2008 year in review

In the year 2008:

- The Philadelphia Phillies won the World Series
- A black man was elected president
- Guns 'n' Roses released Chinese Democracy
- My Bloody Valentine went on tour
- Portishead put a new album out
- The Flaming Lips finished Christmas on Mars

These are all extraordinary occurrences, right? I didn't wake up 11 months ago in some weird alternate universe where this sort of weird shit is commonplace, right?

2008 music posts coming in a couple weeks, so shtick around.

"World's Oldest Person Dies" is such a non-news headline. Just from a statistical standpoint, is there anybody in the world who could possibly be more likely to die at any given moment than the world's oldest person?

"you talkin' to me?"

Last week I bought the newly released "Coppola Restoration" box set of The Godfather and its sequels. A purchase well worth the money for anybody who doesn't own those movies already (which was me before last week).

I was watching Part II tonight, and thinking about how much I love watching Robert De Niro do anything, even just stick his hands in his pockets and stare into space, and I eventually landed on his Wikipedia page, and I realized that his career is a neat little oversimplified microcosm of Hollywood filmmaking over the past 35 years.

And if you want to illustrate the difference between the "film school brat" era of the late 70s and the "sequels, remakes, and formulas" era of the past ten years or so, De Niro's filmography charts it perfectly: The Godfather Part II, Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter, and Raging Bull then, Analyze This (and Analyze That), Meet the Parents (and Meet the Fockers), Rocky and Bullwinkle, and Shark Tale now.

This isn't meant as a criticism of De Niro (if you asked me who my favorite actor of all time was, it would be De Niro in a walk, issues raised by yesterday's entry aside), and it isn't meant to say that there were no awful and overly familiar movies back then, or that there are no sweeping, method-acted epics now (or that there are no film school brat types now). It's just a funny thought I had.

"half of what I say is meaningless..."

I was at a party last weekend, and I was approached (cornered) by a young woman, who had apparently been told by one of my friends that if she wanted to talk about music, I was the person to talk to.

I would probably dispute that notion, by the way, because while it's true that I do love talking about music, and I know more about pop music than most people (because that's what I busied myself with in high school and college while the rest of you had friends and such), I tend to be very opinionated and sometimes dismissive. This can end up hurting people's feelings if all they wanted to do was talk about, say, Band of Horses, and I dismiss them as "Death Cab for Journey" and immediately switch back to ranting about why John Cale is the greatest musician of all time, or whatever people like me like to talk about. And I don't really hate Band of Horses, or care about them one way or the other, and it doesn't bother me one bit if anybody else likes them or even thinks they're the future of rock music. I'm just an asshole sometimes, that's all.

Anyway, this girl asked me who my favorite band is. I don't like that question, because it's not really an interesting question, it's reductive of anybody's musical taste, and mostly because that changes from hour to hour with me, and probably most other people.

I deflected the question back to her, in hopes that she would say something that could spur the conversation on, and get me out of reciting my boilerplate list of favorite bands.

"I would have to say the Beatles," she said.

My response, because I'd had a few drinks and didn't really care if she thought I was an asshole, was, "Well Christ, of course your favorite band is the Beatles, but you can't say that. There's no discussion to be had about that. Everybody's favorite band is the Beatles, there's nothing interesting about that."

It got me thinking later on: first of all, I don't actually think for a minute that everybody's favorite band is the Beatles. I know a lot of people who somehow made it to adulthood without spending their entire childhood digesting every single Beatles song and album, for hours and hours (again, this is what I did as a kid instead of socializing). But still, they were a phenomenon unique in the history of music, a result of improbable circumstances and talent that resulted in unbelievable popularity of an unprecedented scale, that left behind a catalog that is essentially perfect, from the first song on their first album to the last song on their last album. They were insanely prolific, provided countless innovations that still bear effect on pop music, were surprisingly eclectic within the course of any of their albums, let alone their whole career, and had nary a single misstep from start to finish.

But are they my favorite band? Purely from the standpoint of which single band or artist has provided me with the most rewarding listens, who stand up to hundreds of listens without diminishing, who've provided me with more entertainment than anybody else, the Beatles are the obvious answer, but there are artists whose work I cherish more, who provide a more personal connection. The Beatles, in part because of their massive global and cross-generational popularity, and in part because they're so perfect and unassailable, are hard to pick as a favorite.

We like to root for underdogs, we like our heroes flawed, and we like to feel unique. Picking the Beatles in that situation is just too obvious, too safe, like listing Beethoven as your favorite classical composer, Citizen Kane as your favorite movie, and Shakespeare as your favorite poet. Sure they're good, brilliant really, and I would never doubt the truthfulness of anybody who did list all of those, because they're so good, but that's the point. Everybody knows they're good. It's damn near impossible to dispute their greatness without looking like the world's most obnoxious contrarian, and with good reason. But holding those up as your personal favorite doesn't say anything about your personality.

The tragedy of John McCain

Anybody who knows me even a little can probably vouch for my status and an unabashed liberal. I will pretty much automatically vote for whoever the Democrat is in any statewide or national election, although if I had my way we might actually get stuck with a President Kucinich.

But I actually feel a little bit sorry for John McCain.

It's not that he's waited so long for his chance and now appears to be on his way to defeat (although, by the way, let's not count our chickens before they hatch here, we still have to go vote for Obama tomorrow for him to win). It's that even if he does win, he's given himself over so thoroughly to the demons of Rove-style right wing politics.

The lesson that McCain took from George W. Bush's victories was apparently that playing to the base (and/or the lowest common denominator) wins, especially if you do so in the lowest, crudest, most misleading, and plainly insulting manner possible. Bush sunk McCain in the 2000 primaries with the most shamelessly sleazy campaign ever seen, and McCain, having absorbed this information, has been applying it to his 2008 campaign against Obama, robo-calls and all.

What he didn't realize was that Bush's victories in the general elections were by fractional margins (the national margin in 2004 was 2.4%, and of course he famously didn't even win the popular vote in 2000), against Democratic opponents far less organized and less convincing than Obama, in times less turbulent than now. So while Rove politics did edge out Kerry in 2004 (the Swift Boat controversy comes to mind, although that was not strictly from the Bush campaign), in 2008 the entire economy damn near collapsed, and McCain's campaign is still flailing about hoping that people are going to care about Obama's "involvement" with William Ayers that happened 7 years ago. Obama has clear, agreeable messages about tax reform and the economy, and McCain has Joe Biden's words taken out of context against images of rallies and soldiers in Arabic countries. Obama speaks for crowds of tens of thousands of people, and McCain acts as if Obama's massive popularity and eminent likability is somehow a negative trait.

It would be just another dirty campaign run by a Republican, except for the fact that McCain is actually NOT just another Republican. McCain's nauseating repetition of the word "maverick" is actually justified by his actions in the Senate. He has consistently stood up to his party, worked for smart bipartisan compromises, and shows a willingness to listen and learn that Bush would probably find foolish (this is a compliment). He's stubbornly resisted the extreme right wing of his party, taking moderate (and, dare I say, liberal) stances in the past on abortion, campaign finance, and immigration, among others. He's the one who publicly called Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell "agents of intolerance." He was still pretty solidly conservative, but he was the type of conservative I could actually respect, even if I'd never vote for him.

And now here he is, at the tail end of a campaign marked by misleading statements and outright lies, fearmongering, anti-intellectualism, subtle racism, hypocrisy, and, of course, Sarah fucking Palin, the ultimate physical manifestation of ignorance, and for what? If McCain loses, he can't flip a switch and go back to the McCain who was in the Senate in 2000, pretending that he hasn't done what he's done and said what he's said for the past year and a half. If he wins, he's bound to the far right wing of the Republican party that will have put him there, which means no pro-choice Supreme court justices, no immigration reform, and no courting the Democrat-controlled Congress with the reasonable compromises that are his specialty. Win or lose, John McCain has sold his soul.

All of which is to say...

Vote Obama.

"hockey moms" are the new "NASCAR dads"

There's been a lot of talk lately about Sarah Palin, and I'm sure you're all sick of hearing about her by now, so I just have two quick questions about her that I don't think anybody else has asked so far, and then we can all move on to bigger and better things:

1. Is she related to the Monty Python guy?

2. How many moose has she fucked, and is this more or less than the average Alaskan?

Hopefully we can get this all cleared up, and she can resume her campaign against Barack Obama to become the next president.

