8.1.14
New Amazon $5 MP3 album deals are out, and here's my advice on what to buy:

Must-haves: Arctic Monkeys' Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, Arcade Fire's Funeral, Tears for Fears' Songs from the Big Chair, Morrissey's Viva Hate, Modest Mouse's The Moon and Antarctica, the Strokes' Is This It, Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet, Yeah Yeah Yeahs' It's Blitz!, the Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, the Police's Regatta de Blanc, the BoDeans' Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams, the Dream Academy's The Dream Academy, and Fine Young Cannibals' Fine Young Cannibals.

Recommended: Nine Inch Nails' With Teeth, Pearl Jam's Vs., Fiona Apple's Tidal, the Housemartins' The People Who Grinned Themselves to Death and London 0 Hull 4, and Siouxsie and the Banshees' Peepshow.

I might buy: John Mellencamp's The Lonesome Jubilee, U2's Pop, Simple Minds' Once Upon a Time, Ryan Adams' Demolition, the Thompson Twins' Queer, Tom Petty's Hard Promises, Weezer's Pinkerton, Superchunk's No Pocky for Kitty, and the two Baseball Project releases.

There were a ton of great records in the must-have category this month, but there are even more if you go to the More Deals section and then find the section down the page of Top Albums for $4.99 or Less. I don't know how long these deals stay up there, but on the day I was looking, I saw lots of great $3.99 albums from the likes of Prince, Kanye West, Frank Ocean, the Cure, Public Enemy, the Police, the National, Vampire Weekend, Jane's Addiction, and many, many more (and I ended up buying Lorde's Pure Heroine).

8.4.14
I've been spending the last week or so revisiting albums from bands that I like that didn't make much of an impression on me and which I haven't listened to in years. I guess I shouldn't be surprised with how forgettable most of the material is, given that I chose to forget it, but I was hoping to find a few more gems worth adding back into my list of memorable songs than I have.

8.5.14
Spoon!

8.6.14
Last month I bought Public Enemy's 1987 debut, Yo! Bum Rush the Show and it's follow up, 1988's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Previously I had only heard their masterpiece, Fear of a Black Planet, and the album that followed that one, Apocalypse 91...The Enemy Strikes Back, a lackluster record that signaled the beginning of the end for their creativity and their cultural relevance.

Both albums are worth listening to, but the difference between them is striking——the group took a quantum leap in the year between Bum Rush and Nation of Millions, and I've narrowed down this dramatic improvement to two factors. First is DJ Terminator X's much more sophisticated beats and layering of samples to create a lot more texture in the music.

Second, and pretty surprisingly, is the greatly increased use of Flavor Flav. It's easy to view him as a class clown who wasn't vital to the band's sound, but when you compare the tracks on Bum Rush (which primarily feature Chuck D.) to Nation of Millions (where Flavor Flav is present on nearly every song and takes the lead vocal on many of them), Flavor Flav's importance is undeniable——you start to realize that without his voice to provide a counterpoint and contrast to Chuck D.'s deeper voice and intense, serious style, the songs can become monotonous and a little boring.

Fear of a Black Planet is undeniably their masterwork——Terminator X builds on the ideas from Nation of Millions to create even more deeply layered songs, and Chuck D. and Flavor Flav find the perfect balance between their contrasting voices and personalities——but Nation of Millions ends up a close second, and is an even more remarkable album given the exponential increase in quality between it and the album that they released just a year earlier.

8.7.14
I watched the documentary about Kathleen Hanna, The Punk Singer, on Netflix recently. I've been a fan of hers for a long time (although I found her long after her initial Riot Grrrl fame with Bikini Kill), and this film justified that fandom and then some——there's a lot more to love about her than I previously realized, and I loved her a bunch anyway.

I first encountered her in 1998 when she released her homebrewed solo album under the alter ego Julie Ruin, which is still one of my favorite records from her. The other record that is in contention for my favorite is the eponymous debut album from Le Tigre, which was released immediately after Julie Ruin in 1999. These are, of course, the two records I could recommend starting with if you've never listened to her music, and they've both stood up extremely well 15 years after their releases.

I learned a lot about Hanna from this film, and not just from the period prior to my awareness of her as an artist: for the past ten years she has suffered from Lyme disease, which when misdiagnosed for many years and which eventually caused her to stop touring and releasing albums. She's also been married to Beastie Boy Ad Rock (Adam Horovitz) since 2006 (and they were dating for years before they got married), something that makes more sense in light of the Beasties' transition to a more socially conscious group over the past decade, but which would have been hard to make sense of back in the late 90s.

