9.1.09
I hope some good stuff gets released in the next few months, because right now this is looking like a mediocre year for new music——the biggest story so far seems to be the re-release of the Beatles catalog and the Rock Band game based on the band. Pretty weak way to close out the first decade of the new century.

9.2.09
So about this last.fm thing: I thought I had it all figured out with GimmeSomeTune and ScobblePod, but then ScobblePod suddenly stopped scrobbling the songs from my iPod. And then when I installed Snow Leopard, it stopped working altogether. So at the suggestion of another Mac-using friend, I went back to the actual last.fm client, which I had used for a while when I first signed up for last.fm, but which I abandoned because I believed it was improperly duplicating my song plays (all of the duplicates with all the clients were likely because I had enabled a connection to last.fm in GimmeSomeTune).

And so far, so good. I haven't noticed any duplicate plays, and all of my iPod songs have been getting scrobbled whenever I do a sync. I wish I could clear my history and reimport my iTunes library to eliminate all of the existing duplicates, but last.fm appears to only offer that service to new accounts, so I'd have to delete my existing account and create one with a different name. But it doesn't bother me that much, and I'm hoping that they'll add that as an option for existing accounts at some point.

9.3.09
If my obsession with of Montreal (which has been going on for about a year now) continues, they are almost certainly going to dominate my most played tracks in iTunes, but as of right now, their most played song is only at number 22 on the list. However, there are 14 of Montreal songs in my top 100 most played, far more than any other artist, and every time I spend a couple of days listening to my all-of Montreal playlist, not only do those 14 tracks tend to move up, but it's also likely that another one or two could creep onto the bottom of the list (there are currently five more songs that are one to three plays away from cracking the top 100).

9.9.09
Picked up a few new discs over the holiday weekend: Datarock's Red, Patrick Wolf's The Bachelor, the Starlight Mints' Change Remains, and Jay Reatard's Watch Me Fall. I was also hoping to pick up YACHT's See Mystery Lights, but that wasn't in stock. However, there was a used copy of I Believe in You. Your Magic Is Real, and the used discs were half off, so I picked that up for only $3.

Nothing's wowing me so far, although Patrick Wolf and Jay Reatard are both making good impressions. Red seems like it's going to turn out to be the disappointment I feared it would be from the song clips, and I'm not quite sure what to make of Change Remains, but my opinions should firm up in another week or two of listening.

9.10.09
I'm afraid I'm getting caught up in the hype of these Beatles releases. The only CD I own from the first round of CD releases in 1987 is The White Album, but I've always wanted to fully explore the band's catalog, and now seems like the perfect time (the full stereo box set with 14 discs can be had for $180, which is not a bad price in an era of $18 CDs).

I'm also sorely tempted by the Rock Band thing, but there are a few problems: 1) I don't own a previous version of Rock Band, so 2) I don't have any of the instruments and whatnot you need, and most importantly 3) I don't even have a modern game console (my last console purchase was a Gamecube back in 2002). If I had the console, I could probably talk my wife into a Rock Band 2 starter set with the Beatles software for $140, but tack on $250 for the system (especially when I'm also likely going to spend that $180 on the CDs), and that's a very hard sell.

9.14.09
I knew it was bad sign when the new Datarock record, Red, led off with "The Blog", a series of clips from speeches by the likes of Bill Gates and Tim Berners-Lee over a techo beat with occasional invectives from the band members tossed in. Ugh. There are a couple of songs that might grow on me if I gave them a chance, but I doubt that will happen since the rest of it is so uniformly bad and uninteresting.

It's really too bad——their debut was one of my favorite out-of-nowhere releases when it came out, and I had high hopes for their sophomore effort. But even though very few of the songs clock in at longer then three minutes or so, they're so terrible it feels like their each seven minutes long. I've tried listening to it all the way through a couple of times, and I'm just not finding anything worth listening to again.

9.15.09
So was anyone really surprised by Kanye West's outburst at the increasingly irrelevant VMAs? Because you shouldn't have been. He's tremendously talented, but he's also a tremendous egomaniac/windbag. But hey, every now and then it's nice to see some sincere emotion from the micromanaged and image controlled contemporary entertainers who are now seldom more interesting than athletes in postgame locker room interviews.

9.16.09

Mixtape: 1988

Track 13
"Standing in the Shower...Thinking"
Nothing's Shocking
Jane's Addiction

It was Nirvana's 1991 release of Nevermind that really brought alternative guitar rock into the mainstream, but in the same way that the Stone Roses never would have been huge in England if the groundwork hadn't already been laid by the Smiths, Jane's Addiction's Nothing's Shocking paved the way for the harder guitar sounds that would define much of early 90s rock.

The Janes were already famous for their live sets before they released their debut studio album, and although there's too much studio sheen to say that the record is a faithful reproduction of their live show, the intensity and fury of the band remains intact. The band was best known for the largely acoustic "Jane Says" (which is probably still their signature song to the mainstream audience), but the record as a whole has a much harder edge with glam metal influences and Stephen Perkins' aggressive drumming.

