Brand New Awesome

I was planning on publishing the next part of the 2011 retrospective today, but, instead (and seeing as how that isn't done yet) I'm going to instead put up a review of the album that's been ringing in my ears for the last week or two.

Imperial Teens', Feel The Sound, is an aurally expansive, very approachable, pop-rock album with 11 good tracks.  (Of note, there are only 11 tracks on the album).  There is one song over 4 minutes and one song shorter than 3 minutes, so, when I say "pop", I'm talking radio ready fare, not auto-tuned vocals over a drum machine and keyboards.  The album is a bit of a break from their previous albums, but really good.  It sounds like a weird love child from The Temper Trap, Getup Kids, Sleater-Kinney, a little Foo-Fighters and maybe a little Stone Temple Pilots?  I dunno, hard to place at time.

You may remember Imperial Teens from their late 90's hit, Yoo-Hoo.  It was used to great effect in a couple of teen movies (Jawbreaker, Not Another Teen Movie) back in the day.   It remains a stupidly catchy pop song.

While I've never seen it, their live set is supposed to be very fun as they're known to change instruments during the set--and not like, Hey, Roady, gimme a new guitar, but like, drummer goes to keyboard, guitarist goes to drums, keyboardist goes to guitar, swaps.

Also, the keyboardist is from Faith No More.  Let me assure you now, they sound nothing like Faith No More.

The sound is bright and boppy--it'll get your feet tapping and your fingers drumming.  It has pep, as the kids say.  The album is a cohesive whole--the songs all sounds like they belong together.  There are no real outlier tracks that leave you scratching your head and wondering if the song got cut from a previous album.  The vocals are a mix of male, male/female, and female.  There are a good number of harmonies and trade-offs, but no real duets, if that makes sense.  The guitars are sparse and simple and there are no big giltar-solo's**, although the bass lines are tight enough to make Barry White jealous.  Out From Inside has a bassline and beat that is straight out of mid-70's disco and if that song doesn't cause your toes to hum and dance I dunno what will.  I should note that I say that it is a 70's disco beat and mean it is as a compliment.  Say what you will about the overall disco movement, it remains better than any dance music published in the 80's and most of the 90's.


The vocals, drums and piano are the real musical hero's here.  While there is variation in the gender singing, Imperial Teens have always been believers in the falsetto, so, there isn't that much variation even between the different genders.  The biggest might actually be that the women sing in a bit of a breathier fashion, while the guy sings in a more traditional manner.  Overall, tight vocals that sound natural--no autotuner here.  The drums just drive this album--there isn't a song on the album that doesn't have a solid beat or set the tone and flavor for the song.  More than that, though, the drums are actually interesting.  Many of the beats are pretty standard but the fills and bridges turn what could be ordinary into something compelling.

The piano, unlike the drums varies in use and effectiveness.  It is probably the biggest variable on the album. Largely absent from some songs, it defines others.  I list it as a strength here because with those songs where it defines the song, the songs soar.

I would check out, Runaway (the first track), Last to Know, All The Same, Out from Inside, and Overtaken to see if you like it.  You can easily preview the songs via Amazon--and I think they  have the album for 5 bucks right now.


Feel The Sound is a catchy and very repeatable.  It'll be a great spring/summer album and has that light-hearted, enjoyable quality that really defines great warm-weather listening.



**giltar solo = gilded guitar solo, which I would classify as those things where there's a 15 second solo of 10-12 notes and the guitar player is wailing and acting like they just dropped some Clapton in your ear-holes.  In other words, a BS guitar solo.  For examples see: Coldplay, Maroon 5, etc

Brag, Borrow, Bury

Touche, sir!  I SAID TOUCHE!

Three albums, three different levels of goodness.  One of them you'll want to brag about--you know, that indie douchebag brag about having found a band before they were big?  That kind of bragging?  Yeah, do it.  These albums will have broad appeal or just be really good.  Sometimes both.  

