Musing

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...