6.2.14
Okay. Enough is enough. Here are my top singles from 2013. Same rules as always: only one song per artist, and tracks listed alphabetically by artist. The fact that there happens to be ten tracks in the list this year is mostly a coincidence, although I always have to be a little suspicious of my subconscious given my compulsive preference for round numbers.

"Here Comes The Night Time"——Arcade Fire
Arcade Fire have almost won me back after the dour but solid Neon Bible and utterly boring The Suburbs, and this song is a big reason why. Arcade Fire is incapable of being un-self-aware at this point in their career, but Reflektor, for all the grandiosity of its title track, also has some of the band's most carefree moments yet. "Here Comes the Night Time" can get downright silly at times, but it's real silliness, which makes it incredibly endearing.

"Interlude (That's Love)"——Chance the Rapper
"Cocoa Butter Kisses" is probably more representative of his style, and it features some killer verses from Chance and his guests, but this short, sweet beauty of a track is the most soulful thing I've heard this year.

"Lungs"——Chvrches
I have a feeling that "The Mother We Share" or "Gun" are most people's favorite songs from this record, and while I like those, there's something goofy and charming about this one that always gets me. It's like a kiss-off from a soon-to-be-ex-lover who you always knew was too smart for you, and you can't help but marvel at her one last time even as she's tearing your heart out. And I mean that in the most adoring way possible.

"Love in Stereo"——Sky Ferreira
"24 Hours" is the obvious single from this record, but I have a thing for the oddball tracks, and "Love in Stereo" fits the bill. A track from the non-existent era where the synth bands of the 80s discovered how to be catchy and subtle at the same time.

"Dance Apocalyptic"——Janelle Monae
My kid LOVES this song. I love this song. You will love this song.

"Weird Shapes"——Surfer Blood
Surfer Blood followed up their stunning debut with a very solid sophomore effort, and "Weird Shapes" is the standout track. Given time, I could see this song becoming the easiest way to encapsulate what's best about the band.

"100 Lovers"——Tennis
When you listen to Tennis, you don't necessarily get the sense that you're hearing anything you haven't somehow heard before, but it hardly matters when it's so good. The EP Small Sound was their only release this year, but every one of its tracks is a keeper, and there are many bands that would have thrown in four or five non-keepers and called it an album. But there's a reason that I haven't rated a single Tennis song lower than four stars——quality matters to them. I'd be happy with only an EP every year if each song was as worth listening to as theirs are. "100 Lovers" is a funny, wry track from a band who typically traffics in sincerity, which is probably why it's become one of my favorites——there's just enough that's different about it to make it really stand out from the rest of their catalog.

"We the Common"——Thao
Thao always has several good songs, a couple of throwaways, and a couple of absolute knockouts on her records, and this time she leads with her best punch, putting the title track as the opener. I always assume there's some deeper message or allegory that I'm missing, but I still hope she appreciates my fandom even though I'm a lazy dummy who just likes to listen to her songs.

"Swan Dive"——Waxahatchee
It was really, really hard to limit Waxahatchee to just one song from Cerulean Salt, but I ended up going with "Swan Dive" because that's the first song that I fell in love with. Sweet, sad, smart, and honest, this song is an exemplary track off one of the strongest albums I've heard in years.

"On Sight"——Kanye West
If I were going to make a mixtape of all these songs, I'd be comfortable with all the rest of them sitting side by side next to each other in almost any order. But I can't conceieve of a way to make anything on Yeezus sit comfortably next to anything else released in music last year. Every track was abrasive, agressive, brilliant, and untouchable, and opener "On Sight" represents this attitude as well as "Black Skinheads" or "New Slaves". The gospel-tinged vocal interlude includes a reference to a central theme in Chrisopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy (Kanye gives us what we need, not what we want) and it underscores just how far ahead of other rap artists Kanye thinks he is. And I can't help but believe he's right.

6.3.14
When I was compiling my top 10 singles list for this year, I was choosing from only 27 songs that I had rated at five stars from last year, which felt like a low number to me, so I went back and looked at the number of five star tracks over the past ten years:

2004: 50
2005: 58
2006: 33
2007: 69
2008: 62
2009: 39
2010: 53
2011: 63
2012: 45
2013: 27

There have been a couple of other down years (2006 and 2009), but 27 is still clearly the weakest year of the past decade, especially when you consider that nearly a quarter of those 27 tracks (6 songs) come from Waxahatchee's Cerulean Salt, an album I didn't discover until only a week or two before the end of 2013.