Borrow is the label I give to albums that I probably like but that I recognize might be outside the norm or something that may suffer from limited appeal.  Give them a try and see if you like them.

Bury consists of the albums that need to be put out of their misery and put in a shallow grave out back.  Or sometimes just albums or songs that are guilty pleasures--a moped, if you will.

(This post was mostly written in mid 2011 and just never posted.  I finished it up and have now posted it.  I think I'll keep this up--three up, three down--and I'm very open to taking recommendations and suggestions on albums I should give a listen to.

BRAG

Two Door Cinema Club: Tourist History

This is one of my favorite albums of the year. Blending rock and dance beats, it is the album that The Killers, The Bravery or  Panic at the Disco should have made--taking their styles of mixing synth with killer beats and guitar and dropping in solid vocals and interesting arrangements. And energy--undeniable, foot tapping, run run run, energy!  If you're familiar with Metric, they would be the fourth parent in the mixing of this incredibly catchy album. Cigarettes in the Theatre starts things off with an energetic boom boom, and it keeps going. Undercover Martyn is probably the most dance-rock-ee song on the album, but I Can Talk is a close second. They're both fantastic tracks. What You Know is my favorite track on the album. Coming in at 3:09, it is showcases every part of why this album is so good--really good beats, really good vocals, just the right amount of synth and a guitar line that soars above it all and acentuates how well it is mixed together.  The beat drop is a page out of the Killer's playbook and it turn the track into a Dangerous Driving Song.

Word is, their live show is pretty solid as well.  I saw them do a song on Palladia playing, Something Good Can Work.  It was okbut but seemed a bit low energy.  Part of that could be that it was one track and that it was recorded at a Glastonbury festival where it was pouring, but, excuses aside, you could tell they know how to play. Something Good Can Work is an interesting track as it mixes a Carrib beat with some steel pan drums and tight American Pop sensibilities.  Coming in just under 3 minutes, it is a single waiting to happen.

They've started to get some radio play around the greater Boston area, but not nearly enough.  I've heard Undercover Martyn on the radio a few times, but I think that's it.  This is a top notch album and worth the six or seven bucks on Amazon.  It is "office friendly" as well, with very few, if any, naughty words.  

BORROW

The Dodos: No Color

This album has some broad appeal but it has a bit of that indie-folk dueling acoustic guitars that can turn some people off.  It is one of my personal top albums of the year despite kind of not wanting it to be.  I can't explain it and I'm sure that sounds like some damning praise, but, hear me out: it is album that is immediately catchy and fun and it has a lot of the elements that defined 2011 as a musical year (folk+, a bit retro, solid singles with an overall very strong album) and yet...  It has a strong early Shins influence.  It could literally fill out a checklist of things I want to hear in an album and come away with a full page.  And yet...

I kept poo-poo'ing it and I can't figure out why--but I also kept finding it on my playlists and among my highest rated songs.  The album owns a place in my playlists, but it isn't a place that I feel like I decided to cede.  The Dodo's just kind of moved in, set up shop and said, We're here.

Listen to the album.  Borrow it from a friend of put it into Pandora/Spotify/etc and give it a go.  You may love it and own it, or you may love it and have it own you.


BURY

Iron & Wine: Kiss Each Other Clean

Early Iron & Wine is fantastic music that I cannot recommend to people highly enough.  The Trapeze Swinger, sung live, is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. There is a recording on NPR's All Song's Considered that is Iron & Wine with Calexico at the 930 Club from a few years ago.  It is magical.  I believe they still have it up under the live concerts podcast.  I'm sure someone has split it up into tracks by this point, so there might be an easier way to listen to it.

The first few albums are full of simple, folk-oriented songs that don't always hit, but they hit more often than they miss--and when they do miss, it isn't that far off the mark.  Sam Beams breathy voice, as filtered by his beard, always sounds raw and emotional and timbrous.  The instrumentation is sparse and clear and arranged in a way that highlights the lyrics and singing.  They are very well put together and executed songs.  Like I said, early Iron & Wine is fantastic music that I cannot recommend highly enough.

