11.3.14
Not sure what's going on here——for the first time since I've become aware of the program, it's a few days after the first of the month and Amazon's $5 MP3 albums selections haven't been updated. Maybe it's because the first day of the month fell on a weekend, but it's now Monday and it's still the same stuff from last week.

11.4.14
The Decemberists have shared a song from their just announced upcoming album What A Terrible World, What A Beautiful World called "Make You Better":

Not a bad track, but hardly a knockout stunner to announce the band's first material in several years, and musically it's a little generic——the only thing that really points to this being a Decemberists track is Colin's voice. And it seems like a few changes to the relatively drab arrangement——a slightly faster tempo, more of and more prominent use of the organ that kicks in later in the song, something happening with a rhythm acoustic guitar (or putting it higher in the mix if there is one in there somewhere), a bass line that isn't on autopilot——could have improved this song immensely (although I'm still nto sure that would turn it into a quality track).

I have such high expectations for this band that it may not be possible for them to be met after years of waiting, but this feels very much like a b-side, not the first thing you share with the world from a new and long-awaited record. Hoping it gets better from here, because it sure would be a shame to see them go downhill after so many quality records and only a few genuine missteps.

I'll go see them live anytime, though, so even if this record's not that good, it at least means they'll be getting back out on the road. But still, I'm hoping they aren't destined to become the American version of Belle & Sebastian.

11.5.14
Okay. Amazon's $5 MP3 album deals have finally been refreshed. Kind of slim pickings this time, but here are my recommendations:

Must-haves: Rage Against the Machine's Battle of Los Angeles, Tom Waits' Bone Machine, Eels' Electro-Shock Blues, Bob Mould's Workbook and, Deerhoof's Apple O'.

Recommended: Lorde's Pure Heroine, Michael Jackson's Off the Wall, Oasis' (What's the Story) Morning Glory, Ben Folds Five's Ben Folds Five, Teenage Fanclub's Bandwagonesque, Elvis Costello's Imperial Bedroom, PJ Harvey's To Bring You My Love, and the Hold Steady's Boys and Girls in America.

I might buy: Nico's Chelsea Girl and Desertshore, PJ Harvey's Dry, Deerhoof's La Isla Bonita (I'm a little surprised to find this one here, since it was just released), We Are Scientists' TV en Francais, and Suzanne Vega's Solitude Standing.

11.6.14
On the heels of sharing a track intended for the new rendition of the Drive soundtrack, Chvrches have shared yet another soundtrack song, this one for the third Hunger Games movie, Mockingjay Part 1. It's called "Dead Air", and you can hear it below:

This is definitely better than "Get Away", and it sounds like it's actually a new track, even though it's incredibly unlikely that it was recorded specifically for this soundtrack. It still doesn't equal the high water marks of the best tracks on their debut album, The Bones of What We Believe, but as least this song could be put on that album and not stand out as a weakness (which I actually mean as a compliment even though it might not sound like one, but that's a truly great album, and any song that's worthy of being on the tracklist is a pretty good song).

It somehow feels too empty during the verses, and while I have no idea what should go in all that space, it seems like something is missing. The chorus is richer and fuller, but it too doesn't quite have the same bombast as their best choruses. But I take it as a good sign that, if they are currently recording material for a new album, they felt good enough about the strength of the rest of the songs that they felt comfortable letting this one go for a soundtrack.

11.7.14
One of my favorite bands you've never heard of, the Rural Alberta Advantage, is coming to play the Earl, the same small club where I saw Waxahatchee earlier this year. I'd love to see this show with a friend (a couple are considering joining me), but like Waxahatchee, this is one of those shows that I'm going to see with or without a companion.

11.10.14
I think if I'm going to continue to like Amanda Palmer as a musical artist, I'm going to have to unfollow her on Twitter every now and then. She's great in small doses on there, but she rarely seems to pause for breath so you can appreciate the more interesting things she has to say, especially when she's in full-on promotion mode like she is now for her new book, The Art of Asking. I'm actually curious to read the book at some point, but right now, with all the constant Twitter posts, it's just too much.

11.11.14
I much prefer the British name for Veteran's Day: Remembrance Day. And I much prefer Big Country's song about it, "Rememberance Day", to Sting's maudlin "Children's Crusade".

11.12.14
I had high hopes for the self-titled debut record from Alvvays after all the critical praise, and I liked the first song pretty well. And then really nothing else. Still not quite sure why this one is being heralded as one of the albums of the year——if this had come out five years ago, it might have felt fresh exactly because it was referencing sounds that hadn't been used in a while, but do we really need another Best Coast imitator at this point? Especially one that doesn't surpass that artist in any way?