2014 is nearly half over, and things aren't looking much better for this year: so far I've only purchased 15 albums (my yearly totals are typically around 50 or so albums), and out of those records, I've only tagged FOUR songs as being five star tracks. Meaning that if the second half of the year is like the first, even if I include all the five star tracks in my end of year best-of list, I won't have enough to reach ten songs.

There are three possibilities here: 1) Not as much good music is being released these days as has been in the past. The increasingly codgery part of me is tempted to go with this explanation, except that up until 2013, there was no indication (based on the number of four and five star tracks I rated and overall number of albums I purchased) that this was true.

So from a data perspective these two years seem like aberrations from the norm rather than a new pattern, which is the second alternative for explaining the extemely low number of highly rated songs. Although if 2014 turns out like it looks like it's going to turn out and 2015 is more of the same, I'll have to rethink this and consider that this may actually be the norm for me going forward. And if this is the new normal for me, it bring possibility number one back into play.

The final possibility is that I'm just not hooked into the music being made today that would be music that I would really like, and so the reason these counts are low is because I'm just not aware of the albums and songs that would bring these totals up. This seems unlikely, however, because in addition to keeping up with Pitchfork's review and a few other music blogs that review the kind of stuff that I tend to like, I also make a point of looking at the year end best-of lists from various sources (Pitchfork, of course, but also NPR, Spin, the Village Voice's Pazz and Jop, etc.) and give a serious listen to any album that I haven't heard that shows up on more than one of these sources (in fact, that's how I discovered Waxahatchee's Cerulean Salt, which has quickly become one of my most beloved records).

So the optimistic explanation is that 2013 was just an anomaly; the depressing one is that either the music being made today doesn't appeal to me as much and/or that the music being made today sucks, relatively speaking. Here's hoping for the former.

6.4.14
Damnn it, Morrissey...I had tickets for this show tonight. Fourth time he's canceled on Atlanta in the last two years——I'm starting to wonder if this city did something to piss him off and his revenge is going to be to endlessly schedule and cancel shows here.

6.5.14
Wilco's Jeff Tweedy is releasing a solo album soon, only he's not calling it a solo album anymore because his teenage son Spencer played drums on all the tracks and "help[ed] the songs take shape", so now the album is being released under the band name Tweedy. Anyway. He just shared the first track from the album, "I'll Sing It":

Comparisons to Wilco are unavoidable, and on that front, this would be an interesting b-side from the strongest point in their career or a middling album track from their more recent releases. It's worth seeing how the rest of the album might shape up, but this isn't going to be an automatic purchase for me by any means.

6.6.14
Los Campesinos shared a song that was recorded for a movie (Benny and Jolene, which sounds like a horrifyingly unnecessary sequel to Benny and Joon, because Benny and Joon was horrifyingly unnecessary in the first place) in between Hello Sadness and No Blues called "Little Mouth":

As is typical of just about anything this band has ever released, I'm a fan of this song. It's a bit unusual in that the female vocal track is pushed to the front and is the focus of the singing, but it's clear that Gareth (who still sings on the track, but whose vocal is used as background texture more than anything) actually wrote the lyrics.

The thing that excites me most about this song: one of the band's tweets about its release, which reads: "It's 18 months old, so don't use it as a barometer for WHERE WE'RE GOING". I mean, if this was an indication of a new direction of their music, I would be fine with that, but I'm most excited because this does seem to indicate that the band is going SOMEWHERE. I live in near-constant terror that they're going to break up and that what we have now is all we're going to get from them, and this has been heightened over the past year with the revelation that frontman Gareth has had to get a real job doing PR at a record company to help pay the bills. So any indication that they are still a functioning entity is always welcome.

6.9.14
Here's a rundown of my recent purchases: the Wave Pictures' City Forgiveness (packaged as a double album) and Helen EP; Hamilton Leithauser's (former Walkmen singer) first solo album, Black Hours; and Echo and the Bunnymen's Meteorites.

Lots of opportunity for disappointment here——I adore the Wave Pictures almost as much for their flaws as their strengths, but they have a knack for ruining a good song by making it go on entirely too long, and on an album like City Forgiveness with 20 songs on it, I fully expect that I may only really like four or five of them.

As for Leithauser: the Walkmen were always somewhat disappointing, because even though every album they released had at least one killer song on it, they never put together that masterpiece, and it's hard for me to believe that their most visible member will be able to do that on their own.

And Echo and the Bunnymen...I know, I know, they're never going to make a great (or likely even a good) record again. But still I hope and yearn and foolishly spend my money...

