8.1.12
Good lord this has been a slow summer for new releases. A slow year, really. I don't know if I've purchased that many fewer new records compared to my average for previous years, but there sure are a lot fewer that I love. At this rate, I think there's a real chance that I won't have ten records that I like enough to put on my annual top 10 list.

8.2.12
Los Campesinos' b-sides and outtakes aren't quite as vital to their catalog as, say, the Cure's or the Pixies', but they're usually worth several listens, and every now and then you stumble on one that you wonder why it didn't make it to a proper album. The most recent of these is "Tiptoe Through the True Bits", an outtake from the Hello Sadness sessions and a song that I've grown to love more than most of the album tracks. You can download it here.

8.3.12
I recently discovered that a Reptar member lives across the street from one of my friends. I have renewed interest in the band for no other reason than that.

8.6.12
Still can't decide whether to get a ticket for Amanda Palmer's Atlanta show next month. The problem isn't the music——I pledged to her Kickstarter project and she's released three preview songs for her backers, two of which I love——but rather the nature of the show. She has an interactive show based on Dada cabaret that requires lots of audience participation, and as an introverted man in my 40s who would likely be attending solo, that's not really my thing——I've reached the point where I like to stand in the back (or, at the 9:30 Club, in the balcony) and watch the kids have all the fun.

8.7.12
I was looking forward to the follow-up to the Morning Benders' Big Echo, but it looks like it is not to be. They were one of many bands doing a modern indie take on 60s California folk-rock (behind the emulation of the 60s girl group sound, this was probably the biggest trend in indie rock 2-3 years ago), but they were really the only band in that category that clicked with me.

They are now known as POP ETC, and they have a sound that's completely foreign to all their previous work——it seems as though bright 80s synth-pop has become their new touchstone (it's kind of like when My Morning Jacket tried to appropriate Prince's funk stylings and Jim James went all falsetto to match). It's weird and unsettling and wrong, although I at least have to give them credit for changing their name before they foisted this new direction on their fanbase.

I'm not really sure what happened, other than that someone told them that "bender" was British slang for a homosexual (whereas "fag" is British slang for a cigarette——go figure), and they are apparently uncomfortable enough with their own sexuality that they felt immediately compelled to change their name, and then they decided to change their sound along with it. I don't know why one would follow the other, except that when you choose a name as loaded as POP ETC, you've either got to make music that's more pop than Katy Perry or you've got to become the kings of black metal.

They attempted to do the former, and if they were a little worse at it this may have all come out okay——after all, Ben Gibbard's (of Death Cab for Cutie) album with Jimmy Tamborello under the Postal Service moniker is heavily indebted to 80s synth-pop, and it's one of my favorite records of the past decade. But instead the POP ETC record comes out feeling more like Owl City, the one-man-band imitation of the Postal Service that tastes and ugly and fake to fans of the Postal Service as hydogenated oil-based margarine must taste to a butter-loving Frenchman.

8.8.12
Here's a short documentary on the recording of Watch the Throne, the major failing of which is that it seems like an extended teaser for an actual documentary that doesn't actually exist. If it weren't for the fact that these days we'd have to see so much of Kim Kardashian, I'm of the opinion that Kanye West should have a video camera pointed in his direction 24/7.

8.9.12
This has me super excited.

8.10.12
I ordered King Tuff's eponymous debut album hoping that they would be this year's Surfer Blood (and hey, speaking of Surfer Blood, where the hell is their sophomore release?), and there are definitely elements of that sound on the record. But I was having trouble coming up with a consistent personality for the band——many songs veer off pretty significantly into Tapes n' Tapes territory, but even that's not a really good comparison.

Then the right analogue hit me: the record sounds very much like what I would expect Mitch Easter's Let's Active project to sound like if they had come of age in the 2000s instead of the 80s. There's the singer's voice, certainly, which is more Easter-ish than anything I've heard in a long time, but it's more than that——there's just something about the feel of the album that feels very much like Let's Active's early works, Afoot (their debut EP) and Cypress (their first full-length), but with the production chops of the more shiny Every Dog Has His Day.

Not being able to find the proper context in which to put the King Tuff record was always nagging at me when I was listening to it, and I wasn't able to fully immerse myself and enjoy it, but as soon as Let's Active popped into my brain, I was able to let go of the analysis and just enjoy it.

