4.2.12
Pitchfork released their quarterly guide to upcoming releases, which I had hoped would be packed with stuff I want to hear given the relatively light release schedule so far this year, but man, there's really not that much. Spiritualized's Sweet Heart Sweet Light was already on my radar, but other than that, there's not much. Liars have a new record in June, along with the Walkmen, Hot Chip, and Fiona Apple, and I'll likely be pretty interested in the new releases from Jack White, Sigur Ros, and the Gossip in May, but other than that small list, I don't see much to get excited about. And even if I buy all of those, that will still put me at fewer than 20 new albums by midyear, which instinctively feels far lower than normal.

Maybe I just need to become a fan of all of Robert Pollard's various incarnations; that way I'd be guaranteed a new record of interest at least every two months.

4.3.12
New east coast shows from Los Campesinos! I still haven't written about their November show in DC in detail, but I liked it enough that I'm hatching a crazy scheme to follow the band from Baltimore to Chapel Hill to Atlanta for three shows in a row in late June. The likelihood of me pulling that off is very low, but I know I'm going to see at least one of them, and I'm super excited.

4.4.12
This morning when I was driving my son to day care, Cloud Nothings' "Heartbeat" came on, and he insisted on listening to it over and over and over. He did the same thing with Kanye West's "Hey Mama" last week, but the difference here is that "Hey Mama" is a decently long song so we only had to listen to it five or six times in a row. "Heartbeat", however, is just over a minute long, so we probably listened to it more than a dozen times. And it's a pretty repetitive song anyway, so while it is one of my favorites of theirs, it starts to grate after the fifth or sixth consecutive listen.

I have no idea why my boy preferes some songs more than others, especially when they are so varied in their genres in styles, but he sure knows what he likes when he hears it.

4.5.12
The Arctic Monkeys are like a friend who's a borderline alcoholic who suddenly stops drinking and gets in a stable relationship: I'm happy for them, I guess, but they sure aren't much fun to hang out with anymore.

4.6.12
I like most of what Nathan Williams has released as Wavves, but for some reason I'm reluctant to embrace them and proudly proclaim myself a fan. And after thinking about it for a while, I've come to the conclusion that it's because of his close association with Best Coast frontwoman Bethany Cosentino. There's something about her that just leaves a terrible taste in my mouth, and that has rubbed off on my perceptive of Williams.

4.9.12
I'm not all the way sold on of Montreal's Paralytic Stalks, but I'm getting a lot closer. Track 8, "Exorcismic Breeding Knife", will always be nothing more than a 7 minute plus waste of time, but I'm growing quite fond of the tracks that make up the first half of the album, and I'm getting so I can tolerate pretty well the last half, where the tracks average 9 minutes or so even without "Exorcismic Breeding Knife".

I'm still frustrated by the closing track, "Authentic Pyrrhic Remission", a 13 minute entry that opens with the most hook-filled passage on the entire record and closes with a nice piano ballad, but which spends far too long in the middle on abstract noodling. Take out that part and remove track 8 and you might have a pretty solid record. It's not the of Montreal that I fell in love with on Hissing Fauna and Skeletal Lamping, but if I was a fan of a different band that sounded like the one that made Paralytic Stalks, I'd have to think this would be a nice addition to their catalogue.

4.10.12
I just read about David Byrne and St. Vincent collaboration. I have a real soft spot for a lot of David Byrne's solo work, and I can see this either being a Metallica/Lou Reed level of epic fuck up or a Billy Bragg/Wilco dream collaboration. But either way, I'm really interested in hearing it.

4.11.12
Finally got around to pre-ordering Spiritualized's Sweet Heart Sweet Light, which I have really high hopes for, and also decided to throw in Passion Pit's Manners, which I've been meaning to order for a while now. Given how quickly Amazon delivers in-stock titles to me (even using the normal Prime two day shipping, I often get CDs the day after ordering them), I'm hoping this will hold me over until next week when the Spiritualized will hit the street.

4.12.12
My son's favorite songs this week, based on his demands to hear them over and over and over again: Kanye West's "Hey Mama" (which has been in his heavy rotation for a few weeks now), the Drums' "Skippin' Town", the Beach Boys' "Vega-Tables", and Cloud Nothings' "Turning On" ("Heartbeat" was a favorite last week).

4.13.12
Passion Pit. Manners. Like it so far. Might love it eventually.

4.16.12
I've been listening to a lot of of Montreal recently, and I finally figured out why the two songs that Kevin Barnes collaborated with Janelle Monáe on ("Make the Bus" on Monáe's The ArchAndroid and "Enemy Gene" on of Montreal's False Priest) never felt quite right to me: they were on the wrong albums.

"Make the Bus", which is really an of Montreal track grafted onto Monáe's album (she does such a good job of aping Barnes' vocal style that it's hard to tell which lines are hers and which are his) would have been a much better fit for False Priest's space-funk-pop, while "Enemy Gene" is a clear match for The ArchAndroid lyrically, musically, and thematically.

