6.3.13
I'm a huge Los Campesinos fan, and compared to the first few years of their recording career, the past two years have been a relative desert——they released only one studio album since 2010 after releasing three albums in their first three years together. And while they're supposed to be recording their next record this summer, it likely won't see the light of day until 2014, more than two years after their last release.

So you'd think I would have immediatley pounced on the release of an incredibly long live album (A Good Night for a Fistfight), especially because I've seen them live twice and have come away more in love with them than I was previously. But for some reason it just didn't appeal to me——not only did I not preorder it, I actually forgot about it until I got an email from them about a merch sale on their web site.

After deciding to pick up a poster, I threw the album in the cart as well, and while it has its flaws——singer Gareth is rougher live than in the studio, especially when he doesn't have the rest of the band backing him up like he does on a lot of the studio tracks——I'm overall pretty pleased with it as a fan. One thing I like a lot about it is the format: it's not editing together from several different performances, it's just 90 minutes of uninterrupted recording——crowd noise, stage patter, pauses while the band is getting ready to play the next song, etc. It's a warts-and-all presentation that actually captures the heart of this band in a way that a more carefully curated live collection could not.

Let me state clearly, however, that this is a document for fans only. If you are not one of those yet, I'd start with Romance Is Boring and then We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed. If you're not a fan after those, you have nothing but my pity and a dash of scorn.

6.4.13
I have somehow failed to acquire a CD copy of the Talking Heads' Remain in Light over the course of the past 20 years. That has now been remedied.

6.5.13
Along with announcing a new album (Hesitation Marks), their re-signing to a major label after trying the pay-what-you-want model, and a major world tour later this year, Nine Inch Nails have also released a new track from the record, "Came Back Haunted":

After a couple of listens, I'm optimistic about this record. If I had to place this track in the context of their earlier work, this sounds like a track that could have been constructed between their debut, Pretty Hate Machine, and the follow up to that record (and possibly their best work), The Downward Spiral.

Of course, there was a record that came in between these records, the excellent Broken EP, but I don't think this would fit that well on there. That purpose of that EP seemed to be to put the guitars front and center as a preview of the dominance of that sound on their next record, while "Came Back Haunted" tilts more towards the Pretty Hate Machine sound. There's the heavy reliance on a synth sound that seems like it was taken straight from the Pretty Hate Machine library, although the viscous darkness infusing the slides around in the background reminds me more of how The Downward Spiral feels in my memory.

Anyway. Good track, and good to see Trent Reznor isn't going to spend the rest of his life making backing tracks for his only moderately talented wife to sing over with the How to Destroy Angels project (I often mistype that as "How to Destroy Angles", which I think is actually a much cooler name).

6.6.13
Our 20th college reunion is this weekend, so for fun I've been listening to a playlist of tracks from that period, 1989-1993. I've limited it to tracks I've rated at four stars or above, and I'm surprised at how varied the artists and songs that show up are.

That was a big period of change in music——Nirvana would overturn the entire ecosystem of both mainstream and indie music in 1991, and aside from the rising profiles of bands like Jane's Addiction and the Pixies, there were very few trends in either world that would have led anyone to predict that a band like Nirvana could pop up pretty much out of nowhere and give birth to the grunge movement, which would dominate the charts for the next several years.

I haven't been that good about listening to it, however——it's been mostly in the car, and I haven't been driving that much this week. I'm going to try to listen to it on the drive to the reunion, but we'll see how that goes with a two year old strapped into the backseat.

6.10.13
I have to admit I don't quite get the strategy of no preorders for Kanye West's new Yeezus——you can't preorder the digital copy on Amazon or iTunes, and you can't even preorder the physical version on Amazon——but at this point in his career, I guess he's entitled to do his album releases however he damn well pleases.

6.11.13
Surfer Blood's debut, 2010's Astro Coast, was one of those records that I liked about half of immediately and grew to like the other half just about as much over time, so I've been anxiously awaiting their sophomore effort, Pythons, especially in the wake of the excellent Tarot Classics EP that was released towards the end of 2011.

It finally arrived today, a bit unexpectedly——unexpectedly in that I knew it was coming out sometime in June, but my brain hasn't really registered that we're in June now——and while it doesn't have any songs that immediately grab me the way "Floating Vibes" or "Anchorage" did, my initial impressions are that they have delivered a record that won't disappoint their fan base, even if it took longer than we had hoped to get our hands on the album.

6.12.13
No Age posted a track, "C'mon Stimmung", on YouTube from their upcoming new record An Object, due in August. And even though video content accompanies the music, it is explicitly labeled "not the video", so take that however it suits you.