I'm just not sure about the speech this guy MacCane gave last night. He sure did talk a lot about himself. I don't think it's going to benefit Sarah Palin very much in the polls.

Lucky Old Sun's got nothin' to do but roll 'round heaven all day...

You know, I think among my friends, my undying devotion to/worship of Brian Wilson is well-known enough that they would probably joke, on the subject of Brian Wilson's That Lucky Old Sun, which was released on CD today, that I probably heard it over a year ago. And in this case, that would almost be true, as the work was premiered as a whole by Brian and his band live in September 2007, and I had it shortly thereafter through the magic of internet distributed bootlegs.

I stopped in my favorite record store to buy it anyway today, of course, and, like with Smile (although in an altogether more low-key fashion), I avoided listening to the studio versions until I could pop in the CD and hear the whole thing all at once. Actually, I was only mildly excited to hear it, as I had decided based on the bootleg that That Lucky Old Sun was a pleasant but inconsequential bookend to Brian Wilson's life and career.

Then I actually listened to the damn thing, and man, I forgot how much I really do love that man's music. A good handful of the songs are middling and forgettable, but every so often an amazing melody or harmony jumps out of the speakers, and it just floors me. And the songs that are really good are breathtaking, on par with anything he did 40 years ago.

Speaking of which, holy shit, "Can't Wait Too Long" is on the album! He's been sitting on that one for 41 years, actually.

Anyway, it is a pleasant bookend to Brian's career, but not inconsequential. The symbolic values are enormous, maybe even more than his final vanquishing of his Smile demons. With That Lucky Old Sun, Brian returns to his love of California, the only home he's ever known, invoking specific memories of his past with an agreeable nostalgia. Brian has conquered his demons, made peace with himself, and is finally learning to enjoy life. Not bad for a guy who probably should have been dead several decades ago.

At this point in his career, though, everything about Brian Wilson has a huge symbolic value. The references in the lyrics to "Summer '61" (when the Beach Boys formed), how Brian "turned out the lights" at age 25 (when the Smile debacle occurred), or had "a dream singing with my brothers in harmony" (a reference to his deceased brothers and former bandmates Carl and Dennis) would be typical lyrical oddities for any other artist, but out of the mouth of Brian Wilson, they're almost insider references, nods to the people paying attention who "get it."

But maybe I'm thinking too much. At it's simplest, That Lucky Old Sun is a fine example of sunny California pop from the man who invented the genre.

AMERRRRICA

If this isn't a sign that MCain has no chance this fall, I don't know what is. God that is incredibly confusing.

My favorite part of that article might actually be the phrase "while promoting his new movie 'Beer for My Horses'..."

keepin' the spirit alive

a mildly amusing momentary diversion

Click on "edit - paste" in your browser thing and be amazed at the weird non-sequitur of seeing the last stream of text that you copied with your computer without any context. Especially fun if you haven't used the feature for several days.

I just did it and got this: Neil Hamburger

fuck

You know, I have to admit, I think the new Coldplay album is pretty good.

Then again, I've always been partial to Coldplay. For a guy who is as much of a bullshit indie/elitist/hipster/asshole or whatever as I probably am to stick with them through an album as mind-numbingly boring as X & Y (christ, even the title is boring), and sit through a million irritating iPod commercials with Chris Martin doing his Bono/Jesus thing, and still run out to buy Viva la Viva or Death and All His Friends the first week it was out... well, I think that's some kind of devotion.

See, I know that the days of Parachutes are long over, and I'm never going to see them again in a place as small as the 9:30 Club (and I'm certainly not going to be ever to wait after a show and meet them again), but I think these four dorky British dudes still have some great potential. The first two times I saw them (before they started touring on increasingly mediocre material) were some of the most energetic and enthusiastic performances I've ever seen. I've never seen a band that seemed so genuinely amazed that a room full of people would ever be so into their music. I left those shows feeling almost as good as I did leaving Flaming Lips and Polyphonic Spree shows, and without the impressive spectacle of those two acts. Coldplay were never going to smash their instruments onstage after a show, but even if singing along with a room full of people as one voice to a song as pretty as "Yellow" sounds irredeemably lame, well, don't knock it until you've tried it.

The thing is, Coldplay eventually became a club act stuck playing in basketball arenas, where their contagious enthusiasm is muddled, and their music started playing the part as well, reaching for the stars but somehow always gazing down at the charmingly befuddled navel of Chris Martin, and all of those U2 comparisons seemed depressingly apt. The difference was that before U2 became bigger than Jesus, they were an angry group of punks (and Boy and War will always be great testaments to the glorious righteousness that was), whereas Coldplay have always been more reflective, even insecure.

All of which is to say that X & Y was a tedious mess, and deserved every negative word thrown at it. What makes Viva la Vida so interesting is that it is a de facto apology for its predecessor. Hiring Brian freaking Eno of all people to produce isn't going to make the U2 comparisons go away any time soon, but the new album is so engaging because it's the first time Coldplay have sounded unpredictable since A Rush of Blood to the Head followed the subdued Parachutes with the clamorous pounding of "Politik." There are abrupt mid-song shifts, songs that abruptly segue into the next song, sounds foreign to any previous incarnation of Coldplay, hip-hop beats combined with huge church organs, waves of trademark Eno-scapes. It's an album full of songs that sound like they were written by real human beings, and if that seems like a small compliment, it's not something that could be said of their last album. The "huge arena rock" sound hasn't gone away, but it's been incorporated into something interesting.

In short, it's engaging pop music, and often pretty damn gorgeous too. It's not exactly great, but there isn't a song on it that I find myself skipping, and it's at least a step in the right direction for the band, a sign that they might still have a masterpiece in them.

na na na na na na na na FISHING!

Seriously, are we STILL making movies about Batman?

boring music geek stuff

There was a blog post on The A.V. Club last week that I found intriguing. You pick your favorite album (or an album by some other criteria of your choice) for every year in which you've lived. Obviously I'm doing it now myself. It's interesting before me because half of the years I have to go with were before I was even aware of what kind of music was coming out at the time, and half of the half remaining would be completely different I had picked them during that year. Metallica would have made the 1995 list if you'd asked me then. They're not on it now.

COMMENCE NERDAGE:

1983 - Talking Heads - Speaking in Tongues

1984 - Robyn Hitchcock - I Often Dream of Trains

1985 - Suzanne Vega - Suzanne Vega

1986 - Paul Simon - Graceland

1987 - U2 - The Joshua Tree

1988 - Talk Talk - Spirit of Eden

1989 - XTC - Oranges & Lemons

1990 - Depeche Mode - Violator

1991 - Slint - Spiderland

1992 - Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works 85-92

1993 - The Smashing Pumpkins - Siamese Dream

1994 - Built to Spill - There's Nothing Wrong With Love

1995 - Sunny Day Real Estate - LP2

1996 - Weezer - Pinkerton

1997 - Radiohead - Ok Computer

1998 - Boards of Canada - Music Has the Right to Children

1999 - The Flaming Lips - The Soft Bulletin

2000 - Godspeed You Black Emperor! - Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven

2001 - Bjork - Vespertine

2002 - Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

2003 - Sufjan Stevens - Michigan

2004 - Brian Wilson - Smile

2005 - Animal Collective - Feels

2006 - Scott Walker - The Drift

2007 - Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer (that album still keeps growing on me)

2008 - Portishead - Third (so far)

Various things:

Years that make me want to choose more than one album (with alternates):

1986 - XTC - Skylarking

1991 - My Bloody Valentine - Loveless

1997 - Mogwai - Young Team, Stereolab - Dots and Loops, Built to Spill - Perfect From Now On

2000 - Radiohead - Kid A

2004- The Fiery Furnaces - Blueberry Boat

Years for which I would rather pick a movie than an album:

1990 - Goodfellas

I got the new Animal Collective EP, Water Curses, recently. Today I put the CD in my computer to listen to it. iTunes could not quite identify it:

"Multiple matches were found for this CD. Choose one:

Ace of Base - All That She Wants [single]
Animal Collective - Water Curses EP"

Uhh... all right.

