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If we could do a cage match between all of the music released in 2008 and the music released in the first three months of 2009, which side would you put your bets on? Looking at MBV’s list of upcoming releases, there are at least two, maybe three or four or five albums that are contenders for best of the year status. Mind you, I’ve heard none of them—it’s just conjecture based on past pleasures. But what else is the internet for? Here’s a rundown of a handful of albums I’m keeping an ear out for.
Andrew Bird, Noble Beast + Useless Creatures (Jan. 20)
Me, excited for an Andrew Bird album? Shocker, I know. My only fear surrounding this album is that it will render my blog redundant. How many years in a row can I wax rhapsodic about Andrew Bird? Let’s try for three, shall we? By the way, don’t sleep on the limited-edition double-disc version. Usually I’d say an album’s worth of bonus instrumentals is not essential—Spoon’s Get Nice! addition to Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga springs to mind as a mildly entertaining but forgettable treat—but Andrew Bird plus a couple guys from Wilco sounds like it could be good. Not to mention all the instrumental tracks coloring the last two Bird albums have been as good as the proper songs.
Animal Collective, Merriweather Post Pavilion (Jan. 20)
I’m a latecomer to Animal Collective, having found pleasure in the band via Strawberry Jam and working my way backward through their catalog. Of everything I’ve heard, I still find Strawberry Jam their most compelling work, so I look forward to MPP as an outgrowth from that. I haven’t heard a lick of this record yet but it’s definitely the most exciting and unpredictable prospect of everything listed here.
A.C. Newman, Get Guilty (Jan. 20)
On the one hand, pretty much everything Carl Newman has done through the New Pornographers has been golden—yes, including Challengers. On the other, Newman’s other solo album, The Slow Wonder, is good but not great. It’s so close to, but not, the New Pornographers. Like coffee without the caffeine. So I’m intrigued enough for the new record and will probably check it out, though I’m not losing my shit in anticipation.
Polvo, Cor Crane Secret (Jan. 27)
Volcano Suns, All Night Lotus Party and The Bright Orange Years (Jan. 27)
I’ve had 90s indie rock on the brain for the last couple of months, particularly groups that didn’t seem to make as lasting an impression as one might have predicted back in the day. Polvo and the Volcano Suns both fall into this category, so I’m glad to see these reissues hitting shelves. I feel like there’s a lot of fifteen- or twenty-year-old indie rock just waiting to be rediscovered. Maybe it’s these bands, maybe it’s others, but I do predict a collective revisiting of the 90s canon soon.
Beirut, March of the Zapotec (Feb. 17)
Though I liked The Flying Cup Club, arguably even more than Beirut’s debut, I was still left lukewarm on Zach Condon the songwriter. I summarized that feeling in this post. Part of me feels that Zapotec will be a kind of final test for my tolerance of Beirut. He’s gone to Mexico for inspiration this time around! It feels like too much of a shtick. If his overall prowess as a crafter of great songs has improved, then it won’t matter. Good is good. But that remains to be seen.
Neko Case, Middle Cyclone (Mar. 3)
Unlike Carl Newman, Neko Case’s solo material is a world apart from her contributions to the New Pornographers, so I’m considerably more excited for Middle Cyclone than I am for Get Guilty. 2006’s Fox Confessor Brings the Flood was an incredibly slow burner for me. Despite buying it when it came out, it wasn’t until earlier this year that the album truly revealed itself to me. I appreciate that Case has grown beyond her Patsy Cline croon into a more mature songwriter. Hopefully she’s continuing on that trajectory (though I wouldn’t mind a few more uptempo numbers this time around).
Midlake, Courage of Others (TBA)
Peter Bjorn & John, TBA (TBA)
Not sure if these will come out by the end of March or not, but they're right up there with Andrew Bird and Animal Collective for most-anticipated album of the year. I spent most of 2007 listening to The Trials of Van Occupanther and Writer's Block. Unlike Bird and Animal Collective, I’m more anxious about this record—that is, less confident that the follow-up will equal or surpass the previous peak. I want these albums to blow my mind (especially the Midlake). Will they?
There's plenty of other albums on MBV's list; what's got you excited?
