My Music Year

It's time to admit that I won't be able to complete this project by the end of the year. I have about 75 albums to write about before I'm caught up and I'm sure there will be another 10-15 by the end of the year (especially with Christmas), so it's a losing battle. I also want to get my best of the 2000s project underway and that will take up most of my blogging time. I will try to do a year-end roundup of my music year, most likely in the form of a top ten list. It was fun while it lasted, though!

My Music Year #10

This feature hits double digits and rolls into February with a look at Ben Kweller's Changing Horses. To be honest, I'm still not sure what to make of this album. Kweller adopts a more country music style for the record, complete with steel guitar and lots of piano, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I certainly have no problem with twang in music I listen to and I also don't have a problem with an artist trying something new. The songs are solid, from the pretty "Old Hat" to the kinda-cowboy punk of "Fight" to the typical goofy-yet-endearing Kweller lyrics of "Things I Like To Do." So what's my problem? It's not his last album, about which you'll be hearing more in my best of the decade series. What it comes down to is that while I like it well enough, I don't love it and I was hoping for another home run. Not much else to be said, I guess.

My Music Year #9

When I read that David Byrne and Brian Eno were releasing a record in 2008, I was mildly interested. I've been a fan of Byrne's but that fandom wasn't really active; I can't tell you the last time I listened to my Talking Heads compilation and I let go of the 2 solo albums of his I'd had. Brian Eno I knew more for his production on U2 records than for any of his records. I flagged it as something worth checking out, then forgot about it until I noticed it on eMusic and here we are.

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today is an album with two modes. One is a shimmery pop with chiming guitars and soaring melodies as exemplified in "Home" and "My Big Nurse" and the title track. The other is more experimental, like the skittering piano and squalling guitar of "I Feel My Stuff" and the white guy danceable funk of "Strange Overtones," which is a song about a song. The styles work very well together and make for a solid record.

My Music Year #8

Here's a case of not knowing what you'll come home with when you go shopping. I had received some Best Buy gift cards for Christmas and hadn't spent all of the money yet, so I was wandering around the music section. I walked by the "R"s and saw some of last year's Replacements reissues. I flipped through and came home with All Shook Down, their final album from 1990. I had owned the album once before but had gotten rid of it during the big 1994 depressed music purge and while I had replaced the rest of the Replacement discs, this one hadn't quite found its way back. Perfect.

I think there are many fans of the Mats who don't really think of this one much and that's a shame. Yes, I suppose it could be seen as a Paul Westerberg solo album but it's not labeled as such. And yes, there are a bunch of guest musicians like Benmont Tench and John Cale and Steve Berlin but their presence only serves to enhance the music. In the end, isn't the music really what the focus should be on?

The album gets out of the gate strong with the mid-tempo rock of "When It Began" and stays strong all the way through the piano-based "The Last." The songs are tightly constructed and the mood varies from light (the fumbled countdown of "Attitude") to the somber (the haunting "Sadly Beautiful"). It also contains one of my favorite-for-no-particular-reason lines - "The magazine she flips through/Is a special double issue/Smells like perfume/She leaves it on the plane" - which is followed by a little Steve Berlin sax riff in time with the snapping drums.

The reissue also contains demos for many of the songs as well as a couple of extra tracks. They are worth listening to but the main attraction here is the album proper, an underappreciated classic.

My Music Year #7

This year has been a big year for Jayhawks fans and not just for the release of a retrospective and rarities disc this summer. We were also treated to new material from Gary Louris and Mark Olson, the driving forces of the early period of The Jayhawks. Olson left the band in 1995 but over the past couple years the two have performed together and recorded Ready For the Flood. It's not a Jayhawks record but there are still many pleasures to be had.

Much of the album is the two men together - their voices (Louris up high and Olson on the bottom) and their acoustic guitars. They blend so well together that you can just get wrapped up in the sound. That's helped, of course, by a keen sense of melody and the construction of the songs. I don't think any of the songs will strike a person as one of the best they've ever heard but they are all candidates to get stuck in your head. There are subtleties to the music as well and other instruments (notably organ, harmonica, and electric guitar) contribute to the whole. It's a cohesive album in the best sense and one of my favorites of the year. I hope they keep making music together.

