4.1.14
I guess Amazon has given up on the whole 100 albums thing in their bimonthly $5 MP3 offerings——this fortnight they are offering 274. Here's the good stuff in there:

Must-haves: Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral, Iggy Pop's Lust for Life, and Waxahatchee's Cerulean Salt (you'll be hearing lots more aboutt his band in this week's entries——I went to see them in concert on Sunday night).

Recommended: Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream, Pearl Jam's Vs., and Mikal Cronin's MCII.

I might buy: Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers, INXS' Shabooh Shoobah, and Drive-By Trukers' Alabama Ass-Whuppin'.

Given how many more selections there are than there used to be, I'm guessing that the new format is less curated than it was before. But at least there are still a few decent choices scattered amongst a largely underwhelming pile of offerings.

4.2.14
On Sunday night I did something that I don't think I've ever done before: I went to a concert by myself. After I discovered late last week that Waxahatchee was playing at an Atlanta venue called the Earl and that this was their only trip to the area for the next few months, I was determined to go see them whether I could find someone to join me or not. And I didn't, so I ended up going alone.

Before I talk about the show, let's talk about the venue itself. I could see the Earl becoming one of my favorite places to see a band in Atlanta. Other than the smoking (which is a common problem in Atlanta, since Georgia still hasn't outlawed it indoors, unlike Maryland and DC where I used to see all my shows), it was a great experience: lots of parking right next to the venue, a very small space where you can get close to the stage without even trying, and a reasonably safe (if dangerously hipster-saturated) neighborhood.

I showed up about halfway through the set of the band that immediately preceded Waxahatchee, and I still ended up one row back from the stage by the time the headliners came on. I don't think I've ever been in a venue that small, and I know I haven't been that close to the stage since my high school friends and I used to show up when the doors opened to get a spot right by the stage for our favorite acts when they came through Chapel Hill's Cat's Cradle.

4.3.14
The Earl is also small and unpretentious enough that each band set up and broke down their own gear, and the sound checks happened immediately before each band started their set. This took away a little of the mystery——not a lot of room for mythology-building showmanship when you've just been shouting/singing "check check check check" into the mic for five minutes two feet from your audience——but it also reinforced the DIY lack of artifice that I'm guessing many of the bands who play the Earl wear as a badge of honor.

Katie Crutchfield, the songwriter/frontwoman for Waxahatchee, reminded me of Throwing Muses' Kristin Hersh in that if you bumped into her on the street, you would never guess that she was the singer and guitarist for a band that's capable of getting really loud. She wore a shapeless flower print sundress, white Keds, and a dark patterned heavy cardigan——she looked for all the world like the 80 year old woman in your neighborhood that the kids know better than to mess with, except that she still happens to be inhabiting her 25 year old body.

The rest of the band was a motley crew: a female bassist who wore black jeans, a black t-shirt, and a black knit beanine; a balding and bearded drummer in an old white t-shirt and jeans who looked like he'd just stumbled out of the house after a weeklong Titanfall binge during which he consumed nothing but Cheetos and Code Red; and a vaguely preppy-seeming second guitarist who was clearly the best musician in the group in terms of technical proficiency.

This makes some sense, as Waxahatchee was originally concieved as a solo project, and I'm guessing that the band portion was cobbled together out of odds and ends primarly for the purposes of touring. It will be interesting to see if Katie Crutchfield continues with the previous model of essentially making records by herself and only playing with other musicians while she's touring, or if she'll actually try to make a go of it as a band.

4.4.14
Katie started the show alone on the stage and did three acoustic numbers, and then the rest of the band joined her onstage. The show itself was pretty good, and I'd defnitely go see this band again, but there were some elements to criticize.

First, the song selection: there were six songs from Cerulean Salt that I really wanted to hear ("Hollow Bedroom", "Dixie Cups and Jars", "Blue Pt. II", "Tangled Envisioning", "Lively", and "Swan Dive"), and they played only two of them, one of which was significantly altered. This might be an okay ratio if these songs were from an album that was four or five years old and the band had released a couple more albums in the meantime, but Cerulean Salt is the second and most recent Waxahatchee release and it just came out last year.