Album art done by Timmy, age 9, in Cray-pas

Two things strike me about that sentence:
1) The use of the term, "early".
2) the implicit understanding of an impending "but".

Here's that but: but, this latest effort is atrocious.  There, I said it.  This is the 4th studio album by the band.  This should be the stride, not the falling action. This album is a compilation of failed experiments that have been wrapped up and packaged for our purchasing pleasure.

Walking Far From Home, the first track and first single from the album, is an abject departure from that simple elegance and raw emotion. Big Bearded Sam went from creating breathy dirges and folky love songs to generating re-imagined pop rejects from the 70's and 80's as sung by someone who sings in a breathy, folksy voice.  There's a term for that: horrendous.  There's something to be said for mixing genre's and expanding, but, there are also limits to that-- you don't have T-Pain sing opera, for instance.  You don't have Rivers Cuomo sing duets.  Kanye should never actually, ya know, sing.  Rap, yes.  Sing, no.  I think this album is solid confirmation that Sam Beam should never sing 70's and 80's pop rejects.

A telling quote: (From SPIN)

“It’s more of a focused pop record. It sounds like the music people heard in their parent’s car growing up… that early-to-mid-’70s FM, radio-friendly music."

Dear Sam,

Please understand that the majority of people listening to your music were either not alive in the 70's--let along the early 70's-- or they were too young to remember the music being played then. Also, early 70's pop was terrible music. It was a rejection of late 60's experimentation rock and folk, and therefore very boring and square (to avoid the hippie, anti-war smear) or it was bad copy-cat artists who thought they were the Beatles. Why would you want to resurrect that?! The mid-80's and the late 90's/early aughts are equally terrible, homogenized periods in music and you don't see anyone (but major labels who made BANK during those periods) lining up to repeat the aural mistakes of those years.

Let's bury this album and pretend it never existed.

Best of 2011 -- Pt 2, The Singles and One - Offs

It is hardly news to anyone that music has as music sales have moved more heavily towards digital models, major labels have moved more heavily towards the killer single.  This isn't a hit on their attempts to market singles in the 70's, 80's, 90's and any other time when there have been big music labels, just the fact that it's a helluva lot easier to sell 1 million copies of a $.99 single than it is 100k copies of a $9.99 album.  You have to strike gold once rather than over and over and over again: It can be done, but, how much are you gonna risk getting trying?

This is merely pre-amble to the most annoying musical trend of 2011: the single that is simultaneously the best song a artist/band puts out in a year AND somehow not present on their major album drop.  Bon Iver, Radiohead and The National are all guilty of this.

Just to round this out I'm going to include a couple singles that were standouts--even if they were on the greater album.  Sometimes there is a single good song on an album smothered in mediocrity.  Sometimes, a single song is the only redeeming quality a 30 minute tour-de-suck has.  Sometimes major labels make albums for one or two singles--they make their money  and artists are left with 8 other songs and probably 28 minutes of CD space to fill as they please.  This leads to some great singles and some awful albums.  It's a trade off, really.  Sometimes you bet the teddy bear, and sometimes it pets you.

The True Singles--Major Label/Mainstream:
The Beastie Boys, Make Some Noise
Maroon 5, Moves Like Jagger  (DON'T YOU JUDGE ME!)
Death Cab for Cutie, You Are a Tourist

So let's discuss these.  The Beastie Boys are return with a pretty good album--not 90's Beastie Boys good, but, certainly better than, To the 5 Boroughs.  Make Some Noise is probably their best single in about a decade--and for a band that has dropped a laundry basket full of killer singles (Intergallactic, Sabatoge, Pass the Mic, So Whatcha' Want, Sure Shot, Root Down, Don't Stop) it's good to hear them back in action and doing what they do.  The 1-2-3, 2-3-1, 3-1-2 flow they're known for is in full effect and it's tight.  Yeah, they're older and yeah they sound like they're just having a good time rather than trying to "bring it", but...  okay? I'm cool with that.

