10.1.14
It's that time again: new selections from Amazon's $5 MP3 album deals.

Must-haves: Radiohead's OK Computer, Green Day's Dookie, Violent Femmes' Violent Femmes, LCD Soundsystem's LCD Soundsystem, Nick Drake's Pink Moon, Whiskeytown's Faithless Street and Stranger's Almanac, Elvis Costello's My Aim Is True, Pulp's Different Class, Tribe Called Quest's Midnight Marauders, Rufus Wainwright's Poses, and Macy Gray's On How Life Is, artist title, artist title, artist title, artist title.

Recommended: Death Cab for Cutie's Narrow Stairs, Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Fever to Tell, Jane's Addiction's Ritual de lo Habitual, Tom Waits' Swordfishtrombones, Arcade Fire's Neon Bible, They Might Be Giants' Flood, Dirty Projectors' Sing Lo Magellan, and Steve Earle's Guitar Town.

I might buy: Tracy Chapman's Tracy Chapman, Beach House's Teen Dream, Joni Mitchell's Blue, the Go-Gos' Beauty and the Beat, and Spider Bags' Frozen Letter.

10.2.14
Last night my wife and I went to see Belle & Sebastian, a band we've been to see twice before——once at the 9:30 Club with the New Pornographers opening and once at Merriweather Post Pavillion preceded by Broken Social Scene and Ted Leo.

I don't have a lot of specific memories of the previous two performances, although I remember liking them a lot, but my notes from those two shows both mention how chatty frontman Stuart Murdoch was, and that was definitely in evidence last night. It took him three or four songs before he acknowledged the audience, but after that, practically every song was preceded by some sort of comment or story.

The show was held at the Tabernacle, an Atlanta landmark that used to be a Baptist church but which was converted into a concert venue nearly 20 years ago. Being on the elderly side of the audience (although with a band like this there were many more people our age in attendance than there were at say, the Waxahatchee show I saw a few months ago), we decided to check out the balcony, which had seats. Even though we got there on the late side of early (about halfway through the opening act's set), we were still able to get two seats on the second row in the section on the left side that was closest to the stage (well, the closest one they were letting people sit in that night——there was another section that seemed to be reserved for friends of the band).

It was a great venue——lots of character, lots of easy parking (we had no trouble finding a space in a lot just down the street even though One Direction was playing the nearby Georgia Dome the same night), and many different ways to experience the show, whether from the balcony seats or standing room on the floor. It was my first time seeing a show here, but this has become another in a long list of Atlanta venues that I'll happily return to.

One of the best parts of the show was when Stuart invited a dozen or so audience members up on stage to dance while the band played "The Boy With the Arab Strap" and "Legal Man". Once the group got over a bit of shyness, they danced with abandoned, and once they did that for a couple of minutes...they all got their phones out and started taking selfies of themselves onstage with Stuart or Stevie in the background of the shot. I think of all the people who were up there with the band for those two songs, there was only one girl who I never saw take her phone out, and most of the dancers stopped for photos multiple times. It was a little weird to me, but I'm guessing most of the young folks in the crowd thought nothing of it because that's exactly what they would have done had they been invited to dance with the band, offering further proof that I can no longer be considered a young person in any way, shape, or form.

Here's the setlist:

1. Judy Is a Dick Slap
2. I'm a Cuckoo
3. Funny Little Frog
4. Photo Jenny
5. If She Wants Me
6. Allie
7. Perfect Couples
8. Piazza, New York Catcher
9. The Stars of Track and Field
10. She's Losing It
11. Enter Sylvia Plath
12. A Summer Wasting
13. I Didn't See It Coming
14. The Boy with the Arab Strap
15. Legal Man
16. Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying
    
    Encore:
    
    
17. We Are the Sleepyheads
18. Me and the Major

They played a bunch of my favorites: "If She Wants Me", "Photo Jenny", "Piazza, New York Catcher", "A Summer Wasting", and "The Boy With the Arab Strap" would all be on my wishlist for a perfect Belle & Sebastian concert. They also played three new songs from Girls in Peacetime Want To Dance, the album they just recorded in Atlanta and which they're going to release early next year——"Allie", "Perfect Couples", and "Enter Sylvia Plath"——none of which seemed particularly good or even in the style of the band's best work (although Stuart whipped out a keytar for "Enter Sylvia Plath", which added to the entertainment value). So I'm not expecting great things from this record, but I'm probably going to buy it anyway (I mean, I bought The Third Eye Centre, and there's no way it could be as bad as that).

I will definitely go see the band again if they come through the city on the supporting tour for the album——their performances have been uniformly good, and even when they're focused on newer material, they still play enough of the old stuff to make the show well worth attending.