Unwound, Repetition
The Jesus Lizard, Pure and Head
Harry Nilsson, All-Time Greatest Hits
Jeff Buckley, Grace
Blood Brothers, Burn Piano Island, Burn
The National, Alligator
Faust, Faust IV
The Walkmen, You & Me
The Walkmen, You & Me
Fleet Foxes, s/t
Little Joy, s/t
Simon and Garfunkel, Bridge over Troubled Water
Andrew Bird & the Mysterious Production of Eggs
Vampire Weekend, s/t
The Ruby Suns, Sea Lion
Beach House, Devotion
Gee, does this list look familiar? Guess what I've been listening to all week. No mp3s today since I put so many up during the week; many to come all next week, too.
Okay, so the requisite best 08 release list is behind us, as well as a rundown of some of my favorite discoveries of the year, plus my post on my most beloved record, personally, this year. Still, none are totally accurate. Lost in the cracks are the more recent albums that don't really fit into either category. In this year's case, that means adding three albums from 2007 that I didn't get to until 2008. Here's my list of my personal favorite albums of the year. (Again, the logic of the ranking gets a little fluid around number six or so.) Links go to any long-form posts I might have written about the albums in the last year.
1. Andrew Bird & the Mysterious Production of Eggs (2005)
2. Okkervil River, The Stage Names (2007)
3. Animal Collective, Strawberry Jam (2007)
4. Brian Eno, Another Green World (1975)
5. Fleet Foxes, s/t (2008)
See also my original review.
6. Fiery Furnaces, Widow City (2007)
7. Monks, Black Monk Time (1966)
See also this post featuring five videos from a Monks performance in '68.
8. The Lovin' Spoonful, Anthology (1965-69)
9. The Ruby Suns, Sea Lion (2008)
10. Vampire Weekend, s/t (2008)
See also this post, in which I lament the missed opportunity for New England synergy in pop culture.
11. Little Joy, s/t (2008)
12. United States of America, s/t (1968)
I knew when I discovered Armchair Apocrypha last year that I’d found something special in Andrew Bird. This was an artist I wanted to savor. So I let my obsession with that album play out before I sought out another one of his records. It took about a year. By March of this year I felt I was ready to dive into another: Andrew Bird & the Mysterious Production of Eggs, from 2005. Like Armchair, it went on to become my most listened-to album of the year. Not only that, I was astonished to find a Bird album that was better than Armchair. Eggs is a masterpiece.
It’s a more melancholy album than Armchair. Although it has its moments of humor, it rarely gets as upbeat as the first half of that album. That turned out to be just fine for me: 2008 turned out to be melancholy year, to understate.
Part of why Eggs became so important to me, besides its more tangible qualities—great songs, stellar musicianship, etc.—is that it happened to enter my life just when I needed it to. I owned it for maybe one or two weeks before I was called to my childhood home to be with my dad for the last few weeks of his life. It was an ordeal, to say the least. a time of communal grief shared with aunts, uncles, sister, brother, wife, stepmother, mixed with a kind of simultaneous loneliness and introversion that can’t be articulated. Music, as with any other event in life, is there to be one’s psychological wallpaper. I’ve written about that already, the music I went to before, during, and after.
Eggs held a unique place at that time because it was mine. It wasn’t an album my entire family could find comfort in, like Graceland; it wasn’t identifiably my dad’s, like the O Brother soundtrack or Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms. It wasn’t even an album to be shared with my wife, despite the amount of time we’d later spend listening to Eggs for the rest of the year. At that point, only I knew the record. I would eject myself from the house occasionally, off on a walk through my old neighborhood, sometimes venturing further from home than I’d intended. It was me, my headphones, and Andrew Bird. Because of Armchair, Eggs was familiar enough to embrace—to be embraced by—without reservation, yet strange enough that it gave my mind something to focus on. I had a conversation with Eggs for two or three weeks straight. We still talk sometimes.
Bird’s lyrics can be like a game, as you listen to how the sounds of the words melt into each other. “You took my hand and led me down to watch a papillon parade / and we let the kittens lick our hair and drink our chalky lemonade”—the words beg to be mouthed. The more familiar the songs become, the more meaning reveals itself—Bird is a wordsmith, not a gibberish peddler. In those early, difficult weeks of listening to the album, those meanings had yet to come through to me. Stray lines from each song wafted through my head, crystallizing into something that, combined with the wistful tone of so many of the songs, felt custom designed to my situation. “I was getting ready to be a threat,” Bird sings in the opening track, “Sovay”—as if to say that something had been cut short. The next song begins with a question posed to a panel of experts: “'Why are we alive?' / Here was their reply: / 'You’re what happens when two substances collide / When by all accounts you really should have died.'” That existential wonder manifests again in the gorgeous “Masterfade” as a child gazes into the sky “full of zeros and ones” before “you took my hand and said I shouldn’t be afraid.” The next song, “Opposite Day,” cries over and over, “Today was supposed to be just another day”—a cry I repeated to myself, attaching my own moribund meaning, over and over. Throughout the album there was a lyric or musical motif (“Sovay,” “Measuring Cups,” “The Naming of Things”) that seemed to comfort or commiserate.