My Music Year #6

My Bruce Springsteen fandom goes back 25 years to when I heard the singles from Born in the U.S.A. on the radio. It wasn't until my 14th birthday in 1985 that I got the whole album (on cassette, having received a Walkman for a Christmas present in 1984) and I spent months listening to it while doing a wide variety of chores outside. The live boxed set that came out in 1986 introduced me to a lot more of his music and I became a true fan. Naturally, I bought his latest album, Working On A Dream, the day it came out.

The title track was out and about before the album came out and it's a good indicator of the album's feel as a whole. Springsteen is definitely working in a pop mode, and I love the little bass run by Gary W. Tallent that opens this song. We get melody and some background "la, la, la-la"s with an uplifting message. It's not his best song but it is solid.

The bass is a bit more upfront on the whole album than previous E Street records and I enjoy hearing it. Springsteen and the E Street Band have been working together for more than 35 years and I love all the little touches they bring. "My Lucky Day" starts out as a run-of-the-mill pop song but when Steve Van Zandt starts harmonizing on the second verse, the song seems to catch another gear and everything just seems sharper.

Some reviewers had a problem with "Queen of the Supermarket," specifically the lyrics. They were reading the song as some sort of commentary on the state of American consumerism but to me it's just a love song set in a supermarket with some nimble bass and a solid pop feel that gets a bit operatic before an odd little outro.

I'll admit to not being the biggest fan of the album opener, "Outlaw Pete." It's a tall tale that really goes on a couple minutes too long. I do enjoy the bonus track, the Oscar-nominated "The Wrestler" from the movie of the same name, although I don't think I've ever seen a one-legged dog.

The back half of the album holds some real gems. "Tomorrow Never Knows" has a lovely folk pop beat (and borrows the title from The Beatles) and "Life Itself" is filled with urgency and nice guitar texture. Finally, the acoustic-based "Last Carnival" is a tribute to the late E Streeter Dan Federici and is effective due to the brevity and tone and some beautiful gospel coos at the end.

Will this be one of the Springsteen albums I listen to over and over and over again? No, and it hasn't been. Is it yet another solid album in his long career? Absolutely.

My Music Year #5

One of the drawbacks to using eMusic as a main source of music is that sometimes you have to find a album that fits the amount of downloads you have left. There are also times when you are running out of time before your downloads turn over. These circumstances can lead to some hasty decisions, decisions which sometimes work out and sometimes don't.

I don't quite remember if Rilo Kiley's The Execution of All Things falls into either or both of those categories but the facts are these: I listened to the whole album 2 time in late January and hadn't listened to it since until tonight. Now it's not that I don't like Rilo Kiley or Jenny Lewis but obviously this album didn't grab me. You know what? It still doesn't. Oh sure, this album has well-crafted mid-tempo pop songs but I don't hear anything to really grab me. If the songs come up during a shuffle, no problem. But as for a fourth listen? I don't see it happening anytime soon.

My Music Year #4

Let's talk Tokyo Police Club. The Canadian band made a splash in the music blogosphere with the release of their 2006 debut EP, A Lesson in Crime, and rightfully so. It was full of short, sharp songs that were extremely catchy; my favorite of the 7 songs was "Citizens of Tomorrow," which was a warning about how we would so be ruled by robots. They followed that up in 2007 with a 3 song EP, Smith, and then a 2 song release, Your English is Good. In 2008, they released their first full album, Elephant Shell, and the reaction was not even close to what it had been. I read words like disappointing and letdown in reviews. I still wanted to get the album but didn't have it at the top of my priorities.

I got the album from eMusic back in January and was unsure of it at first. By a few more listens, however, I was wondering if everyone else had heard a different album because the one I was hearing was great.

They are still writing short, sharp catchy songs. The drums and bass are often prominent, as well as some slashing guitar. The lyrics are wonderful. "In A Cave" and "Juno" are so good that I'm surprised they haven't been used in a movie or TV show...hell, even an advertisement. It's a great album that deserves a second chance and I think the band should be huge.

