12.1.09
The opener for the Pixies last night was an artist I've recently become taken with, Jay Reatard. I only have his most recent record, Watch Me Fall, but on the basis on that work I'm intending to pick up a couple of his other records from the past few years.

He blazed through his set, hardly stopping between songs (he would often use a feedback loop to bridge between songs, punctuated by a quick announcement of the next song's title), and although he was compelling to watch, his clear charisma was masked by a curtain of curly locks that completely hid his face from the crowd. And although I think the crowd was pretty into him, he and his band didn't get a chance to hear any of the applause that would have been directed their way if they had paused for even a couple of minutes in between songs.

He even ended the show with his guitar in a feedback loop, and you could only hear the crowd after his bassist unplugged Reatard's guitar as the band was headed off the stage. The set kind of reminded me of the Fiery Furnaces' opening set for Wilco a few years back——that was another full-steam-ahead performance with no breaks or pauses. I'd love to see this guy in a small club, though——I think his stage presence in that environment would burn through his wall of hair.

12.2.09
I haven't finished writing up my review of the Pixies show, so instead enjoy this detailed rant about the poor accounting of online sales at major labels from former Too Much Joy lead singer and current senior vice president at Rhapsody Tim Quirk. As he says at the end of his essay in a footnote, it's hard to tell if the big corporate labels are dumb and lazy or evil and greedy (or all four at the same time), but it's clear that the rot goes pretty deep, whatever the root causes.

12.3.09
I'm serious about trying to rate all songs on all the records I bought this year that were also released this year, but I'm being held back by a few discs that I have so little interest in that I don't want to listen to them even once more. I'm tempted to give them all twos and move on, but the obsessive in me knows that there are probably a few three star songs among all the others, and maybe even a couple of fours.

12.4.09
I just heard my favorite song from the new YACHT record, "Psychic City", in a commercial for Dayquil. Sigh.

12.7.09
Jason Lytle (formerly of Grandaddy) can write some really beautiful songs, but when he gets stuck on a mediocre idea, he can make three minutes of music seem like eight.

12.8.09
I want to like the BlakRoc project, the collaboration between the minimalist blues rockers the Black Keys and an assortment of hip hop artists including Q-Tip, RZA, and Mos Def. But listening to the iTunes streams, it just doesn't seem to click.

The ideas and artists involved are compelling enought that, even though I haven't been that taken with what I've heard so far, if I found it somewhere cheap, I'd probably pick it up just to give it a proper listen. But this year has been flush with middling releases that held a lot of promise on paper, and I don't think I need to spend another $13 to own another one.

12.9.09
I was hoping that the Gossip's Rick Rubin-produced latest record, Music for Men, would both turn them into global superstars and be one of their best albums. And I would have settled for at least one of them, because even if their music drifted farther away from the scorching blues rock of their earliest efforts than I was willing to follow, I still would have rooted for them to make it big.

But unfortunately neither of these goals has been achieved; they're still relative unknowns (at least in America——lead singer Beth Ditto regularly makes the tabloids in the UK), despite the big name producer and major label marketing effort (which as admittedly more scattershot than it could have been), and this is easily their weakest outing.

I'm betting a lot of the songs on this record would be better live, where they'd lose some of the studio sheen that takes away from the raw power of Beth Ditto's personality and voice. But as it is, it's too rock-y for the dancefloor and too dance-y for longtime fans, even if you liked the abrupt shift in that direction after Beth Ditto started hanging out with the girls from Le Tigre.

Maybe now they and their label will give up on the idea of them being a big selling act and they can get back to making music that isn't so calculated. This band still has a lot of potential, but their next record has to reward my faith.

12.10.09
I think I might be done buying records for 2009. There's not too much on my list that I didn't eventually acquire, and there isn't anything that's going to be released during the holiday season that I care about. So I guess it's time to start putting together those year-end best-of lists that I typically don't finish until sometime around February...

12.11.09
Speaking of year-end lists, they're starting to appear with more and more frequency, and I've seen one variation that I'm considering trying out for my lists this year: not ordering the singles and albums I liked most, but simply listing all the ones I thought were great and arbitrarily putting them in alphabetical order.

This wouldn't be a bad year to try out this method since there hasn't been one single album that has stood out head and shoulders above all the others, and singles are always that way because there are way more than ten amazing songs released in a given year.

