Pretty Goes with Pretty

My Listening Year: My Favorite Albums of the Year

My priorities this year were so far from keeping up with new releases that I've totally failed at coming up with a respectable best-of list—one comprised of actual 2009 releases, that is. I probably could have come up with eight or ten new albums I heard this year that I liked, or that were solid (see last week's post for recommendations of that nature.) But I can't bring myself to make that kind of list. This is something I went on about last year, but my simple stance is that an end-of-year list should be as long as the quality of records dictates it should be. So, if I were to do a list that only included 09 albums, I'd have a top two, maybe a top three. That seemed insufficient as far as a worthwhile blog post goes. So this year I'll dispense with the 09 list and the rundown of favorite old stuff and just jump straight to my own personal favorite acquisitions of the year. I've neglected to include mp3s this time around because all of these acts are going to show up in my playlist post tomorrow (75 songs!). If you're especially eager to hear any of these bands, however, I encourage you to click on the categories at the end of this post; somewhere or other on this blog I have done mp3s for all of these before.

Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion
Merriweather Post Pavilion is such a transcendent success because it works on the two most essential levels: one, it's a riveting album if for no other reason than its sound—the samples, the harmonies, the songs' cohesiveness, all adding up to something greater than the sum. But two, it's also just a straight-up jam. It's just a fucking fun record to play! "My Girls," "Summertime Clothes," "Brothersport" (especially the big instrumental ravey moment toward the end)... these songs appeal to the head-nodder, the car-dancer, the occasional funky boss that I am. Avey Tare and Panda Bear's voices blend with each other and with the music itself, creating a kind of sonic morass with a shining pop core—it's like the aural equivalent of looking at a searchlight in deep fog: ominous yet comforting. MPP weaves its thread through foreboding numbers like "Almost Frightened," through romantic sentiments like "Bluish," through flirtations with the abstract in "Daily Routine," yet remains compelling and, again, simply pleasurable, throughout. At this point I'm exhausted by talking about this band at all—praising them, defending them, parsing them, dissecting them. Then again this album isn't really for talking about—at its core, no classic album is. It's just for putting on and feeling in your gut that it's incredible.

Faust: Faust IV
Did I really only pick this album up this year? I guess I did—I bought it right around Christmas 2008. But man, it feels like I've known this album forever. I prefer that lie; otherwise I'd have to feel the ache of knowing that I'd made it to my third decade without this in my life. (Confidential to all Animal Collective fans: I've said this before but will reiterate that I find Faust to be a kind of spiritual ancestor to AC—they have a similar blend of seriousness and playfulness, of accessibility and experimentation, of genre jumping and genre defining. You owe it to yourself to dig up at least one of AC's roots by getting this album.)

Dr. Dog: Fate
Wait: Fate was on my 2008 list! I know. It was my fifth favorite album of last year. But it deserves a second shout-out because I think I wound up listening to it more this year than last. If I were to remake last year's list, this would be #1. Unlike the top two on the present list there is nothing remotely experimental about Fate; it happily, confidently blends an adoration for the Band and other classic rock acts, all of whom you've heard of before. The album is also structured like a conversation, with main songwriters Toby Leaman and Scott McMicken trading tunes back and forth, each grappling with themes of religion, free will, and yes, fate. By the end of the album you almost feel like they might have even reached a healthy conclusion. Fate is a smart, compelling album—and it's become an essential part of any road trip or pick-me-up playlist.

Neko Case: Middle Cyclone
Neko Case made the best record of her career. It can be hard to settle in with—most of the tracks on Middle Cyclone are aching ballads, and it can feel monotonous during the first few times through—but once the record clicks, those aches are your aches. As with the Dr. Dog record, Middle Cyclone mostly sinks its teeth into a lyrical theme—bad romance—in which each song adds a level of depth to all of the others. You hurt for the woman in "Pharoahs" in part because you already felt for the narrator of "Middle Cyclone." You worry for the person behind "This Tornado Loves You" after you meet the protagonist of "The Next Time You Say Forever." And so on. It's not all like this: "Prison Girls" is some hot noir; "Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth" is just a powerhouse (and a little nuts); and I'm not going to say no to a Harry Nilsson cover ("Don't Forget Me"). Neko Case made the best record of her career—did I say that already?

