3.1.10
Even though I haven't finished the notes for the 1988 mixtape, I've started prepping for the 1989 mix by listening to records from that year, and I've already decided that I'm going to violate one of my original guidelines for the year mixtapes. The original goal was to make a mixtape of what I was actually listening to that year, which meant that when I didn't acquire a CD from that year until years later, it would be excluded. But the Mekons' Rock 'n' Roll is too great to ignore for purely procedural reasons, so even though I wouldn't discover it until the mid-90s, it's definitely going to have a place in the 1989 discussion.

3.2.10
So here's some stuff I've been meaning to write to Sliced Tongue. I mean, he reads this site anyway, and content is content, right?

1. I was totally wrong about the of Montreal keyboardist. That's not Kevin Barnes' wife. I was trying to figure out who the bass player was when I found info on her. Her name is Dottie, and she's been played around bands in Athens for years. I guess Nina doesn't do anything on stage with the band.
   
   
2. When we were at the of Montreal concert, we talked about the Fiery Furnaces, and I was comparing the tone of the latest record to a song on Bitter Tea. I told you the song was actually the title track, "Bitter Tea", but what I actually meant was "Benton Harbor Blues", the only really great song from that album. If you like "Benton Harbor Blues" as much as I do, you should give I'm Going Away a shot.
   
   
3. And finally, a third of Montreal-related issue. I'm similarly obsessed with the McDonalds Filet-O-Fish ad you wrote about last week (in fact, I was pretty sure I'd written about it/linked to it a couple of years ago, but I can't find it in my archives anywhere), but I'm not convinced it's an of Montreal rip off. First of all, having sold songs to Comcast, T-Mobile, Outback Steakhouse, and NASDAQ, I have a hard time believing they wouldn't immediately take whatever money McDonald's wanted to throw at them and run. Second, I wonder if you hearing of Montreal in that song has more to do with your current obsession with the band than it does any intentional or accidental corporate thievery.
   
   It reminds me of when I was in the throes of my Modest Mouse obsession after The Moon and Antarctica was released and I saw a personalized license plate in a mall parking garage: M MOWSE. I thought it was pretty unusual that someone would be so obsessed with what was then a relatively unknown band that they would put it on their license plate, but for the life of me I couldn't think of what else it could possibly mean. Then you sent me an email with the obvious (and far less crazy) solution after reading about it on my blog: Mickey Mouse.

3.3.10
February was a useless month release-wise, but that was mostly okay because January was a lot better than January typically is. Still, I'm looking forward to the slew of new stuff coming in March.

3.4.10
I want to feel strongly one way or the other about Vampire Weekend, but I'm becoming increasingly convinced that's impossible. Although I bet it would be easier to hate them than to adore them.

3.5.10
I'm going to give this only-buy-music-from-Amazon thing a serious try. There are a whole bunch of CDs that I want coming out in March, so I went on Amazon and pre-ordered them all with standard shipping. My hope is that, since I seem to live relatively close to a mid-atlantic shipping center, I will receive the discs within a day or so of their official release, which is sooner than I would have bothered to make a trip to the record store to buy most of them.

If that works well, I might try the free shipping next time——even if it took a little longer (and I'm not necessarily convinced that it will based on past experience), as long as I got stuff within a week of release, that's usually going to be okay. Even with the regular shipping, though, I'm still only paying about as much as I would pay at the local record store (even with my $1 off per CD club discount), and I'm guaranteed not to come away frustrated that they decided not to stock half the CDs I'm looking for.

Still, I think pre-ordering will be the key here, especially if I'm consistently getting CDs within a day or two of their release, because then there will be less temptation to go hunting for a new release at the record store. March is a good test month because there are so many things coming out that I want, and I should be able to get a good handle on how this process will work if I'm vigilant about putting in preorders.

The only real downside is that a lot of times I'm on the fence as to whether I want to buy a CD, and since there are generally no previews available until the actually day of release, I have to gamble a bit when I pre-order. I'm erring on the side of pre-ordering if I'm at all interested for now, but that might have to change if I end up with too many discs that I ordered without hearing anything that end up not being worth it.

3.8.10
Mark Linkous, better known as Sparklehorse, committed suicide over the weekend, shooting himself in the heart. His music means a lot to me, and while darkness was always part of the equation, light and hope and joy were an even bigger part, and I didn't think he would go like this. Every hair on your head is counted, Mark. May you rest in peace.

3.9.10
Sparklehorse was introduced to me by my friend Tom when we were both working for a legal publishing company in Charlottesville, Virgina. Tom and I were into different kinds of music then——I remember he was really into Palace Music and all its offshoots (the prime mover in Palace Music was Will Oldham, also known as Bonnie Prince Billy, who I wouldn't get into until years later).