Not completely sold on this although it's not far off from what you might expect from a new No Age track. Something about the voice feels off——it doesn't sound like the voices I expect from No Age, and it seems oddly disconnected from the rest of the track, like it was recording on very terrible equipment at the back of the room at a live show in someone's basement, while the rest of it, while using a decidedly lo-fi aesthetic, seems like it was recorded in a studio using their normal equipment and techniques.

6.14.13
Heard a Liz Phair song on a random shuffle list, and that led to about a day and a half of re-obsessing about her. She's may be the artist whose career arc might be the saddest to me.

I got into her about a year after I picked up her second album, Whip-Smart, in the used bin and quickly fell in love even though I had pointedly ignored her up until that point——she had received thunderous, unanimous praise for her debut, Exile in Guyville, a concept double album that was meant as a song-by-song response to the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street, and my contrary nature arbitrarily decided that I wasn't going to like her just because everyone else seemed to.

But when I finally heard her music, I saw what all the fuss was about, and I grew more and more obsessed as I waited for her third album to arrive, keeping up with the fan sites that reported numerous stops and starts and switching of producers and release dates. I even purchased Juvenalia, a collection of early leftovers and throwaways that the record company released as some way of making money off a hot young artist while she was dillying about in the studio, and eventually found a CD copy of The Girlysound Demos on eBay, a set of demo songs that had convinced the record execs to sign her and finance her ambitious first album.

So I got into her just in time to start to think of her as The Girl Who Could Save Rock and just before she began the steep decline that sometimes makes it hard to listen to even her first two amazing albums. Whitechocolatesapceegg was a letdown, but it wasn't so far off the track that you couldn't believe that she couldn't come back from it with a little refocusing. But it was the last Liz Phair album I would ever buy, or am likely ever to buy, because as mediocre as it was, what came after was even worse.

Not only did her next two albums, the last two on her major label contract, strongly break any connection she may have still had with her seminal early work, but she as an artist essentially disavowed that work and stated even more plainly than the empty studio gloss of her new music could that her goal now was to make as much money as possible, and that she had no other artistic goals other than using her music to create a comfortable life for herself.

For a short while it seemed like her strategy might have worked, at least in terms of her personal goals——the first of these two radio-friendly pop-oriented records had singles that cracked the top 40, and it looked like she might be able to crossover to a lesser version of Sheryl Crow while leaving her original audience entirely behind. But then her new audience didn't really stay with her either, and, having lost both her old and her new fans, she essentially became nothing.

Still, it's hard to deny the power of those early recordings——there's only one track on the first two records that I have rated lower than four stars, and that's the so-filthy-it's-hard-to-take-seriously "Chopsticks", the opening track on Whip-Smart. Post Exile and Whip-Smart, I've only got one track that even rates a four——the pleasantly odd, Gary Numan-esque "Headache" that somehow snuck onto Whitechocolatespaceegg despite being a solid track.

6.13.13
One thing that continues to annoy me about Pitchfork is that, even though they are my main source for discovering new artists, they are very inconsistent about doing reviews of some of the artists they've turned me on to, even ones that they give relatively decent scores to. The latest case in point: the new album (which is not really all that new anymore) by the Wave Pictures, Long Black Cars.

Their last album, Beer in the Breakers, received a medicore score from the Pitchforkians, but it caught my attention enough to give them a listen and buy not only that record but their previous two as well (both of which scored much higher when they were reviwed jointly). I recognize the weaknesses of this band——they are especially frustrating to be a fan of because they have so many songs that would go from average to good or even great with either a little more disciplined editing or the extra work to add one or two more unique elements. But when they hit on a great song, it's really great——"I Love You Like a Madman" might be my favorite love song of all time.

However, despite the middling score of Beer in the Breakers, the band did have a history with the site, and with two of their three records scoring well, I figured that at least the next album would get reviewed whenever it came out, which meant that I didn't have to go out of my way to keep up with news on the band——Pitchfork would let me know when there was new material.

But that didn't happen——Long Black Cars was apparently released in April 2012, over a year ago, and I just happened to find out about it because I was wondering how a band that had been so prolific had managed not to release an album in two years only to find out that they had (and based on their release history, I ought to keep my eyes open for a new record sometime this year). I went back to check Pitchfork to see if I had somehow missed their review, but I hadn't——there was nothing on the site about the band since the review of Beer in the Breakers.