Mike Myers

Mike Myers.

God, just fucking stop it. Seriously.

For fuck's sake, dude. I used to think of "Sprockets" in my head and recall it fondly. Now I think "Sprockets" and think "fucking Mike Myers sucks." I don't want to look it up on YouTube for fear that I might actually find it funny.

I mean, Christ, if it's not another fucking Austin Powers movie, it's another dip in the ol' cash well for Shrek. And now this Love Guru thing. God. I don't know what the hell that horseshit is, I just know every time I see a commercial for it on TV I want to punch Mike Myers in the throat.

And let's not forget YOU, America! Why on Earth do you people keep giving this idiot money? Don't you know that only lets him keep doing this? Don't you realize that when The Love Guru has a huge opening this weekend, that only guarantees that he'll make another Cat in the Hat movie? Why are you doing this to yourselves? WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME?

Plastic Ono Band

MAMA DON'T GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

DADDY COME HOME!

soapbox time!

I usually try, sometimes a little too hard, to play devil's advocate in issues. I fall pretty far to the left of the political spectrum, but if at all possible, I like to acknowledge that on many issues, there is a valid opposing viewpoint, even if I don't agree with it. (This is called being civil, which I know is an unheard of idea on the Internet.) I am pro-choice, for example, but I recognize that some people just think that it is never ok to willingly take a life, even in the form of a fetus. If anybody needs to me to run down the list of reasons why I disagree with that, I will, but that's not really where I'm going with this.

On some issues, though, there's no devil's advocate. If you are against gay marriage, I think you're flat out wrong, and I've said it before, and I'll say it again, in 50 years you will look as foolish and ignorant as you would if you stated today that a white woman should not be allowed to marry a black man. I was reading, in an article about the California Supreme Court's ruling that essentially legalizes gay marriage (at least until this fall), about a lesbian couple in their 80s who have been together for 55 years, who can finally get married (they were married in that two-week window where gay marriage was legal in San Francisco, but it was annulled when it was decided that the mayor had severely exceeded his authority). I would rather appeal to ration and common sense, but emotion will do sometimes, and I just can't imagine how anybody could look at this couple who's been waiting since the Eisenhower administration to tie the knot and tell them they shouldn't be allowed to do so.

Really, if you've got a rational and logical argument against gay marriage that doesn't involve God or your own personal squeamishness, I would very much like to hear it.

whatever makes you happy, whatever you want...

Sometimes I think that for all the amazing things they've done, Radiohead have never really topped "Creep."

Most of the time I don't really think that, but I don't think most people will argue with me if I say they've never done anything so immediate or nakedly emotional since then. Everybody in the world loves that song, with the possible exception of Radiohead themselves.

That song is kind of an anomaly, now that I think about it. It came out in the middle of the grunge era, when mainstream music was dominated by somber bands that were all about pathos and self-pity and nihilism, (for an intolerably boring example, see the Stone Temple Pilots song of the same name, released a year earlier), and along comes this band of goofy-looking British dudes aping REM and U2, and they blow everybody else out of the water, almost by accident. Apparently they weren't even going to put "Creep" on Pablo Honey, which sounds strange, considering that it's basically one of the two really good songs on that album. Eventually Radiohead took a few astronomical leaps forward, but they're always going to be associated with "Creep," whether they like it or not.

"Dick Laurent is dead..."

One of the earlier CDs I ever bought with my own money was the soundtrack to the movie Lost Highway. At the time, I didn't have a clue who David Lynch was, I just wanted it because it had a great non-album Smashing Pumpkins song on it, and I kind of liked Nine Inch Nails' "The Perfect Drug" too. It also had Lou Reed, David Bowie, Marilyn Manson, Rammstein (pre-"Du Hast"), and all that crazy Angelo Badalamenti noir-jazz that's in every David Lynch movie. It took me another few years to really care about Lou Reed and David Bowie too, although I at least knew who they were when I was 14.

So tonight, I finally watched the movie, after it was finally released on DVD last month and after I read a couple "wait, maybe we got this wrong" articles about the DVD release by critics, who generally hated it in 1997.

It's an all right movie, I guess. It's unmistakably a David Lynch movie, like everything he does. It's got quite a few "what the hell is this person doing in this movie?" moments; Robert Blake, Henry Rollins, Richard Pryor, Robert Loggia, Marilyn Manson, and Gary freakin' Busey all turn in supporting roles. I found it to be a lot more low-key than the rest of his stuff. First viewings of a David Lynch film are always a little confusing, but they're usually not difficult to stay interested in, like this one was. I would say Lynch fans should watch it, and if you're not a Lynch fan, you're not going to watch it anyway.

Anyway, I really just wanted to show you all this clip, because it's a good example of why we should probably all be terrified of Robert Blake. This thing rivals Daniel Plainview drinkin' up milkshakes in terms of the whole "what the fuck this is insane/awesome" thing.



Supposedly Blake is completely responsible for the way that character looks and acts, which, just... yeesh. Check the huge 1997 cell phone too.

I kinda like how Phillies-Mets is a legitimate rivalry now. For a while it seems like we've really hated the Mets, but the Mets had bigger things to worry about, which fueled the inferiority complex that we Philly fans have, which generally manifests itself as loathing New Yorkers for being such fatheaded smug assholes. So there was no small amount of pleasure in the Phillies not only winning the division last year, but doing it over the New York Mets, who set a new standard for incompetence with the worst season-ending skid ever (finally getting, who else, the '64 Phillies off the hook). Even after the Phillies got swept by the Rockies in the playoffs, it wasn't heartbreaking, because the Phillies were division champs, and the Mets fans had to wallow in disgust all winter long, and we have bragging rights for a whole year. And now Phillies-Mets is a big-ticket rivalry, and Fox's game of the week.

I think that's pretty cool. As long as the Phillies start winning some damn games here.

sunshine 'n' water 'n' trees 'n' such

A couple months ago, I was sent down to Maryland to work with a pipe crew for a week when my other job was shut down to dry out (February is no good for construction). We were putting in a sewer line in a sort of village that's pretty typical of the area, a collection of houses bunched near the shore of the Chesapeake, a village in the sense that it's a group of homes that are all in the same area, but not in the sense that the homes sprung up around a central location for any reason other than that there's a large body of water nearby.

I knew the water was close by, but I didn't know how close (I figured within half a mile or so), and the first morning I was there it was extremely foggy, so I was lucky to be able to see the machine at the other end of the pipe I was standing next to. Then around noon, the fog cleared, and the sun came out, and holy shit, there was the beach 50 feet away from us, along with possibly the most beatiful waterfront landscape I've ever seen.

Anyway, I was just thinking about that, because one of the guys who was at that job got sent to mine today, and I was realizing that part of the reason I don't completely hate my job is because while a lot of people I know are staring at a computer screen in a cubicle, I'm outside enjoying the nice weather, and sometimes, nice scenery too. It was nice to not have to stare at nothing but dirt all day.

I was also thinking about the fact that the bay down there is one of the most tranquil and gorgeous places I've ever been, and I've lived most of my life 25 miles away from it, and I've been there something like three times in my entire life. I've been to Disney World that many times, and that's 1,000 miles away and also horrible. Christ.

Other random thought for today: I kind of think I'm going to listen to I Often Dream of Trains by Robyn Hitchcock every day for the next three months. It is a wonderful album and I have no idea how I lived for 24 years without it. Well... 23, it came out after I was born.

soapbox time!

You know, in Barack Obama I finally had a presidential candidate that I actually admired. If I wasn't necessarily ga-ga about the idea of him being president, that's basically because I don't think that it's actually possible for me to go ga-ga for a politician, no matter who it is.

Then he had to go and put his foot in his damn mouth. I'm not about to switch who I'm voting for next week, but I'm not going to gloss it over and pretend it's not an issue either. It's not an issue of him being "out of touch," it's about him acting like a condescending ass. He not only said that religious people and gun owners have turned to those things because of economic issues, he also put them on the same level as racism, nationalism, and bigotry. That's not exactly small potatoes when you're trying to convince those people to put you in charge of them. It's condescending at best, insulting at worst.

