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 ...

Donald Hall gets it.

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...

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 ...