11.13.14
I only got into Jay Reatard after his final record was released, and he died not too long after, so I sometimes forget he ever existed. But then one of his songs comes up in a shuffle playlist, and it kills me to wonder how much we lost with his early passing.

11.14.14
I got the Uncle Tupelo album No Depression (the source of the name for the alt country movement that started in the early 90s) a few weeks ago, and I finally got around to listening to it. I was a big fan of a lot of the bands that came a few years into that movement including Wilco, which was one of the bands that spun off from Uncle Tupelo, and so I was hoping that this might offer some early hints of what was to come with Jeff Tweedy's later career.

Unfortunately, this sounds a lot more like Son Volt, the other band that came out of the Uncle Tupelo split, only not as good as Son Volt. And the thing about Son Volt is, even when they're good, you really only need one album (and some would argue only one song), because there's just not a lot of variation——they're so consistent that it gets boring fast.

No Depression is one of those records that it's important that I know for the historical context, but it's not going to be a record I love. And quite frankly, with all the other alt country stuff that came out before and after, I'm having a hard time figuring out why the music press latched onto this one as the defining record from that period.

11.17.14
New Amazon's $5 MP3 album selections. Pretty slim pickings on all fronts this time.

Must-haves: Chvrches' The Bones of What You Believe, the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, Tom Waits' Frank's Wild Years, LCD Soundsystem's This Is Happening, Oasis' Definitely Maybe, Helmet's Meantime, Joe Jackson's Look Sharp!, Iggy Pop's Lust for Life, and John Mellencamp's Uh-Huh.

Recommended: Men At Work's Business As Usual, Modest Mouse's We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, Elvis Costello's Get Happy and Armed Forces, Hot Chip's In Our Head, PJ Harvey's Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, INXS' Shabooh Shoobah, Talking Heads' Fear of Music, the National's The National, David & David's Boomtown, and Deerhoof's Friend Opportunity.

I might buy: Dexys Midnight Runners' Too Ay Rye, Cibo Matto's Viva! La Woman, and The The's Soul Mining.

11.18.14
Los Campesinos are releasing a Chrismas EP called, fittingly enough, A Los Campesinos Christmas, and they've shared a track from it called "When Christmas Comes":

I'm too much a fan of this band to give you a truly objective opinion, so just trust that I like it and give it a listen yourself. What I'm really bummed about is that they were selling a limited number of physical copies that included a Christmas postcard signed by the band, and I missed out.

See, they said it was going on sale at 7 p.m. their time (GMT), which I know is five hours off from EST, but I did the five hours the wrong way: I thought it was going on sale midnight my time, when it was actually going on sale a 2 p.m. They had long since sold out by the time I realized this, and although there are supposed to be a very limited number going on sale in a few independent record stores, I'm guessing that my city won't be one of those receiving any copies. But at least it's not a physical-only release, and I'll be able to download the EP from iTunes when its released on December 9.

11.19.14
I keep hoping for some new music from Kim Deal that I really love, but it's been a long, long time since that happened. Recently she shared a new song from a singles series she's doing called "Biker Gone":

This one surprised me——it has a very early Breeders feel, and I guess some of that is probably attributable to drummer Britt Walford, who played drums on the Breeders' debut full-length, Pod.

Even though the vinyl copies of the singles are limited to 1000 copies, it looks like she's also putting these up for sale digitally, so I'm going to have check out the rest of the songs that have been released so far to see if we might end up with a halfway decent album from her at the end of all this.

11.20.14
I've bought a lot of stuff recently, and it's not necessarily stuff I talked about buying, so I'm going to run down the list: Nico's Chelsea Girl, Medicine's Home Everywhere, Ex Hex's Rips, Deerhoof's La Isla Bonita, ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead's IX, Allo, Darlin's We Come from the Same Place, TV on the Radio's Seeds, Siouxsie and the Banshees' cover album Through the Looking Glass, and the Aislers Set's complete catalogue: Terrible Things Happen, The Last Match, and How I Learned to Write Backwards.

Many of these artists are new to me, and all of the records are new except for Through the Looking Glass, which I'm very familiar with. This was one of my favorite Siouxsie and the Banshees records when it originally came out, but my copy was on cassette and I was never able to find a CD copy, or, in recent years, even a digital copy. I assumed that the latter situation was due to some royalty situation, but I would occasionally search for it on Amazon and iTunes just in case, and the last time I did this, it was for sale on both sites, so they must have worked out the issues that were keeping it off the market.