I wonder how that happens in Pitchfork-land——does a band get blacklisted because they are now passe or have past their hipster expiration date, so much so that the band has effectively ceased to exist? Because it wasn't just that there was no review of the new album (which you could maybe understand if it was a record that they didn't like and didn't feel compelled to write a review that was a redux of the last review they'd published), but there was nothing at all about the band——no tour annoucements, no record release date, nothing. Which means that even before anyone on the staff had heard the new record, the Wave Pictures had already been excommunicated from the sphere of Pitchfork-worthy bands, which hardly seems fair either to the band or to their fans who are expecting at least some coverage of the band given the previous history with the site.

This isn't the first time I've seen this kind of thing happen, and they're certainly guilty of the flip side of this coin——continuing to insist that a band is innovative and worth listening to when it's clear that for a large segment of their audience, the band just isn't newsworthy or worth listening to. And it's hard to believe that, with all the content blocks they need to fill (five album reviews a day, five days a week for most of the year), there wasn't space or resources to review an album that some small percentage of their audience would be looking for, especially given that, by and large, I only choose to read about 1-2 of the five daily album reviews simply becuase it's clear that so many of the reviews simply are space-fillers that they're using to try to increase their street cred/hipster bona fides.

Whatever. It's their prerogative to publish what they want, but I do wish they were a little more consistent.

6.17.13
I can't tell if music doesn't affect me as much as it used to because it's just not as good as it used to be or simply because it doesn't affect me as much as it used to. Maybe it's just that I don't really get to spend as much quality time with my music as I did when I was younger.

Back then I would sit and listen to an album on my headphones and that's all I would be doing——the music was my sole focus. Now I mostly experience music while driving or while doing work of some sort on my computer——it's there, and I am taking it in, but it's in competition with other things. Maybe that alone is enough to account for the lack of immediacy and primacy in my relationship with great music.

6.18.13
Holy fuck Yeezus is intense. I thought marrying the detestable Kim Kardashian and having a kid might make Kanye lose his edge, but this is easily the angriest, most focused album he's ever made. It's not his best——I still think My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy deserves that title——but he's so masterful, so in command of his art on this record that it's clear he could have made an album better than Fantasy if he'd wanted to. He's in absolute control here, and I don't think there's anyone in the pop or hip hop world that can touch him.

6.19.13
Still puzzling over the Pitchfork review of Surfer Blood's new album Pythons. While generally praising the music (it received a 6.7, perhaps a bit lower than it deserved), a significant portion of the review focuses on calling out lead singer John Paul Pitts for his arrest last year on charges of domestic assault.

Now, if you want to pass judgment on the moral failings of the artists whose work you're experiencing as part of your evaluation of that work, you're free to do so. But Pitchfork seems a bit out of line and frankly hypocritical when considering their reviews of other artists accused of criminal wrongdoing. Pitts pleaded not guilty initially before accepting a plea deal that would see both his plea and the charges erased from his record if there are no further incidents, and it's pretty clear that the physical altercation between Pitts and his girlfriend was mutual based on the police reports. But without knowing both sides of the story (or even one side of the story, really), Pitchfork has decided to make this incident the centerpiece of the review.

I'm not trying to excuse Pitts' behavior, and I would get it if you as a listener decided that crossed some sort of threshold with you where you didn't want to listen to his music. But as part of the music press that has reviewed work from artists with far more serious and compelling cases against them, it seems inappropriate for Pitchfork to jump on its soapbox here. I'm sure there are many, many examples I could dig up if I wanted to take the time, but the most glaring one is R. Kelly.

In case you weren't aware, R. Kelly spent five years under investigation for having sex with a minor on video (and peeing on her as part of his sexuals abuse to boot). During all that time before the trial (and when Pitchfork's staff undoubtedly had access to the infamous video showing his criminal behavior, because it was EVERYWHERE), they continued to review R. Kelly's records positively without a whisper judgment about the charges against him.

I don't know about you, but if I was going to go around passing judgment on people for their criminal behavior, especially if it involved some sort of abuse of another person, I'd certainly be more upset about an adult male having sex with a minor and using her for a disturbing sexual act, all while taping it, than I would about a very opaque incident of domestic assault. I'm not condoning the latter in any way, shape, or form, but if you're going to call out someone for that, you damn sure better call out another party for the former.

Yes, R. Kelly was eventually found not guilty by a jury——a starstruck jury that bought one of the most ludicrous stories concocted by a legal defense team ever brought to a courtroom with a straight face——but the Pitchfork staff didn't know that would be the outcome during the five years when the trial was pending and they continued to write glowing reviews of R. Kelly's records without once passing judgment on the artist as part of their reviews (despite the sexually charged content of the songs, which it seems would be a natural entry point into the allegations). There were only a couple of comments about the charges during that five year period, including the following flippant, trying-way-to-hard-to-be-funny opening paragraph for the review of TP3 Reloaded:

Is R. Kelly a joke or a genius? Does he really expect us to forget his recent...unpleasantness, or does he just not care what we think? Given the charges against him, how is he still recruiting A-list guest stars?