There's some stuff that I like a lot and some stuff that's good and a couple songs that I don't care for, but the album is varied enough (and overall good enough) that I'm anxious to see what the future holds for this band. I'd also love to see them live, because I'm betting that would unlock a greater appreciation of their sound——I get the strong sense that the studio process has smoothed out some of their more interesting personality quirks, the kinds of things that would make me love their music even more.

8.13.12
Amanda Palmer has released another track, "The Killing Type" from her upcoming album Theatre Is Evil, which has already gotten a lot of attention due to the $1.2 million she raised for it on Kickstarter (twelve times her original goal). This time, though, anyone can download it, not just her Kickstarter backers.

This is the fourth track I've heard from the record (out of 15), and so far I'm a big fan of three of them, including this one. I wouldn't quite call myself a true fan of her music yet even though I was a Kickstarter backer to the tune of $125 (although I'm a big fan of HER, thanks to her ceaseless and endlessly entertaining Twitter feed). But if the rest of the record is as good as the songs I've heard so far, I can't see how it won't be under serious consideration for my top 10 list this year.

8.14.12
I'm on the verge of believing that of Montreal's Paralytic Stalks is Kevin Barnes' best record outside of the stellar string of releases starting with Sunlandic Twins and ending with Skeletal Lamping (including the Icons, Abstract Thee EP). I can't quite bring myself to say it with conviction given how negatively I reacted to the record when it first came out earlier this year, but it's really grown on me (except for the horrid "Exorcismic Breeding Knife", which I've long since deleted from my playlists and which I'm very close from deleting completely from my library).

8.15.12
On a Duran Duran kick again, listening to Girls on Film, Rio, and Seven and the Ragged Tiger. It's best not to fight these little impulsive nostalgia trips and just hope they play themselves out quickly. Although it would help if there was more new music worth buying out there...

8.16.12
I'm psyched that Conor Oberst seems to be in the midst of resurrecting Los Desaparecidos (their first and only album so far, Read Music Speak Spanish, was one of my favorite albums of 2002). They've released new material which I'm eager to hear, but you can only purchase the new tracks digitally on the band's web site, and they're charging $5 for just two songs (it goes up to $10 if you want the vinyl 7 inch, the only physical version of the release).

With that price point (and without the ability to preview the songs), I think I'll just hope for a full album that contains these tracks, or wait until they release them to iTunes or Amazon where I'll be able to buy them for 99 cents.

8.17.12
This is another one of Amazon's bonaza months for $5 MP3 albums which I'll need to go through sometime soon, but I did make a couple of purchases already: Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run and Nebraska.

These are the first Springsteen albums I've ever bought, and although I'm often tempted by the records in the classic rock section of Amazon's monthly cheap offerings that I've seen show up on list after list of the greatest records in the history of rock, I can't often bring myself to pull the trigger, even for $5 (Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, Blood on the Tracks, and Highway 61 Revisted are also on this month's list, but I'm still pretty lukewarm about adding them to my collection).

I've only listened to each record once at this point, but I think I'm going to end up being pretty happy about my decision to buy them. I don't need to justify or re-examine iconic albums from the rock canon, so I don't have a whole lot more to say about them except that they're each every bit as good as I expected them to be.

8.20.12
I'm pining for an imaginary album between the Cure's Seventeen Seconds and Faith that doesn't exist.

8.21.12
I may have turned the corner on Fiona Apple's new album. I've been in a pretty morose mood recently, and that's probably a better frame of mind for appreciating this record.

8.22.12
Most people who read this site (if there are actually any) have probably already spent some time reviewing Pitchfork's People's List of the best 200 albums from the last 15 years (that's how long ago Pitchfork was founded), so I won't go over it in detail.

My only observation is that it was far more conventional than I expected, and for the most part the 100 or so albums that I would have included on my ballot (I never got around to properly filling one out) were included somewhere on the list, and I don't really think of myself as having tastes that would align that closely with the typical Pitchfork reader, but I guess I'm wrong about that. The list makes it pretty clear that, despite the staff constantly hyping difficult to digest records in genres outside of indie guitar rock, it's actually indie guitar rock that their audience is most interested in.

My favorite social media response to the list came from Los Campesinos frontman Gareth (@grthdvd): "Would have loved to be the person in the Pitchfork office that got to exclaim "I fucking told you so!" when the People's List results came in." This is presumably referring to the fact that Radiohead's OK Computer, which most non-Pitchfork/non-Radiohead fans would use as a stereotypical example of the kind of record that would be at the top of a Pitchfork reader's poll actually did end up at the top of the poll (along with two other Radiohead records in the top 10, four total in the top 20, and five in the top 40).