My Music Year #3

I resisted Bon Iver for much of 2008. He was a music blog baby and I was hesitant because sometimes the blog buzz is for an artist or band who may have a different sound but really isn't all that good. I finally decided to give him a shot and was glad to have found someone whose work I did like, so when his Blood Bank EP came out early this year, I quickly downloaded it.

The first song and title track is the highlight of the collection. Justin Vernon's falsetto is one of his signatures and in this minor key pulser he harmonizes with himself to gorgeous affect at the start of the song. The lyrics are interesting too: "Well I met you at the blood bank/we were looking at the bags/wondering if any of the colors/matched any of the names on the tags" are the opening lines in a song about family and secrets. It's a beautiful song and one of his best.

While the other three songs don't quite match the first, there are still pleasures to be found in the strum and slide guitar of "Beach Baby" and the dissonant piano of "Babys." The last song, "Woods," is just Vernon's voice run through Auto-Tune and then layered while he sings only, "I'm up in the woods/I'm down on my mind/I'm building a still/To slow down the time." When you first hear it, it sounds stupid and weird but repeated listens changes that impression into something more positive.

On the whole, that's what listening to Bon Iver needs to be. You need to hear the songs a few times to let the subtleties hit your ears and, at times, to understand what's he's saying. That falsetto is gorgeous, yes, but sometimes the diction isn't all that clear. It's a minor quibble, though.

My Music Year #2

When I think of Andrew Bird, I think of plucked strings, violin, and whistling. On the first track of Noble Beast ("Oh No"), you get all three and you also get melody, another Birdian trait. You also get some intriguing lyrics - in this case, "Arm in arm we are the hopeless sociopaths." Indeed. That opener also give you a pretty good indication of what you're going to get on the whole record, which is not to say that every song sounds the same. Rather, these elements are his strengths and he weaves them throughout time and mood shifts in his songs; one example is "Anonanimal," which starts out with the sweeping strings and starts layering in sounds before opening up into a rockier style of drums and guitar. "Masterswarm" dissolves into video game-like blips and clicks after starting with an introductory passage followed by a lightly bouncing rhythm accompanying the violin. There is also the "pop hit" of "Fitz and the Dizzyspells."

I admire Bird quite a bit and I enjoy this album (and his previous one, Armchair Apocrypha) when I listen to them but I don't always reach for them. I don't often have his songs running through my head either, though they have a bit more after listening to this album in preparation for this post. If you like music that can make you think while also entertaining, this album is for you.

My Music Year #1

I didn't get my first album of 2009 until the second half of January, which is a bit unusual for me. There was no big reason for it; I was just waiting for some music of interest to come and was still digging into what little I got for Christmas. Whatever the reason, my first new music of the year came in the form of A.C. Newman's Get Guilty.

A.C. Newman is the solo guise of Carl Newman, who is the glue that holds The New Pornographers together. He writes most of the band's material (excluding the songs Dan Bejar writes and sings on and a few other exceptions), fueling their four album run of power pop goodness. This is his second solo album after 2004's The Slow Wonder.

Newman writes pop songs, real pop songs that aren't afraid of melody or subtlety or varied instrumentation. Heck, he's not even afraid to use whistling in the background (see "All of My Days And All Of My Days Off"), to use "yo ho" in the place of a la-la or do-do (see "The Heartbreak Rides"), or even a chorus of "one high, one high, one high, one." (see "Prophets")

The album gets off to a great start with "There Are Maybe Ten Or Twelve," with it's ascending and falling guitar line, soft plucked strings, and a string of interesting lyrics (such as "There are maybe ten or twelve/Things I could teach you/After that well I guess you're on your own/And that wasn't the opening line/It was the tenth or the twelfth/Make of that what you will").

Other highlights include the propulsive strumming and percussion of "Like A Hitman, Like A Dancer" and the mid-tempo pulse of "The Changling (Get Guilty)" with its piano chords and the great first line: "It's not war/It's more like a warning."

The album has many charms and I can also state from firsthand experience that he and his band did a fantastic job translating these songs to a live setting as well. Any album with work written and performed by A.C. Newman is well-worth picking up and this one is no different.