Of course, the album in fact was not that literal. If anything it is an album about adolescence, not death. For a son watching is father die over a period of a few weeks, an album about adolescence presses the emotional buttons better than anything else. At any rate Eggs is not that sad of a record. It’s certainly not a stereotypical wallowing record. And that’s just it: Eggs helped me not wallow (not too deeply, at least). As melancholy as it could be in some places, it was also quite optimistic in others, if not downright humorous. That might be why it has managed to become more than just the soundtrack to one of my life’s lowest points. My personal story aside, it is an undeniably outstanding album, perfect from beginning to end. In Pitchfork parlance, this is a 10.0.
As I’ve been saying in a few posts here and there, I think 2008 turned out to be noteworthy for a lot of albums—sure, they’re good—that sit pretty comfortably inside larger trends of the last few years. I’m thankful for Andrew Bird, whether last year, 2005, this year, or next (Noble Beast comes out in a matter of weeks), because he is truly an individual voice in music right now. His strengths—lyricism, composition, musicianship, whistling!—are singularly his own. He’s got at least two stellar records to his name already (I’ll let you know when I get to the rest), and likely one more to come in less than a month. Happily, almost a year since I bought Eggs. I think I’m ready for it.
In 2007 my blind spot interests were fairly monogamous: my love of the Byrds morphed into a fascination with the Laurel Canyon scene, opening basically into a lot of 60s and 70s folk and rock. (Also, Elvis Costello.) That interest continued in 2008, though moving into a more country-rock direction—the Lovin' Spoonful's Anthology, for instance, was on of my favorite records of the year. I didn't listen to it a lot on its own, but nearly every track made its way into one iTunes playlist or another. I need to start picking up their proper full lengths.
Unlike last year, however, my interests diverged in a few directions in 2008. I started moving toward more experimental and/or less pop music: I resparked my interest in krautrock, finallybegan dipping my toes into contemporary composers, and enjoyed one or two more psychedelic albums. Toward the end of the year, mostly inspired by Michael Azerrad's book Our Band Could Be Your Life, I also filled in a few blanks from punk and early indie bands. (Also, Elvis Costello.)
I didn't have any major obsession-sparking experiences with my purchases this year, the way I did with Big Star's #1 Record and Elvis's Imperial Bedroom. Still, there were pleny of great finds. I finally filled in the gaping blind spot that was Brian Eno. Another Green World was partly what I expected and partly a total surprise--highlighting, if nothing else, how clueless I actually was about why Eno is so great. I knew he was an ambient pioneer, but I sorely underestimated him as a pop auteur. This was reinforced when I picked up Before and After Science, which sounds like a proto-Talking Heads record.
My understanding of krautrock, previously defined mostly by Can, one or two Neu! songs, and the vague "motorik" sense of the word as it applies to bands of the last decade, also came in for reconsideration. Neu!'s warm but desolate electronics, Amon Duul II's ramshod improv, and—best of all—Faust's brilliant deconstruction of rock have me eager to find more, to really get deeper inside this genre.
Part of that journey through krautrock led me to the Monks, who really aren't remotely kraut; they're garage, or proto-punk. Black Monk Time easily ranks as one of my favorite purchases of the year.
One of my prized acquisitions of the year the United States of America's sole album, from 1968—an early example of rock incorporating electronica elements such as tape splicing and other studio-as-instrument techniques. Absolutely worth seeking out.
It wasn't all experimental shit for me in 08, though. Les Paul & Mary Ford's Best of the Capitol Masters has fully ingratiated itself into numerous playlists in my iTunes. I have a soft spot for music from the 40s and 50s that evokes a real sense of G-rated optimism; Les Paul & Mary Ford fit right in alongside my Doris Day and Fred Astaire albums.
I also continued to fill in holes for artists I've been developing a listening relationship with over the last couple of years: two albums each by Elvis Costello (Armed Forces and Get Happy!!), Neil Young (Everybody Knows This is Nowhere and Rust Never Sleeps), and David Bowie. The Bowies I picked up weren't too hot (the dreadful Young Americans and the good but not mindblowing Station to Station), but Costello and Young both were predictably terrific. 2009 will likely see more purchases of albums by all three of these guys, including albums that I know are among their best but which I've still never heard.