The Byrds: Ballad of Easy Rider
Dillard & Clark: The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark
These two albums came out in the same year, 1969, and they make a good pair. Easy Rider is the second Byrds album to feature Roger McGuinn and a bunch of guys who weren't original members (and it's also an excellent country record that is as good as Sweetheart of the Rodeo, maybe better). Fantastic Expedition, meanwhile, features three ex-Byrds in Gene Clark, Chris Hillman, and Michael Clarke (and is also an excellent country record that is as good as Sweetheart of the Rodeo, maybe better).

Animal Collective: Sung Tongs
What can I say? This one was new to me this year. (Richard, after so many conversations in my comments about the merits of Sung Tongs, I hope you feel vindicated that this album has risen in my esteem with every passing month.) Yeah, I still like MPP more, but the allure of this record is so different it's difficult to compare. MPP is immediate; the melodies of Sung Tongs burrow. The rhythms of Sung Tongs waft past you if you let them, but they're not aimless. (And to my surprise it was produced by a kid I knew in high school!)

The Feelies: Crazy Rhythms
See last week. I still love it.

Tomorrow: 75 songs. Portrait of a listening year.

My Listening Hours: October–December

It's been a slow three months for new-to-me music consumption, capping what feels like a low-consumption year. I'll have a little more on my personal year in review soon, but in the meantime I thought I'd wrap up my quarterly MLH post so as not to obscure these eight albums amidst a longer list.

In a year where I didn't spend a whole lot of time keeping up with the newest releases, I tried my best to catch up on at least a few 09 albums I'd been meaning to get. The good news is that most of these records delivered! More or less! If I were giving letter grades, most here would receive a B or B+. I'm going to dispense with the week-long MLH post this time around since I have more year-in-review posts in the works. Without further ado, here's the rundown, in the order they were acquired:

The Feelies: Crazy Rhythms
Earlier this year I fell into a small Galaxie 500 hole, re-buying both Today and On Fire, reminding myself how great that band is after many, many years of forgetting about them. As part of that revival I bought and devoured Dean Wareham's memoir, Black Postcards, in which he spent a lot of time waxing on the Feelies as a big influence on him in his teen and college years. In a nice confluence of events, the Feelies catalogue was reissued at the exact same time, so I took it as the sign that I should finally put these guys at the top of my priority list. Glad I did.

Like Galaxie 500's albums, it takes a number of listens before the songs on Crazy Rhythms begin to differentiate themselves from one another. Each track features an airtight rhythm section and the same kind of raw unadorned guitar tone that was favored by many other late-70s bands. It reminds me of a less dancey Talking Heads or less syncopated Devo—it's hard not to think of Devo's "Satisfaction" when hearing the Feelies' "Everybody's Got Something to Hide (Except for Me and My Monkey)." A further distinction from those two bands might be that Glenn Mercer's vocals are far less dynamic than David Byrne or Mark Mothersbaugh. No matter: the songs on Crazy Rhythms are so hypnotic—yet so fun—that a manic vocalist might just get in the way.

• The Feelies: Everybody's Got Something to Hide (Except for Me and My Monkey)

John Vanderslice: Romanian Names
I met John Vanderslice a long time ago, back when his first album, Time Travel is Lonely, came out. At the time I booked shows in Arizona. He was a nice guy, the album was great, and the show was great! Yet, eight years later, I never really did keep up with his output (though I'd heard raves from a few different quarters). On the recommendation of Rawkblog I checked out "Too Much Time," a melancholy bit of electroni-pop that has since become one of my favorite songs of the year. Though the electronics crop up here and there on Romanian Names, for the most part the rest of the album is much more guitar-oriented; the first half of the record is full of great indie pop—"Fetal Horses," and "D.I.A.L.O.," for instance. Moving into the second half things start to slow down, delving into more atmospheric and fragmented material. I appreciate the move into a different territory, though it never quite gets me in the gut. At any rate the album is solid overall. And I must admit a strange affinity to "Fetal Horses" after many weeks of feeling baby pgwp doing somersaults in my brilliant wife's belly. If it's true that fetal horses gallop in the womb, let's all be glad baby boys just kick a little.