The altered version of "Swan Dive", which was the song that originally made me fall in love with Waxahatchee was actually okay: for the verses, the song shifted to a 3/4 time signature with 50s era guitar stylings that reminded me a lot of the Cowboy Junkies' rendition of "Blue Moon" (the original "Swan Dive" is not in 3/4 time), and for the part that's most like the chorus (a repeated refrain of ooh-ooh-oohs in between the verses), the band moved to full-on Pixies emulation mode, amping up the guitars and creating a wall of noise.

Despite liking what they did with "Swan Dive", this reshaping of the songs for a full band was one of my other big criticisms: too many of the songs were remade into generic rock versions of themselves where making noise seemed to be the main point, which did nothing but demonstrate how much the choices that Katie made in the studio while recording the songs helped elevate them beyond the bland 90s alternative rock copycats that they mostly sounded like at this performance.

Waxahatchee also played a couple of new songs, and while they weren't bad, it was very easy to lump them into this same decent but not distinctive category (for futher illlustration of this, see Katie's twin sister Allison's band Swearin', who made a whole record filled with songs like this that serves to illustrate the danger of Katie following this path). I'm guessing that for the first couple of years of touring as Waxahatchee, she did a lot of solo acoustic shows, and I'm also guessing that it feels really good to get out there with your gang behind you and make some noise.

But with many of these band-oriented arrangements, the songs themselves weren't served well——it felt like Katie was more concerned with giving her friends something to do onstage other than stand around and watch her play rather than with presenting the songs in the best light. I didn't need absolute fidelity to the studio recordings, but it would have been nice if the spirit and uniqueness of many of the songs they played hadn't gotten lost in the sea of noise that was the primary feature of the live set.

I also get worried that she's now thinking of Waxahatchee as an actual band, which means input from the others on the songwriting and recording process. I hope this isn't the case——she and her sister will end up twins in yet another way, and in this case not for the better——the songs where Allison sings the lead vocals are the best ones on Swearin's last album, but for the majority of the record she relegated to the background..

Finally, I experienced another first in my personal concert-going history (in addition to attending a show alone): the headliner ended their set without doing an encore. About 30 seconds after Waxahatchee left the stage, the PA started playing Prince's "Purple Rain", but the house lights didn't come up. A couple of minutes later, the bassist appeared from backstage...and then she walked immediatley into the crowd and started talking to a friend. The second guitarist and the drummer both came back a minute after that and took the stage...but then they started packing the equipment and taking apart the drum set. At that point most of the audience figured out that they weren't going to play anything else, and we slowly started to disperse.

I know this sounds like a lot of negatives, but that's because I'm such a huge (and recently converted) fan of the last Waxahatchee album that I had almost impossibly high hopes for this show. I'd go see them again in a heartbeat, and if they're coming to your town, so should you.

4.7.14
Hamilton Leithauser, former singer for the Walkmen, shared a track from his upcoming debut solo album titled "11 O'Clock Friday Night":

Not surprisingly, this has a very Walkman-esque vibe, although with some new twists (most notably the marimba that gives this track a more tropical flavor than anything I've heard from the Walkmen). I like this track enough that I may just preorder the album——normally I'm cautious about solo projects from bands I like, especially from frontmen trying to forge an independent identity, but if Leithauser understand enough about himself and his audience to stick to what he's good at, this is going to be a very good record.

4.8.14
Tune-Yards shared a second track, "Wait for a Minute", from the soon-to-be-released album Nikki-Nack:

Man, I cannot wait for this album. This track was apparently produced by Malay, who worked on Frank Ocean's Channel Orange, and you can definitely hear that influence here. It works surprisingly well, and gets me even more excited to see what other tricks Merrill Garbus has in store for us.