At the tail end of the year I went headlong into a punk and classic indie rock spell, picking up a bunch of never-heards by the Minutemen, Mission of Burma, and Buzzcocks along with a bunch of re-buys, returning to albums I sold many years ago on some destitute afternoon trying to pay rent and eat a burrito while I was in college. Mission of Burma is great—I've got Vs. on hold for a future eMusic purchase. And the Buzzcocks—one of those bands, like the Lovin' Spoonful, who I realize I've heard many times over the course of my life but never understood "this is the Buzzcocks." I was expecting something a little more snarly, a little more Sex Pistolsy, but I was pleased to find an album full of pop songs about love (okay, and also orgasms).
Later today, my real favorite album of the year. Tomorrow, my official "top ten new-to-me albums discovered in 2008"—which will somehow manage to include still more albums I haven't even touched on this week so far.
So here's the full list. Beyond the first two or three or four, don't take the ranking too seriously. 9 could be 5, 6 and 7 could swap, and 8 could be 9. And 10 is like a ninja; it could spring into action at any moment, wreaking havoc on the list.
1. Fleet Foxes, s/t
2. The Ruby Suns, Sea Lion
3. Vampire Weekend, s/t
Last time I wrote about Vampire Weekend—not counting my Gilmore Girls fan fiction—I advised that everyone stop reading about Vampire Weekend, stop writing about Vampire Weekend, and just listen to Vampire Weekend. Many months removed, it's sort of amusing to think about how riled everyone got about this record. Inflated issues of privilege or colonialism aside, Vampire Weekend is just a really fun album to sing along to, to dance to, to smile with. It's a pleasure from beginning to end. I do wonder if the boys will be able to find a subject matter for their next record that isn't New England coeds, but for the time being this is remains a wonderful, light, fun album.
4. Little Joy, s/t
This is a late addition to the list—I've only had it for about three weeks. When the album came out it went right over my radar since it was marketed as a "Strokes side project"—three words that don't really generate much enthusiasm over here. Happily my wife took the time to listen. Now Little Joy has made itself nice and comfy around the house. We put it on while we cook, while we drive, while we read the paper, whatever. It's a relaxing, lighthearted record clearly made by a relaxed, lighthearted band. This short album is eleven simple songs that don't overstay their welcome—in the case of many, you wish they'd stay longer! These are pop songs made by friends looking for nothing more than the pleasure of each others' company.
5. Dr. Dog, Fate
Like Little Joy, Fate required someone intervening in my life and telling me I had to listen to it (in this case a good friend—one without a blog! crazy!—rather than my brilliant wife). It's such a rock record, so straightforward, so classic, so Beatlesy, so Bandy, so easily digestible indie-y. But six months since buying it, Fate has continued to grow on me. I originally thought it had two or three really fantastic songs and the rest good but not great. I'd go a month without listening to it, then I'd put it on again. I'd reconsider: like, four or five really fantastic songs and the rest good but not great. By now I'm up to about nine or ten really fantastic songs and the other three pretty good. By March this ought to be a masterpiece.
6. Beach House, Devotion
Devotion turned out to have more longevity than I originally expected it to. The same caveat still applies: you have to like the song this duo does, because they keep doing it over and over again. Maybe it just suited my mood this year, but I kept coming back. Victoria Legrand's voice is one of the best in indie rock at the moment, and Alex Scally does an exceptional job of adding just enough guitar to each track—coloring the song in without overtaking it. The whole of Devotion is like walking through a dense fog, with just enough light to lead you further in.
7. Okkervil River, The Stand Ins
The Stand Ins was the third of three Okkervil albums I purchased this year, which really was a kind of overdose. If I could rank The Stage Names in this list, it would probably be number one—but that was 2007. This year's album is still really terrific, thanks mostly to three or four songs as good as anything Sheff has ever done—among them "Singer Songwriter," and "Pop Lie." It took a little distance from my Okkervil Obsession, however, to notice that the rest of The Stand Ins is solid, but not consistently top-notch. A more than worthy album, though I'll still take The Stage Names for the best and most cohesive album Sheff's done so far.
8. Shearwater, Rook
I feel about Shearwater the way I feel about mushrooms: they are both delectable and detestable, awesome and awful, simultaneously. When I listen to Rook I hold my nose with one hand and make dramatic, swooping, Ronnie James Dio-like arm movements with the other. Yes, Rook can be overwrought at times, but it can also be captivating and powerful.
