12.2.13
Here are this fortnight's best choices from Amazon's 100 MP3 albums for $5: Michael Jackson's Off the Wall and Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run are the only real must-haves, but Janelle Monae's The ArchAndroid and Fiona Apple's Tidal are good choices as well, especially at this price.

I'm considering Gang of Four's Entertainment! and Talib Kwali's Eardrum, two albums from artists that I've long been aware of but never had sufficient motivation to add to my collection.

12.3.13
Cloud Nothings posted a video on YouTube that contains several samples from their upcoming new album:

Lead singer/songwriter Dylan Baldi also previewed another new song in an acoustic performance a few months ago:

Based on these two videos, I'm getting really excited for this release. I loved Cloud Nothings' eponymous full-length debut, but they lost me on their sophomore album, Attack on Memory, which was a foray into prog-rock territory where they seemed more concerned with showing off their musical skills than they did in writing great songs.

But it sounds like they're going back to the kinds of songs that they built their fanbase on, only with a bit more polished production. I would like nothing more than to fall in love with this band again, and I'm hoping this record will make that happen.

12.4.13
I've been a fan of Sleigh Bells for their first two albums, but I just didn't like much of what I heard in the first two songs they shared from their most recent release, Bitter Rivals.

I finally broke down and ordered a copy a couple of weeks ago, however, and...well, I think that was a good decision. I listened to it straight through once, but it was an agonizing experience, and I haven't been able to bring myself to do it again. It's like someone trying to imitate Sleigh Bells but hoping they're going to have a hit either with a sappy ballad or with a balls-to-the-wall rawk jam whose main funciton is to be blasted into the ears of sports fans for ten seconds at a time for the next 20 years.

I'll likely force myself to listen to it once more before giving everything three stars or less and removing it from my recently purchased playlist (essentially relegating it to the dustbin as far as my collection is concerned), but that's not even a guarantee.

12.5.13
I almost hate to admit it, but I'm really starting to like Arcade Fire's Reflektor. It's just weird enough that the self-importance is muted to the point where you can generally ignore it and just enjoy the music.

But the 11 minute closer, "Supersymmetry", is still a complete waste of time. Cut that one and I have a feeling this no longer needs to be a double album (although there are probably another couple of songs that could be easily trimmed if you wanted to make it even leaner).

"Here Comes the Night Time" and "Afterlife" are my two favorites, but there aren't many songs on the album that I don't enjoy at least some portion. My favorite sound on the record, however, is a weird, short burst of beeps at the end of track 7, "Joan of Arc" which is also the end of the first CD in the track sequencing.

I have no idea why this noise exists, but I do recognize it from the cassettes I purchased when I was a kid——that same noise was used and the end of some casettes. I would guess that it has something to do with the mass duplication process for cassettes, and I'm sure Google would tell me exactly what the noise is if I bothered to ask, but I'd rather not know at this point——it's a tiny bit of nostalgic mysteriousness from my youth and it makes me like Reflektor just a little bit better because it's there.

12.6.13
Every now and then I decide I'm going to go back and listen to/rate all the albums that are in my collection but which I haven't really revisited since converting my CD collection to digitial files a few years ago. Since this mostly means I'm listening to records that were just average (because the ones I really love I spend regular time with), I never get very far with this effort, usually petering out before I get too deep into the 80s.

But I'm going to give it a try again this weekend. We'll see how it goes. First up: Television's Marquee Moon.

12.9.13
I skipped over a couple of albums from the very early 80s, but aside from those, I've rated all the albums I own through 1984. I'm just approaching the point where I was buying this music as it was coming out——most of what I've rated so far have been albums/artists that I discovered later and went back and purchased long after their initial release.

It makes sense, then, that as I worked my way through the years, I'm encountering far fewer albums that are unrated, because most of the ones from this point forward I was familiar enough with that it was pretty easy for me to go back and give ratings after a quick listen once they were digitized.

12.10.13
St. Vincent announced a new album, St. Vincent, and also shared a song from that record, "Birth in Reverse":

Or you can share your email address and DOB and get a link to download the track:

This has all the hallmarks of a St. Vincent track, and it's one of her more propulsive songs (I'm guessing the past couple of years she's spent writing, recording, and touring with David Byrne has something to do with that), but it's her slower, more meditative songs that I tend to be drawn to, so it will be interesting to see how the rest of the album sounds.

12.11.13
As part of my dive back into unrated albums from the 80s, I listened to The The's Infected, and it left me with the same impression that it did nearly 20 years ago: one great song, a couple of really good songs, and so many songs that came close to being great songs that you know if Matt Johnson had nailed them he would have had a truly classic record on his hands.

12.12.13
Busta Rhymes and Q-Tip have released a free mixtape that is clearly meant to evoke Q-Tip's golden age with Tribe Called Quest: the album is called The Abstract and the Dragon, and the cover is a Chinese dragon's head rendered in the same style as Tribe Called Quest's seminal The Low End Theory. You can download it here or stream it using the player below:

12.13.13
I finally picked up Kendrick Lamar's first full-length, Section 80, after becoming totally enamored with this year's good kid, m.A.A.d. city. I still haven't completely absorbed it, but so far it's a weird listen: at first glance the songs are more immediatley engaging than those on good kid (I mean in terms of comparing how I responded on my first couple of listens to good kid), but they leave less of an impression.

So I'm not really sure what to think of it at this point, but I'm hoping it will grow on my like good kid did.

12.16.13
Nirvana. Hall and Oates. Cat Stevens. Kiss. Linda Ronstadt. Peter Gabriel.

The fact that you would never find these bands grouped together in any other context but the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame tells you exactly why this isn't a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Call it a Popular Music Hall of Fame if you have something like this at all, but rock and roll it's not.

12.17.13
After the Baltimore Ravens' crazy win over Detroit yesterday, I figured I couldn't be in a better mood to give Sleigh Bells' Bitter Rivals another listen, since my initial impression was that a large percentage of it was intended to be played over stadium loudspeakers. So I gave it a shot, and it still doesn't resonate with me at all.

This band might turn out to be this decade's version of the Go! Team——the first album was brilliant because it brought together styles that hadn't been successfully mixed previously, the second was more of the same but still fresh enough to be good, and the third felt flat and empty because they just didn't know how to evolve their sound.

I had high hopes that Sleigh Bells would be able to grow their sound after hearing "Rill Rill" from their first record, but they haven't made another song like that since, and they seem to be ever narrower in their musical ambitions. I almost didn't buy this record at all after hearing the first couple of songs (I only picked it up because the digital copy was on sale on Amazon for $5), and they have now officially been put into the category of bands that I onced liked but who I'll have to hear great things from again before I'll buy anything else.

12.18.13
Every year I intend to put together a playlist of Christmas songs by artists I like, but it never gets done. And I don't think it will this year, either——we're leaving town for a few days on Saturday, and when we get back it will practically be Christmas already, and I just don't think I'm going to have the time or the motivation to do this before then.

I should probably do this some other time of year before I get all Christmas-ed out, like November. Or July.

12.19.13
Stuck in the 80s again. It's a nice place to visit every once in awhile, but I might be edging closer to living there than I'd like.

12.20.13
This is most likely my last post for the year. Next month I'll give my comments on Pitchfork's year-end lists and hopefully post my own as well. 2013 was not a spectacular year in music, but there hasn't been a spectacular year in music for me personally in a long, long time, so it wasn't a bad year either, but it still felt stagnant even compared to recent average years——I just don't feel like I've heard anything new in a while.