Being from a somewhat depressed, small Pennsylvania town myself (not coal-country depressed, but not exactly thriving either), I would like to point out that what he said is actually true for a small minority of people, but is still horseshit. I'd also like to say that for about as long as I've had a political sensibility, I've always bristled at the myth that liberals are out of touch elitists. That's horseshit, too, but the reason that Republicans are able to convince so many people that that's true is because people keep giving them perfect ammo to do it, like Obama just did, and if he keeps it up, he's going to end up just like John Kerry. Fortunately he's probably got people to remind him every day never to say something like that again.

Again, barring unforeseen circumstances, I'm still voting for Obama next week (and in November too, John McCain scares the hell out of me), but it's naive to pretend that this isn't a concern, if not about his personal views toward small town people, than at least from an electability standpoint. If you compare his comments with Hillary Clinton's deluded fantasy about sniper fire in Bosnia, I would say Obama's is the bigger faux pas, and more likely to bite him in the ass later on.

when I grow up to be a man...

When I grow up, I want to be the sad loser who watches R-rated movies with a clicker in hand to post the exact number of usages of the word "fuck" (and its variations, of course) to imdb.com trivia pages.

With some hard work and a little luck, I could be the guy who edits this Wikipedia article.


Crap, I just ruined my snarkiness by actually browsing the article and finding something I consider amusing: Apparently Good Will Hunting dropped more F-bombs than Trainspotting. Damn you, Wikipedia! Your utter banality has once again proven surprisingly alluring!

I have nothing of importance to say.

The nice thing about a wireless network is being able to waste time on your computer and sit outside enjoying the nice weather at the same time.

Suck my dick, WIRES!

I don't understand the rage directed toward Uwe Boll. If I could banish one filmmaker to Siberia, and I had Uwe Boll, Michael Bay, the guys who keep making these "Scary Movie" and "Meet the Spartans" things, and Brett Ratner in front of me, Boll would be the last guy I'd get rid of.

I can see people not liking him actually boxing his harshest critics, but I think that's a pretty funny publicity stunt. Nobody made anybody get into the ring with him, and for fuck's sake, nobody is making anybody pay attention to him, or constantly shoving his crap down our throats, which is more than can be said for whichever 80s cartoon, 70s movie, or 60s sitcom is being made into a shitty movie this week.

SFA OK

Try as I may, I can't really get into the Super Furry Animals' latest album, Hey Venus! I lauded their last album, Love Kraft, thusly: "the slowed pace has enabled the Super Furry Animals to make the most coherent and focused album of their career, and even if their whirlwind compositions no longer make your head spin, there are still many gorgeous subtleties to be found in their characteristically lush orchestrations and brilliant pop melodies." (Take a trip in the wayback machine here.)

Hey Venus! doesn't quite have the stately strut of Love Kraft, but the mood and the sound are similar enough. So why can't I get into it? I've never heard an album by these guys that I didn't like until this one.

The answer I keep coming up with is that this one feels kind of half-assed. For an album that clocks in at under 40 minutes, it sags a lot. A handful of the songs, at three minutes, still feel too long by a minute. A couple of them sound like song titles that were stretched into songs as fast as they could be written ("Baby Ate My Eightball," "The Gift That Keeps Giving"). Then there's "Run-Away," which is either a very lazily written song, or some kind of experiment in how many elements of other songs can be borrowed without giving any credit. Songs checked on that list include "Be My Baby" (drums), "What Becomes of the Brokenhearted" (melody) "Every Time We Say Goodbye" (lyrics) and, uh, "Runaway" (title), but I'm sure Led Zeppelin still has them beat somehow or another. It's also the best and most interesting song on the album.

Listening to Hey Venus! makes me feel the same way that I do when I listen to Steely Dan. It's eminently listenable, immaculately recorded and produced (as usual for the Super Furry Animals), and there's a part of me that feels like I'm being had for even trying to take this so seriously (never more so than during the baffling "Suckers!").

Maybe I can break it out in two or three years when they put another album out and it'll sound a lot better.

I'm pretty sure Ben-Hur and Spartacus are the same movie, anyway

There are plenty of examples of how political involvement can sully the reputation of an artist, actor, or performer in the minds of roughly half the population, and there are examples on both sides of the spectrum. Jane Fonda is one example. Barbra Streisand is one. Ted Nugent is one. And hey, here's where I'm going with this, Charlton Heston is another.

I first encountered Charlton Heston as the star of every hilariously overblown epic ever made in the 50s and 60s (and every time Ben-Hur or The Ten Commandments came on TV, my dad would proclaim the movie's untouchable greatness, and get nostalgic for the days when ham-fisted history buffs like David Lean and Cecil B. DeMille ruled Hollywood). In the late 90s, Heston became more familiar as the face of angry gun-toting conservatives across the country, and that's about when I started developing an irrational hatred of Heston, a feeling that only grew when I saw him in Bowling for Columbine actin' a fool.

Here we are years later, and Heston died, and I can scarcely remember why I hate him so much. The "cold dead hands" moment sticks in my brain, but I had to do some research to realize that he was a conservative nutjob well before he became president of the NRA. Check out this quote: "Somewhere in the pipeline of public funding is sure to be a demand from a disabled lesbian on welfare that the Metropolitan Opera stage her rap version of Carmen as translated to Ebonics."

Ouch! Take that, lesbians, disabled people, publicly funded arts, opera in general, rap, and, uh, black people!
I was working on the best "cold dead hands" joke to make about his passing (rough draft: "Are Charlton Heston's dead hands cold enough to pry his gun away from them yet?"), but The A.V. Club came up with a better one, found here, along with the moment that will almost certainly be better remembered than "damn dirty ape" or "let my people go" or "I am Spartacus" or whatever. Ok, that last one was Kirk Douglas. Anyway, reproduced caption: "Has anyone checked to make sure nobody has stolen Charlton Heston's musket in the last couple of days?"

I guess you could say I wasn't terribly sad at the news of his death. The other quip I came up with had something to do with him and Ronald Reagan and Alzheimer's and delusions of grandeur. It was pretty mean.

Unrelated: I just saw Meat Loaf in a commercial for AT&T or something, and it was kind of awesome. Another ad was for a movie from "the guys who brought you Knocked Up." I'm quoting it because those are the exact words that appeared on the screen. How pointlessly vague is that shit? It's weird that the only time you ever see that type of thing is in ads for shitty-looking comedy movies that I hope I never see. Like the above example, or anything with Rob Schneider or the Wayans. We need to adapt this sales tactic to other mediums. "Shine a Light, from the guys who brought you Taxi Driver and 'Start Me Up.'" I think that record labels should start advertising any Brian Eno-produced album as being from "the dude who brought you The Joshua Tree." Hell, why even limit it to albums he produced? Which record label was Robert Wyatt's Comicopera out on? Print this in Rolling Stone ASAP: "Robert Wyatt's Comicopera: there was a dude who was involved in making The Joshua Tree who was also tangentially involved in this project." Platinum by May, guaranteed.

Wait, what was this about? Oh right, Charlton Heston... nah, I'm done with that dude.

Easter in her bonnet, Easter in her hair

Today is Easter Sunday, and I went to church this morning. I am not a very familiar face in any church, which put me today in fine company with millions of Americans who go to church today to celebrate the death and subsequent resurrection of Jesus, then mostly sleep in on Sundays until it's time to celebrate his birth in December. My visit, however, was largely diplomatic in nature. It was also the first church service I've attended in five years (weddings aside). It's amazing what people will do when they're in love.

Anyway, instead of paying attention to the service (or is it a mass? The Episcopal service is nearly identical to the Catholic masses I endured as a child, does it get the same name?), I was pondering why a person like myself, a fairly committed atheist, has no problem celebrating Christmas, but is annoyed by or would rather just ignore Easter altogether.

The answer I came up with was this: to celebrate Christmas, if you even choose to acknowledge it as a religious holiday at all (what with Santa Claus and all that crap), is a tacit admittal that Jesus existed, and that his birth is worth celebrating in some facet. You don't have to worship him as the son of God. I can just think of it as the birth of a good man who preached kindness and tolerance, and stood up for the poor and oppressed. Easter is a little different, an acknowledgement that Jesus was resurrected from the dead and ascended into heaven to absolve the sins of all mankind. A little more serious from a theological point of view, you know?