Unpleasantness? Really? Videotaping yourself raping and peeing on a minor who cannot give consent can be categorizes as...unpleasantness?

The only other mention of the charges was a single sentence in a review written a few years later that read: "In 2007, he still faces multiple counts of child pornography that could put him in jail for up to 15 years."

All in all, Pitchfork spent more ink dissecting and passing judgment on a single murky incident for which they have little information and which the court system decided to take a pass on that involved the frontman for a relatively unknown indie rock band than they did in five years for multiple felony charges for sexual abuse of a minor that was captured on videotape and involved a global multiplatinum pop star.

Maybe R. Kelly gets a pass because he's a Chicogan like the Pitchforkers, maybe they didn't feel like they were on the bleeding edge of the R. Kelly story and so decided to downplay it. But whatever the reason, it seems like their scales are a little out of balance.

6.20.13
I've had to drive around coworkers that I don't know very well to site visits the last couple of weeks. The smart thing to do music-wise would have been to just not play anything at all, not knowing who liked what or who might be offended by what. But I'm not all that smart, so instead I spend half an evening putting together a playlist of stuff released over the past three or four years that was unlikely to be offensive to anyone (which meant most of my hip hop selections had to go, along with some indie rock).

All to no purpose, I'm sure——the best case scenario there was that no one would be listening anyway, which means that I was essentially preparing a playlist for myself, albeit one sanitized of some of my favorite songs.

6.21.13
No one cares at this point——no one——but I swear I'm going to do my best of 2012 lists before the end of this month. I just can't not do it. I don't expect that anyone will try to go back and reconstruct this particular fossil record at any point, but for consistency's sake I have to make this list.

6.24.13
Okay: my favorite songs from 2012. Like last year, they are listed in alphabetical order because I don't feel strongly enough about this crop to rank them on a 1-10 scale, and just as similarly the list is not limited to ten songs.

"Hot Knife"——Fiona Apple
I'm not going to convince you to like Fiona Apple——you've already made your decision about her. But the rolling drums and positively manic (for Fiona) repetition of the main two lyrics is entrancing, and you can find yourself slipping into an odd meditative state despite hyper tempo of the track. I grew to really love The Idler Wheel after an initial negative reaction, but this song got its hooks into me the first time I heard it.

"Objectum Sexuality"——Big Boi
Aside from Frank Ocean's "Pyramids" (see below), this might be the oddest song made by an artist generally classified as hip hop this year. If I hadn't known it was a Big Boi track in advance, I don't know I would have guessed it, even after his first rap verse. It's like Big Boi went on a field trip to a 25th century version of an intergalactic Hedonism resort and wrote this song during his wormhole trip back to 21st century Earth. Which sounds more like the kind of song you would expect former Outkast partner Andre 3000 to write, but here we are.

"The Trouble With Candyhands"——Deerhoof
There are more standout tracks——and tracks that I consider representative of the very best that Deerhoof has to offer——on Breakup Song than on any Deerhoof offering since Apple-O——but this one has the best title, so it wins.

"Like Ice Cream"——Divine Fits
There is no better band in the world than Spoon at getting locked into a tight groove with a minimalist guitar hook, and for all intents and purposes, Divine Fits is Spoon when Britt Daniel is singing. To be honest, it's sometimes hard to tell when it's Daniel or when it's Wolf Parade's Dan Boeckner because Boeckner has made a pretty good career out of imitating Spoon, but this track is definitely Daniel's. I'm pretty sure. Like, nearly 100% sure.

"The World Moves On"——Jens Lekman
Jens Lekman doesn't release albums without many great songs on them, and he rarely releases a song that doesn't have at least one great line in it. But typically there's one line in one song that sums up a whole album for me, and in the case of I Know What Love Isn't, that line comes in "The World Moves On": "You don't get over a broken heart, you just learn to carry it gracefully."

"Andrew in Drag"——Magnetic Fields
Quite simply one of the most brilliant, funny, and listenable songs that Stephin Merritt has ever written, and if you are at all familiar with his career, that's really saying something. Unfortunately he has a growing tendency to release albums with one or two killer tracks and the rest somewhat above average filler, but if he released a record with ten pop songs this amazing, our sun might implode, so maybe he knows what he's doing after all.