So when he loaned me the CD for Sparklehorse's first album, Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot, I wasn't expecting to like it much——the lo-fi thing still didn't do a lot for me, and that record is famous for having been mostly recorded in Linkous' self-constructed home studio that he nicknamed Static King. But it appealed to me almost immediately, and I was obsessed with it for many, many months. When I found out that the follow-up, Good Morning Spider, was going to be released in Europe six months before it would be available in the US, I paid over $30 to get the import version within a week of its British release because I just couldn't wait.

And it was worth it, too——Good Morning Spider was just as good as its predecessor, and it solidified my love for Mark Linkous and his music. The albums were to come slowly after that, and by the time of his death, he had produced only two more full-lengths (although it is rumored that he had nearly completed a new record when he died). But although the later releases didn't quite grip me the same way Vivadixie and Spider did, they still had a lot of great songs and were worthy additions to his catalog.

In many ways Mark Linkous was alreay a ghost; his spirit seemed disembodied from this world, and he had a longstanding battle with his body and his physical existence. But it still sucks that he's not able to walk among us anymore.

3.10.10
I actually talked to Tom on Monday, and we spent awhile remembering Sparklehorse and Mark Linkous. During the course of that conversation, we were talking about our favorite songs, and Tom mentioned one called "Devil's New". I didn't have it in my collection, which includes all of the full-lengths, two EPs, and a British single, but when I looked it up on iTunes, it said the song was on his 2001 release, It's a Wonderful Life. I doublechecked my copy, and it wasn't listed, and the best I can figure is that I somehow got ahold of an early American release that mimicked the tracklist for the European release (I don't remember ordering the import version of this album) and didn't include "Devil's New", whereas later releases of the album did.

It's a sad, slow song, with a somber piano and grossly distorted, barely intelligible vocals. It includes the line "I pulled my heart out", which chillingly recalls Linkous' suicide, where he aimed a rifle at his heart and pulled the trigger. It was fitting to encounter this song after his death, but I'm not going to let that be his epitaph; for me, the gentle "Hundreds of Sparrows" embodies the other side of his personality, the one that saw the beauty of the world, even in dark or ordinary places.

3.11.10
I thought this Amazon ordering thing would work out pretty well when I saw that the CDs being released this week that I had preordered had left Amazon's shipping faciliy on Monday morning (the day before they would be released to stores) and arrived at their next location (unspecified on the tracking screen) at 5:30 that afternoon. Since they were leaving from Delaware, I was assuming that they had arrived at a major distribution center in Baltimore, and that they could possibly get to me by Tuesday, but at the very latest Wednesday.

But then the tracking didn't change at all on Tuesday or Wednesday——the USPS tracking was showing that it hadn't gone anywhere since Monday afternoon, and it was still projecting a Friday delivery date. That's still not terrible, but given that it left Delaware and presumably made it's way to Maryland on Monday, it was a little disappointing to have Wednesday's mail show up devoid of an Amazon package.

I still don't know when it will get here——as of this writing, the tracking still hasn't been updated since Monday——but I'm hoping no later than Friday. I'm a little worried that it's gotten lost somewhere, but I suppose I can't really complain about it until next week since the projected arrival was always estimated to be Friday.

3.12.10
So my order from Amazon miraculously appeared yesterday afternoon, and here's what I got: Titus Andronicus' The Monitor, Rogue Wave's Permalight, Liars' Sisterworld, Hot Chip's One Life Stand, Gorillaz' Plastic Beach, Broken Bells' eponymous debut, Miles Kurowsky's (formerly of Beulah) solo debut The Desert of Shallow Effects, Ted Leo's Brutalist Bricks, and Frightened Rabbit's The Winter of Mixed Drinks.

Very excited about all this new music to listen to——I'm got high hopes for Titus Andronicus, Broken Bells, and Miles Kurowsky, but really, any of these artists are capapble of making a great record, so I would be I've got at least a couple of contenders for the 2010 best-of list in this batch of albums.

3.15.10
The version of Sparklehorse's "Devil's New" that I downloaded from iTunes was different than the version Tom had been listening to; his version was some an unreleased, more straightforward rock version that was distributed to subscribers of the Sparklehorse email list a few years back.

He sent it to me last week, and you wouldn't really know that the two songs were related if you didn't know that they shared the same title. In the album version, the main lyric is a softly muttered and distorted "I pulled my heart out" that you hear at the beginning of the track; the repeated and predominant lyric in the outtake version is "devils are real", and while the lyrics from the album version make up the first verse of the outtake version, the songs otherwise don't really have anything in common.

