5.1.14
New selections in Amazon's $5 MP3 offerings. Here we go:

Must-haves: Just one this month——the Replacements' Pleased to Meet Me. Yes, yes, I know it's not as good as Tim and Let It Be, but this record is chock full of great songs, and was the last great album the band would make.

Recommended: Vampire Weekend's Modern Vampires of the City, Fiona Apple's The Idler Wheel, Soundgarden's Louder Than Love, the Beastie Boys' Ill Communication, the Cure's Faith, Stereolab's Margarine Eclipse.

I'm probably going to buy: Talking Heads' Fear of Music (I don't know how I don't already own this——a grave mistake on my part), Cut Copy's Bright Like Neon Love, the Ramones' Halfway to Sanity, Public Image Ltd.'s Second Edition, and Stereolab's Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements.

5.2.14
So, before I do my actual top 10 singles and albums for 2013, back to this analysis of my top 10 based on plays. For the singles, it was relatively easy, because I simply took the most played songs and did the top 10 without repeating a given artist. For the albums, it's a little trickier.

I rarely rate an album manually in iTunes, but as soon as you rate a single song in that program, it starts averaging the ratings of all the songs you've rated and coming up with an aggregate rating for the album. However, becuase most of my ratings are between 3 and 4, and decent albums typically have a five star song or two at least, many of my albums end up with a four star rating.

And since there's no category for total plays of an album or total plays by adding up all the individual plays for songs, I just have to scan through the list of 2013 four star albums and give a good estimate of which ones have the most total plays. Here's my best guess at the top 10 by most played:

1. Cerulean Salt——Waxahatchee (approx. 23 plays per track)
2. Fade——Yo La Tengo (approx. 23 plays per track)
3. We the Common——Thao (approx. 22 plays per track)
4. Acid Rap——Chance the Rapper (approx. 20 plays per track)
5. The Bones of What We Believe——Chvrches (approx. 16 plays per track)
6. Yeezus——Kanye West (approx. 13 plays per track)
7. Reflektor——Arcade Fire (approx. 12 plays per track)
8. The Silver Gymnasium——Okkervil River (approx. 14 plays per track)
9. Static——Cults (approx. 10 plays per track)
10. Modern Vampires of the City——Vampire Weekend (approx. 10 plays per track)

There are a few surprises for me in this list, most notably the Yo La Tengo showing up as one of my most played when the songs themselves haven't really left an impression on me. I attribute this to the album being released early in the year when it didn't have much competition for my ears from other new records, and for it being a good record to put on repeat while working. But I'm almost certain it won't show up in my real top 10. I also thought I had listened to Yeezus a lot more than that——it certainly looms as a much larger presence in my sense of which albums had the biggest impact last year.

There were a few other albums that hovered around the 10 plays per track level, which to me means that we were getting to a dropoff in quality towards the end. I don't formally stick to a top 10 concept any longer with my year-end lists, I just list albums I thought were worthwhile in alphabetically order because it's been a long time since the best 10 records released in a year were worth ranking against one another (or the difference between 10 and 11 made 10 worth including but not 11). I don't know if I'll do that again this year, but based on this list, it's entirely possible that I'll end up with a top 10 list that doesn't actually include 10 albums.

5.5.14
I really can't tell if I like Lana Del Rey's Born to Die or not. There are elements I like, but very little that really grabs me. This is either going to be a slow grower that I fall in love with on the fifth or sixth listen or one that I listen to five or six times just to make sure it's nothing special and then never listen to again.

5.6.14
Leaving on a business trip for a few days, so no posts for the rest of the week. I'm very much looking forward to getting to know Tune-Yards' Nikki Nack while tuning out my fellow passengers on the plane.

5.12.14
I was right. No concerts for me on Saturday night after returning from a business conference, especially not after my first flight was delayed to the point where I had to rebook a different flight, and then that flight was also delayed after we had already boarded and I didn't get home unitl five hours after my original arrival time.

I would have loved to have seen either Tokyo Police Club or the Faint (and they were playing different stages in the same club, so I had a little fantasy that I'm sure never would have happened that their sets would have been offset just enough for me to see a good portion of each of their shows), but even if I had gotten home at 2 in the afternoon as originally planned, I was wiped out by that conference and I don't think I would have recovered in time to hit the club that night.

5.13.14
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah have shared "As Always", a track from their upcoming album Only Run:

I was never really in love with this band, even though I've so far bought all of their albums, but there's some part of me that still roots for them. This song doesn't do much for me, however, and I doubt that I'll end up owning or listening to this new record.

