cloudsofhiss

Roughly in order: Titus Andronicus - The Monitor Sleigh Bells - Treats Kurt Vile - Square Shells No Age - Everything in Between The New Pornographers - Together Warpaint - The Fool Corin Tucker Band - 1,000 Years A little bit of a disappointing year for me, a lot of the bands I usually really enjoy put out albums I found a little forgettable. (National, BSS, She & Him, Spoon, Thermals, Tift Merritt, Arcade Fire)

Pleasant and sappy without making me cringe, I like it.

Arcade Fire - Funeral Andrew Bird - The Mysterious Production of Eggs Fiery Furnaces - Blueberry Boat The National - Boxer Panda Bear - Person Pitch Sigur Ros - () Sleater-Kinney - The Woods Snow Patrol - Eyes Open Sonic Youth - Murray Street The Strokes - Is This It Tom Waits - Orphans The White Stripes - Elephant Wilco - YHF Wrens - The Meadowlands Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Fever to Tell

Entertaining. He talks about the insularity of blog/indie world, but I'm not sure where he's coming from. Rolling Stone (can you get more traditional than this?) gave the new U2 and new Bruce Springsteen ablums 5's. The new Dirty Projectors album gets a 3. RS isn't exactly challenging their readers to seek out new stuff are they?

I've given it a couple listens so far. Two Weeks and While You Wait For Others are both great, but I'm finding that when You Wait comes on I can't really remember anything about the songs that played since Two Weeks.

ArsTechnica has some good guides, for choosing the set of components for a build: http://arstechnica.com/hardware/guides/2009/04/ars-technica-system-guide-april-2009-edition.ars It gives you a good list of pieces you can to start from.

I know for me, a lot of how I listen to music is in relating it to events/times in my own life. I can't tell the difference between a song in 5/4 or 4/4 time while listening, and a review that analyzes the technical aspects of an album probably won't help me. I don't care what he had for breakfast, but there is some sort of middle ground in there somewhere. Growing up in the grunge era saved me from some of the most embarrassing first albums, but my first was probably a Cranberries cassette. Before I was old enough to start listening to my own music, I think my favorite was Randy Travis,

Yes?

Of the six "Best New Music" albums on the pitchfork frontpage, none are in the iTunes or Amazon MP3 top 25 selling albums. Their commercial influence is limited to a small and pretty insular group of people.

I don't feel like they've turned on Wilco. It seems like they still have Wilco related news stories quite frequently. I would guess that many of their writers are still Wilco fans. There is a lot of pandering to what's "cool", but I still get the impression when reading the site that most of them still have a genuine love of music. Cokemachineglow.com for example is a music site I used to read, but over the last year or so it seems like they devolved into rating anything anyone else likes poorly, and only liking what's too obscure and cool for anyone else to like. Pretty good article

Pitchfork is just a website... Their album ratings are pretty consistent in terms of what they rate well or rate poorly. YHF overlapped pretty well with what they typically like, SBS did not. If the new album contains the sort of things they value, it will score well, if it doesn't it won't. If their tastes don't overlap with yours, calm down and read some other music site.

For me, Sister is the high point of their older stuff, and Murray Street the high point of their newer stuff. My first SY album was Washing Machine when it came out in 96ish and liked it. I tried Daydream Nation next as it was usually recommended as being their best, and it didn't really work for me at all. It's one of my favorites now, but it might not be the best starting point.

Five Cornered Drone I Heard You Looking Flying Lesson The Summer Pablo and Andrea and because five isn't enough: The Story of Yo La Tango