That was the serious and thoughtful version of my Easter post. The original version was this:

Easter is all about how Jesus was betrayed by his best friend, given over to the local fascist government, brutally tortured, and executed. And also cute little bunny rabbits and pastel-colored eggs and candy, candy, candy!

moose

This is an email that found its way into my spam folder under the subject "moose":

translated back to his native language. Payment is not a problem

VlA rdg GRA $1. 28

[link removed to protect the stupid]

hoarse cries of fannish enthusiasm.grim-faced-but winked when I glanced his way. Iron John and Svinjar A tiny but well-stocked bar unfolded from one wall; the dispenser Directly ahead. Lets just stay on this course and well track th

Seriously.

feels so unnatural (Peter Gabriel too)

You know, I write a blog. Technically. I mean, most of these things that you see get updated several times a day. You can probably probably look at the second page of mine and see items from last June. But it's a blog. I'm a blogger. Almost entirely about music.

So I guess it's with some degree of hypocrisy that I have to say that blogs about music are some of the most irritating things ever.

Ok, we'll backtrack a bit here. We'll start by saying that the primary way I have of hearing bands I've never heard of is by reading reviews of them. Generally there are a couple websites that I scan periodically for reviews of new stuff, and if I see enthusiastic reviews pop up on more than one site, I'll check out a few songs, and then maybe the whole album (bless the internet), and then when I'm more familiar with the material in question, I may occasionally go back and read what I read before, or some other stuff about them, to see if people are generally having the same reaction that I am.

So this is more or less the cycle I went through with some fellas named Vampire Weekend. I wouldn't say it's really a "great" album, or groundbreaking in any way, but it's got enough good bouncy pop tunes to keep me interested. Depending on your rating system of choice, I'd give it a B or maybe B+, a 7/10, a thumbs up, or whatever.

Then I discovered that Vampire Weekend are apparently one of those "blog bands" that are around, that nobody would ever hear of without the internet, similar to... I don't know, Lily Allen or Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.

Then I did a google search for "Vampire Weekend and blog" and a couple similar phrases, which led me to where I'm at now, which is feeling like I'm never going to read a music blog again. People haven't made such a huge fuss over music this innocuous since The Strokes came along.

To me, Vampire Weekend is a perfect encapsulation of what it's like to be an indie-rock fan in the age of internet domination, and it runs in a cycle something like this: 1) Overenthusiastic hype is lauded upon a competent but unspectacular artist by bloggers who may hope to take credit for the discovery 2) Confused by the unwarranted hype, what would be ambivalence by naysayers turns into irrational hatred and vitriol (I have been guilty of this before, I will admit) 3) By the time the damn album actually comes out, battle lines have already been drawn, and casual listeners who find their blissful ignorance of the "controversy" shattered are forced to either buy into one side of the hype or find the whole thing off-putting.

The unabashed hyperbolic love (which is harder to find, but out there) is a little perplexing to me, but the hatred is just exasperating. Let's take a look at the general list of reasons cited (as listed in a post about the confusing controversy surrounding the band, of which there are also plenty, including the one I'm creating right now):

"The four kids in Vampire Weekend have certainly done plenty to make themselves hater-targets. They wear pastel sweaters. They flaunt Ivy League educations. They jam obscure vocabulary tunes into keenly felt and observant little indie-pop jams that would've worked just fine without the verbosity. They swipe individual sounds from Afropop without attempting to master the form. During interviews, they engage in obnoxious useless-knowledge one-upmanship games. One of them is Scott Baio's cousin. And it's already been preordained that they're about to be fucking huge, or at least as fucking huge as an indie-pop band can be in an era where everyone downloads music instead of buying it..."

The one common thread through all of that: it has nothing to do with the band's music. The complaint that seems to come up so often is their borrowing of sounds from Afro-Pop (and let's be real here, we all know it sounds more like Graceland than King Sunny Ade), and I'm trying to figure out why that's such a problem. The most hilarious phrasing of the problem is found in the above paragraph (oh no, they haven't attempted to "master the form" before being influenced by it!), but usually it's lumped in with a mention of their Columbia University educations, which makes it sound more to me like the problem is that rich white kids aren't supposed to have things to say with their music, and rich white kids CERTAINLY aren't supposed to incorporate affectations of African music in their music. Perhaps if they'd met and formed their band in a coal mine instead of in their Columbia dorms, it would be ok. ("Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" would also have to be changed to something like "Pittsburgh Kwassa Kwassa.")

I also wonder if the people who are bashing them for their upper-middle-class backgrounds and borrowing of African influences also steer clear of, say, Talking Heads, who are guilty of pretty much the same exact thing. That's more of an extreme example, because Talking Heads are one of the greatest rock bands of all time, and people probably aren't going to remember Vampire Weekend by this time in 2009, but you get my point.

Anyway, to wrap up sort of where I started, I think from now on I'm going to stay clear of the blogs (except for mine and my friends'... probably) and just listen to the damn music. And if you're surfing across the blogosphere on a search engine and you find this page, just remember that I'm just as full of shit as everybody else out there.

Oh joy, apparently the Academy Awards are tonight

Who else thinks that the Academy Awards would be much better suited to a strike-necessitated, press-conference-style show like what the Golden Globes were this year?

I think that the only thing that would get me to actually watch the show tonight would be if Daniel Day-Lewis promised to give his acceptance speech in character as Daniel Plainview while throwing bowling pins at Paul Dano.

news headline: "movies to be terrible at least through 2011"

I know that by this point, writing about the creative bankruptcy of Hollywood studio film-making is beyond redundant, but I'm still amazed at what manages to come out of there. By the time I sit here and bitch about the fact that a Transformers movie exists, and wonder if things can sink any lower, they've already moved on to making a Thundercats movie. And so on.

But still: ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!

The tragedy of this is that there will probably be more people who see Monopoly: The Movie than will ever see There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men combined. Or pick any other two movies that somehow get made these days that are actually good.

The other sad thing is that these board game-based movies will undoubtedly be completely idiotic, and nowhere near as hilarious as they are in my head. Can you imagine how amazingly psychedelic a movie based on "Candy Land" could be? Think about it in terms of how it might actually be made, and it becomes a cheap CGI coming-of-age tale with "hilarious" pop-culture references and wacky voice cameos by Drew Carey as King Kandy and Wanda Sykes as Queen Frostine.

I also like to imagine a Monopoly-based movie where Uncle Pennybags is some sort of near-omnipotent Mafia kingpin type, or a Battleship movie about a warship blindly firing torpedos based on an arbitrary grid on a map, while the captain listens over a two-way to see if the Russians (or whoever) say "Oh no! Torpedo hit at C-8! Our submarine has been sunk!" The actual Battleship movie will surely be a sub-Hunt for Red October nautical thriller, but I really can't imagine how Monopoly can be made into a movie. I can only picture it as some sort of Glengarry Glen Ross type thing where we watch the characters sink lower and lower into pathetic desperation, while your friend's smug asshole older brother won't loan you the rent you don't have to stay at St. James Place so you can stay alive for just one more turn, because you KNOW somebody HAS to hit that Atlantic Ave-Ventnor Ave-Marvin Gardens monopoly you have in the next turn.

The Ouija movie will obviously be some sort of mildly scary J-Horror knock-off.

"ohhhh, Depression!"

I can't think of any musician that I actually like that I would like to punch in the face more than Morrissey. He evinces this combination of smugness and self-pity that I just find incredibly irritating. But he's played a key role in the creation of some fantastic songs, so I've got to give him some credit for that, right? It's interesting that some of the lyrics are far less irritating than others, although for the most part they come from roughly the same attitude and aesthetic. Here is my half-assed guide to songs by The Smiths that I find annoying or not annoying, with vague and unsatisfying explanations as to why or why not.

Annoying: "Hang the blessed DJ/For the music that they constantly play/It says nothing to me about my life" - This is true. My foremost complaint in dance clubs is that the songs do not feature lyrics that I can relate to. I don't understand why more DJs don't play more songs by Coldplay, or Iron and Wine. I also agree that this crime against my emotions should be punishable by death.

Not as Annoying: "I would go out tonight/But I haven't got a stitch to wear" - I like to carry this to its very literal conclusion in my head, where the lyric is more like "I would go out tonight, but instead I'm going to sit on my couch watching reruns of Cheers and eating Doritos, clad only in my underwear."