Also, for those of you (like Pitchfork) who insist that tUnE-yArDs is actually the band's name and not just a type treatment/logo that the band has used on past releases, I'd like to point out that on this video the band itself uses an all-caps type treatment for their name. Type treatments for the purposes of creating a brand image are just that: Tune-Yards are not tUnE-yArDs. The tv show Lost is not LOST. Pharrell's new album is Girl, not G I R L. But I guess we're living in the kind of world now where not even highly educated cultural critics can tell the difference between content and design, so I have a feeling this belief will put me in an increasingly small minority, out there with the weirdos who think we should, you know, actually care about punctuation and spelling when we write.

4.9.14
I think the last new purchase that I wrote about was Drive-By Truckers' English Oceans. Here's what I've bought since then: Speedy Ortiz's Major Arcana, Wire's Pink Flag, Vertical Scratchers' Daughter of Everything, the Pixies' EP3 (which actually means I've now purchased separately all the pieces that will comprise their upcoming album Indie Cindy), Tokyo Police Club's Forcefield, the Hold Steady's Teeth Dreams, Liars' Mess, U2's Rattle and Hum ($5 special——don't judge me), Cloud Nothings' Here and Nowhere Else, Waxahatchee's American Weekend, and the Faint's Doom Abuse (I was also gifted St. Vincent's 4AD Session EP by a friend for my birthday).

I don't think I've written about any of these yet, so I've got to get around to that soon, but the standouts from that group are definitely the new records from Liars and Cloud Nothings (I'm not mentioning Pink Flag because it should go without saying that this is a record well worth your while). The rest of the releases all have significant points of interest, but enough flaws that I'm not ready to recommend any of them, especially to people who aren't already fans of those bands.

4.10.14
Liars' Mess might be their best album yet, at least in terms of being their most consistent and consistently listenable. The first six songs, which clock in at more than half an hour, are like one long song with different phases, each as enjoyable as the last, and even some of the weaker cuts towards the end of the album might only seem less compelling because of the overwhelming strength of the first half.

If you're a fan of Liars, you expect to have your patience/goodwill test at least once an album, and two final tracks, which come it at 9 and 7 minutes respectively, definitely fit that bill. But even they are very tolerable compared to the band's normal boundary-pushing antics——there's a deep groove that runs through every song on this album, one that we've heard threading its way through Liars albums before but which usually only surfaced in a meaningful way in a few songs.

On Mess, the groove is the primal force, taking over the rhythm and percussion that has often been the centerpiece of their sound, and it's produced an album that won't come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the band's catalogue but which is surprising for the uniformity of the attack.

4.11.14
I finally broke down and bought Waxahatchee's debut album, American Weekend. Despite my love for the second album, Cerulean Salt, I hesitated on buying this one because it was essentially a home demo of acoustic songs, lo-fi not to make a statement with the production but because frontwoman (and at the time this was recorded the only person in Waxahatchee) Katie Crutchfield was snowed in for a week with a guitar, a single microphone, and an 8-track recorder.

There are some really great songs on here, however, so good that it's easy to get past the production quirks. In theory I like both lo-fi recordings and I like the spirit of how this was recorded——it reminds me of Michelle Shocked's first album, The Texas Campfire Tapes, which was literally recorded while she was singing the songs around a campfire in Texas——but I also think about how amazing the songs on this album would be if they were recorded with the same studio tools that Crutchfield had access to for Cerulean Salt.

I almost wish she would go back and make that album——however much charm some people might find in the original recordings, I guarantee she'd win a lot more fans if she updated them to match the standards of Cerulean Salt, and she's certainly not shy about making them loud and nothing like their original selves for her live show, so I can't see how she would consider re-recording to be some sort of violation of their spirit.

Still, I'm glad I've gotten to know these songs, even if I spend half my time while listening to them daydreaming about how they could sound if they truly had been demos that she then took into the studio. If you get half as obsessed with Cerulean Salt as I am, you should probably pick this up, too.

