This Year's Model

One extra year on top of 40, 198 new albums heard:

• Album of the year is probably Night Shop's The Fountain - every song so full of longing and resignation and pitched right at this moment
  
• So much ambient, most of it necessarily unspectacular. 7.5 hours of Moby especially so
• Darkside's Random Access Memories Memories is the kind of adventurousness every remix project should aspire to
• New albums from Squid, Spirit of the Beehive, Idles, and The Avalanches were all varying degrees of disappointing, but had a lot to live up to.

Most represented:

• 4 Jeff the Brotherhood albums, all are pretty good!
• 4 Kelley Stoltz albums, all are pretty ok!
• 5 Je Suis France albums, still super underrated!
  
• 6 King Gizzard albums as usual!
  

The whole year didn't have much that really blew me away, but that might be the year talking!

See you next one! Maybe!

Gimme Fiction

Herzog (still the 2nd most underrated band in the country) has a lovely new one out in Fiction Writer. It's the fist-pumpingest thinnest lizziest set they've ever put out, packed with bangable riffs and shoutalong choruses.

They've still got that great talent for simultaneously wearing the hats of rock gods and regular dudes, bountiful and generous and honest; like how you might have wished Weezer had grown up into, like sincere Tenacious D. Herzog wants to take you as high as a Boston spaceship, but it's all more ET than Independence Day - the ship's gonna come down to you and a kind stranger will talk to you face to face and say If You're Alone, You're in Our Band Now, with songs about problems delivered with transcendent energy, a spiral staircase to the sky. That's all a way to say, check out the new album, it's a generous dose of just what you need on the home stretch.