10.3.14
Fiona Apple shared a new track, "Container", which she wrote for Showtime's new series The Affair (the video is the title sequence for the show):

Since it's just the backing track for the credits for a television show, it's not exceedingly long, and therefore doesn't give us a lot to go on, but I like what I hear. I get the sense that this was modified from an unreleased song and not a leftover from sessions that will lead to an album in the near future, which is too bad——one of my few complaints about Apple is that you have to wait so long between releases, because they're so good that you can't wait to hear the next one. But if that's the price you pay for quality, I guess it's worth it.

10.6.14
Just realized that Drive-By Truckers, who I've never seen live and whose most recent album is their strongest in years, is going to be playing the Tabernacle this weekend. But alas, we're off to North Carolina and I won't be in town for the show. Here's hoping that they make another visit to their semi-hometown to wrap up this bout of touring sometime next year.

10.7.14
TV on the Radio shared another track from their upcoming album, Seeds, called "Careful You":

I like this one much better than "Happy Idiot", which they shared a couple of weeks ago, but I'm not sure I can say yet that I like it period (although I think I probably would have liked it more if "Happy Idiot" hadn't left such a bad taste in my mouth).

I t certainly doesn't change my mind about whether or not I'm going to preorder this album——that would normally be a given with TV on the Radio, but that first single made me a little cautious about this release, and I'm going to need to hear the whole thing before I commit dollars to it.

10.8.14
Wavves' frontman Nathan Williams has started a new side project called Spirit Club, and has made both songs from their debut release available for download here for free.

The songs are called "Eye Dozer" and "Sling", and the instant impression they give is very chill compared to Wavves material. There's still a distinct California vibe to the songs, but it's much more Beach Boys by way of the 80s than the typical surf rock influences that Williams usually employs, and his voice isn't really recognizable (I'm not actually fully convinced that he's doing the vocals here, although I can't imagine he'd let anyone else in the band take vocal duties either).

At two songs, it's a nice, relaxed little interlude, but I think this would start to quickly wear thin on a full-length release, and second song, "Sling", would likely instantly become my least favorite track if it were featured on a Wavves record. Still, the price is right, especially if you're a fan of Williams' other work.

10.13.14
Relistening to Belle & Sebastian's records after seeing them live last week, and I'm surprised to find that Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant, which was my least favorite release from them for a long time (Write About Love is now tied with Fold Your Hands), is not nearly as bad as I remember. It has one of my favorite songs of theirs——"The Model"——but until this most recent listen, I don't think I rated anything else above a 3.

Hearing these songs now in the context of frontman Stuart Murdoch's fascination with 60s sounds (especially his work on God Help the Girl project) makes it a bit more palatable, and I can even say that I like tracks such as "Women's Realm" and "There's Too Much Love". It's still a pretty weak album overall, especially in the context of the two albums that preceed and succeeded it, The Boy With the Arab Strap and Dear Catastrophe Waitress, but it was marginally listenable this time, something I would never have said about it before.

10.14.14
Stars' No One Is Lost arrived today, and it's very...dancey. I have a real soft spot for this band——I know they have some signficant weaknesses, but one of them is sometimes being overly sentimental, which also happens to be one of my weaknesses, so I can forgive a lot from them as long as I get a few songs an album I can really identify with.

I love the title, and I'm willing to go on this adventure with them for at least a few listens, but I'm not sure if I'm going to end up seeing this record as anything but a midlife crisis lark.

10.15.14
So it looks like iTunes has replaced the original album art for the free release of U2's Songs of Innocence with the black and white photograph used for the physical release. Which is a real shame, because the cover was one of the few things I liked about that record...

10.16.14
Time for another helping of Amazon's $5 MP3 album deals:

Must-haves: Prince's Purple Rain, Radiohead's Kid A, Kendrick Lamar's good kid, m.A.A.d. city, Arcade Fire's Funeral, the Cure's Disintegration, Arctic Monkeys' Favourite Worst Nightmare, Tom Waits' Raindogs, Lou Reed's Transformer, Morrissey's Viva Hate (this may be simply in the recommended category for non-Smiths fans, but it's still a pretty good album), Steve Earle's Copperhead Road, the Police's Zenyatta Mondatta, Fiona Apple's When the Pawn..., The Dream Academy's The Dream Academy, and the BoDeans' Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams.

Recommended: White Stripes' Icky Thump, Soundgarden's Louder Than Love, Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians' Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars, Eels' Daisies of the Galaxy and Beautiful Freak, Sonic Youth's Dirty, Berlin's Pleasure Victim, John Mellancamp's American Fool, and Cut Copy's Bright Like Neon Love.

I might buy: Radiator Hospital's Torch Song, Alvvays' Alvvays, Generationals' Alix, Joe Jackson's Night and Day and I'm the Man, Bishop Allen's Lights Out, and Daft Punk's Human After All.