8.23.12
A more fun and less boring list of favorite records to consider (compared to Pitchfork's People's List) is Amanda Palmer's list of her 13 favorite albums. Granted, she's not limited to the past 15 years, so her list should be more expansive, and since it's just one person instead of a conglomeration of thousands of people, quirkier, but I was heartened to see many of my secret favorites end up in her top 13.

There are some expected classics in here for someone who came of age in the 80s: the Violent Femmes' debut, the Cure's Disintegration, Depeche Mode's Violator, along with two perennial favorites from the 60s and the 90s, the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's and Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. But there's also Robyn Hitchcock's Globe of Frogs, which remains my favorite album from an artist who should be much better known and appreciated than he is.

My favorite, though, is the Thompson Twins' Into the Gap, which is one of those records (and bands) that I was completely in love with for a couple of years in my early teens but who I denied liking for a decade plus after that. But now I embrace those first musical loves, and nothing made me happier paging through Amanda's list than to see this album make an unexpected but very welcome appearance.

8.24.12
Been on a Cure run lately. I think I'm ready to accept that Wild Mood Swings is actually a pretty decent album and easily their best post-Disintegration work (including Wish, which I never cared for even though I have many Cure-loving friends who like that record almost as much as Disintegration).

I don't know exactly where this is coming from, but I have been on an 80s kick in the car recently, and I was listening to Duran Duran's first three albums a lot before that, so maybe this is just a continuation of those two things.

8.27.12
Got Spider Bags' Shake My Head late last week. So far they remind me of the Black Lips except they don't seem like they're purposely annoying me every other song. I'm not liking them quite as much as I hoped I would, but I like them enough to keep listening.

8.28.12
This month Amazon is doing one of their huge 1,000+ MP3 albums for $5 each, so I'm going to take this in stages. First up: the alternative/indie selections.

Must haves: the Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, the Black Keys' Brothers, Violent Femmes' eponymous debut, Green Day's Dookie, the Stone Roses' self-titled first album, St. Vincent's Strange Mercy, Spoon's Girls Can Tell and Kill the Moonlight, Eleanor Friedberger's Last Summer, Pearl Jam's Ten, the Clash's London Calling, Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and Nine Inch Nails' Broken.

Should probably haves: the Black Keys' Attack and Release, Sleigh Bells' Reign of Terror, the Walkmen's Heaven, Spoon's Gimme Fiction, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, and Transference, Shout Out Louds' Our Ill Wills, Death Cab for Cutie's Plans, the Minus 5's self-titled album with a gun on the cover (The Gun Album), Sigur Ros' (), Dinosaur Jr.'s Farm, Tokyo Police Club's Champ, and Sonic Youth's Murray Street.

8.29.12
Continuing the Amazon list with selections from the rock, pop, classic rock, and rap categories:

Must haves: Depeche Mode's Violator, the Grateful Dead's American Beauty, Lupe Fiasco's Food & Liquor, and Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska and Born to Run (both of which I picked up myself just a couple of weeks ago).

There's a bunch of other stuff I'm considering picking up, but given that I've listened to samples of all the stuff I'm considering at least a couple of times already and I have yet to pull the trigger, my guess is that I won't buy too much (if anything) before the end of the month when the list will reset.

8.30.12
Divine Fits' first record, A Thing Called Divine Fits, arrived earlier this week, and it sounds pretty much like I expected it to (which is a good thing). This band is an indie supergroup that includes members of Handsome Furs/Wolf Parade, New Bomb Turks, and most prominently, Spoon frontman Britt Daniel, whose seems to be the primary creative driver Divine Fits as well.

So when I said that the record sounds pretty much like I expected, that means it sounds like a Spoon record with a few forays into sounds that Spoon doesn't use too often. I'm sure that Dan Boeckner devotees could go into great detail about how influential his style is on the record based on his work with Handsome Furs and Wolf Parade, but the overriding reference is the spare, minimalist approach that Spoon has perfected over the years.

8.31.12
New Looper song:

It's just an intro track to what I assume will be a forthcoming new record, but it sounds a lot more Looper-y (that is, much more like Up A Tree and The Geometrid) than The Snare, which took the group's sound in a very different direction and which I was never able to bring myself to purchase despite loving the first two albums.