11.1.11
Hey! Smile came out today! I preordered this awhile back, but I'd sort of forgotten about it until it showed up on my doorstep.

I sort of know what to expect here——I've got the version that Brian Wilson recorded and released back in 2004, and I also downloaded bootlegs of the original albums sessions from some dark corner of the internet long ago, but it will be nice to hear the original tracks cleaned up a bit, especially the vocal tracks——Wilson and his faux Beach Boys backing band did a pretty nice job with the re-recording, but Wilson's voice certainly wasn't the same as it was back in 1967, and although they were pretty good imitations, the vocals from his band certainly weren't on par with the original Beach Boys.

It's almost cliche to love this album nowadays, and calling it "The Most Anticipated Album in Rock & Roll History!!!" as the sticker on the packaging proclaims is a little silly given that anyone who was truly interested in hearing it has heard some version of it by now, but I didn't hesitate to buy this one. True, it might have only achieved a status greater than Pet Sounds because of the J.D. Salinger effect of remaining hidden from view for so many years, but it's still a damn good record, and I think it's the bigger influence on groups like Animal Collective and their many imitators than Pet Sounds was.

11.2.11
The new Decemberists' EP, Long Live the King (a companion piece to their latest album, The King Is Dead), also came out yesterday, and even though I'm a huge Decemberists fan, I've gotten to the point where I only buy EPs digitally (unless I can order the physical copy for the same price as the download, which doesn't seem to happen very often).

Only a cursory listen so far, but it fits in with the sound of The King Is Dead, an album that I thought was a nice return to form after wandering off into the dark, disturbing prog rock forest on their last couple of releases. "E. Watson" seems an odd choice as the lead track——it would have done better at fourth or fifth in the sequencing (out of six tracks), as it's not one of the strongers songs.

The Grateful Dead cover had potential, but somehow the Decemberists can't make the ramshackle thing work. It was a good approach to the song, but they sound like they're trying so hard to play just off the beat that it ends up being a pretty miserable failure——it clearly goes against their natural musical instincts as a band.

Overall, it's a nice little piece of ephemera for Decemberists fans, but it's not much more than that. I'm happy with my purchase, but it's not an EP I would recommend to non-fans (unlike, say, The Tain, which is one of their strongest releases).

11.3.11
The new M83 album, Hurry Up, We're Dreaming, doesn't have a ton of tracks that are going to get individual ratings high enough to make them end up in my shuffle playlists, but man, is it a good album. It's one of those ones that just needs to be listened to straight through, both sides, in the order that the artist intended. You get dissolved in its ocean of sound and there's nothing that makes you want to come out.

11.4.11
This has been another bad week at work——my boss, who I've worked for for 10 years and have a lot of respect for, resigned on Monday——but today started off well: Los Campesinos sent out download codes to everyone who preordered their new album, Hello Sadness. There still a lot of ways this day could go wrong, but at least now it's got a fighting chance to be good.

11.7.11
I've been in a weird OCD mood the last week or so where I need to listen to all the tracks on a given record the same number of times, so when the playcounts don't match, I pick and choose the least played tracks until they catch up to the most played tracks.

I'm not sure what's bringing this on, and hopefully it passes soon, because this is a dangerous game to start playing.

11.8.11
I've listened to the new Los Campesinos five or six times since I got the download code last week, and as usual, my initial reaction is that I don't like it as much as their previous releases. I always think that when they put out a new record, and I always end up changing my mind and liking the new one a whole lot.

What's different this time is that I also always end up thinking that their latest is their best effort yet, and even if I come around on Hello Sadness, I don't think I'm going to think that it surpasses Romance Is Boring. There are two songs on there, "In Media Res" and "The Sea Is a Good Place to Think of the Future", that are startlingly brillant and show real growth in their songwriting, and no matter how many times I listen to Hello Sadness, I don't see two songs of that caliber coming to light.

Of course, those were two of my least favorite songs when I was first listening to Romance Is Boring, so it's entirely possible that I'm going to be wrong. But I don't think so.

Still really psyched about going to see them live next weekend, though.

11.9.11
So I downloaded the latest Surfer Blood EP from iTunes recently, and there's a glitch in the first song that's really annoying. I figured I'd just redownload the song from iTunes, but it apparently only lets you redownload content you've purchased if it can't find it in your library.

I guess the obviousl solution is to delete the song from my library, but I'm worried that it still wouldn't let me redownload it and then I'd be without the song entirely. I've never had any kind of error with an iTunes download before, so I'm not really sure how to fix this.

11.10.11
I'm starting to wonder if, with the recent official release of the Beach Boys' Smile sessions, including dozens of extra demos, alternates, etc., the legendary album is starting to lose a bit of its mystique. Years ago, when I first encountered it, there was no official release of that album, but if you hunted around a bit, it wasn't too hard to find sites on the web where you could download bootlegs of the original sessions. But you really did have to seek them out, and when you heard them, you knew that you were part of a relatively small community that had taken the time to ferret them out and appreciate them despite the rough state of some of the recordings and the unfinished nature of the album in general.

Then in 2004, Brian Wilson released rerecorded versions, but with his very-good-but-still-not-the-Beach-Boys backing band and his aged voice, it still wasn't like hearing the original, but rather a very good facsimile. The original sessions still retained their magic allure, although Wilson helped codify it by giving us a final tracklist and a sequence.

