Musing

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

Indeed, the question which it is not safe to ask of any religion is just the one we are prone to ask first, namely, Is it true? A much safer question is, Is it saving? That is, does it hold men up to a higher standard of life and duty than they were otherwise capable of? Does it cheer and sustain them in their journey through this world? Could the religion of Greece have faced the question, Is it true? And yet the German historian of Greece, Dr. Curtius, says that the religion of Apollo "was nowhere introduced without taking hold of and transforming the whole life of the people. It liberated men from dark and groveling worship of Nature; it converted the worship of a god into the duty of moral elevation; it founded expiations for those oppressed with guilt, and for those astray, without guidance, sacred oracles." Can historical Christianity any better face the question, Is it true? Did all these events fall out as set down in the New Testament? Are they set in their ...

The blue circles were originally part of a flow diagram for a brainstorming session. I added the red lips on Tuesday of this week. As the week went on, different people added more embellishments until we got to this final state today. Creepy? Maybe. But it made people chuckle all week as it got more and more crazy. That's people management.