"Pyramids"——Fank Ocean
There are very, very few songs over nine minutes long that my three-minute-pop-song-addicted heart can really, truly love, and this is one of them. It's also absolutely the strangest song, lyrically and musically, to appear in my purchases for 2012. I can't tell you if you will like it or not, but I can tell you this: if you do like it, hunt down everything Frank Ocean has ever recorded, because if you get this song then you get him.

"Melody Dean"——Amanda Palmer
Amanda Palmer borrows A LOT from the 80s on Theatre Is Evil, but on this track she just plain rips off "My Sharona". She's not trying to hide the appropriation——I mean, she name checks the song halfway through——but still, that takes some guts.

"Hey Jane"——Spiritualized
It was actually a pretty tough call deciding which Spiritualized song was going to be on this list——"Hey Jane" and "So Long You Pretty Thing" are two of Jason Pierce's best songs since the Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space era, and either one could have been the centerpiece of its own album. "Hey Jane" won because Pierce actually did make it the defining song of the album——the title Sweet Heart Sweet Light comes from a refrain that pops up towards the end of the track.

"The 400"——Stars
Usually the songs on this list are the ones I would use as the foundational building blocks for a mixtape from a given year, but this is not one of those songs. It's too simple, too quiet, and too spare for the kind of mixtapes I make, which are these days made more for listening to on the road than for sharing a coded message with a friend. The desperate plea of the refrain, repeated endlessly, really gets to me: "It has to go right this time..."

"It All Feels the Same"——Tennis
"Petition" was the first song from Young & Old that I fell in love with, but it's hard to beat the opening lines of "It All Feels the Same":

Took a train to get to you
Finally got there, I couldn't find you anywhere.

I don't know if this has the same resonance for other people that it does for me——I've had dreams like this about a close friend, and even wrote a short story about one of those dreams, so that line gets at the core of something deeply personal and emotional——but this is my list, and that's why this song is on it.

6.25.13
I thought I was going to give you the list of best albums of 2012 today. Really, I did. But it's just not going to happen, and I'm sort of dubious about getting it done before July——this is going to require a bit of concentration and not a small amount of actual writing time, and with us being crazy busy at work and trying to get the house ready for lots of family visitors next week, I just don't know when I'm going to find that time.

6.26.13
I want more than anything to like the band Trampled By Turtles just because I love their name so much. But I don't. They're close——they remind me of a bluegrass-inflected version of one of my favorite little-known bands, The Rural Alberta Advantage, but the manic fiddling on almost every track just kills it for me.

6.27.13
The Pixies posted a new track, "Bagboy", their first in nine years and their first with Frank Black singing since the band stopped making new music after 1991's Trompe Le Monde:

It's definitely more Pixies-ish than the last song they put out, the Kim Deal-penned 2004 track "Bam Thwok", and it's the most like Black Francis that Frank Black has sounded since he took on the latter stage name, but it's not a great Pixies track. It reminds me immediately of "Dig For Fire", although it's not nearly as well constructed (or good) as that song. This would be a fun little b-side from the Bossanova or Trompe Le Monde era, but as for living up to the weight of more than two decades of expectations from their fanatical fan base...well, this track just doesn't satisfy on that level.

No word from the band if this heralds a new era of recording with the original line up (or most of it, anyway——Kim Deal announced she was leaving the band a few weeks ago, even though she appears to be singing backing vocals on "Bagboy") or another one-off like "Bam Thwok".

6.28.13
I'm pretty convinced that Amazon's monthly offering of 100 MP3 albums for $5 from Amazon is not really monthly anymore, since there seem to be some albums that are added and some that disappear between the first and last of the month. There's definitely still a major overhaul in the list at the beginning of the month, but I wonder if some of those initial offerings are limited to a certain number of purchases at the $5 level, and once that number is reached, the album is removed from the $5 category and a new one is added to the list for the remainder of the month.

Anyway. This is not the same list that it would have been at the beginning of the month, and it's fairly likely that by the time my few and infrequent readers have seen this post, it will already be another month and a new list, but for the sake of posterity, here are my selections for this month.

Must-haves: The Police's Ghost in the Machine, Rage Against the Machine's Battle of Los Angeles, and John Mellencamp's Uh-Huh.

Worth the five bucks: The Decemberists' The King Is Dead, Beck's Sea Change, Radiohead's The Bends, Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Fever to Tell, and Neutral Milk Hotel's On Avery Island.

Things I'm considering purchasing: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' Push the Sky Away and the Shout Out Louds' Optica.