Annoying: - "In my life/Why do I give valuable time/To people who don't care if I live or die?" - Seriously, who has the kind of time for social interactions with anybody but close friends and relatives? For Morrissey, every second spent idly chatting with a mere friendly acquaintance feels like an eternity, as he ponders the countless hours wasted making small talk with people who would not be deeply upset at news of his passing.

Not as Annoying: - "I am human and I need to be loved/Just like anybody else" - "How Soon is Now?" represents an astonishing emotional breakthrough for Morrissey, as he realizes that there are actually human beings who feel emotions who aren't Morrissey. It also made the Smiths one of those bands that are famous for the song that sounds the least like the rest of their catalog.

2007 music is finally finished!

It may be almost Valentine's Day, and I'm already queuing up a 2008 list, but God damn it, better late than never, right? Let's get this damn thing over with.

10. Deerhoof - Friend Opportunity - I really like combining words, and I kinda think that this album should have been called Fripportunity, except that would have sounded like Robert Fripp was involved somehow. Deerhoof are one of my favorite current bands, and this one is probably the best sounding album of their career, if not simply the best. It's an album that showcases all of their best talents: the big balls rock ("The Perfect Me"), the off-kilter pop ("Matchbook Seeks Maniac"), the flat out bizarre ("Kidz Are So Small"), the Velvet Underground-like long-form noise experiments ("Look Away"). Deerhoof may record better albums, but they might not ever record one that better encapsulates what they're all about.

9. Menomena - Friend and Foe - It's a damn shame that every discussion about Menomena eventually devolves into "their album art is so crazy lolololol!" because it overshadows how great their music is. Friend and Foe may require use of the artwork as a decoder ring to find out track names, but I'm more impressed by the tunes. Not every band can get away with having three different songwriters and three different lead singers, but Menomena isn't just any band. The sound is something like if Spoon or The National went completely off the indie pop deep end, a kinetic compilation of every sound, mood, and spacey trip the genre has to offer. It's surprisingly deep and rich, and it rewards the repeated listenings that it takes to fully absorb it.

8. The Apples in Stereo - New Magnetic Wonder - Robert Schneider claimed in an interview last year that New Magnetic Wonder was heavily inspired by Brian Wilson's Smile. This shouldn't be too surprising, coming from a guy who records in a place called Pet Sounds Studio (also the place where Schneider recorded and produced every indie kid's favorite album). The sound of the album is more like Jeff Lynne than Brian Wilson, though, not that this is a bad thing either. Schneider's Apples are far more slick and polished than they were back in their Beatle-esque psychedelic heyday 10 years ago, and New Magnetic Wonder is one of the better-sounding albums I've heard in a while. It's also one of the catchier. I can't think of whether or not "Energy" was used in a commercial or if it just sounds like it was written as a jingle to sell Hewlett Packard computers (I mean that as a compliment, if at all possible). Robert Schneider, with has nasal voice, baldness, and dorky glasses, may look more like George Costanza than a rock star, but as long as he wants to keep making albums, I'll keep listening.

7. Jens Lekman - Night Falls Over Kortedala - Every couple years it seems like one of my friends is telling me that I need to check out a very pretty-looking Scandinavian singer/songwriter, and I end up finding them to be fairly boring. I can dig Jose Gonzalez (yes, he's Swedish) every now and then, which is more than I can say for Sondre Lerche, but I figured I'd give this Jens Lekman dude a shot. I hit the play button. A quick timpani roll, and a soft bed of strings drift in, and Mr. Lekman softly croons, "There will be no kisses tonight," and I let out an audible groan, and start mentally tweaking my standard "pretty, but not really interesting" review, and then HOLY GODDAMNED SON OF A BITCH, there's a HUGE crescendo, and gigantic bombastic chorus, and suddenly my ears perk up. See, as it turns out, Jens Lekman isn't a boring Sondre Lerche type singer songwriter, he's a flamboyant pop crooner. Horns stab, strings swell, and melodies rise and fall with the confidence of a seasoned pop songwriter. The sounds and moods are scattered all over the pop spectrum, and the lyrics are as often funny and clever as they are melancholy and introspective. He's as likely to be singing over a backing track that sounds like early Scott Walker as he is one that sounds like Marvin Gaye with an electronic backbeat, or a Friends-era Beach Boys song. He may be leaving his girl because he doesn't love her enough in one song, and he may be pretending to be a lesbian's boyfriend to fool her father in another. In short, it's a varied, novel look at pop songwriting, and I like it, quite a lot.

6. Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer - If I was going to pick somebody who I thought would make the album with more catchy pop hooks combined with more unnervingly personal lyrics than any album since Weezer's Pinkerton, I'd have been about as likely to say Kevin Barnes as I would have been to say Rivers Cuomo (ie., not likely at all), but here we are. I'll admit that I vastly underrated this before. After putting it down for a few months and picking it up again, for whatever reason, it just started hitting me like a ton of bricks. The songs were stuck so thoroughly in my head, the lyrics streaming absent-mindedly through my mouth at all times, that it was hard to think about the fact that I was singing lyrics about anti-depressant-induced writer's block, nervous breakdowns, separating from a loved one, rebounding, and the self-loathing that results from the whole thing. It's rare to find an album with lyrics that are as equally fascinating as the music (or vice versa), but Hissing Fauna is one.

5. M.I.A. - Kala - M.I.A. follows through on the potential of her debut to deliver Kala, which may be best described as a dance album that amalgamates every genre of music in the world, the craziest, most psychedelic album of its ilk since Paul's Boutique. M.I.A. is almost as liberal with her sampling and borrowing here as the Beastie Boys and Dust Brothers were there (at least they're all credited here), and the result is a colorful collage of the vaguely familiar and thoroughly alien.

4. Panda Bear - Person Pitch - I just happen to be listening to "Sister Ray" by the Velvet Underground as I write this. I point this out because the juxtaposition is funny to me, because apart from their mutual association with New York's experimental music scene (though decades apart), I don't think I could pick a more exact opposite of the Velvets than Panda Bear if I tried. As "Sister Ray" pounds me into submission and dares me to turn it off (or at least skip some of its 17 minutes of chaos), I think about Panda Bear's hypnotic pop bliss, and my mind is at ease. Noah Lennox's day job with the Animal Collective is pretty secure by this point, but Person Pitch shows that he has a fulfilling solo career to fall back on as well. (A few earlier thoughts are here.)

3. St. Vincent - Marry Me - St. Vincent is Annie Clark, and nobody would have heard of her or this album if she hadn't played guitar for the Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens. The fact that she's got the most adorable big brown puppy dog eyes doesn't hurt either. But I'm glad she was able to get some recognition, because Marry Me is a damn good album. Imaginative songwriting and tasteful arrangements abound, and Clark's got the vaguely seductive yet vulnerable female vocal delivery style down, even if some of the lyrics are a little dumb.

2. Radiohead - In Rainbows - It's too easy at this point to take the brilliance of Radiohead for granted, especially when you've got the whole aspect of the download-only release to distract you from it, so for those of you who need the reminder, In Rainbows is as good as anything else they've done in this decade. The album is more cohesive than anything they've done since Kid A, the songwriting is more consistent than anything they've done since Ok Computer, they sound more like a democratic band than on anything they've done since The Bends, and it flat out rocks more than just about their whole catalog. Everybody in the world is sick to death of the lavish praise heaped on Radiohead by this point, but Christ, they deserve every word of it.

1. Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam - When I was living with my roommates in Philadelphia (this would have been 2005 or 2006), three of us and a fourth friend all realized at one point that without knowledge of any of the other people feeling the same way, "The Purple Bottle" by the Animal Collective had worked its way into our own personal lists of favorite songs. This resulted (after a few beers) in a chorus of grown men emphatically pounding their fists on
a coffee table chanting "Get that- WOOOOOOO! Get that- WOOOOOOOO! Get that- WOOOOOOOOOO!" This was about the time that I realized that the appeal of the Animal Collective lies not with their mixing of strange song structures and sounds with great melodies, or some such thing (although that doesn't hurt), but with the fact that their music possesses a pure and simple joy that is exceedingly rare in any kind of music.