• John Vanderslice: Fetal Horses

Phoenix: Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
Who expected Phoenix to make the best album of their career this year? Not me. It's not a perfect album—a few of the tracks on the second half feel a little too similar to "Lisztomenia" and "1901," as if the band decided to just start over on side two—but for those two singles and the apex that is the two-part "Love Like a Sunset," Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix has been a great antidote to my recent listening slump. It's actually that latter track, the mostly instrumental centerpiece to the album, that has become the highlight for me. It spins WAP into a different place—somewhere more expansive, less pop-oriented. In fact, its epic quality is what sabotages the album's second half. When the band starts up again with "Lasso," featuring a vocal melody we've already heard a couple times in the first part of the record, you start to wonder if Phoenix only has two tricks up their sleeves and "Sunset" was just a fortunate case of lightning in a bottle. I like all the songs on the second half of the record, it's just that I want them to deliver more. The band hints at an escalation but then fails to escalate.

• Phoenix: Love Like a Sunset

Kings of Convenience: Declaration of Dependence
If I have to wait five years for every Kings of Convenience album, only to discover with each release that the duo basically refuses to develop their sound beyond that of their debut, 1999's Quiet is the New Loud... well, that's actually totally okay with me. With their third record, Kings of Convenience have turned in something about as surprising as Thanksgiving dinner. And I don't really have a problem with that; I'll take Erland Oye and Eirik Glambek Boe's eerily similar harmonizing voices and simply strummed acoustic guitars about as readily as I'll take a turkey breast and mashed potatoes. The first half of Declaration in particular—"Mrs. Cold," "Me in You," "Boat Behind"—is as good as the best material on either of their other albums. As of now I still find myself distracted by the time I get to the album's second half; the songs get quieter, darker, and a little less distinct. But the first half is so enjoyable that I continue to return to the record in hopes that the later songs' pleasures will reveal themselves in time.

(I'll be the first to note the vaguely positive reaction to this record vs the vaguely negative reaction to Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, despite that I feel both records have incredibly strong first halves and somewhat indistinct second halves... I think it comes back to that idea of "hinting at escalation"; Phoenix points toward a more varied record and then backs away, while the Kings of Convenience rather staunchly remain in a single musical domain. Heck, you might even say they spell it out in their album title.)

• Kings of Convenience: Boat Behind

The Fiery Furnaces: I'm Going Away
Had I segmented this quarter's haul into my usual best/rest categories, I'm Going Away might have been the only record to wind up on the "rest" side of things. There are other records here that are more predictable than the Fiery Furnaces' latest, but that's not the same as saying they're more disappointing. I give this band a lot of credit for refusing to stagnate, to constantly needle their audience; but with their premeditated irritation comes the risk that fans (or I, at least) won't always want to stay on board. Widow City, their last album and my first exposure them, is one of my favorite albums of recent years—it's confrontational, idiosyncratic, funny, and smart. I'm Going Away is all of those things as well, just less fun to listen to. The new record depends more on piano, less on guitar; more on blues progressions, less on the proggy compositions that fired up so much of Widow City. That's not to say I'm Going Away is without its merits—songs like "Even in the Rain" still burrow into my head whether I want them to or not—it's just not, overall, quite the flavor I was hoping to taste. 

Dillard & Clark: The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark
After a couple false starts with getting into Gene Clark's solo material, I've finally hit upon the excellence I knew he was capable of. For his first of two collaborations with Doug Dillard, Clark hit on a modest but wonderful country/rock hybrid. There is something almost ego-less about the material here; the songs are simply good, aspiring to nothing more or less pure than that goal. Opener "Out on the Side" is one of the best songs Clark has ever written; his lead vocal aches while the backing harmonies, supplied by Dillard and former Byrd bandmate Chris Hillman, buoy the song beautifully. Those same harmonies—they're not as otherworldly as David Crosby's contributions to the Byrds, nor as steady as the Gosdin Brothers' contributions to Clark's first solo effort—lift many of the other tracks, like the gospel of "Git it on Brother" or the skillful "Train Leaves Here This Morning" and "With Care from Someone." Fantastic Expedition is just that—a fantastic expedition—and belongs in any collection that already includes records like The Notorious Byrd Brothers, The Gilded Palace of Sin, or American Beauty.