"Standing in the Shower...Thinking" seems more influenced by funk than metal (aside from the freakout guitar solo), and it almost sounds pop-y in this post-grunge age, but compared to what was being played on the radio at the time, it was pretty aggressive. The band didn't have a big impact on radio, but their live shows garnered them a loyal following that gave them a gold record and a hit single by their second album.

It's hard to overstate the importance and influence of Nothing's Shocking, especially given how short the Janes' career was (at least the first phase, the important phase), but this record was the harbinger for almost every successful alternative rock band that would top the charts a few years later, from Nirvana to the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Radiohead to Smashing Pumpkins and all the lesser imitators of these groups. We remember Nevermind more because that was the first massive commercial success that kicked off a decade of chart dominance for alternative rock, but the release of Nothing's Shocking in 1988 is where I mark the beginning of the sea change that would be fully realized three years later.

9.17.09
Not sure what I think about the new Patrick Wolf. It's definitely not as fun as The Magic Position, but his craftsmanship is immaculate and there's still a lot of great (if more serious) stuff on here. But the moments of bliss on The Bachelor are scattered amongst dark and winding hallways, whereas many of the songs on The Magic Position were bliss through and through. It's worth taking the journey for those little moments, but I wish there were a few more of them and that they weren't sometimes so hard to find.

9.18.09
Jay Reatard isn't exactly what I was expecting——I thought he would have a bit more distortion and have kind of a Wavves/No Age vibe——but I'm liking most of his latest, Watch Me Fall. "Faking It", "Rotten Mind", and "There Is No Sun" are particular favorites.

9.21.09
I've tried, but I don't think the Starlight Mints new record is going to do much for me. Add Change Remains to an ever-growing pile of records released this year from bands who have made albums I really loved who released poor to middling this year (including but not limited to Peter Bjorn and John, Datarock, Art Brut, Robyn Hitchcock, Beirut, Ben Harper, and maybe even Wilco——I still haven't figured that new record out yet).

9.22.09
Looks like of Montreal's follow up to Skeletal Lamping won't be out until sometime next year. Sigh. 2009 really could have used a full length release from Kevin Barnes. I would have even settled for a record from the long-rumored collaboration between Kevin Barnes and Andrew VanWyngarden of MGMT that was supposed to come out this year under the Blikk Fang moniker, but it looks like that project might never see the light of day.

9.23.09
I've recently started working out regularly, and when I do cardio, my routine is to listen to five songs on my iPod before I see how much more I have to go. It typically takes about six songs for me to get the distance I want, but there have been days when it has taken eight and days when it has taken four. I have a vague sense of how long the songs on my playlist are, and when one comes on that I know is five or six minutes, I get a little more excited because I know it will eat up more time than average. I know it's all a mind game, because I'm going the same distance for the same amount of time no matter what, but when a marathon Fiery Furnaces song finishes, I know I'm much closer to my goal than I was when the song started.

9.24.09
I really hope the new Islands record doesn't suck. It's hard to follow up something like the Unicorns, but Nick Thorburn turned to his poppier side and created something worthy of affection in Return to the Sea, only to follow it with the almost wholly unlistenable (and terribly titled) Arm's Way. This is the make or break record for them as far as I'm concerned; one more bad outing and it makes their debut seem more and more like a fluke than a promise of things to come.

I still listen to Arm's Way every now and then, hoping I'll magically get it and I can have more Islands music to love, but in my heart of hearts I know it's a futile effort. So this album means a lot to me; it's either a sigh of relief that the mistakes of the last album were an exception, or the beginning of the end of my relationship with the band.

9.25.09
Nintendo is dropping the price of the Wii by $50 starting next week, which means I'm $50 closer to getting the Beatles Rock Band and a console to play it on. With the special instruments bundle and the price of the Wii, it will be about $340 for me to get up and running, which is still a steeper price tag than my wife would like, but "less than $350" sounds a whole lot more reasonable than "almost $400".

9.28.09
I used to think "Houseclouds" was the best track off Liars' self-titled most recent record. But recently I've come to realize that "Clear Island" is definitely my favorite. "Houseclouds" is still a great track, and maybe one of the reasons I loved it so much in the first place was that it wasn't what I expected from them, but nothing gets to the primal force of the band like "Clear Island".

9.29.09
Danger Mouse doing a record with the Shins' James Mercer I kinda get, especially considering DM's past collaborations with the likes of Sparklehorse and Beck (and on the Dark Night of the Soul project, with Mercer himself). But Thom Yorke and Flea? I don't know, man, I just don't know.

9.30.09
Picked up Islands' Vapours and Yo La Tengo's Popular Songs last night. I was also hunting for the Japandroids, Kid Cudi, Karen O's Where the Wild Things Are soundtrack, and YACHT, but no luck finding any of those. I haven't listned to either of the new discs yet, but for the love of god, Yo La Tengo, why do you have to punish me with two songs to close out the album that each clock in at ten minutes plus? I suppose there's a chance I could really like one or both of them, but I would bet that the number of songs over ten minutes that I can stand to listen to all the way through is in the single digits, and I haven't ever cared for the long (typically instrumental) tracks on other Yo La Tengo efforts, so I don't hold out a lot of hope for these two songs.