solace

i LOVED Marry Me, but other than 3-4 songs, don't like Actor nearly as much (as evidenced by it's lack of mention in my EOY list) Actor is certainly more impressive/ambitious musically, but the songs & melody from Marry Me just aren't quite there. Marrow is a barnburner tho

considering my favorite album of 2009 is Face Control by Handsome Furs that came out in March but leaked the first week of January... i first heard The Antlers album in February as well, it's held up insanely well for me.

lmao @ that review/post... wow anywho, the album is very solid (wound up in my top 20 on the year) and i loved the HELL out of them live 2 weeks go. they're not much to look at/watch live, but they recreate the album very well and it's hard not to be sucked in.

i sure hope you're not right on that one!

they just released that performance this week too!

it's actually not too bad!

sadly their old drummer left... he was f'n stunning to watch live: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOdtcUHLpyk now they have a drummer and percussionist/keys/synths guy that still don't quite do as much as their old drummer did.

Yeasayer... damn. super hard to pin down. electronic + world beats + super poppy choruses? i definitely hear some Peter Gabriel influence in a lot of their stuff (first album moreso) i didn't LOVE their debut record, All Hour Cymbals, but 2080 was my favorite song of 2007 and i saw them like 7 or 8x in the last year and a half. def one of my newer favorite live acts. here's 2080: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2A_Juv213s and the first single off the new one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w-LmPa3h88 (the uncensored version is pretty f'd up)

terrible artwork... but damn this is every bit as great as i'd hoped and then some edit: holy shit the 80's influence on this is insane (track 5, ONE, in particular)

just use this one next time:

it's certainly not a record i would have expected to love so much... as i was so-so on Plague Park (it eventually grew on me a lot), but at the end of the day, the album from 2009 that gets me the most excited and amped up and that I enjoy most all the way through is def that one. doesn't hurt that Dan Boeckner has the quintessential rock voice for me either.

no prob! was just mostly a heads up for those who haven't tracked it down yet, that a good rip is probably eminent and worth a week or two wait.

gotcha. cuz i was like... i can certainly recommend you worse albums than those two to hear

funny thing about the latest Dylan... i enjoyed it quite a bit at first (as i'm sure i probably said somewhere on here), but i had little to no desire to revisit it at the end of this year, thus why it didn't get a mention from me. as for WTA, i don't hate it, but obviously i didn't care for it enough to mention it either... in fact i forgot it even came out in 2009 but if those 2 are truly your least favorite albums, curious how many records you heard??

it's a f'n great record, but i honestly i only LOVE 3 songs on Keep It Hid (but 2 of those are some of my fave songs of the year), and i know some people like it more than most Keys records, but for me i just don't enjoy it quite as much. it didn't help that it came after my favorite Keys album to date either. now the live show for the record... WAY better than any Keys show i've seen as for Isbell... i dig it a lot too. not as much as the debut, but that one wasn't super high on my list that year either. i feel like while he's put out 2 very solid records, he can still do way better (as

yeah, all the ones i've seen that have leaked have been 320kbps transcodes of the webrip (with the skip/blip at the beginning of Norway), thus why they keep getting deleted from what.cd, etc. compare the leaked version of Norway to an uncompressed wav of the song: http://www.beachhousebaltimore.com/beachhouse-freedownloads/Norway.WAV no blip at the beginning and it sounds a lot cleaner and more full.

exactly... huge difference

as final as it's probably ever going to be (i'm sure i'll discover some album in a month or two from this year that i love, always happens, oh well) i think the most surprising thing is, if you'd told me last January that some of my fave artists (mostly Andrew Bird, M. Ward, Neko Case, Wilco, Doves, Thermals, etc., and to a lesser extent Avett Bros.) new albums from 2009 wouldn't be in my top 40-50 at the end of the year, i wouldn't have believed you. Handsome Furs - Face Control Megafaun - Gather, Form, & Fly The Antlers - Hospice Why? - Eskimo Snow Akron/Family - Set 'em Wild, S

sorry, i forget how light it can be on some monitors. the rips that heave leaked so far are kind of crappy, fwiw. it's worth waiting to hear a good version (album is out in a month, shouldn't be long)

i thought Dhani Harrison basically confirmed that in an interview? i recall him saying that they had to teach him the song during soundcheck and they just told him to "go off" on the solo during the actual performance and do his thing. it's not one of the Beatles best known tunes (granted you'd hope Prince has heard all of The White Album...), so if he was never that well versed in The Beatles, it's certainly plausible. i'd say the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle... in that he'd heard the song before, maybe not in a long time, but just didn't know how it went on guitar exactly.

can't. stop. listening.

The Decemberists annoy me SO much these days it's not even funny.

what's Wilco?

edit: ok, that was a lot easier than i thought. that'll do for now i suppose