4.17.12
We're moving down to Atlanta in June, and although I'm really going to miss seeing shows at the 9:30 Club, which has been my go-to venue for the past dozen years, I am excited about getting to see shows at the 40 Watt in Athens. Growing up in North Carolina, there were three major clubs for indie/alternative bands: the Cat's Crade in Chapel Hill, the 9:30 Club in DC, and the 40 Watt.

I spent my high school and college years seeing shows regularly at the Cradle, then transitioned to the 9:30 as I finished with grad school and moved into the early part of my career, and now I'll get a chance to complete the triumvirate. I'll definitely miss the 9:30 Club, because that seems like a better hangout for aging music fans like me, but I'm hoping there will be a combo of venues around the Atlanta area including the 40 Watt that will be able to serve as some kind of substitute.

4.18.12
I think the Shins' Port of Morrow is growing on me. Still might be the weakest of their records, but they're so consistently high-quality that this doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad record. It's definitely getting its hooks in deeper than James Mercer's Broken Bells project, which I never really grew to like, either as a whole album or on an individual song basis.

4.19.12
Looks like Wilco and I are completely out of sync for their summer tour: they're going to be down around Atlanta in May, a month before I'm in Atlanta, and then back up in the DC area in July, after I've moved away. I'll have to reconnect with them some other summer, I guess.

4.20.12
I've taken a few days to absorb the new Spiritualized, and overall it's pretty good. But it has two obvious standout tracks: "Hey Jane", which is the first single from the record, and "So Long You Pretty Thing", the album closer.

They clock in around 9 and 8 minutes, and since my tolerance for songs longer than 3 or 4 minutes is limited, it should tell you something about how good these tracks are. "Hey Jane" starts off with an engaging, rollicking section that could have easily stayed a 3 minute pop single, but it goes off the rails and stumbles into an entirely different groove for the second half, which, once it gets going, is possibly even hookier than the initial piece.

"Pretty Thing" starts out as one of Jason Pierce's trademark slow jams for Jesus, but it also switches gears about halfway through and repeats the chorus (that until then had been missing) until the song's end. So the track has the standard verse and chorus components, but they're completely segregated: it's all verse until you hit the chorus the first time, and then it's nothing but chorus from then on out. And those last 3 1/2 minutes that have nothing but the chorus are pure bliss, the closest he's come to matching "Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space"'s mesmerizing trance.

4.23.12
I'm going to miss the Merriweather Post Pavillion like crazy when we move away. It was my fondest hope that my son's first concert experience would be sitting on the lawn there under a summer night sky sometime in the next couple of years, but that's just a daydream now. Hopefully Atlanta will have some decent outdoor venues for concerts where I might be able to replicate at least part of the experience, but there's nowhere in the world like Merriweather Post.

4.24.12
Been on kind of an 80s kick in the car on the way to work. Not sure what's driving it, but with all the activity in my life right now, I don't have time for a lot of thoughtful self-examination, so I'm just going to go with it. Plus Will doesn't seem to mind it much, and his approval always makes our car rides more pleasant.

4.25.12
I'm so overwhelmed with all the stuff we have to do to prepare for our move that I rarely have time to get emotional about it. But every now and then, the moment catches me just right and I get overwhelmed. Case in point: Frank Ocean's cover of "Strawberry Swing"——from the opening seconds I can feel the tears welling in my eyes, and by the time I get to the lines "I have loved the good times here/And I will miss our good times here", I'm bawling (I'm crying now just typing the words).

We've had a really good life here the past tweleve years, and I just haven't been able to process the end of that. I'm sure once the move is finished and I have a little downtime before I start my new job, I'll find more appropriate ways to work through my affection for this place, but for now, it's just going to have to come out in random bursts of emotion.

4.26.12
Will's favorite song this past week by far has been the Beach Boys' "Vega-Tables". There have been at least four times he has sat at my desk with me and we listened to it over and over.

He also had a passing affair with the Clash's "Washington Bullets", requesting it repeatedly on one of our morning car rides to day care, but it was "Vega-Tables" that he always wanted at home.

4.27.12
I know it's a little late, but here are my buy recommendations for April's MP3 albums for $5 from Amazon: Radiohead's OK Computer, the Shins' Oh, Inverted World, M83's Saturdays = Youth, and Spoon's Transference. The first two are much stronger than the last two, but if M83's music does anything for you, Saturdays is a pretty strong album, and Transference is a prototypical Spoon record, and may even be in their top 3.

I'm considering the Men's Open Your Heart, although the price differential between the CD and the $5 download isn't significant, so I may just end up ordering the physical copy. I'm also thinking about Best Coast's Crazy for You, mostly because I want to be really, really sure that I don't like them and $5 might be the right price point to put my curiosity to rest for good. Tennis' latest, Young & Old, might also make the cut——I've passed on their debut when it has been available for $5, but this one sounds a little faster-paced, which makes it more appealing to me.

4.30.12
I've been waiting for a while for St. Vincent's Actor to have a price drop to $10 or less, and it finally happened over the weekend, so I ordered it. I also picked up Grimes' Visions and Jack White's Blunderbuss, and I suddenly find myself having purchased five albums in the past few days. Looking forward to some new music, and hoping that all of these could be keepers.