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! 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...

2014 has been a circus. The HMA's will only be out in one mega-post sometime in January once things begin settling down. Hang in there.

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...