Musing

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...

Adele's 21 Editor's Note: This is the 2nd 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. Letting my wife play the radio one night while we were out driving, I had to make an uncomfortable admission - whoever this girl singing about "rolling in the deep" was, she had some glorious pipes. I stored it in the back of my head until we saw her on television performing "Turning Tables" while we were in Rome. Another good song? One or two good songs can be luck. Three good songs on the same album is my minimum requirement to investigate a new artist. "Someone Like You" is a little sappy-sweet (or bitter-saccharine) for me, but I couldn't deny the talent. I got both of her albums this fall and gave them both a few listens. And while I still have a slight preference for 19, 21 is still a great album by an artist with serious talent. It sags a little in...

Red Hot Chili Peppers' I'm With You Editor's Note: This is the 1st 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. It can't be easy to lose John Frusciante. Hardcore fans of RHCP went into a collective apoplectic shock when Frusciante announced in 2009 that he was splitting amicably with the rest of the band.  The Three Pillars of the Peppers were down to two.  Regardless of where you would rank John amongst those three, it's pretty evident that he's not on this album.  What can we say about the new guy?  Well...he does play a guitar.  But few guys can drop a solo like John. That's not to say this is a bad album.  It's making the top ten, isn't it?  I wouldn't cut any of the songs in the tracklisting off of the album, which is more than I can say for some albums that will actually be ranked higher in the next few weeks.  The disappointment comes, unf...

Conky is what Vista's Sidebar should have been - customizable at every level so that I can count on using as much (or as little) of my resource pool as I would like. It's not a required function by any means, but anyone serious enough to be running some version of Linux is probably someone who refers constantly to some form of a task manager. The OOTB configuration provides basic system information and the list of hotkeys. Grabbing weather forecasts is a popular request, but I couldn't find many start-to-finish discussions that ended with a satisfied user and script. The few such ones that I found were outrageously complicated. If I wanted something that bloated, I'd just run Vista! Below is my own script, which shows a few basic system statistics and works with www.weather.com to grab current stats and forecasts for today and tomorrow. Note that in the evening, the forecast for today is no longer a valid entry on weather.com, so the script returns "N/A...

If you dismiss this album after the first track as a poor-man's Oasis, you've fooled yourself out of something pretty special here. You only have to go one track farther into the album to hear something that heavy-handed Noel would have never allowed onto an Oasis album. I would have been shocked to hear any of these tracks on Oasis-LP8 barring four. There's a sense of variety-with-cohesion that was lacking in Dig Out Your Soul . More importantly, it makes up for another lack in the last Oasis album: production. High quality VBR MP3's of DGSS sound better than listening to DOYS on CD or vinyl; I don't want to see Dave Sardy's name in the liner notes for any album ever again. I'm excited to hear the whole thing at CD quality in a couple of weeks!

Well. That was not "In Rainbows: Part II". Yorke sings in much the same way that he did for IR, but it's over an electric mix that sounds like Amnesiac on steroids. Sounds like a blinding endorsement, but that first 15-20 minutes of frenetic toe-tapping starts to wear a little thin about halfway through "Little By Little." The back half is definitely slower. Maybe that was the intention - an uptempo first half and a more relaxed second half. Instant favorite? "Codex" is gorgeous. It has rightfully been called "Pyramid Song V2.0." It's too soon to talk about TKOL's rank amongst other Radiohead albums, but of their 8 albums, it's currently somewhere in the middle. The physical release might correct a couple of rough spots in the MP3's, and holding the so-called Newspaper Album might add some of the magic that strangely seems to be missing now.

Website of the Year - Pat's Fantasy Hotlist Pat stirs up a lot of, well, let's say "emotions" amongst those who read his blog. But even if I don't agree with every review he writes or particularly care about Cirque du Soleil, I like his reviewing/interviewing method because he addresses each of the most important qualities that readers look for in books. I'm also happy to hear that he'll be continuing to write his reviews, even if he'll be cutting back to focus more on the world of flesh and blood. Book of the Year - Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson's Towers of Midnight It might be more accurate to create a category called "Author of the Year" and give it to Brandon Sanderson without any reservations at all, because The Way of Kings was almost as awesome. But ToM was the book that most of us have been waiting for for almost a decade. If you thought prophecies were being fulfilled before ToM, then ToM itself will leave you breath...