Moves Like Jagger...  Look, it's catchy as shit and it's everywhere.  If this get stuck in your head, you're screwed, so, you might as well enjoy it.  And, let's face it, Jagger has some moves.

Hey, do you like droning , meandering albums full of self-felating piano experimentation and high production values?  You do?!  Then boy have I got an album for you!  Two Death Cabs, One Cutie!  I keed, i keed.

Death Cab's latest effort just didn't do it for me.  I have a well known anti-Ben Gibbard personal bias, but I'm a fan of a great deal of his music.  This album was a pass for me, though.  It just didn't grab me--the whole thing sounded like some musically inclined super-fan wrote a bunch of Death Cab songs based on their early catalog and then tricked them into recording it.  The album is redeemed only by the production values, but even they can't make this anything other than a mediocre pass. You Are a Tourist, is probably the most engaging song on the album and worth the .99 cents I paid for it.  I can't imagine shelling out 10 clams for this.  


The True Single-- Label Inset, Indie:
AgesandAges, No Nostalgia
The Naked and the Famous, Young Blood
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Belong

AgesandAges' No Nostalgia is a sweeping, open song that sounds like a road-trip. I can't think of a better way to describe it.  It feels like the song you put on as your friends all climb into the car and you set out with a full trunk and everyone telling ridiculous stories.  AgesandAges has this raucous, live feeling to their music--which is likely because they recorded a lot of the album live and unmixed with multiple people singing into the same microphone.  It gives it an energy that many similarly styled albums have been missing-- Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes being a great example of what I'm talking about.  The harmonies are gorgeous and almost choral given seven or eight people singing at any given time.  It is another entry into the Folk+ genre--this time, Folk + Jam.  They're young and good and I can also recommend their album, but, start here.  Toss it on in the car, roll down the windows and start a sing along.  I expect really big from them in the future and while I'm uncertain about their future fortunes or mainstream appeal, they should be making great music for many years to come.

Young Blood, by The Naked and The Famous, is  completely different from AgesandAges.  High production values, no folk influence at all, and a sick house beat with a killer hook, Young Blood is a great song and one that I have listened to many... many...  times.  I have this issue where when I find a good song I will put it on repeat--not the album, the song.  It drove my roommate in college nuts and it currently drives my wife batty.  This song just lodges in your brain and demands that you play it.  Repeatedly.  Until you want to gouge your ears out.

It is magical if you listen with headphones, as the mixing is encapsulating.  The rest of the album is okay, but ultimately not on the same level as this cut.

The Pains of Being Pure At Heart are this year's winner of the 30 Odd Feet of Grunts' Worst Band Name Memorial Award.  Is there a more emo, whiny whiny boo-hoo, i-wish-i-was-grass-because-then-i-could-cut-myself-and-people-would-notice band name?  I mean, really?  This whole album loses a lot just due to the name on the cover.  Awful band name aside, this is a good song.  A very good song, actually.  It has a very Temper Trap meets Silversun Pickups feel--big wall of sound, overdrive pedals in all their glory, soft, vaguely feminine vocals when a man is singing, the whole shopping cart.  It's catchy and worth listening.


The Singles that Should Have Been on the Album
Bon Iver, I Can't Make You Love Me
Radiohead, Staircase
The National, Exile Vilify


Here are three songs that are, without question, the best song that each artist put out this year--and Bon Iver's self-titled second full length album is really, really good.  (We'll get to that later).  We've already discussed Radiohead's latest effort and found it wanting.

Yes, i know, technically, that High Violet, which is The National's latest album, was released in May 2010, but, this song was written at the time and didn't make the cut, so it counts.  There is no foot fault.  We are not over the line.  Mark it a strike.

