a beautiful little red book; think Amnesiac with fewer minotaurs and more recipes for fish.  Meanwhile,...

This list is more about posterity than about writing convincing arguments imploring you to try these albums. I'm already later than I'd planned and time isn't getting any freer, so it's time to spit it out and get on with everything else! Remember when I said that last year? When I evidently (somehow) had even more time to write than I have today? Ah, the good old days. So! Same rules apply. Remember when I said that last year, referencing the year before? Same rules apply again. This year started off amazingly, with four albums in a row coming out within a month or so of each other - Painting of a Panic Attack, Are You Serious, Petals, and Jet Plane & Oxbow (though JP&O technically came out in January, it wasn't until I ordered Frightened Rabbit's album that I saw that this new Shearwater album had finally dropped). Jet Plane & Oxbow A Moon Shaped Pool Painting of a Panic Attack Courting the Squall 25 Are You Serious The ...

This list is more about posterity than about writing convincing arguments imploring you to try these albums. I'm already later than I'd planned and time isn't getting any freer, so it's time to spit it out and get on with everything else! Remember when I said that last year? When I evidently (somehow) had even more time to write than I have today? Ah, the good old days. So! Same rules apply. 2015 had both better quantity and quality when compared to 2014. I came up with a list of 20 albums off the top of my head that were new in '15, not including albums that were released earlier than that but found for the first time in the last 12 months. Let's recap. Chasing Daylight What A Terrible World, What A Beautiful World How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful Strange Trails My Favourite Faded Fantasy Did I Sleep And Miss The Border Beneath The Skin These Changing Skies Vestiges And Claws Curio Cities Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance Kintsugi No No N...

This list is more about posterity than about writing convincing arguments imploring you to try these albums. I'm already later than I'd planned and time isn't getting any freer, so it's time to spit it out and get on with everything else! Of the albums worth mentioning from last year: ( Reflektor The Takeoff and Landing of Everything Bulletproof Picasso Things Are Really Great Here...Sort Of Slingshot to Heaven Odludek Embrace Ghost Stories Song Spells, No. 1: Cedarsmoke ) I have to hand it to Arcade Fire for Reflektor . Something that long could easily have become a bloated nightmare, but even listening to only one half or the other feels incomplete.  "Song Spells..." gets an honorable mention because it's one of those rare albums that actually captures a lot of the magic that made Sea Wolf's first album so good. The best track of the year comes from Elbow. A two-parter, "Fly Boy Blue / Lunette" gives you a proper f...

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...

Website of the Year - Raspberry Pi Great project, great cause. So beautifully nerdy to watch this happen from the ground up. Book of the Year - Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus There was a whole lot of buzz surrounding Morgenstern's debut novel about this one-of-a-kind circus. I finally got it for my lunchtime reading break on my Kindle and devoured about 7-10% of it every day. It was absolutely worth every penny I paid. I've since ordered it in hardcover as well, since I think it's a book that's going to have staying power. While the plot is certainly better than average, it's the world that the plot is couched in that really makes me want to start reading it all over again. The novel is not intended to be a part of any series, so there's no commitment to anything greater than its own length. This was one of the most attractive things about it from the start, since a lot of my reading time is gobbled up by enormous books, enormous s...