6.10.14
Spoon have shared the first track, "Rent I Pay", from their upcoming new album, They Want My Soul:

Reliable is not usually a word you want to use to describe a band you like, and workmanlike isn't typically a positive descriptor either, but Spoon's career have made the best of both those words, and this track is solidly in the Spoon tradition. You have to wonder at this point if Britt Daniel could write a bad song if he wanted to——he's defined his sound and style so well and so consistently that you could get another band to write a Spoon parody and it would still probably be a pretty good song.

6.11.14
Dinosaur Jr. frontman J Mascis shared "Every Morning", a track from his upcoming solo album Tied to a Star:

I haven't really like his previous solo releases because they've been entirely acoustic, and while this one is more mellow than your average Dinosaur Jr. track and features predominantly acoustic guitars (except the solos, of course), he is using a full band this time (or, more likely, playing all the instruments himself in the studio but using all the parts of a full band).

This is a nice, pleasant little tune, and you could easily see how cranking up the amplifiers could turn it into a proper Dinosaur Jr. track, so it will be interesting to see if this trend holds for the rest of the record: is this going to be just stripped down, less aggressive, more subtle takes on Mascis' typically song constructions, or are the other tracks going to go farther afield?

I'm pretty intrigued by some of the guest musicians, especially Miracle Legion's Mark Mulcahy——I loved that band so much, and I love his voice, but I just haven't enjoyed the songs he's written as a solo artist. I might be willing to buy this album if it does nothing more than give me a single new song featuring Mulcahy on lead vocals that I could fall in love with.

6.12.14
The New Pornographers announced a new album, Brill Bruisers, and also shared the first track, also titled "Brill Bruisers":

Here's what I love about this band: no matter what the individual members of what has turned into an indie pop supergroup do with their free time (Neko Case and Dan Bejar (as Destroyer) have thriving careers outside of the band, and frontman A.C. Newman has also released solo work in the band's downtime), they know exactly what it is they're supposed to do when they get together as New Pornographers: indie power pop. This track is exactly what you would expect and I mean that in a very good way.

(Also: I don't know if I'm grammatically allowed to use a colon as a break two times in the same sentence, but they each feel like they belong where they are and I really like the symmetry of it.)

6.13.14
They will likely expire over the weekend, so get them while you can: this fortnight's selection of Amazon's $5 MP3 albume:

Must-haves: A Tribe Called Quest's Midnight Marauders, Whiskeytown's Strangers Almanac, John Mellancamp's Uh-Huh, the Dream Academy's self-titled debut, and Fine Young Cannibals' Fine Young Cannibals.

Recommended: Spoon's Gimme Fiction and Girls Can Tell, Elvis Costello's This Year's Model, Imperial Bedroom, Blood and Chocolate, and Get Happy, the Cure's The Top (this was a close call as to whether this one belonged here or in must-haves), Elliott Smith's XO, PJ Harvey's To Bring You My Love, Jesus and Mary Chain's Honey's Dead, Rufus Wainwright's Poses, Los Campesinos' No Blues, and Painted Palms' Forever.

There were a whole bunch of albums I was thinking of buying: the Dream Syndicate's The Days of Wine and Roses, Cibo Matto's Super Relax, Luna's Penthouse, Prefab Sprout's Crimson/Red, Otis Redding's The Dictionary of Soul, Los Lobos' By the Light of the Moon, the Notwist's Close to the Glass, the Byrds' The Byrds, Morrisey's Southpaw Grammar, Public Enemy's Yo! Bum Rush the Show, Joe Jackson's Look Sharp!, and Yellow Ostrich's Cosmos.

In the end, however, I only bought the records from Public Enemy, Joe Jackson, Morrissey, and the Dream Syndicate, although I also purchased Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back when I noticed that it was only $3.99.

6.16.14
Morrisey shared the first real version of a song from his upcoming album World Peace Is None of Your Business (he has previously shared several spoken word versions of songs from the album). The track is called "The Bullfighter Dies":

This isn't a stunning track, but it's not bad either, although the "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover"-style rhyming-within-the-same-line gag of the verses quickly wears thin. The most striking thing about the track is how short it is: barely two minutes long with only two repetitions of verse and chorus. But I'll take the brevity of a two minute song over a four minute plus dragging out of a good idea until it becomes a bad idea any day.