But now with the release of the original sessions, Smile has suddenly gone from the most famous album that never had an official release and one of the most mysterious artifacts in the rock canon to one of records that is most available for dissection, criticism, and analysis——139 tracks in total, only 20 of which are the near-final versions that would have been included on the original album had it ever been released.

Even though I already had the bootleg versions and the Brian Wilson rerecording, I was very happy to have the official original sessions, and it's also fun to hear some of the outtakes and demos to get more insight into Wilson's creative process (the version I got only has an extra 22 tracks, but there's still plenty to digest). But it does somehow feel like the songs are less special now that they've been exposed in such great detail.

It doesn't make Smile any less brilliant, but at some point that the critical lens is going to become more cutting and less reverent. Pet Sounds has already stood the test of time and the withering glare of detractors; once the critics are given time to pick Smile apart, it could well be that Pet Sounds reemerges as the band's true masterpiece.

11.11.11
This is turning out to be kind of a blah year for new music. I don't think it's going to take me very long to come up with my year-end best-of, and it's looking like the weakest crop of records in a long, long time.

11.14.11
I dislike Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's latest, Hysterical, less than I expected to. Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but that's my unkind way of saying that it might be growing on me.

11.15.11
I took the plunge and signed up for iTunes match. I'm not quite ready to stop syncing my music manually with my computer, but $25 for a year of the service is a pretty cheap way to back up my entire music library to the cloud and play around with accessing it on some non-primary devices like my work computer and my work iPad.

I can already tell that there are still some bugs to work out——some albums had one or two songs that didn't match even though the rest of the album did, there were a bunch of songs that errored out when they were uploading, and although most of my playlists are showing up on my enabled devices, a lot of them are blank or are missing songs, and no amount of resyncing or resetting seems to correct the issue. Still, I'm confident that they'll work these issues out in the first couple of months and I'll still have a good long while to use the service and see if it's worth renewing next year.

11.16.11
Got Tom Waits' Bad As Me and St. Vincent's Strange Mercy from Amazon today. The Tom Waits was a gimme, but I've resisted St. Vincent for a while despite all the rave reviews, and now I'm not quite sure why——after my initial listen, she's a weird blend of Dirty Projectors, Marnie Stern, and Tune-Yards, although she's very unique (which might be the most significant thing that she has in common with those acts).

11.17.11
I didn't much care for Yacht's latest when I first heard it——the closing track (which is also the title track), "Shangri-La", was the only song I immediately loved——but I might be coming around now. There are some still a few really annoying tracks, both musically and thematically, but I turned a corner with about half the album and now I'm starting to convince myself that it's about on par with their earlier releases.

11.18.11
Intrigued by the Smiths' complete box set. It's generally redundant for me, but man, it's still hard to resist.

11.21.11
Saw Los Campesinos on Saturday night with a friend, and I think I love them now more than ever (and I was already pretty obsessed). Detailed write-up later, but I hope to god they do a bigger tour in support of the new record next year. I'm at a point with them where I'd travel a couple of hours to see them two nights in a row.

11.28.11
Well, November is almost over, so if you want any of the monthly selection of 100 MP3 albums priced at $5 each from Amazon, you better act quickly. The reason I've delayed in posting my recommendations for this month for so long is that frankly, there's just not that much worth having. For the must-haves, we're limited to Lauryn Hill's The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and...that's it.

There are some albums of peripheral interest, but none that I'd highly recommend, including Temple of the Dog's eponymous album (featuring Chris Cornell and a pre-Pearl Jam Eddie Vedder on vocals), Wild Flag's debut album (ex-Sleater-Kinney), Radiohead's The Bends, and the Black Keys' Thickfreakness. Nothing truly mind-blowing about any of those, but they're reasonably priced at $5.

11.29.11
Even though I thought I had been importing all of my CDs at the iTunes Plus level (256 kbps, AAC), almost everything in my collection was actually at the 128 kbps level, so after I signed up for iTunes Match, I decided to upgrade all the songs that were matches in the cloud. To do this, I had to delete the existing songs on my computer, after which an iCloud download icon became available, and I could then grab the higher quality copies from Apple. I didn't lose any of my metadata——tags, plays, etc.——otherwise I wouldn't have done it.

It took longer than I would have liked to do this, because quite often it would match on a whole album...except for one song. So I usually couldn't highlight songs for more than a screen or two before I came across one that had been uploaded instead of matched. I made a playlist to identify all of the songs that I needed to upgrade and that had matches in the cloud, but it turns out that you have to delete the songs from your music library directly, which doesn't offer the same filter options that you can achieve with a smart playlist (deleting them from the playlist does just that——deletes them from the playlist——without deleting them from your library so that you can then download the higher quality version from the cloud).

I was a little worried about the increase in the file size in terms of how many songs I could put on my phone, but I figured I could cut the number of songs on my phone in half and still be in pretty good shape. But for some reason, the cloud copies appear to take up far more than twice the amount of space as the old versions did. I can't figure out if that's because of larger album art or what, but my current number of songs is about one quarter what it was prior to the song upgrades, and I have less free space on my phone to boot. So I'm not sure what's going on there, but I still have over 3,000 songs on my phone, so I think I'll be okay for daily listening.

11.30.11
New track from of Montreal, apparently from their upcoming new record, Paralytic Stalks:

Not sure what I think about this. I know Kevin Barnes has been listening to Sufjan Stevens' The Age of Adz, an album that I didn't care for, and I get some of that same feeling from this track——a lot of random and/or mediocre material in the beginning and end but a nice sweet spot in the middle——but it could still grow on me, and I'm still really looking forward to this new album.