"The Purple Bottle" was on 2005's Feels, but the joy has only increased for Strawberry Jam. You could pick any song at random from the album and I could probably pick out a part that makes me want to drop whatever I'm doing and throw my hands in the air and shout. "Fireworks"? "IIIIIII'M ONLY ALLLLL I SEEEEEEE SOMETIIIIIIIIIIMES!" "Winter Wonder Land"? That rapid-fire chorus is brilliant. "Cuckoo Cuckoo" is essentially six minutes of pure bliss, alternating between the calm meditative bliss and the explosive triumphant bliss, all held together by a single repeating piano figure. The Panda Bear-helmed "Chores" opens with about the most gloriously insane minute and a half of music ever recorded.

It's rare to find a band that carries its own oddness with as little self-consciousness as the Animal Collective, but that's just who they are by now. These lists are always subject to change, of course, depending on the whim and mood of the creator, but if I had to list my favorite albums of the 00s so far, there's a good chance that the Animal Collective might be sitting at 1 and 2 on the list. I can't wait to hear what they do next.

2007 music almost finished...

Before I get to 10-1 of my little countdown, I have some 2007 miscellanea to deal with. Stuff that didn't make the list for whatever reason, plus random crap that I wanted to talk about anyway.

Best albums from previous years that weren't released in the USA until 2007:

- Lily Allen - Alright, Still - I was at a party in the summer some time and somebody had the radio on, and "Smile" from this album came on, and I said something like "what the fuck, is that Lily Allen?" My buddy Ed said something like "Tom probably had this album a year ago," and I was put in the awkward position of trying to say that I actually did have the album a year ago without looking like some hipster shitdick. I don't think I succeeded, but Ed claimed not to be a sarcastic ass in saying that either. At any rate, Lily Allen makes some fine sweet pop confections, and she finally got her well-earned US recognition this year. So good for her.

- The Pipettes - We Are the Pipettes - This one was FINALLY issued in the US with different artwork and a couple bonus tracks last fall. It's about damn time. Also, We Are the Pipettes is still an absolutely delightful pop album. It was good enough for #4 on my 2006 list, and it's good enough to mention again, now that you can actually buy it in a store.

- Cyann and Ben - Sweet Beliefs - This one came in at #7 last year on my list, and it's a fine continuation of the Cyann and Ben catalog, with the slow-burning builds, the spaced out psychedelia, and the epic explosions. It's pretty good.

- Junior Senior - Hey Hey My My Yo Yo - This one actually came out in Europe in 2005 or something crazy like that, and it's unbelievable that it wasn't released in the USA until 2007. It's another orgasmic celebration of happiness via pop music, and maybe the most delightful release I heard all year (except for maybe the Pipettes, I guess).

The Led Zeppelin III award(s) for irritating album packaging:

- Bjork - Volta - This one has a sticker on the front that's part of the album art (the picture of Bjork is the sticker, the red part is the cardboard), and to actually get to the CD inside you either have to rip the sticker in half (and then the cardboard sleeve will never actually close again) or carefully peel off half of the sticker. God, it's annoying. And pretty.

- Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer - It's another cardboard package with a gatefold in the front, except the gatefold is the black areas on the front, and the only way to get it to actually close, so that the liner notes (helpfully printed on a loose circular glossy piece of paper) don't fall out, is to carefully replace the whole thing back in its clear plastic sleeve, which would be fine except the thing is damn near IMPOSSIBLE to get back in there.

And the rest:

Brian Wilson - That Lucky Old Sun - This isn't on the list because there is no recorded version of it that isn't a live bootleg (that we know of, anyway). It would be on the list if it were given a proper release because it's Brian Wilson, and it's actually pretty damned good. It's wonderful to see that revisiting Smile seems to have retriggered the part of Brian's brain (or soul) that makes amazing music, because this is the first brand new album-length work he's written that's been consistently good in 30 years (I'm counting The Beach Boys Love You as the last one, for those keeping track). And hell, even the live bootlegs sound great. Brian Wilson is a better performer at this point in his life than he's been in four and a half decades of making music. Brian's 65 years old and still following his muse, and I couldn't be happier about it.

Scott Walker - And Who Shall Go to the Ball? And What Shall Go to the Ball? - Scott Walker, meanwhile, proved what we'd been suspecting anyway: stripped of vocals and "rock" production, his music is now simply avant-garde classical music. It's not on the list because it's a 4 song, 25 minute EP that was written as music to a ballet. The thought of anybody trying to dance to this stuff is beyond absurd. Scott went deep into the waters of atonality with 2006's The Drift, and this stuff is atonal, and also mostly arrhythmic as well. It's not as viscerally intense and downright horrifying as The Drift, but it's almost as unsettling. Scott's 65 years old and still following his muse, and I couldn't be more terrified of it.

2007 music finally, gawrsh. 20-11

You know it's been a decent year for music when some of my favorite artists release albums that don't even crack my own top 20. Missing the cut this year, but just barely: Liars, Air, Mum, Bjork, Super Furry Animals, Paul McCartney, Suzanne Vega. Bjork! BJORK didn't make the list! I am amazed at myself. Here we go, literally counting down:


20. Six Organs of Admittance - Shelter From the Ash - I don't hear Six Organs of Admittance mentioned enough in discussions of either post rock or psych folk. They make a lovely hybrid of both. Ben Chasny is also underrated as an indie rock guitar god. Chasny's been churning out fairly good albums fairly consistently every year since 2001, and Shelter From the Ash is another fine collection of drone-based psychedelic acoustic guitar workouts. Also, check out that wild crazy psychedelic cover art!

19. The Fiery Furnaces - Widow City - I saw the Fiery Furnaces live for the second time this past June (I wrote about the first time, if you recall, here). Even having seen them before, I was unprepared for the total mindfuck that I witnessed. They didn't so much deconstruct their own back catalog as slaughter it, rip it limb from limb, and create an ungodly Frankenstein monster out of the parts. If the songs were nearly unrecognizable before, they were completely unrecognizable now, able to be discerned only by listening carefully to the lyrics. I mention it now because it sets up how weird an experience Widow City is. On one hand, it's a fairly simplified version of the Furnaces' trademark insanity, featuring some calm, straightforward songs that actually wait for the next track to start before veering off on a hairpin turn toward something completely different. On the other hand, it's got some of the only music ever recorded that approximates the careening freight train that is their live show. It sounds like something a live band could actually play, mostly due to the fact that Matthew Friedberger's assault of multi-tracked splatty synthesizers and organs has largely been reduced down to a relatively basic lineup of guitar, bass, drums, and, um, mellotron (I said RELATIVELY basic). It makes for some surprisingly simple rock songs ("Duplexes of the Dead") and some insane prog-rock freakouts ("Clear Signal From Cairo"), and most importantly, a sign that the Fiery Furnaces are evolving, however slowly. And they can go as slow as they want as long as they keep making good music.

18. Wilco - Sky Blue Sky - I guess this is Jeff Tweedy's rehab album or something, I don't know. It took me awhile to realize that it was subtle, not simply boring. Unfortunately, a lot of people never got that far. There are plenty of keepers here, though, even if none of them provide the heart-rending devastation of, say, "Reservations." But Christ, I'm not listening to Paul McCartney's new stuff expecting to hear "Hey Jude" either, I can forgive Wilco if they never make another Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as long what they do make is still good. A Ghost is Born wasn't (at least I didn't think so); Sky Blue Sky is.

17. The Polyphonic Spree - The Fragile Army - Up until this album, pretty much every Polyphonic Spree song could have been called "Sure, Life is Bad Sometimes, BUT YOU ARE AWESOME!" And I would have been ok with that. I would probably have paid to hear that song 12 times every two or three years as long as they wanted to keep making it, because it was great, but now there's this whole "army" concept we've got to deal with, and the technicolor dream robes were ditched in favor of black fatigues. Clearly the new album would prove to be darker and more confrontational, and... oh, come on. When I saw them in June, they wore the fatigues, but by the time the encore came around (which ended up being almost as long as their set), and they wove their way through the crowd to retake the stage, they were back in their old robes. They're still the Polyphonic Spree, they're still just peachy as can be, except now there's some sort of nonsense about marching to take on the world and unite it with love, or some such thing. As with their previous two albums, you'll either love it or hate it, but they're still the same old, huge, bombastic, psychedelic, pompous, subtle-as-a-brick, anthemic, Polyphonic Spree.