I actually like the ghostly, haunted album version better, but the outtake version is interesting because that's probably the original version of the song——it sounds a lot more like it was recorded to be an album track, whereas the album version sounds more like a b-side or outtake——and the difference between the two gives some insight into Linkous' process of deconstructing and distorting his songs. You get the feeling that he could take a single song and make an entire album from it, and you would only have the vaguest hint that all the songs were, in fact, the same song.

3.16.10
I haven't had as much time to listen to all my new CDs as I was hoping——it's been difficult to put aside time to just listen to music, and when I have been able to find time, I've been gravitating to Sparklehorse or random playlists——but so far here's what I think: Plastic Beach seems way overrated given the almost universal acclaim it's received, and Sisterworld is also not nearly as great as I was hoping it would be on first listen ("The Overachievers" is a pretty great track, although it sounds cribbed from Clinic's playbook).

The Monitor is likely going to turn out to be pretty amazing, and while the new Ted Leo is definitely better than the last one, it's not as good as his great earlier stuff like The Tyranny of Distance and Hearts of Oak. Same goes for former Beulah frontman Miles Kurowsky's solo debut——it's great to hear from him again after so many years, but this record's at best on par with Beulah's parting shot, Yoko, which was their weakest outing.

The Rogue Wave album seems a little weird, but I may end up liking it; the Broken Bells, Hot Chip, and Frightened Rabbit records I really haven't listened to at all.

3.17.10
I'm so close to pulling the trigger on becoming a Strange Angel, Kristin Hersh's name for her fans who support her through various levels of patronage (the cheapest plan is $30 per quarter, and it goes all the way up to $5000 per year). She's really giving this whole no-record-company thing a serious try, and I'd love to see a stable model for established musicians to be able to cut the corporate ties and make it on fan support alone.

The great thing about her model is that, while you get bonus stuff like concert tickets and free physical copies of her releases by becoming a subscriber, anyone can download individual tracks as she finishes them, and she recently even posted some demos for some new Throwing Muses material.

I also think it's very cool what she's doing for her next record: in addition to the typical CD release, she's also releasing a companion book that includes essays and artwork about each of the tracks and a code for a high-quality digital download of the record so you can choose to buy the album as a book if you wish (the title of the book is actually Crooked: An Album). It's being published by a UK imprint of HarperCollins and I think only intended for the UK, but I have a feeling many copies will make their way stateside).

There's a nice blog entry that explains a lot of what appeals to me about this project, mainly "[restoring] the physical object to a position of importance in a world where digital downloads rule". You all know that I still buy most of my music on CD, and although that's for long-term copyright and quality control issues more than because of the phsyical objects (in general, less and less thought and time is put into CD packaging these days anyway, although there are always art project exceptions), I do feel a lot more disconnected from the music than I did when I was a kid and I would pore over CD/casette inserts for hours.

3.18.10
This was my second week of preorders from Amazon, and just like last week, the order (a single CD, Drive By Truckers' The Big To-Do) came in on Thursday, two days after it showed up in record stores. I was really hoping they would ship preorders early so they would get to me the day of the release, but if it's consistently going to be two days after the release, I can live with that.

The next thing to try is using the super saver shipping instead of regular shipping and see how that affects the timeline. It would be nice if that shipping method would also get the CDs to me by the end of the week, because it would save me a few dollars on every order, but if it would stretch into the following week in most cases, I think I'd have to pay for regular shipping.

3.19.10
Tom sent me a note about a memorial service for Sparklehorse's Mark Linkous in Richmond tomorrow, 3 p.m. at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden. I'm not sure if I'll be able to go given the travel time and my brother's need for a ride to the airport, but my thoughts will definitely be there even if I am not present physically.

While we're on this topic, RIP Alex Chilton. I'm hoping the Rule of Three won't come true this time.

3.22.10
Had high hopes for Broken Bells, the collaboration between Shins frontman James Mercer and über producer Danger Mouse, but after a few listens, there aren't any tracks that jump out at me. There are no terrible songs, but there are no great songs, either. If consistency was what they were going for, they get an A+, but I'm not sure if any of these tracks will make it into my four star shuffle mix or if I'll give this record too many more listens before it gets rotated out.

3.23.10
The new Gorillaz, Plastic Beach, is alright, and has some good stuff on it, but I just can't stand the pseudo-title track, "Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach", which features Snoop Dog on lead vocals. Didn't he lose all musical credibility years ago? I can't hear his voice now and think of anything besides his numerous forays into winking pop culture in everything from commercials to reality shows. I just don't think of him as a rapper or artist anymore, and anything featuring his vocals instantly turns into a joke.

The De La Soul track is pretty awesome though.