• Dillard & Clark: Out on the Side

Animal Collective: Fall Be Kind
Between Merriweather Post Pavilion—my favorite album of the year—and Sung Tongs, which was new to me this year, 2009 could be characterized as my year of Animal Collective (if it weren't already my year of Slint). It's fitting that one of the last new releases I'll pick up this year is this EP—sort of a little bow to tie it all up. And that's really how I perceive Fall Be Kind: not the latest statement from the almighty Animal Collective, but a nice capper, a stocking stuffer. The EP holds together as a cohesive, twenty-something-minute piece. It's spacier, less rhythmic than MPP, yet less playful than something like Sung Tongs and less meandering than parts of Feels. Have I placed it on the Animal Collective Map yet? Anyway, you either already have this and hold your own opinions or you could give two shits. I like it.

• Animal Collective: Graze

Tortoise: Beacons of Ancestorship
The very fact of a new Tortoise album this year spurred me to revisit their whole catalogue earlier this year, though I didn't finally get to Beacons of Ancestorship until just a few weeks ago. After being away from Tortoise for most of this decade, it's been nice to welcome them back to rotation. All of their albums stand up to close listening—they're impeccably produced and impeccably played—and they also work well as non-distracting "work" music. That's slightly different from "background music" in that even as a Tortoise album can stay out of your way, it still finds a way to inspire—to subtly, perhaps subconsciously, spur you to concentrate and excel at whatever it is you're doing.

That's a nice way of talking around the quality of Beacons of Ancestorship. At this point I feel about Tortoise approximately the same way I feel about the Kings of Convenience: every few years this group is going to get together and make a record that sounds more or less like the last one. If your expectations are properly adjusted, everything's cool. Ever since solidifying their lineup around the time of TNT, Tortoise has consistently created their trademarked brand of electronica/jazz/film score hybrid. I don't really have any complaint with adding such an album to my collection every few years, so if that's what Tortoise wants to do then that's what I'll take. I can't say there isn't a part of me that wishes they'd take more risks, push themselves as composers and/or improvisers, just be more adventurous. Do people remember or realize that fifteen years ago people talked about Tortoise the way people talk about Animal Collective now? The exuberance—the expectation—that surrounded a Tortoise or Tortoise-related release was pretty fucking high. For whatever reason the group settled into a comfortable place and, starting around the time of Standards, have tempered all of those expectations. It's sort of a bummer, but it also doesn't suck completely. Tortoise have become dependable, for all the good and bad that goes with that word.

• Tortoise: Monument Six One Thousand

This Week's Soundtrack

V/A, Bold Beginnings: An Incomplete Collection of Louisville punk, 1977–1984
R.E.M., New Adventures in Hi-Fi
Dillard & Clark, The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark (6)
Gene Clark, Echoes
Okkervil River, The Stage Names and The Stand Ins
The National, Alligator
Crain, Speed
Papa M, Hole of Burning Alms
Karp, Self Titled LP
Palace Music, Viva Last Blues
Die Kreuzen, s/t
Grizzly Bear, Yellow House
Phoenix, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix and Alphabetical

I bought the Dillard & Clark album while I was in Louisville and basically just drove around all weekend with the album on repeat. I knew I'd find a Gene Clark album that would knock me out! It's wonderful.

• Dillard and Clark: With Care From Someone

My Listening Hours: Rest of July–September

Andrew Bird, Weather Systems
An Andrew Bird album that doesn't fall in the "best" category? It's hard for me to believe too. I bought Weather Systems while in a bit of a listening funk—wanting something new but not wanting anything in particular. So my ambivalent state of mind might have had something to do with my failure to really latch onto the record. Or maybe it's because I've been listening to Bird pretty consistently since early 2007 and that's just a lot of Bird to listen to. Or maybe it's because Weather Systems feel largely like a sketchbook. Bird has claimed that he made this record as a repository for the overflow of ideas he had while making The Mysterious Production of Eggs (which came out one or two years after Weather Systems), which means even when it was released it wasn't the album he was most concerned with. It shows, especially in retrospect, that much of this album might have been released into the world prematurely. Both "I" and "Skin" would turn up again on subsequent albums much more fleshed out ("Imitosis" on Armchair Apocrypha and "Skin Is My" on Eggs). Here they feel unfinished, both in terms of their composition and Bird's lyrics and vocals ("Skin" is instrumental here and "I" finds Bird repeating the same four lines over and over). Though there are a handful of fully completed songs that match up against the best of Bird's other albums ("Lull" and "First Song" especially), others are more ponderous exercises that seem like they'd be fun to play, maybe even fun to see live, but not as compelling to listen to on record. 