Anyway. The film is well worth watching no matter what, but you'll be more likely to enjoy it if you have any appreciation for Hanna's artistic output over the years, or if you're interested in the Seattle scene that spawned grunge (Bikini Kill also came out of that scene, and Nirvana's Kurt Cobain was a close friend of Hanna's——she famously spray painted graffiti on his bedroom wall that read "Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit", which was later shortened and became the title for the single that made the band famous).

Hanna has led an incredibly interesting life, and most of that seems to be because she's such a rare and exceptional individual. The Punk Singer gives you a clear-eyed picture of who she is, warts and all. And there's something about knowing her weaknesses and wrong turns that makes her seem all that much stronger and worth admiring.

8.8.14
I got Lorde's Heroine cheap on Amazon recently, after not being sure if she was a little too far over the line of the Miley Cyrus/Sky Ferreira divide between young female pop singers I hate and ones I love.

The record starts out pretty strong, but as it goes on, it starts to drift a little too much towards the end of the spectrum that I dislike, although it's hard for me to pinpoint exactly how the later songs are different from/worse than the first few songs.

I'll give it a few more listens, and it's possible that it will grow on me——Night Time, My Time certainly did——but right now I'm feeling pretty good that it only cost me $3.99, which is about what I would have paid to buy the four songs that I really like so far.

8.11.14
We still love you, Morrissey. But what did you think was going to happen when you badmouthed your new label less than a year into your relationship?

8.12.14
I've been spending a lot of time recently going back and filling in ratings for albums released in the last ten years for which I've done little or no rating of the individual songs.

My goal here is to uncover some forgotten gems that rate four or five stars and which will therefore be reintroduced to my random shuffle playlists, but what I'm finding more often than not is that if I declined to give a rating to a song when I was listening to the album back when it was first released, then that song is going to get three stars (my default rating for songs that are solid for that artist but nothing that really strikes me as better than average).

While it has been nice to hear some albums that I hadn't revisited in a while, I'm betting that I could simply assign three stars to any unrated song that's more than three years old and that would be the right rating for me better than 99% of the time.

8.13.14
One album that I hadn't rated many tracks for that turned out to be much stronger than I remembered: Daniel Lanois' 2003 effort Shine. Sure, the tracks I had rated were the strongest ones, and the majority of the tracks that were unrated did turn out to be 3s, but it was a great listen as a complete album.

As is typical for me, I didn't care much for the instrumental tracks individually, but the overall feel of the record was very consistent——quiet, contemplative, and lonely, but somehow optimistic in the way that someone at the end of his life who has given up hope for his own happiness can still have hope for the rest of us——and the instrumentals fit pretty well into that concept. So even though they didn't get beaucoup stars from me in their own right, they also didn't take away from my enjoyment of the record as a whole entity.

8.14.14
More than a decade after its release, I've decided that Pitchfork was right: the Wrens' Meadowlands is a pretty spectacular album.

8.15.14
As part of this fortnight's Amazon $5 MP3 album promotion, I bought the Thompson Twins' Queer, their final album. I listened to some samples first and it didn't sound too bad, and many of the online reviews on iTunes and Amazon said that it was their best album and they were shocked that it hadn't received more recognition, so I decided to give it a shot.

I was a huge Thompson Twins fan when I was younger, listening to the four album block between 1982's Set and 1985's Here's to Future Days (although the only one I've gone back and repurchased so far is 1984's excellent Into the Gap, their best known work that still holds up pretty well after 30 years, especially if you've recently developed a fetish for 80s pop music). But my musical tastes shifted after that, and I considered my love for those records (along with Duran Duran's first few records and OMD's 80s work) an embarrassment that was best put behind me forever (although it's worth noting that I have regained appreciation for the albums that I enjoyed in my younger years from those other two artists).

But since revisiting Into the Gap a few years ago, I've been open to buying more of their music if the opportunity to get it relatively cheaply presented itself, so I was primed for one of their records showing up for $5 on Amazon. This purchase just wasn't worth it, as much as I wanted it to be. I don't know where the album I thought I heard on the samples I listened to went, but Queer wasn't at all what I was expecting, and after a single listen, I can't imagine that I'll ever get the urge to hear a single track again.