9. The Walkmen, You & Me
The nice thing about doing your end-of-year list in December is you get to read up on all the giddier bloggers' premature lists. I've had You & Me for about six days now, thanks to seeing it on a few different lists and checking out an mp3. Hearing "In the New Year" reminded me that I like the Walkmen. I dug Bows + Arrows when it came out a few years back but was scared off by all the tepid reviews for A Hundred Miles Off in 2006. After all, Bows + Arrows did demonstrate that the Walkmen had a specific sound they were going for; it could, conceivably, get old. That sound—a total absence of low end; the way the drummer seems to be hanging on by a thread; Hamilton Leithauser's disassociative lounge act—is still in place here, but that's okay. You & Me is far superior to Bows + Arrows. It's a more cohesive album, a more emotionally resonant album.
10. To Be Announced
Within days of posting my list last year, I discovered at least two albums that in retrospect belonged on the list. So, rather than toss on MGMT (which has four outstanding tracks—you've heard all of them—and a lot of okay songs) or some other album I'm lukewarm on just so I can round the list out, I'm going to leave this space open for now. I'll let you know if and when I fill it.
Using different criteria, you could as easily call the Ruby Suns’ Sea Lion my top album of 2008 as Fleet Foxes. I questioned in my Fleet Foxes post whether that album had actually broken into that nebulous group of permanent collection albums that are always on hand. Elis & Tom, Air’s first two albums, the Radio Dept.’s Lesser Matters, Tied & Tickled Trio’s Observing Systems—these are albums that, years after buying them, have yet to wear out their welcome. These are the albums you want to play when you’re getting ready to go out, when you’re tired from being out, when you’re writing or cooking or driving or working or just being.
Sea Lion, I already know, has made it into this category. Though the album never had the play-it-’til-you-puke period that Fleet Foxes and Vampire Weekend enjoyed, it’s nevertheless remained in consistent rotation for the last nine months. All these spins later, I still don’t feel like I’ve fully discovered everything it has to offer.
The best quality of Sea Lion is that it’s varied without sounding unnecessarily eclectic, Ryan McPhun has crafted ten songs that blend contemporary indie rock—yes, reverbed vocals and space-out ambient rock—with a dash of 80s new wave, 60s surf pop, tropicalia, and African rhythms. The end result is something not too dissimilar from, yet far more unique than, a lot of other indie du jour records out there right now. You guys can keep Deerhunter; I'll take the Ruby Suns.
It’s an atmospheric record, filled with dreamy vocal harmonies and sound effects that filter in and out of each track. But unlike, say, Person Pitch, Sea Lion isn’t content to sit in one place for too long. Just look at the first half of the record: opener “Blue Penguin” is a laconic song, moving at a turtle’s pace, followed by the Latin-influenced (with a tinge of Avery Island-era Neutral Milk Hotel) quick-strummed “Oh Mojave.” From there, “Tane Mahuta” gets fully into a Os Mutantes-like jam before segueing into the 80s-esque “There Are Birds” and finally falling into the structureless “It's Mwangi in Front of Me.” Yet the whole thing coheres. Vocal melodies in one song show up as musical motifs in another; songs melt into each other track by track. Sea Lion is a journey. It's easily the most underrated record of the year.
Until this weekend, when I set out to remind myself of some of my favorite new releases of the year, I hadn't listened to Fleet Foxes for a while. I'd burned out. But that's because I listened to their debut intensely for about three months out of the year. I wonder—I can't guess—if I'll return to this album again and again in the future or if it will forever and always just remind me of 2008—that era of my life when my brilliant wife and I lived in West Hollywood, when we didn't have kids yet, back when I worked for a museum, that year we vacationed in Hawaii, the same year my dad passed away.
Did Fleet Foxes crack that permanent rotation barrier the way 07 picks like Andrew Bird's Armchair Apocrypha or Jens Lekman's Night Falls Over Kortedala did? Hard to say just yet. But even if it doesn't, that doesn't take anything away from the band or the record. It's a powerful album that managed to wrap itself around my life like a blanket. What better purpose should music serve?
And it is a powerful record. The big knock from its dissenters—and there are many, including pretty much every single one of my favorite fellow bloggers—is that it is somehow free of substance. Assuming you first discount the fact that this band is incredibly skilled—those harmonies ain't easy, buddy—the critique still only carries any weight with two tracks. My suggestion to the detractors is to try playing the record straight through, without the instrumental "Heard them Stirring" (which sounds too similar to Pet Sounds' instrumental title track) or the mantra-like "Quiet Houses."