Exile Vilify was released as part of the soundtrack to the game Portal 2.  I cannot begrudge the game a song of this caliber--frankly, the song and the game sync up perfectly and work to illicit some solid emotion responses from viewers/listeners.  That being said, Why the hell wasn't this song on High Violet?!  It is perfect--and I mean, 100% could not be better, it is at the absolute top of my all time favorite songs list.  It is sweeping and simple.  It is emotional and strained with a huge soundscape and Matt Berninger's baritone.  The production values are top notch and it mixes modern rock instrumentation with a strings section while a piano hook drives this song deep into the, I must listen to this song on repeat, part of your brain.  Just get this song.  This is a song where great headphones or speakers really shine--the timbre and resonance you get from a solid pair of Sennheiser's add's another layer to an already dense song.

If The National is just going to drop singles like this for games, then, fine, whatever--i guess their albums are filler in between incredible stand-alones?

Radiohead is no stranger to a weird release cycle--they announced The King of Limbs about 2 seconds before it was released--but Staircase is a bit of a departure for them.  Part of a two track release (paired with, The Daily Mail) Staircase is better than the sum of the King of Limbs--and the thing is, they know it.  When they were on SNL earlier this year promoting TKoL, they played Lotus Flower (the first single from the album) and they played Staircase.  So, to summarize, they had a big audience to play two songs for in order to boost sales, and instead of choosing two from the album they were promoting, they played one song from the album and another from a side release.

Finally, and most fantastically, BonnieVer Bon Iver covered the Bonnie Raitt classic, I Can't Make You Love Me.  Even though Bonnie Raitt didn't, in fact, write the song, I think everyone will always associate it with her as it was written for her to sing and she was the first one to do it.  Aside from the heartbreaking rendition of what is, arguably, one of the saddest songs written in the last half century, it feels like the authoritative version of the song, which is...  surprising.

You have, no doubt, heard the Jeff Buckley cover of Hallelujah, which was originally penned by Leonard Cohen.  It has been covered ad-naseum, with few improvements.  Cohen originally recorded it, and it is a serviceable rendition, but Buckleys' is the best.  Rufus Wainright's version is is up there as well (sadly, his version is held back by his nasality and desire to sing through his nostrils).  Anyway, Cohen, the original artist and author of the song, might have been the first, but when i think of Hallelujah, I will forever recall Jeff Buckley's moving magnum opus instead.

That is where I'm at with Bon Iver's stripped down, piano-solo version.

Just Vernon's falsetto drips with emotion and plays and he alternates between his standard high pitches and his more rarely used lower registers.  It is music to listen to while you stare off into space, contemplate your life or regret losses and loves.

The one detractor on the song is a bit of a recording mishap--he reds out at one point and you can hear it on higher end recordings.  For a song--and an artist of his caliber and recording studio access--this is just unacceptable.  You can hear his intake of breath at the start of the song and the 3 minutes later the mic is capping out?  The sound engineer should be embarrassed.

Single recording error aside, this song is a masterwork--and it is a b-side to the first single.

As the band toured late night shows and played a song or two, he played this song roughly half the time.  The song he used to sell his album was a song that was absent from his album!  Double-you.  Tee.  Eff.

On the one hand, this trend slays me--why withhold your best song from the full album release?  Wouldn't you rather drive people to spend the 10 bucks to buy your full album instead of ensuring they buy a single, .99 song?  They aren't even off-cycle releases--all of these songs were either written with the album or recorded nearly immediately after the album went to press--and we aren't talking about artists who record an album and then sit on it for 6 months to create anticipation.

I'm sure there's some reason but for the life of me I cannot figure it out and it is annoying.

Part 3 Upcoming: Good Albums.

A Funny

I has one.

One of Blogger's nice features is that you can see who is viewing your website--where they log in from, their browser, how they got here, etc.  Apparently MusicalJunta gets big hits off the Google search: "Calm down i know what i'm doing."

If this does not perfectly describe me, as a person, I'm not sure what does.

Thank you, Internet, for understanding me.