10.17.14
Eleventh anniversary of this site. And despite giving it a good go back in August, I still haven't completed the write up for the 1989 mixtape...

10.20.14
Sleater-Kinney, who have been defunct since 2006 (although the various members have showed up in new projects like Wild Flag, Quasi, and the Corin Tucker Band), announced that they are releasing a new album next January called No Cities to Love. They also shared a track, "Bury Our Friends":

I can't tell you how excited I am about this band's return (although their current tour dates don't take them anywhere near Atlanta——I'm hoping they'll do a bigger tour in the summer), but I'm not especially excited about this song. I mean, it's more Sleater-Kinney-ish than any of the music any of them have made since their last album, 2005's The Woods, but in the context of their full catalog, this is a middling song——representative of their sound but not exemplifying the best the band has to offer.

10.21.14
Thurston Moore recently shared a track from his now-released solo album, The Best Day, called "Speak to the Wild":

Point one that is so obvious that I really don't need to write it but which I will anyway: this sounds a lot like Sonic Youth. Point two: it's really long, which is another Sonic Youth-y trait. But since I'm making obvious Sonic Youth comparisons, this sounds like really good Sonic Youth, especially for an 8 1/2 minute midtempo track, so I'm likely to end up owning this one.

But I'm going to wait until I can hear the whole thing first——on the record, this track is the opener, and it's followed by the 11 minute "Forevermore". I need to know I can reliably make it through those first 20 minutes before I can convince myself to invest.

10.22.14
Chvrches have shared a new song, "Get Away", that will be released as part of a re-scoring of the 2011 film Drive:

This was supposedly recorded especially for this project, but compared to the brilliance of their debut album, The Bones of What You Believe, this feels very much like a leftover or b-side. It sounds like a band who desperately want to be Chvrches but who are missing some crucial ingredient, and I hope this really was something that they originally discarded for not being up to snuff rather than a harbinger of their next album.

10.23.14
Animal Collective's Panda Bear (whose real name is Noah Lennox) has announced a new solo album, Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper (which will be released early next year), and also released a four-song EP called Mr. Noah whose title track will also appear on the full-length. A video for the song is embedded below:

It's only been a couple of years since the last Animal Collective disc, but co-leader Avery Tare released his first solo effort last year, and while both of them have some of the classic Animal Collective hallmarks, this track sounds more like what you might expect from the band in light of their most recent album, Centipede Hz.

We've all learned the hard lesson that preview tracks don't necessarily tell you a lot about the rest of the album, but if the rest of the Mr. Noah EP shows as much promise as this song does, I might start to get excited about the full album (as opposed to the Avery Tare record, which I haven't purchased yet and will still show up in digital format for $5 or less one of these days).

10.24.14
Finally! The Decemberists have announced a new album, What A Terrible World, What A Beautiful World, which will be released early next year and will be their first record since 2011 (although it sure feels like a lot longer than that).

Frontman Colin Meloy has spent the intervening years publishing a trilogy of YA fantasy books set in Wildwood (also the title of the first book), and while I'm happy to see him fulfill what has clearly been a lifelong dream of being a published novelist, I'm very happy that he hasn't given up on the whole music thing. These guys have been one of my favorite bands for a long, long time now, and I'm as excited about them (hopefully) getting back on the road again as I am about hearing the new songs.

10.30.14
Belle & Sebastian recently announced a new album, Girls in Peacetime Just Want to Dance, and a couple of days ago they shared the first preview track, "The Party Line":

This is not one of the three new songs they played when I saw them in concert a few weeks ago, and while it's marginally better than my impressions of those songs, the combined weight of the new material doesn't give me a lot of hope that this is going to be a late career resurrection for the band's recorded output.

They're still amazing live——I'd go to see them again in a heartbeat——but I'm kind of glad that I saw them on a pre-release tour, because I'm guessing that the official tour will be much heavier with newer material than the show I saw.

10.31.14
I've decided to get serious about rating all the tracks in my collection, and so I've started back where it all began for me: 1986, when I bought my first Smiths album. And even though I've already rated most of the material released that year that I own, I'm listening to everything all over again, not only to see if there are any ratings that need to be revised, but also to put the unrated stuff in the context of what it was competing with when it was actually released.

You will no doubt already have guessed that I'm much more impressed with my overall collection of albums from that year than I am with any year since the turn of the century (we're far enough along that we can legitimately use that phrase now, right?), and I'm guessing this trend will continue until sometime in the early 90s.

I know this is a phenomena that virtually everyone would experience, whether their first deep dive into contemporary music happened in 1966 or 2006, but I will also argue unapologetically that the music being made in 1986 was collectively much better than the music made in the last decade and a half.