• Andrew Bird: Lull

Gene Clark, Echoes
The first Gene Clark solo album I ever bought was No Other, from 1974. It had a few nice spots but for my tastes was a little too bloated, too MOR, and not at all close to his work with the Byrds ten years earlier. Not giving up on Clark's solo material, I told myself I just needed to start from the beginning, with Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers. At least a year has gone by since that decision. I've checked the bin at the record store with some frequency but the album has never been in stock. Then I realized Echoes (available on eMusic) is the first album plus a mini-album's worth of bonus tracks. I downloaded it! Then I found out it's actually not quite the same as the original album; it's a different mix, largely the same as the original but pushing Clark's voice a little further up in the mix so he feels like the leader and not equal to the Godsins. I'm always a little suspicious of people messing with the original versions of albums, and hearing the original mix of "Keep on Pushin'" bears this out. It's a subtle enough difference but the Echoes version is the lesser version. So now I have a hard time listening to Echoes at all because I feel like I'm hearing the wrong album. It is perhaps an overreaction but it's how I feel.

• Gene Clark: Keep On Pushin' (from Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers)
• Gene Clark: Keep On Pushin' (from Echoes)
  

Engineers, Three Fact Fader
I have no idea who Engineers are—where they’re from, whether this is their debut or not, how many people are in the band, etc. Nothing. My wife just brought the album home one day, on loan from a friend. So, with zero expectations going in I can say I enjoy Three Fact Finder. It’s vaguely My Bloody Valentine-y—not as warped or dense but it is hazy and at times ethereal. I hear shoegaze, I hear a little electronica in there, a little modern-day indie. All that is great and it adds up to an album I like putting on and never feel the urge to skip through. That said, four or five listens in and I still only really notice maybe two songs. So Three Fact Finder falls into that dastardly category of “great background music.” I love writing or otherwise working to it; just don’t really feel compelled to listen to it. Recommended with caveat.

• Engineers: Clean Coloured Wire

Joel Alme, A Master of Ceremonies
Purchasing this album was a direct result of my brilliant wife wanting the Ida Maria record. We started talking about the water up there in Sweden, and how those who drink it magically gain the utmost pop songwriting skills. This reminded me that I'd been meaning to hear more from Swede Joel Alme. His song "The Seven Islands," from this album, was one of my favorite songs of 2008, but I'd never gotten around to picking up the full length until recently. While I haven't had the album for too long, I do find that the rest of the record is not as good as that song. Alme's got a bit of a Will Sheff thing going—moany, not much of an indoor voice—which is fine, though at times it makes me just want to listen to Okkervil River. That might be too harsh, too reductive—A Master of Ceremonies is still a good album, still growing on me.

• Joel Alme: In Your Arms

Ida Maria: Fortress 'round My Heart
Due to details too mundane to enumerate, I can only listen to this album in the car, and I'm rarely in the car long enough to hear an album all the way through. It seems to work for Ida Maria, though. This album feels very single-oriented—every song great fun, hanging its hat on each chorus. It doesn't feel to me like an album I'd normally buy, but it is fun. 

• Ida Maria: Oh My God

Wye Oak: The Knot
Once I wrote about this record I pretty much stopped listening to it. It’s not bad—and I like many of the songs when they come up on shuffle—but as I said in my original post, I just get antsy to hear the records The Knot reminds me of rather than The Knot itself (though "Tattoo" is still pretty terrific).