6.17.14
Amazon has posted it's latest round of $5 MP3 albume, so I'll get to my recommendations before we get to close to the next rollover at the beginning of next month, especially because this is one of the deepest groups of good albums we've seen in several months:

Must-haves: U2's The Joshua Tree, Kanye West's The College Dropout, Lou Reed's Transformer, John Mellencamp's American Fool and Scarecrow, Helmet's Meantime, and R.E.M.'s Reckoning.

Recommended: Rage Against the Machine's Rage Against the Machine, the Black Keys' Thickfreakness and Rubber Factory, Beck's Midnite Vultures (not as good as we all thought it was when we first heard it, but not annoying as it seemed a couple of years later), Modest Mouse's We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, TV on the Radio's Return to Cookie Mountain (best title ever?), Talking Heads' More Songs About Buildings and Food, Soundgarden's Louder Than Love, the Sundays' Reading, Writing & Arithmetic, Elliott Smith's Figure 8, PJ Harvey's Rid of Me and Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, Cut Copy's Bright Like Neon Love, Panda Bear's Person Pitch, Pulp's Different Class, Shane McGowan and the Popes' The Snake, and Sonic Youth's Goo.

I'm thinking about buying: Outkast's Stankonia, the Replacements' Hootenanny (in my defense, I owned this on cassette, I just never repurchased it on CD), Chuck Inglish's Covertibles, MC5's High Time, Don Henley's Building the Perfect Beast (I know, I know, he's an ass who doesn't understand contemporary music and the changing music industry, but "Boys of Summer" is still one of my all-time favorite songs that I've never actually owned in any format), the Fixx's Reach the Beach, Wye Oak's Shriek, and Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction.

And finally, god help me, I'm thinking about buying Eels' The Cautionary Tales of Mark Oliver Everett even though I swore to myself that I wouldn't.

6.18.14
Going on a long car trip tomorrow (and then again on Sunday for the return trip). I used to take these opportunities to really get to know an album, but recently, on the occasions when I actually listen to music on long drives, it's usually a mix of highly rated tracks. But I'm actually much more likely to be talk radio, either of the advice-giving or political ranting strains.

I'm not sure why this is——maybe it's that these days I'm always traveling with my wife and son and I can't really zone out and engage with the music that way I do when I'm alone——but some of my biggest breakthroughs with much-loved albums have come as a result of getting to know them on long solo drives, and I kind of miss that experience.

6.23.14
A friend sent me the Tones on Tail compilation Everything!, which includes the original tracking of their first album, Pop, and several alternate takes, b-sides, etc.

I had no context for this before I started listening——I vaguely knew the name, but had never knowingly listened to them or even read anything about them——so I didn't know quite what to expect. The first track reminded me so much of Shriekback that I started to believe this was a side project from the lead singer of that group, but the second track made me recognize exactly who they were: Love and Rockets without David J on bass (I know that technically it's also Bauhaus without David J on bass or Peter Murphy on vocals, but trust me, it's Love and Rockets and not Bauhaus that is the best reference here).

The good thing about this is that I'm a big Love and Rockets fan, especially of their first two albums which immediately followed the output of Tones on Tail. The bad thing about this is that, in comparison to the Love and Rockets material, this is clearly transitional material where primary songwriter Daniel Ash is finding his way into more pop-oriented postpunk in the wake of being in the seminal postpunk guitar band, Bauhaus, so there are a lot of unnecessary tangents and missteps that make this a fairly uneven listen.

Still, there are some good songs on here, and it's interesting as a historical document if nothing else, since it fills in a crucial gap between Ash's work in Bauhaus and his very different style in Love and Rockets. If Love and Rockets second album, Express, is the sound of a band not from California who have been thoroughly immersed in the LA of the 80s, the Tones on Tail work that preceded it is the sound of a group experimenting with a new alien culture before being wholly consumed by it.

6.24.14
There must have been a magic moment sometime around 1980 where the British music press was wondering which of Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson, or XTC was the real deal and which was a pretender to the throne, since there are so many similarities in their music around that time.

As it turned out, they were all brilliant and worthwhile for different reasons, and they all went on to provide great distinction in their music styles from one another, but it would have been pretty hard to see where they'd all end up given that they were all living in a pretty small box at that point.

6.30.14
I swore I was going to listen to some recently purchased albums that I haven't had a chance to listen to yet during the flight portions of my business trip at the end of last week, but instead I ended up listening almost exclusively to Waxahatchee's two records. I'm sure that will come as a real shock to those of you who have been following this obsession for the last six months, but I just can't get over how good they are, especially Cerulean Salt.