5.14.14
I was really looking forward to Tune-Yards' new record, Nikki Nack, especially after falling in love with the two tracks that were previewed before the record was released, "Water Fountain" and "Wait for a Minute", but I've listened to the record two or three times through now, and thoase are really the only songs I like so far.

The last record, WHOKILL, was a grower for me too, but now that I've gotten used to Merrill Garbus' style, I wouldn't think it would take me as long to absorb new material. But either she's trying enough new stuff here that it's going to take a while for this one to click for me as well, or it's simply not as good as her previous work, and that's the direction I'm leaning right now.

5.15.14
Just as time is expiring on this fortnight's selection of $5 MP3 albums from Amazon, I've decided to purchase a few: Public Image Ltd.'s Second Edition, Talking Heads' Fear of Music, Stereolab's Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements, and Cut Copy's Bright Like Neon Love.

I sometimes feel like the purchases I make using this promotion (which switches to a new selections of albums every two weeks and which has gone from offering 100 albums each time to over 250 now) are satisfying the completionist in me more than the music lover, or else giving me an excuse to add records to my collection that I feel like should be there because they are seen as classic works more than because I actually have a strong affinity for the music.

Sometimes this works out great——I bought both Lou Reed's Transformer and Iggy Pop's Lust for Life more out of an obligation to learn more about the music from that period, but I ended up really, really loving both records (although I don't find it a coincidence that David Bowie was involved in both projects, and that both of them were reclamation projects for musical heroes of his who were in danger of slipping out of the business of making music due to low album sales).

But other times I buy an album, listen to it a few times, and, having dutifully absorbed it from a cool historical perspective, file it away, never to be listened to again (Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers, Rage Against the Machine's first album, Nick Drake's Bryter Layter, and at least one of the many Elvis Costello records I've bought for $5 all fit into this category).

Even though all of the albums I just bought are from bands who have at least one record that I own and feel passionately about, I have a feeling all of these purchases are going to fit into the latter group. But I'm really hoping that there's a Transformer in there that will grab hold of me and never let go.

5.16.14
And speaking of Amazon's $5 MP3 selections——it's past midmonth now, so it's time for a new batch:

Must-haves: Jane's Addiction's Nothing's Shocking, the Strokes' Is This It, John Mellancamp's American Fool, and the BoDeans' Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams.

Recommended: the Cure's Seventeen Seconds, Spoon's Transference, and Shane McGowan's The Snake.

I might buy: Television's Adventure, Nick Drake's Five Leaves Left, Teenage Fanclub's Shadows, and the Men's Tomorrow's Hits.

One thing I've noticed about this deal in recent months: even though there are about five times as many albums to choose from (250+ twice a month) compared to the original incarnation which only featured 100 albums each month, the ratio of albums worth buying to albums available has gone way down.

I suppose that across the whole month I still find about as many records to recommend purchasing, but again, that's out of more than 500 choices instead of just 100, and the list is increasingly populated with best-of collections that I have no interest in purchasing or discussing here even if I like the band's work.

5.19.14
Lana Del Rey has shared a video for "West Coast", a track from her upcoming sophomore effort, Ultraviolence:

I'm still getting to know her music——I just bought her debut a few weeks ago as part of an Amazon promotion for $5——and I'm still undecided as to whether she's an artist worth investing serious time in or whether she happens to have a couple of songs I like and a bunch of stuff that I'm indifferent to.

This song doesn't do much to sway me to true fandom, and for some reason I find the drums to be especially annoying. There are still hints of something good going on here, but if this is the strongest track of this record, I don't think I'll be buying this even if I end up liking Born to Die after a few more listens.

5.20.14
New video/track from Jack White's upcoming solo release——"High Ball Stepper" is the track and Lazaretto is the album:

I haven't really liked anything Jack White has done since disbanding the White Stripes, but there's something weird and appealing about this track even though it's an instrumental. And that's really the main complaint I have here: I can practically hear his vocal line in my head, and I'm wondering why he didn't write one. It doesn't seem like the kind of song where a vocal just wouldn't fit——there's no reason this one has to be an instrumental.

I'm going to wait to hear more from this record until I make a decision on it, but given that nothing else in his post-Stripes career has won me over, I'm kind of doubting that this record will either despite my initial affection for this song.

5.21.14
There are brief moments when I'm listening to the Pixies' Indie Cindy where I almost catch myself thinking, "This really isn't so bad, is it?" But that can't be right...can it?