I'm also started to work on the decade-in-review lists, but even if I try this and it works out for the 2009 singles and albums lists, I don't think I'll handle the decade best-of lists like this. Since I'm planning to do 20-30 albums and 30-50 singles from the aughts, I think there's more room for ranking, although the songs and records in the top 10 for each list will essentially be ties.

12.14.09
I wonder if at this point, 20 years removed from the Smiths, there are Morrissey fans who are just that: Morrissey fans only, with no connection to or awareness of his work with the Smiths. It sounds completely ridiculous to me, but that's because I'm a Smiths fan whose love for Morrissey springs solely from that place; my appreciation for any of his solo albums is a by-product of my Smiths fandom.

I suppose there must be, as weird as that is. But for someone like me, that's like liking swimming without liking water, but there you have it.

12.15.09
So: the Pixies Doolittle concert.

It was about as amazing as could be expected, which is to say, pretty fucking amazing. The show started with a recut version of Un Chien Andalou, the surrealist film that is referrenced in Doolitte's opening track, "Debaser", playing on a huge video screen at the back of the stage. After a few minutes, the band took the stage and played four of the b-sides from the Doolittle sessions: "Dancing the Manta Ray", "Weird at My School", "Bailey's Walk", and "Manta Ray".

Then came the real point of the show: playing the entire Doolittle album straight through in the same order as the record. I had purposely avoided listening to Doolittle in the months leading up to the concert so there would be little surprises here and there and I wouldn't know exactly what was coming next. The time went by way too quickly——Kim Deal, who was kind of the voice of the band, commented a couple of times about how short the songs were back then compared to now (and she's right——the songs on Doolittle average no more than two and a half minutes). Aside from a few off-notes every now and then during Joey's solos, the performances were dead-on, and it was really incredible to see how much power these songs and this band still had after twenty years.

For the first encore, the band played the remaining b-sides from Doolittle, "Wave of Mutilation (UK Surf)" and "Into the White". The whole show was a really nice bookend for my Pixies experience——the first time I saw them was on the Doolittle tour——but I was especially happy they played these two songs together, because the setlist back in 1989 was in reverse alphabetical order, so the first two songs were "White (Into the) and "Wave of Mutilation", and they just happened to play the UK surf version during that show (I remember this so specifically because we were standing right next to the stage and my friend swiped the setlist after the show).

They came on for another encore and played "Where Is My Mind?", "Gigantic", and "Caribou", and then, after the crowd refused to leave, played "Nimrod's Son" as their closer. The setlist must have been pretty close to what I heard twenty years ago, because I'm pretty sure they played most of those songs (all of which pre-date Doolittle)——I know they played "Caribou" and "Gigantic".

It was a great show, and a great final memory of one of the best bands that ever existed.

12.16.09
One of the interesting pieces of merch you could buy at the Pixies concert was a live CD of the show or a USB drive that contained footage from the European leg of the tour and a code that would let you download your show online a couple of days later. I was really tempted by this, but the $25 price tag for each was a bit steep, and I didn't feel like fighting the crowds at the end of the night (we had taken the metro into DC, and it shuts down relatively early on weeknights).

I still looked up the web site (www.doolittlelive.com) when I got home, and I was happy to see that you could download the show without having purchased the USB thing, and that it was only $14 for the download, much cheaper than buying one of the options at the concert. But still, while it was amazing to be there live, I'm not sure how often I'd listen to the recorded version of the show (instead of just listening to the original tracks of all the songs), and since there doesn't seem to be an expiration date where you won't be allowed to download the concerts anymore, I'm not really pressed to make a decision.

12.17.09
I think my musical tastes are increasingly out of sync with the kids at Pitchfork. They released their list of the 100 best singles of 2009 earlier this week, and only 15 of them were in my collection. Compare that to 2007, where I owned 28 of their best tracks that year, and 2008, where I owned 24, and there's a clear downward trend.

12.18.09
The Japandroids are starting to grow on me, but I'm getting the feeling that their songs are going to be like the Raveonettes' stuff: the true brilliance of it is lost when you play a whole bunch of their songs in a row, but if you put one of them by itself in the middle of a mixtape, it instantly stands out. Luckily, once I've gotten to know an album a little bit and rated most of its songs, I'll typically here those songs in the context of a shuffled mix on my iPod, so that works in their favor.