Best of 2011 -- Pt. 1

Well, since I failed to post at all in 2011, I figured it would be good to maybe post up what I've been listening to and what I think the best albums of the year were. This isn't terribly scientific but, the methodology for generating this list is pretty straightfoward: how did i rate the song in iTunes and do i still listen to it. Frankly, i think those are the two important factors there--at the time when is started listening to the song, what did i think of it (the iTunes rating), and then, months later, do i still listen to it/think it's a good song.

Three major themes emerged in 2011 in music: Brand New Retro, mainstream folk and saving your best song for a non-album release. Throwback sounds executed well and generated by artists and not labels has become a thing. Fitz & The Tantrums, Rome and a couple other artists catapulted into the mainstream this year, giving us sounds from yesteryear with lyrics, hooks and beats from today. Adele and Amy Winehouse pushed the BNR musicianship mainstream, and now, with the door open, other artists are entering the space. If this trend holds, we're a couple years away from some spectacular throwback sounds.

Folk, in the words of a record executive, is business code for, Music that doesn't make money. Mainstream Folk is perhaps proving that wrong, though, and enjoying some much deserved time in the big boy pool. Iron & Wine, long a college radio favorite, started pushing folk into the hearts and minds of people close to a decade ago. Big Bearded Sam Beam (AKA Iron & Wine) came out in 2002 with, The Creek Drank the Cradle, and it was magical. Soft, lo-fi, raw and emotionally true, it was a hard rejection of everything that was mainstream. Fast forward 9 years and now Iron and Wine's new album, Kiss Each Other Clear was a truly forgettable album--for me. I don't need phat beatz in my folk. Sorry, I just don't. Cue The Civil Wars (who are hard folk), The Dodo's (who are folk-influenced), Alexander (folk+) and Bon Iver (who are a weird combo of folk and 80's synth-keytar). To see how far folk has gone, do yourself a favor and google, gangsta-grass. (If you watch Justified, you know this type of music). We'll get into these albums below, but, it was a good year for folk.

Finally, musicians opted to withhold the best song they wrote or recorded from their major album release and instead chose to release it as a solo, a b-side or as part of a video game soundtrack. Let's address this trend in a forthright, objective and adult manner: Fuck that. If you've got a song that's that good, you need to put it out on your major album release. If you

don't realize that, the people around you need to--and they need to tell you that. If the people around you don't realize that it is the best song you'll put out all year, you need to get different people. I'm available to help.

In, maybe, a slightly particular order:

Radiohead, The King of Limbs It's a Radiohead album in the vein of their last couple. It's... good? Bloom, Morning Mr. Magpie, Little by Little, Feral, Lotus Flower and Codex are all good songs but nothing is great. For a good time, check out videos where someone puts new music over the video for Lotus Flower. My personal favorite it Welcome to the Jungle. Sadly, the best song that Radiohead put out this was, Staircase, off of, The Daily Mail & Staircase.

Putting out great songs that are not on the album you dropped in the year is a theme for 2011. We'll have more entrants into this category.

The Airborne Toxic Event, All At Once If you dig pop, and kind of, twangy, emo pop, you'll probably dig this album. Changing, It Doesn't Mean a Thing, All I Ever Wanted are all good songs that wont win musical awards, but will leave your foot tapping.

Alexander, Alexander

Alexander Ebert, the aforementioned Alexander, is the lead singer for Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeroes, which begs the question: Is Edward Sharpe Alexander Ebert's alter ego (a la Ziggy Stardust) or is Alexander Ebert Edward Sharpe's alter ego. Also, i think i just set the record for the number of names in a sentence that doesn't use a list AND I set the record for the most instances of the named Alexander in a sentence. That's the hard hitting analysis you've been missing, i know.

So here's the thing about Alex, if i may call him that: he took the okay parts of Eddy S. & The Ferrously Attractive Ingots, and left the best parts behind. There are fewer duets. There's less energy. It's got some fun AfroBeat in it, but it's also got some utterly unfocused schlok. It's good, but, this album could have been great. Awake My Body, Truth, and Bad Bad Love, are all fantastic songs. They would be better with Eddy's energy. But, really, they would be better with a producer who said, no, who called his bs and who said, let's stop straying into every genre put out in the last 30 years, and let's try and create a single, cohesive sound that might borrow from an eclectic swath of musical history, but that still finds and keeps a unified identity.