Fleet Foxes has an aesthetic that is hard to get past, like a woman wearing too much perfume. You have to at least like the scent—er, sound—before you'll consider getting closer. If you don't like the current trend in indie rock of 70s-influenced folk rock (see also: Midlake, Feist), or if you don't like the current trend of lead singers obscuring their voices with some effect (reverb, fuzz, autotune, whatever), then your patience is going to run out with Fleet Foxes, and fast. Let's face it: the band breaks no new ground, sonically speaking. You have to find their ingredients compelling—the influences the band wears on its sleeve have to be pleasing and not irritating—before you can spend the time enjoying the album's finer points. For many, the journey with Fleet Foxes ends here.
For those of us that are beguiled by the sound, we get the added bonus of discovering the record's more subtle charms. Robin Pecknold is, in fact, a great songwriter: you can hear it in the details. I love the way "Sun it Rises" and "Ragged Wood" are held together by a thin thread of song structure. I love the way Pecknold breaks his phrasing in "Your Protector":
I love the imagery of "White Winter Hymnal," which feels like a nursery rhyme. The nostalgic lyrics are about nothing so innocent as children walking in winter. But like any good nursery rhyme, the song is deceptively violent—the sole verse ends with a child bleeding in the snow, turning it "red like strawberries in the summertime." That last line makes the song borderline psychopathic: the narrator is an adult, watching over the children to ensure they don't hurt themselves. When one child does, the injury reminds the adult of another, faraway innocent season. Hey asshole—call 911! It reminds me of the "oh well" tone of the last line of "Rock-a-bye Baby."
I love the structure of the album's closer, "Oliver James": the first verse is a capella; the second finds Pecknold's acoustic guitar harmonizing with his vocal melody; then the final chorus returns to a capella. I know it's a small detail, but I love that the guitar is playing a harmony to the vocal rather than simply doubling the melody as so many indie guitarists do (off the top of my head: Elliott Smith, Death Cab, the Shins, Deerhunter, Nirvana).
I could go on. Fleet Foxes, if you let it, is full of small, well-thought details. For that reason—added of course to the band simply sounding beautiful—it is an outstanding album. Add to that their phenomenal live show—even better than the album—which says to me that this is a band that can and will top itself. What a start, though.
Tomorrow, my #2 pick as well as the rest of my 08 favorites.
There they are: the 89 albums I acquired in 2008 (up from 57 in 2007!). As you may or may not have surmised from this post (actually I think a lot of people missed my point), I enjoyed what indie rock had to offer in 08, but I didn't depend on it: almost exactly 50% of my purchases—46 albums—were musical blind spots. 24 albums acquired this year were 2008 releases; rounding things out, 12 albums were from 2007 and 7 were from 2000–06.
For the rest of the week I'll be highlighting my favorite albums of the year, kicking of with a few posts on 08 albums and then moving into the blind spots, and ending on my "real" top ten of the year—a list that throws release dates out the window. Come back in a little bit and I'll have my favorite 08 album of the year. Tomorrow I'll have my #2 and the rest of the list; I'll round the week out with thoughts on some of the older albums. Oh, the fun we're going to have.
Jut for the hell of it, here are a few more statistics about my listening habits this year.
If you were to factor in the many one-off downloads I picked up all year long, the country and the 60s rock would both see a heavier representation of what's been occupying my headphones for much of 08. Next week will see a series of mixes dedicated to those songs, so stay tuned.
Come back in a couple hours and you'll see my favorite of the year. (Hint: it's way fucking boring.)
Little Joy, s/t
Deerhunter, Microcastle
Fleet Foxes, s/t
Ruby Suns, Sea Lion
Vampire Weekend, s/t
The Shins, Oh, Inverted World and Wincing the Night Away
The Smiths, The Queen is Dead
Andrew Bird, Armchair Apocrypha
Dr. Dog, Fate
The Little Ones, Sing Song EP
The Walkmen, Bows + Arrows
Most this week was spent reminding myself of what I've enjoyed for the last year. The late contender is Little Joy, who my brilliant wife picked up last week. Sometimes I'm pretty sure she knows my taste better than I do. I spend all my time overthinking my music, then she just slides in some really simple, wonderful little record. We're going to see them tomorrow night at the Troubadour.