16. Kanye West - Graduation - It turns out that being the world's biggest rap star isn't enough to keep Kanye West from being cripplingly insecure sometimes, which is no surprise to anybody who's heard about his various antics at awards shows and other stuff that would suggest that Kanye is a Grade A jerk. Luckily for us, he spins that insecurity into some Grade A pop music. Compelling lyrics and indelible tracks: it's another good Kanye West album.

15. Gruff Rhys - Candylion - Gruff Rhys eats sunshine for breakfast and poops out sweet li'l melodies at night. See earlier review.

14. Robert Wyatt - Comicopera - If you need a little history lesson, Robert Wyatt started his career as the drummer for 60s psych-proggers The Soft Machine. In 1973, he fell from a third story and suffered a spine injury, and was paralyzed from the waist down. This pretty effectively ended his career as a drummer, but it started him in a second career as a solo artist, making some very strange and very sad music. This one fits right in. Ol' Rob is still pissed at the world, and very insecure sometimes, it would seem, and... there are some songs in Spanish, and I don't know what those are about, but it's all still a sad, strange, but lovely affair.

13. Do Make Say Think - You, You're a History in Rust - These guys make it sound easy at this point. It's a particular brand of that peculiar genre called "post-rock" that actually exudes warmth and spontaneity, and even song structures that don't go exactly where you expect them to every single time (I'm looking at you, Explosions in the Sky). This one is so laid back that it could pass as folk music if it wasn't so deafening from time to time. Do Make Say Think: still the kings of the "post-rock" mountain.

12. LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver - Now this is more like it: a cohesive and solid LCD Soundsystem album. I'm nominating these guys (or this guy, I don't know how much of this stuff is just James Murphy blah blah blah) for the most improved award. If they'd have dropped the last song on the album this could have cracked the top 10. As it is, it's still one of the few album-length achievements that make me believe that "dance music" is a concept worth exploring.

11. Caribou - Andorra - Every time Dan Snaith makes an album he drifts further away from electronica and more toward psychedelic pop, and with Andorra, the transformation would seem to be complete. This is an album of bright, lushly arranged, gorgeous pop music, as thoughtful in the winding nature of its songs as in its ornate instrumentation. Snaith's knack for great melodies shines in a way it never has before, and for a guy who made his name as an electronic producer, this sounds amazingly like it could have been released in the 60s and filed next to a Soft Machine or Tomorrow album (obscure 60s name-dropping music nerd alert! Also I just read the above writings and realized that this is two Soft Machine references in one post, a new record.).

Tom's Favorite Songs of 2007

2007 officially begins ending... well, a few days ago, as it turns out, but here are my favorite songs of the year, in no order other than the order in which I thought of them. Enjoy.

Radiohead - "Bodysnatchers" - The big lyrical hook here is "I have no idea what you are talking about," which later turns into "I have no idea what I am talking about." It's kind of funny, and possibly accidental, that these two statements in conjunction form the basis of the vast majority of lyrics that Thom Yorke has written, at least from Ok Computer onward. It's paranoid and fearful, but ever acknowledging that there is perhaps nobody who's more full of shit than Yorke himself. We deify Yorke and Radiohead at our own risk, but who can blame us? This track rocks.

Brian Wilson - "Midnight's Another Day" - A good song with a New Year-appropriate title, right? I resisted the urge to try to include That Lucky Old Sun on my 2007 best of list, but I'm holding out for a studio release this year. Meanwhile, I can at least include this song, because we actually got a recorded studio version, which was uploaded to his website somewhere... I can't find it now. The important thing is that it's a gorgeous song, with a gorgeous melody, the gorgeous trademark Brian Wilson harmonies, and... God, it's just wonderful to know that the old guy still has it in him. I can't say for sure whether Van Dyke Parks was involved with this song, or if he just wrote the between song narratives for That Lucky Old Sun, but that'd be the icing on the cake.

Dr. Dog - "We All Belong" - There are worse things that could happen than for some scrappy, lo-fi Beatles enthusiasts to become ambitious, structurally complex Beatles enthusiasts. On a somewhat related note, it's amazing the difference a well-arranged string section can make.

The Apples in Stereo - "Same Old Drag" - And so Robert Schneider, blissfully unaware of how painfully unhip the Electric Light Orchestra is, soldiers on with his vocoder and big pompous layered arrangements. It's a song that sounds basically nothing like most popular music that's been recorded since the late 1970s, but it's got a bitchin' Rhodes piano part, some great melodies, and the production still sounds great, vocodered background vocals included.

Deerhoof - "The Perfect Me" - Perhaps one of the best album opening tracks ever (hyperbole alert!). "The Perfect Me" explodes out of the gate with some big fat guitar riffing, some great drumming, and the ridiculous musical schizophrenia and manic energy found in any good Deerhoof song.

The Polyphonic Spree - "Guaranteed Nightlite" - For their third album, the Spree largely abandoned the symphonic prog pop of Together We're Heavy in favor of some of the biggest, most bombastic pop anthems ever known to man. "Guaranteed Nightlite" more or less splits the difference, winding up with huge pop hooks and singalong choruses that are bounced back and forth between drastic tempo, key, and mood changes. The Fragile Army is essentially one huge chorus after another; here they're at least set in different contexts within the same song, and the approach is much more effective.

Wilco - "Walken" - When Yankee Hotel Foxtrot came out, I assumed that the song title "Jesus, Etc." had something to do with a weary atheist's perception of religious zealot types, or something like that. As it turned out, the song used to be called "Jesus Don't Cry," and was shortened when somebody in the band wrote "Jesus Etc" on a setlist, and it caught on. I bring this up now because "Walken" looks like a similar setlist-derived title, unless it actually has something to do with Christopher Walken, and not, you know, walkin'. Anyway, Sky Blue Sky has a lot of decent rock songs that take awhile to grow on you, but "Walken" isn't one of them, fitting more in line with the bouncy good-time pop of "Hummingbirds." It's also one of the few songs on the album that actually sells me on the whole "Nels Cline, guitar god" idea that a lot of people seem to have. Frankly, I think Jeff Tweedy may be more responsible...

Kanye West - "Champion" - Graduation featured more darkness and insecurity than Kanye's previous efforts, but "The Good Life" is a great example of the effortless pop brilliance that he can toss off when he wants to. Bonus points for the nearly unrecognizable sample of Michael Jackson's "P.Y.T.," which, in this context, suddenly becomes laid back funk.

Panda Bear - "Good Girl/Carrots" - When I was reading reviews of Panda Bear's Person Pitch, they all talked about "Bros" as a gorgeous sweeping 13 minute epic piece of brilliance. I would read this and nod my head in agreement. I never bother learning track names half the time, and as it turns out, I like the OTHER gorgeous sweeping 13 minute epic piece of brilliance on the album. The opening percussion loop alone, to say nothing of the beautiful backwards vocals that join it, is something I could listen to for an hour. The rest of it contains some of the most engaging hooks, loops, textures, and everything else that makes Person Pitch great on the whole album.

Bjork - "The Dull Flame of Desire" - Wow, I finally like this guy Antony. Sit him down in front of a piano and I want to punch him in the throat, but surround his voice with a typically over-the-top Bjork song and he fits right in. It's an oversimplification, but the point is, Bjork and Antony manage to squeeze an awful lot out of a couple short verses repeated over and over. "The Dull Flame of Desire" has more peaks and valleys than any other song I heard this year, and, as always, any time Bjork really cuts loose, it's a breathtakingly intense experience.

Animal Collective - "#1" - I wasn't entirely convinced when I first heard this song that it wasn't sampled from somewhere in Terry Riley's catalog. I'm still not entirely sure, but it's got enough of the trademark Animal Collective quirks that it's a moot point. Like all of Strawberry Jam, it bursts with energy even while seducing the listener into a trance. It's an improbably wonderful experience, and it's all based around a crazy arpeggiated organ part.

There you go. Sometime soon you'll get yourself a nice top 20 list from me. Yep, it's 20 this year. I heard THAT MUCH good stuff.