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.

The Three Eps

There's a bristly British postpunk scene that I'm excited as hell about. Three great bands with great EPs and no albums. In order of decreasing adventurousness, all full of wit and hooks and piss and vinegar:

Squid - Town Center 

Do Nothing - Zero Dollar Bill
 
Hotel Lux - Barstool Preaching

(honorable mention: Egyptian Blue - Collateral Damage)

Keep an eye on em.

A Weird Exits

Well, here we are, three thousand, eight hundred and thirty-two entries later, give or take - a thought or two about every album I first heard in my thirties (plus a few extra months on the front). And hot goddamn we did it: an album a day, plus a few! But as I'm officially stamped Middle Aged, a baby on the way, a dozen other demands becoming more demanding, I do think this old lark's run its course.

It was fun! The last decade got me thinking more deeply about music, and the thousands of retroactive reads keep me painfully aware of how much I'll always have to learn.

And, look, I have no illusions about having any special talent as a writer, or the value of my increasingly-halfhearted wordplops to the random internet passerby. But if I led any of you four readers out there to a just one well-liked album you'd otherwise not have found? Well, that'd make me pretty happy.

And who am I kidding, I'll probably pop up here with an enthusiastic word or two when I find something especially fine to listen to.

Until then, may you chase your own idiot idea for longer than's remotely reasonable.

Best,

A

#3832 Richard Swift - Dressed Up for the Letdown

3.5/5 soaked in music of a bygone era, jaunty and morose notes from across an ocean of time, spiked with these rare moments of pure joy, but often repeating himself just a bit too much. What must that be like?

And I fear friend, this could be the last song
But we're all good to go

#3831 No Age - Goons Be Gone

3/5 melodic, propulsive, enjoyable, but toothless, all the noisy edges sanded off. As Randal and Spunt creep up on 40, they just don't have that fire anymore - what must that be like?

#3830 1 Trait Danger - 1 Trait World Tour

3.5/5 deeply dumb, just loose as hell, two dudes having a hoot. Those early skits and intros are rough sledding, but you get Clap When I'm Dead and Multiple Computer Mark, and man -- you just don't get hooky, actually pretty funny shit like that to stick unless you're throwing whatever you got. This wouldn't have been better if it was better. be glad it exists exactly as it does. bonus, kinda helps explain Making a Door Less Open's quirky energy