• Wye Oak: Tattoo

This Week's Soundtrack

Don Ho, Greatest Hits
The Byrds, Ballad of Easy Rider (6)
Harry Nilsson, Nilsson Schmilsson
Iron & Wine, Our Endless Numbered Days
The Byrds, Mr. Tambourine Man and Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde
Gene Clark, Echoes
Neil Young, Harvest

Ballad of Easy Rider has really made itself at home in my head, moreso than I initially thought it would. Seems like as soon as I'm done listening to it a few of the songs just linger in my head, nagging me to put it on again and again. Clearly it set me off on a Byrds kick, including spurring me to pick up Gene Clark's Echoes—a combo of his first album, Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers, and some other early recordings. Apparently the mix and the track list of the Gosdin Brothers album is different here from the original, which has me second guessing whether or not this was the version I should have bought. Still, it's good.

• Gene Clark: Echoes

My Listening Hours: The Rest of October–November

The Byrds, Fifth Dimension
I'm not sure why it took me so long to pick up Fifth Dimension. Back when I first realized how much I liked the Byrds I went on a downloading spree, and everything I picked up from this album was excellent—"Mr. Spaceman," "5D," "Hey Joe," and of course "Eight Miles High," arguably (and a great argument it'd be) the best song the band ever did. Unfortunately my expectations were dashed when I finally picked up the album. Turns out this is the most inconsistent of the Byrds albums I've heard (i.e., all the albums prior to Roger McGuinn taking sole ownership of the band). There were a couple of great tracks to be had in addition to those I already owned, especially David Crosby's songwriting debut, "What's Happening," but otherwise Fifth Dimension probably has the largest quantity of questionable tunes—particularly the ghost-of-Hiroshima-narrated "I Stand at Every Door" and the nosediving trio of tunes closing out the album, "Captain Soul," "John Riley," and "The Lear Jet Song."

That this album could have some of the band's best work as well as some its worst is interesting to me. This is the first album without Gene Clark, who was the primary songwriter on the first two releases. For most bands this would have been a bigger blow, but the Byrds' overall sound was too strong.  This goes back to my post from last month, "the song vs. the sound." I was watching a documentary about 60s bands on VH1 Classics the other day and McGuinn explained the Byrds' vocal sound on the first two records: although Clark wrote most of the originals, he and McGuinn would double the lead vocal. Crosby was the only one singing harmony, but he did so in a way that he floated between thirds and fifths, not sticking to one harmonic area as, say, a Beach Boy would. Thus what was essentially a two-part harmony sounded much fuller. It makes sense then that Clark's absence, sonically, is barely noticable on Fifth Dimension, but that 5D is also the weakest of the Byrds albums in terms of songwriting (it's worth noting that "Eight Miles High" is chiefly Clark's song, too—though it's McGuinn who's playing that brilliant guitar solo, which sounds like the aural equivalent of scribbling crayons). On the other hand, since the Byrds had always loaded their albums with covers, most of which were interpreted by McGuinn, they ultimately survived Clark's departure, apparently, without too much trouble. (And on their next album, Younger Than Yesterday, bassist Chris Hillman, who'd been there all along, suddenly blossomed into the best songwriter of the bunch!)

Gene Clark, No Other
As Gene Clark was the first Byrd to go solo, it seems right that his should be the first solo album I check out. Based on a lot of good things said at ILM, I assumed No Other was the place to start. Settling in to hear some post-Byrds folk rock, I was surprised to find that this was more along the lines of bloated 70s MOR rock—full band replete with a bevy of backup singers, meandering seven-minute epics mostly concerned with rivers and ravens; even a near-Vangelis closer. There are a few songs I like—the opener, "Life's Greatest Fool," for instance (the end kinda reminds me of Bowie's backup vocals on Lou Reed's "Satellite of Love")—though most of the album is just average. My error was assuming that this was an early Clark album. In fact he'd done four albums prior to this one—two folky solo albums and two country-influenced albums with Doug Dillard. Based on the strength of his contributions to the Byrds, I'm not done with Clark; I just need start over, in chronological order.

Dennis Wilson, Pacific Ocean Blue
Speaking of 70s MOR... I had a twofer this month. I had a few songs from Dennis Wilson's out-of-print Pacific Ocean Blue lying around my iTunes, but after reading this Popmatters article I sought out the rest. Don't believe the hype: this album isn't bad, but it hardly deserves to be mythologized. It's ambitious, it's not commercially viable, it's by a troubled Wilson lad—the one who died, no less—but it's just not that good. There are some serious bright spots—"River Song" for instance—but POB also suffers from too much navel-gazing, no real hooks, and Wilson's gravelly, often downright shitty voice. It's actually hard to believe that this voice belongs to a Beach Boy. I'm glad I heard the entire album, especially because I do like a handful of the tracks, but there's nothing truly illuminating here.

Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks
What does it say about me that I'm a huge Byrds fan yet I’ve never found my way into Dylan? Something about him—maybe it's his voice, maybe his delivery, maybe the way his cultural importance has been forced on me since I was a child—has kept me from enjoying his work. A few years ago my wife bought Blonde on Blonde and I just couldn’t feel it. Thinking it was time to try again, I picked up Blood on the Tracks. For a few minutes there—“Tangled Up in Blue”! “Idiot Wind”!—I thought I might have finally found my point of entry. Alas, after a few days the urgency calmed down and I haven’t really gone back to digest this album any further. It made a dent—I don’t dislike Dylan—but I’m still not crazy for him.

Fleetwood Mac, Rumors
I want to like Rumors more, but the fact is many of the songs here simply don’t belong to me. “Don’t Stop,” “Go Your Own Way”: these belong to my parents and their generation. They belong to Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. They belong to a bunch of assholes who think they don’t make music like they used to, cluelessly not understanding that a lot of their music sucks. What gets me about Fleetwood Mac though is that they do just enough songs that I like—usually thanks to Lindsey Buckingham. Buckingham is really the saving grace of this band; songs like "Second Hand News" and "Never Going Back Again" are interestingly crafted pop songs. I’m curious to hear the Buckingham/Nicks album that preceded their joining FM, though it’s out of print. And in the comments to yesterday's post I'm told by blckdgrd that Buckingham's post-Mac albums are also worth checking out.

Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers, s/t
Spiritualized, Lazer Guided Melodies
Pink Floyd, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
I can say the same thing about all three of these albums: they're all great, each in their own way. I know that I will go back to each of these albums continually. They're the kind of records I'll just keep putting on when I'm not in the mood for my personally more obvious choices. But in the meantime—maybe because I just had too much other stuff to listen to—these ultimately didn't stick to my iPod as much as I'd expect. I recognize that I like them but I'm not running out the door to tell my friends about them (anyway, my friends already know about them). I do intend to pick up more albums by each band, though (not Pink Floyd, but Syd Barrett).

Big Star, Radio City
Sorry Radio City, I just couldn’t stop listening to #1 Record long enough to give you a chance. And when I tried, I spent most my time wishing you were as good as #1 Record.

R.E.M., Around the Sun
I am a fan of post-Berry R.E.M. albums, honest. I think Reveal is vastly underrated and Up gets a little draggy toward the end but is still a worthwhile album. Thus I didn’t approach Around the Sun with the assumption that it would be total crap, as most mentions of this album would have me believe. In fact this album does have some very nice moments; it starts strong and has a compelling final third ("The Ascent of Man" plods a little but I like it anyway), but the middle of this album… ugh, it really does hit some of the lowest points in R.E.M.’s history. “The Outsiders,” with special has-been Q-Tip, has got to be the most misguided songs—certainly the laziest—in the band’s discography. It’s almost bad enough to ruin the entire album. As a completist, I’m glad to finally get this album, though I don’t feel bad for taking two years to pick it up. It is easily their worst album. Unlike a lot of other naysayers, however, I feel like this is an aberration in an otherwise strong catalogue, not further evidence of a steady decline. I remain optimistic for the next one.

Beirut, The Flying Cup Club
Despite my first impression, The Flying Cup Club turned out to be a fine album. It is certainly the best thing Beirut has done thus far in his brief career, and I remain optimistic for his next album, provided he heeds my advice.

Radiohead, In Rainbows
Here’s something weird. I listened to In Rainbows pretty much nonstop for two weeks straight. And then one day, I stopped. And I don’t feel the need to listen to it again. And I don’t foresee myself needing to listen to it again in the future, either. [previously: my full review]

Iron & Wine, The Shepherd's Dog
I have little to say about this one right now, as I just picked it up a day ago and haven't really digested it yet. I will say that it's immediately obvious that this is Iron & Wine's best album, and that it will likely make my end of the year list.