3.24.10
The new Rogue Wave, Permalight, has a few tracks that are classic Rogue Wave ("Sleepwalker", "Right With You" and the standout "I'll Never Leave You"), but a lot of it sounds like what would happen if the Connells decided to spend some time in the studio with Death Cab for Cutie (title track "Permalight" and opener "Solitary Gun" are probably the best of the bunch).

That's not a bad thing——after the relatively dour Asleep at Heaven's Gate (the only song I really liked off that record was "Lake Michigan"), this new approach makes them sound a lot more engaged and vital and happy.

3.25.10
I'm really digging the new Titus Andronicus——no sophomore slump here——but I think I'd like it a lot more if they'd taken the 10 tracks that average just over six minutes each and often feature two or more song fragments and turned them into 20+ tracks of three minutes or less. Half of the tracks are over seven minutes in length, three of those are nearly nine minutes long, and the epic closer is just over fourteen.

Now, you can get away with an epic track every now and then if you're a band like Titus Andronicus, but they don't quite have enough sonic diversity to get away with these hyperextended tracks as often as they're trying to on this record; even when they change up the tempo mid-song or dive into an extended bridge for a minute or more, the songs just feel like they go on a little too long.

But this album is highly likely to end up in my top 10 for this year, so don't let this criticism keep you away from this record. It's well worth hearing, especially if you had any affection at all for their debut effort.

3.26.10
I wouldn't call myself an afficionado of modern electronic music, but there are a few contemporary bands I like——Cut Copy, YACHT, M83, LCD Soundsystem, and now Hot Chip. Or at least Hot Chip's latest, One Life Stand. There are only a couple of mediocre tracks on this record, and there are two——"One Life Stand" and "Take It In"——that I took to instantly.

I'm still only likely to dip my toes into this genre occasionally——there are several others that have gotten rave reviews from critics, like Neon Indian, Memory Tapes, Four Tet, The Field, Owen Pallett, and Junior Boys, that I just haven't been able to get into. But every now and then an electronica artist will click with me, and it looks like Hot Chip is going to be one of those.

3.29.10
So the goal this week was to start my list of the top 50 singles for the last decade (2000-2009), doing 10 songs per day. But that's not going to happen quite yet——I think I'm going to wait until at least Thursday, the start of a new month, so that in the archives the whole list will be on the same page, and I may wait until the beginning of next week so I can present the list in a weeklong chunk.

I have mostly made the list at this point, however——I've narrowed it down to the top 50, broken those top 50 into five groups of ten, and I think ordered my top 10 the way I want. So there's still some arranging, and I'm sure there will be some second guessing once I've let it set for a couple of days, but I'm 90% there.

I was really surprised at how much time this took. I started out by created a smart playlist with all the songs from 2000 to 2009 that had a rating of four stars or more, then I ordered them by rating and then by band. I mostly stuck to my usual rule with singles lists that I not have two songs from the same album, and I figured once I'd gone through all the five star songs, I'd get a count and see how many I needed to pull up from the four star portion of the list.

As it turns out, that was zero: after working through the five star songs from the past decade, I had 147 tracks that were under consideration for the top 50. The next step, obviously, was to get this list down to that top 50, which was probably the hardest and most time consuming part. The first couple of rounds were relatively easy, but after that, the low hanging fruit was gone and I was still only half done.

First I tried to cut songs from artists who had more than one song on the list, and then I had to start cutting artists altogether. But I finally got it down to the top 50, and although I'll probably waffle on a few of them before the list is settled, I feel pretty good about where I ended up——although it's pretty amazing what ended up in the discard pile.

3.30.10
When I made my list of top 50 singles from the last decade, I started from scratch, meaning that I didn't refer back to my top 10 lists for the past few years, and I didn't try to purposely pick a representative sample from each year to make it balanced——I just picked the songs that I thought were the best, with the small caveat that I couldn't choose two songs from the same album and I would try not to pick too many from a single artist, especially when it became clear that I had so many singles that choosing two from one artist would mean sacrificing another artist entirely.

For the initial list of 147 contenders, here's how the tracks broke down by year:

2000: 11
2001: 16
2002: 17
2003: 21
2004: 13
2005: 15
2006: 13
2007: 20
2008: 10
2009: 11

Overall, that's pretty even, with the earliest and latest years at the lowend and a couple of high end outliers in 2003 and 2007.

After narrowing it down to the top 50, here's how the breakdown looked:

2000: 4
2001: 5
2002: 6
2003: 4
2004: 5
2005: 4
2006: 6
2007: 8
2008: 3
2009: 5

This is even more balanced, with only 2007 keeping it's high end outlier status and 2008 ending up with the lowest count, but only by one and only two off the average.

3.31.10
I go back and forth on Gorillaz' Plastic Beach, and I have a feeling I'm going to do so for a while. But for today at least, I'm kinda in love with it.