4.14.14
Before I get to my actual top 10 lists for 2013, I thought it would be interesting to look at my top singles and albums based on data, namely times played and ratings. I'll do this by first looking at all the songs and records at the top of the ratings, and then pulling the top 10 based on times played.

First, the singles. I'm including the playcount after the artist name, and I'm only including the most played 5 star song for each artist, because most of the songs in this list come from albums

1. "Cocoa Butter Kisses"——Chance the Rapper: 28 plays
2. "We the Common"——Thao: 28 plays
3. "Dixie Cups and Jars"——Waxahatchee: 24 plays (tied with three other songs from Cerulean Salt, but this is the one I like the most from these four)
4. "On Sight"——Kanye West: 22 plays
5. "The Mother We Share"——Chvrches: 19 plays
6. "Dance Apocalyptic"——Janelle Monae: 12 plays
7. "Here Comes The Night Time"——Arcade Fire: 11 plays
8. "Weird Shapes"——Surfer Blood: 11 plays
9. "Were Before"——Cults: 10 plays
10. "Copy of a"——Nine Inch Nails: 9 plays

A couple items of interest: I have shockingly few 5 star tracks for 2013——only 26 songs were rated at that level, and they came from only 14 albums (last year it was 44 songs from 23 albums, and the year before that it was 66 songs from 32 albums even though the album counts for all those years are within my historical norms).

You might also think that being purchased earlier in the year would lead to more plays and increase your chances of getting on a list compiled using this method, but only two albums with 5 star songs were released in the first half of 2013, and the majority of albums represented in this list were released after September 1.

Waxahatchee is the biggest surprise: Cerulean Salt was the very last album I purchased in 2013 (I bought it on December 26), and not only does it have my third most-played track, it easily has the most total plays, with all of its songs recording between 19 and 24 plays since I bought it. And that doesn't even count the 15 or 20 times I've played the album on my Sonos Play 1 in the kitchen while fixing dinner.

Granted, if I had done this list at the end of 2013 like everyone else, I might not have even owned the record yet, and it certainly wouldn't have showed up in a playcount analysis, but the performance of this record using these metrics demonstrates that there may be some value to waiting until a year is actually over before you try to summarize it.

4.15.14
I've started buying Waxahatchee's Cerulean Salt for friends. There's almost no way the next album is going to anything but a disappointment after an obsession this strong, but my god, if it ends up being as good or better...

4.16.14
I purchased INXS' Shabooh Shoobah when it was on sale at Amazon for $5 mostly as a nostalgia item——I got really into the band when they released Listen Like Thieves, and I liked that album so much I gradually worked my way back through their catalog until I got to their debut.

In my memory, The Swing was the last album that was worth picking up in a CD or digital format, and so I've had that one for years and still loved it. But I thought Shabooh Shoobah fell into the category of a band still trying to find its way and wasn't part of the core canon of the band that was still worth owning and listening to.

But I'm so glad that Amazon put it on sale, because my memory was very wrong. The Swing is definitely a more mature and complex document, but everything that is great about the band is present on this record, and there are several songs that can stand toe to toe with their best work, most notably the album closer, "Don't Change".

Part of my opinion of the record may be influeced by my recent re-immersion in early 80s rock and pop (bands like the Cars, John Mellencamp, the Pretenders, etc., some of whom I didn't listen to at the time)——I'm much more appreciative of the production from that period, when the pop-oriented post-punk guitar bands were learning how studios worked and getting that balance between the rawness of a live sound and the polish that a recording studio could offer.

But it's not really about the production, even though it defintely shows its age a little bit——the songs themselves shine through after all these years and despite aural markers that place them in their historical context.

4.17.14
New round of Amazon $5 MP3 albums. Here you go:

Must-haves: Arctic Monkeys' Favourite Worst Nightmare, LCD Soundsytem's LCD Soundsystem and This Is Happening, Flaming Lips' Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, and Yeah Yeah Yeah's Show Your Bones.

Recommended: Wilco's Being There, Phoenix's Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, Massive Attack's Mezzanine, and Jay-Z and Kanye West's Watch the Throne.

