Musing

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...

Here is more than you ever wanted to know about the books, movies, and music that stood out for me in 2013. Website of the Year - alterslash.org Finally - something that waters down the firehose of information that is Slashdot. Very phone friendly as well. Book of the Year - The Last Dark by Stephen R. Donaldson Last year at this time I was assuming that the long-awaited conclusion to the Wheel of Time could not possibly fail to own everything else that would be released through 2013. This behemoth, which  closed 15 years of reading and waiting for me, was satisfying in many ways, but also suffered significantly more than the previous two volumes finished by Sanderson due to the choppy mix of voices (it was his intent to leave as much unaltered Jordan in the work as possible) and the [SPOILER] seemingly-last-minute-addition of some Sharan forces led by a much-anticipated bad guy [END SPOILER]. The short story that was published in the Unfettered anthology would ha...

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

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...

Ben Howard's Every Kingdom Editor's Note: This is the 8th 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 just after the new year. Stay tuned! Chase's departure from "House, M.D." in the final season was tracked with the closing song on this album, "Promise." It gave me chills. "House" brought me several good bands or songs during its eight year run, but I'm not sure it brought me anything better than Ben Howard. I think of Ben as the anti-Matt Nathanson. Matt is more of a chord-driven songwriter, keeping the songs casual, simple affairs. Good campfire music. Ben plays his guitar like a harp, in that his songs are driven by complex melody lines picked out one string at a time. It's not just good sounding music. It's music that makes you sit back and appreciate the level...

Keane's Strangeland Editor's Note: This is the 7th 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 just after the new year. Stay tuned! Keane turned in a weak effort with their last album, which I panned a few years ago. They've since released an EP that was received with scorn by pretty much the entire fan community. Things were looking bad, which was great news for me. I have a theory that artists only make good albums when they're experiencing tough times. The corollary is that they make lousy albums when they are at the height of their popularity/having good tours/etc. Coldplay and The Killers are two fine recent examples. Now Keane joins that list. This album does a sharp U-turn away from the synth-filled excess and sunshiny melodies of the previous two works and journeys back to the pianos and themes of...

Tom McRae's From the Lowlands [ Digital ] Editor's Note: This is the 6th 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 just after the new year. Stay tuned! Tom promised a second half to the HMA-winning The Alphabet of Hurricanes back when he was in the studio for that album, but I'm a jaded consumer of music - I've heard this before. Follow any band in the studio closely enough and you're sure to read something like this at some point: "Hey guys, we have cut 249 songs for this album! Can't wait to share them with you!!!" But oh me of little faith: here is the second half of the AOH cycle. And it's glorious. At first I thought this was just an EP of leftovers, but I posed the question to the man himself on his forum and it was confirmed that this is a full length album. Seeing only 9...

Charlie Winston's Running Still Editor's Note: This is the 5th 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 just after the new year. Stay tuned! After landing 2010's Discovery Artist of the Year Award, I naturally had high hopes for Mr. Winston. And I'm sure he will be happy to know that he did not fail to amaze with Running Still . You're welcome, Charles. "Hello Alone" is a great bridge from the last album, which is good, because "Speak To Me" comes out of left field and - on first listen - made me wonder if he'd decided to completely change his style. It's happened before. Witness "Mischifus," the impossible-to-find-on-disc collection of tunes he wrote for a one man theater production. It's an odd album of sonic knick-knacks that didn't really suggest ...

Sea Wolf's Old World Romance Editor's Note: This is the 4th 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 just after the new year. Stay tuned! Sea Wolf's second full length was something of a surprise. It's far more approachable than Leaves in the River . Although it placed third in my 2009 countdown, it lost something of its luster over time. It started feeling like a sell-out effort, which made me worry about LP3. Apparently I was too quick to judge, because this third album - Old World Romance - starts taking cues from the first album and leaving the sheen and the theatrics of the second album in the past. LitR is another one of those albums I love to pull out on rainy days. OWR is similar, but darker and colder. More of an album for snow than for rain (listen to "Kasper" for example and try t...