It is rather the same issue the ES&M0 suffers from.

Also, it makes me ask what the hell he's doing making a solo album after the debut album had such buzz and their live show was so great. Go be the positive ion to the iron lump's negatives, Alex. Go make knees bounce and heads bob and fingers uncontrollably drum on cubicle desks.

Fitz & the Tantrums, Pickin' Up the Pieces Get this album. It is Motown. It is new. It is catchy. It is hummable. It is everything you want out of an album--it's 5 bucks on Amazon.

Fitz and the Tantrums is part of the whole, Brand New Retro,

movement going on in music right now. People and music labels, for once, seemed to realize something at the same time: there's great old music styles, even if there aren't that many great old musicians left-- I love Aretha, Patti, Tony Bennet, etc, but you can't tell me they still have the pipes or the drive they used to have. Cue fans, and, suddenly, we've got Amy Winhouse, we've got Michael Buble, we've got Bruno Mars' asinine pompadour--and now we have Fitz & The Tantrums. Aside from an awesome name, their music is incredibly well put together and sounds both modern and retro-- Brand. New. Retro. It is an engrossing album that has a lot of replayability. It is also something you can put on when your parents are around that will actually make them sit up and listen and say, Wait... when was this recorded??

Rome, Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi, Featuring Jack White & Nora Jones A throwback to 60's jazz and movie soundtracks from yesteryear, it has all the catchiness of Danger Mouse, the oozey Italian sex appeal that Fellini created and Luppi re-creates, and some of Jack White's best work to date. Nora Jones is a natural fit here and it just works for her to have a producer that says, Yes, No, Stop, Go. The whole album is good, but there are a few standouts, notably, The Rose with the Broken Neck, The Matador Has Fallen, and Her Hollow Ways. It is great reading music, and great house-cleaning music as well. Relaxed, but fun and with enough energy that you're not going to nod off. Also, typically can be found on Amazon for about 5 bucks.

The Big Roar, The Joy Formidable

They're Welsh. I'm Welsh. They're a solid "rock" band (if such a plain genre determinant can still be used) and I enjoy solid "rock" albums. They mix vocals and create harmonies with killer baselines and enough overdrive effects to choke a donkey. Their live set is super energetic and chest thumping. Eight of the twelve tracks on the album have a 4 or 5 star rating in iTunes. That is a stone cold lead pipe lock of an album. I Don't Want to See You Like This, Austere, A Heavy Abacus, Whirring, Buoy, Cradle, The Greatest Light is the Greatest Shade, The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie, are all great songs. The Greatest Light... is probably my favorite, with the intro and outro and overall oomph of the track, but, hey, they're all good. If you're lucky enough to have heard them on the radio you've likely heard, Whirring. Good song, but they radio edit cuts out the drum-solo-jamboree. It is worth listening.

The King is Dead, The Decembrists This is a Decembrists album. If you like them, it is good. If you don't, it is bad. They continue to put out great folk-influenced country rock sung by a guy with a nasal voice and backed by a non-nasally woman. They will shortly put out a live version of the album--or maybe already have. They will then go back into the studio, rinse and repeat.

I'm unfairly poo-poo'ing this album because they don't change--which is good and bad. The Decembrist are you favorite local bar: reliable, fun but not hip, reasonably priced and full of skanks. Wait, no, strike that last part. You know what you're gonna get when you buy a Decembrists album, and that's exemplary, because sometimes you hear an album by someone you've previously liked and wondered what the hell happened. Other times, though, you want to go to the new place with the 100 different beers on tap or that bourbon bar or whatever--and the Decembrists will let you go there and be waiting for you when you want some solid, reliable music. Anyway, good if you like them, bad if you don't.

Part 2 coming soon... Maybe even before 2013!!!