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...

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...

The Decemberists' The King is Dead Editor's Note: This is the 3rd in a quasi-weekly series of reviews marking my favorite ten albums of 2011. New reviews go up every weekend through the end of the year. Colin warned us that this album was going to be something different. He wasn't kidding. This acoustically-driven bit of folksy Americana is the second half of the one-two punch that started with "The Hazards of Love." If you're looking for epic songs about being swallowed by a whale, you're going to be disappointed in this album. And at first, that's where I was. Usually I go to The Decemberists when I'm in the mood for something different, but this entire album is pretty radio-friendly. SiriusXM Radio won't stop playing tracks from it. The only problem with whale-proportioned tales is their size. Listening to "Picaresque" is almost exhausting (even though I mean that in a good way). But "The King is Dead" is...