Very happy to have this one back in my collection; I'm not sure if it will be able to live up to more than a decade of mythologizing it in my memory in the absence of being able to actually listen to it, but I remember the cover of Iggy Pop's "The Passenger" being in some ways better than the orginal, and that's no mean feat.

11.21.14
Starting to really fall in love with Stars' No One Is Lost, although if you were to describe it to me I would guess that I would hate it. There are moments when they sound like Hot Chip or Cut Copy, one song that sounds like Little Dragon, and there are even a couple of times when they sound like Dirty Projectors, but they still always manage to sound like Stars, just Stars who grew up listening to more New Order than the Beautiful South.

This is not a record that I'm necessarily going to recommend to anyone, but I have to admit that it has really grown on me, and it's hard for me to see how it's not going to end up in my top 10 for the year; I've only listened to Liars' Mess more times, and No One Is Lost has only been out for about a month now.

11.24.14
Arcade Fire member Will Butler (not the frontman Win Butler, but his brother), has announced a solo album, Policy, and shared a track called "Take My Side":

I admit that I didn't know quite what I was expecting, but this bluesy, sort-of lo-fi song wasn't it. I can't really say whether I like it or not, but if you forced me to say right now, I'd lean towards not liking it over liking it. I'm intrigued but unsure; this is definitely going to be a preview-before-I-decide-to-buy album, not a preorder.

11.25.14
Smashing Pumpkins have shared "Drum + Fife", a track from the upcoming Monuments to an Elegy (which is the second full album in a multiyear song cycle called Teargarden by Kaleidyscope that will conclude with a third full-length in 2015).

The first most-interesting thing about this track is that the drummer is one-time Motley Crue drummer and all-around douchebag Tommy Lee. The second is that it's actually not that bad (both the drumming and the song itself).

Like most of the people who would likely read this site for more than one entry, I was a big fan of the Pumpkins' 90s output, especially Siamese Dream and Mellan Collie and the Infinite Sadness, and unlike most of their fans from that period, I was still a fan of what looked like the end of their career, especially Machina II, a free release that was a sequel to their final studio album, Machina, that the record company refused to release as an official album. I even was partial to the Zwan project, which was essentially Smashing Pumpkins (it featured Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlain) with some indie all-stars filling in on bass and lead guitar (which, you know, is kind of what they've become now, minus Jimmy Chamberlain).

Even though Billy Corgan somehow turned himself into a joke between 2000 and 2007, when a revamped Smashing Pumpkins released the mostly terrible Zeitgeist, which was a prelude to also mostly terrible Oceania in 2012 (the intervening years did not help Corgan's reputation among the indie tastemakers; if anything, it got even worse), I still listen every time Corgan releases something, hoping for glimmers of whatever it was that I used to love about the band. But I have to admit that I'm a little afraid to go back and revisit those albums now; they exist in my memory as beloved objects, but I'm afraid that by listening to them again, they're going to completely lose their luster and tarnish the good feelings that I have for them now (much like certain authors, who inform and influence adolescence and early adulthood but whose charms do not endure later in life——John Irving, I'm looking firmly in your direction).

So imagine my surprise to discover that this song is actually not all that bad, and neither are the other three tracks from this album that were shared earlier this month, "Tiberius", "Being Beiege", and "One and All" (whose releases I somehow missed completely).

I'm not saying this is going to be a good record, or that I'm going to buy it, but I'm at least going to give it a good solid listen, because what I've heard so far reminds me more of the stuff from the 90s that I love more than anything that the band has released since then (and it's certainly worlds better than their two albums since reforming in 2007). I mean, this is an EPs worth of material, and if it had been released in that format, it would be a pretty decent EP. So Corgan has at least earned another chance with me, Tommy Lee notwithstanding.

11.26.14
I understand why, based on "Happy Idiot", TV on the Radio's Seeds was the first album of theirs that I didn't preorder (or pick up in a record store on release day back when those existed and that was possible). But now that I've bought it and listened to it a few times, I know that was a mistake——this is a great album, and in context even the seemingly weak "Happy Idiot" makes sense.

I can't really call this a return to form, because this band has been incredibly consistent over the years (my least favorite is probably Return to Cookie Mountain, which many other fans hold up as their favorite release by the band, but Cookie Mountain is still a great record even though it's their weakest for me). But it is good see that their creative batteries have been recharged after some time off in the wake of the death of bassist Gerard Smith, who died shortly after the release of the band's last album, Nine Types of Light, in 2011. Opening track "Quartz" reminds me more of the sound of their debut full-length than anything in the ten years since, and closer "Seeds" might be the best track on the record, with a lot of good stuff in between.