Musing

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 ...

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...

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...