The record was released in 1991, when the Madchester scene was still the dominant musical style in Britain, and that sound definitely had a major influence on this album. The first couple of tracks aren't so terrible——it's as if the band were obsessed with the first two Charlatans albums and were doing their best to imitate them but they couldn't quite figure out how——but after that, it's as if they said, "Fuck it , the Charlatans are too nuanced, let's just ape EMF instead." And even though that's a simpler task, the Thompson Twins don't do that very well, either.

It's too bad, really——it would have been lovely to find a lost gem from a band that I adored when I was entering my teenage years. But this isn't a lost gem——there's very little beautiful or valuable about it, and it should remain undiscovered if you've been fortunate enough to keep it from entering your brain thus far.

8.18.14
There's a new set of $5 MP3 albums from Amazon. Here are my picks:

Must-haves: U2's The Joshua Tree, Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral, Lauryn Hill's The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Kanye West's The College Dropout, The Police's Zenyatta Mondatta, Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavillion, and Nick Drake's Pink Moon.

Recommended: Childish Gambino's Camp, Spoon's Gimme Fiction, Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA, Morrissey's Bona Drag, Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Fever to Tell, and Whiskeytown's Faithless Street.

I might buy: Lou Reed's Rock and Roll Animal, the National's The National and Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers, David Byrne's David Byrne, Berlin's Pleasure Victim, Cibo Matto's Super Relax, Camper Van Beethoveen's El Camino Real, and Tom Petty's Southern Accents.

8.19.14
New Waxahatchee record done! No release date yet, but hopefully it will come out this year. To tide you over, here's a video of Katie Crutchfield doing an acoustic version of "Coast to Coast" with White Lung's Mish Way:

8.20.14
I don't think I've ever had a year since I was 16 where I didn't buy at least 40 records that came out that year. And although I've bought way more than that total this year, only 18 or 19 were actually relesaed in 2014, and I don't see another 20+ releases scheduled for the rest of the year that will take me over the 40 mark.

8.21.14
Alright: so it's pretty clear that Lyle Lovett is never going to release a full album of new material ever again——his last album that can really be considered his music was 2007's It's Not Big It's Large, and only one other album he has released since 1998 has been composed primarily of original material (he's released the equivalent of five albums of covers if you count 1998's double album Step Inside This House twice and 2003's Smile compilation, which is comprised of cover songs he recorded for various motion picture soundtracks).

Which means it's time to ask the question: what was the last great album that this great artist actually released? And I'm a bit shocked to realize that, despite my affection for the man, it's been nearly 20 years since he released a record that I really cared about: 1996's The Road to Ensenada, which, based on the strength of the career he'd built to that point (the only small misstep was 1994's I Love Everybody, recorded during his brief marriage to Julia Roberts, which showed that he was feeling the pressure of a much larger spotlight than he was accustomed to), I never would have guessed was going to be his true swan song instead of just another great album in a string of many to come.

Pontiac, Lyle Lovett and His Large Band, Joshua Judges Ruth, and The Road to Ensenada are still vital documents that point to some of the alternative paths that country music could have taken to return to its more authentic history (instead of the popified crap that has passed for country since Garth Brooks and which still dominates the country charts). In addition to truly traditionally country, these albums also pay serious homage to gospel, the blues, and even big band music, but without ever feeling insincere or forced (unlike, say, "The Truck Song", from 2003's My Baby Don't Tolerate, which felt like he was angling for an endoresement deal with whichever American truck maker would give him the most money).

My favorite song is probably still "If I Had a Boat", the first song I ever heard by Lovett. It's almost impossible to ascribe to a genre, and that's one of the things that I loved about it coming from an artist that the industry had decided to label as strictly a country artist.

My hope was that artists like Lovett, Steve Earle, and Dwight Yoakum (along with alt country acts like Son Volt, Whiskeytown, and the Old 97s, among many others) would expand the country genre and give it new life, but all of them failed eventually (although the Drive-By Truckers are still giving the whole alt country thing a good go). Now country has simply become another strain of overproduced pop whose listeners have convinced themselves is somehow different than the overproduced pop that gets played on Top 40 radio. But it's not, and that's a real shame.

8.22.14
I have a four hour car ride ahead of me tomorrow, and while that's usually a time I use to listen to music, I've noticed that since my son was born that I've tended to listen to talk radio instead. And now that he's old enough to hear and understand (and repeat) the words in the songs, I really can't afford to listen to a random shuffle anyway, at least until I go through and tag the ones with child-safe lyrics, something that I'm certainly not going to get to by tomorrow.

I'm on vacation for a week, so no more posts until September. And then I've just got six more weeks to get the 1989 mixtape notes finished before the anniversary of this site...