I'm thinking about purchasing: the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique and Built to Spill's Perfect From Now On.

4.18.14
All of the tracks on the Pixies upcoming album Indie Cindy, their first full-length release in over 20 years, are already known to those of us who have purchased their three recent EPs because the album is just a reshuffling of those twelve tracks, but the band released a new song that won't be on the album for Record Store Day:

It's called "Women of War" and it's one of the most classic-Pixies-sounding songs from their recent output. It's still not great——it probably fits with some of the original band's middling b-sides (although they had some pretty amazing b-sides) or as an unreleased track from Frank Black's first solo recordings.

4.21.14
I had planned to go see Cloud Nothings play on Saturday night, but we didn't get home until after 8 and we had to get up at 5:30 the next morning, so I decided not to. Which is too bad——I've never seen them live, and I'm really like their new album.

I have a feeling the same thing is going to happen with the Faint and Tokyo Police Club——they are both in town (separate shows but the same night on separate stages of the same club) on May 10, but that's the day I get back from a three day conference, and I doubt that I will want to go out and see a show after being away (travel tends to wear me out).

If I am able to make it, I think I would opt for the Faint since I would have to choose between the two acts——I'm guessing that their live show is far more kinetic that Tokyo Police Club's.

4.22.14
I have finally fallen in love with Gang of Four's Entertainment. I purchased it a few months ago, and liked it right away, but more as an interesting artifact from a period of music I've always liked——I could hear elements of the Clash and early Wire, but they weren't merely derivative.

But something clicked a couple of weeks ago, and this has now become one of my favorite records. I'm eager to hear more of the band, but their early career back catalog (aside from Entertainment) doesn't seem to have been released digitally yet, and the CDs are all priced like you're buying them from a national chain in the 1990s.

At some point I'll give in and start to buy their other early albums, but I'm hoping for a price drop of some sort before I do that, whether that comes from a digital release of the content (which can't take that much time and effort) or some sort of celebratory reissue that will set the price at a more typical level for contemporary CDs. But the 30th anniversaries of most of their crucial work has already passed, so I'm not holding my breath for the latter option.

4.23.14
I also recently purchased another classic record from the punk/post-punk era, Wire's Pink Flag. This is one I've been meaning to buy for a long time——I've been a fan of Wire's since the first studio album of their second incarnation, 1987's The Ideal Copy, and I've been aware of their heavy influence over the past couple of decades on many bands that I like. But somehow I never got around to familiarizing myself with their early works.

I've listened to Pink Flag a few times now, and there are a couple of things that surprise me. First, given my love for later versions of the band, my appreciation for their overall style, and my affection for that period of music, I'm a little shocked that I don't love this album more. I like it, and there are some great songs, but there's a lot of material that immediately sounds too familiar to me, and to the point where I think it would be a stronger record if its 21 songs had been pared back a bit.

Second, it was interesting how many different, disparate albums released after this one seemed to be influenced by the sound and the riffs. Aside from the obvious theft of the opening riff of "Three Girl Rhumba" for Elastica's 90s hit "Connection" and the innumerable post-80s revivalist punk bands that borrowed liberally from this record, I also heard similarities between "Ex Lion Tamer" and Dream Syndicate's 1986 track "Slide Away"; between "Lowdown" and more than one song in the Drive-By Truckers releases over the past 15 years; and between the opening riff of "Strange" (which was covered by R.E.M. for 1987's Document" and the opening riff of the Cars' "Good Times Roll", which was released a year after Pink Flag came out. My point being that not only did this album have a big influece on punk forever after (which you probably already knew), but that references to it show up across the past 40 years in everything from pure pop to alt-country.

So perhaps the supposed lack of originality that I've felt in my first few listens to Pink Flag is not actually because it wasn't an remarkably original document in its time, but because it has become so ubiquitous and has been copied so much that anyone coming to it after listening to the bands it has inspired over the decades since its release couldn't help having heard so much of it already that there just aren't that many new ideas left to discover within its songs.