5.22.14
I like to tell myself that maybe pop music wouldn't be so bad if it had artists like Sky Ferreira selling lots of records instead of "artists" like Miley Cyrus. But I also know myself well enough to know that if Sky Ferreira was for some reason really popular, I probably would have more reservations about listening to her music and more acute judgments about it.

I love the song "24 Hours", but I wonder what I would think if Sky was just songwriter and Miley was the singer. Even if the track was exactly the same except for the vocal, and even if Miley did her level best to make it sound just like Sky's vocal, I have a feeling it would be all to easy for me to dismiss it.

As it is though, I'm happy Sky exists in that place where I don't second guess myself becuase she's popular even though she has tons of hooks that keep me returning to her debut again and again.

5.23.14
The first Built to Spill album I ever bought was 1999's Keep It Like a Secret, and I really enjoyed both that record and its follow up, Ancient Melodies of the Future. The songs on these records were a little longer than your average pop song, but for the most part they were fairly digetible morsels, with only two songs out of the twenty clocking in at over five minutes.

It would be another five years after Ancient Melodies before the band would release another album, You in Reverse, and with both that record and its successor, There Is No Enemy, I was disappointed to discover that the band had (I thought) stepped over the edge and started to indulge the prog-rock tendencies that were always lurking: these songs were on average a couple of minutes longer than the ones on Secret and Ancient Melodies, and out of these twenty songs, twelve of them hit or exceeded the five minute mark (and half of those were over six minutes).

I thought this was a new, negative trend until recently, when I picked up the album that preceeded Secret, 1997's Perfect From Now On, their breakthrough record that brought them a national audience. There are only eight songs on this album, and only ONE of them clocks in at less than five minutes, and that one by just eight seconds. So what I'm realizing now is that the albums that I got to know they band with, Secret and Ancient Melodies, may actually be the outliers in their catalog in terms of more conventional pop song lengths; their earlier history points to Reverse and Enemy as the band's truer nature.

Knowing this doesn't make me like the later records more or anything like that——I have a limited tolerance for songs that go on for more than four minutes, especially when most of the excess time is spent on extended guitar solos or slow-building washes of sound, and so there's a limited amount of Built to Spill's catalog that holds appeal for me. It just happened accidentally that I stumbled upon that part of their catalog first and believed that this was really who the band was instead of the prog-rockers that now appear to be their real selves.

5.27.14
I often use bits of song lyrics for email subject lines when I'm writing to friends. Many of them have probably figured this out (I always make sure that whatever phrase I use, when Googled, returns a video or lyric sheet for the song I took the words from), but what they probably don't know is that sometimes I spend longer looking for just the right lyrics from just the right song than I do on writing the email proper.

5.28.14
We're almost halfway through the year, and so far there's a real paucity of five star tracks from 2014. One thing I can tell you though: despite the overall averageness of Tokyo Police Club's latest record, Forcefield, I'm going to be shocked if the opening track, "Argentina (Parts I, II, III)" isn't in my top ten tracks for the year. At this point, I'd be surprised if it didn't end up being my favorite song this year.

5.29.14
I don't really get the Apple purchase of Beats. This is either going to be the first colossal mistake since the passing of Steve Jobs or a show that the company can make big, bold, and ultimately successful moves without his guidance. But I reckon it's going to take us two or three years before we can accurately render a verdict on this one.

5.30.14
Since most of my music listening happens at my computer these days, I think it's about time I upgraded the Yamaha speakers I got as part of my haul from the dissolution of a company I worked for back in 2001 (the speakers date from a few years before that). At this point even a pair of $40 speakers would probably be an upgrade from this set (which were pretty nice for their time), but I'm thinking of going a little pricier to get something that will sound really good.

I've been scouring the internet for suggestions, and so far Klipsch's Promedia 2.1 setup is emerging as a frontrunner, both in terms of quality and availability——they're the only one of the three frontrunners that are in stock in multiple locations around Atlanta, and since my current speakers have taken to frequently cutting in and out in the middle of songs, I'm in the mood to rectify this situation quickly.

There are some 1 star reviews that say they are shit, stopped working soon after purchase, etc., but that seems to be a pattern with all the speakers I've looked at, even the ones (like the Klipsch ones) that have hundreds of reviews and an overall rating north of 4 stars out of 5. And since this is something that is likely true of every product sold and reviewed online, I'm inclined to take my chances and hope that if I get a bad set they show their colors while still under the default store warranty.