4.24.14
And related to the previous two entries: I wish the CD matching services and the digital purveyors of music would use the year an album was actually released instead of the year when of the most recent remaster/reissue. Also: when I'm buying a digital album, I do not need each track's title to note in parentheses "(Album Version)". Yes, I bought this as part of an album——I'm well aware it's the album version.

4.25.14
My son has recently gotten obsessed with the Pixar Cars movies, and so I've had to sit through them more times than I'd car to admit (fortunately, he also likes some of the really good Pixar stuff like WALL-E, Toy Story, Bug's Life, etc.), and while watching Cars 2 again recently, I tuned in enough to one sequence enough to notice that they were using the Cars' "You Might Think" as the backing track for a montage segment.

But it wasn't quite right: the guitar parts weren't the same, the tempo was off, and the vocal definitely wasn't the same (although the signature keyboard riff seemed identical). I thought at first that maybe the band re-recorded it because they didn't own the rights to the original version——selling a new recording to Pixar instead of having them use the original would allow them to collect more royalties. As it turns out, however, it was a cover version by Weezer, and it had nothing to do with the original band.

Which begs the question: when you've got a song you want to use by a band called the Cars, and your movie franchise is called Cars, what in the world would possess you to use an inferior cover version rather than original hit song that everyone already loves?

4.28.14
Here's something that the Hold Steady's Teeth Dreams and the Pixies' Indie Cindy have in common: I know in my heart that neither of them are good albums, but there are enough little flashes in the songs that remind me of what once made these bands great that, for a brief moment here and there, I can almost convince myself that these records aren't so bad. But that's just a nasty trick, right?

4.29.14
Today Bob Mould previewed a song, "I Don't Know You Anymore", from his upcoming solo album Beauty and Ruin:

This song instantly reminds me of his Sugar period, although this is still more smoothed out and pop-oriented than even his radio-friendliest material from that band. It sounds pretty similar to the production of 2012's solo outing The Silver Age, although it's more instantly likable than the hookiest efforts from that record.

It also appears that Bob released a track from this record a few months ago that I somehow missed, "Hey Mr. Grey":

I don't care for this one as much, but if this sets the range for the quality of the songs on Beauty and Ruin (with "I Don't Know You" as the high-end and "Hey Mr. Grey" as the low-end, then this record should be at least as good as The Silver Age.

A few years ago, I figured we'd passed the point where we'd ever get another guitar-centric release from Bob Mould ever again, but something seems to have put him back in love with the classic four-piece rock band structure, and if the rest of this record is as consistent as The Silver Age, then even if his career ended today fans could be content with his late-career surge that revisited his post-Hüsker high points (similar to R.E.M.'s return to their roots for their final two albums).

Sure, I'd love it if we could get something as surprising and intimate as Workbook (his first solo record), or as consistently great as Sugar's Copper Blue, but I'll take four or five good songs scattered across a pretty decent album over ambient noise/dance experiments any day.

4.30.14
I ended up purchasing three $5 MP3 albums from Amazon before the end of the month when they switch over to new selections: the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique, Built to Spill's Perfect From Now On, and Lana Del Rey's Born to Die.

The first two were purchased more in the interest of completing the catalogues of two artists I already like, but I'm a little surprised by my third purchase. I was aware of Lana Del Rey as a cultural entity——the hype around "Video Games", the mostly negative reviews of the debut album, and the disastrously weird SNL performance——but I had never actually listened to her music. When I saw that this album was available for $5, I gave it a listen on a streaming service, and I decided I like it enough to spend more time with it.

I could still end up going either way with her——seeing her as a talented artist who was punished by the cultural mavens for not living up to the impossibly high standards they created for her based on a single song, or (the prevailing opinion) that she's not that talented and/or she's overly concerned with crafting an image instead of writing good material, and her one good song was just a fluke. But she'll get an honest chance with me now that I've bought the album, and I'm guessing either way it's going to take a few listens before the truth becomes apparent.