Everyone’s a critic, Best music of 2007

I’m still not very hip. Many of the critics' favorites of the year are albums that I can’t get my pop-minded head into yet (I’m thinking of LCD Soundsystem, Of Montreal, Animal Collective, Okkervil River, among others). I’ve tried—maybe I’ll have caught up by next year.

This is the top 5 breakdown of albums that I listened to very frequently over the course of the past year (four bands tie for 5th place, as each had a good solid month, at least, of being the main event):

5. Jose Gonzalez: In Our Nature- This is more of the same from Gonzalez, but I liked the last album Veneer so much that it wasn’t a disappointment to have another album full of short, haunting, nylon-string guitar ballads. This album also scores high on the “your-mom-wouldn’t-object” meter.
Arcade Fire: Neon Bible- I recently watched these guys perform via Austin City Limits. Talk about chaos! Arcade Fire may have gotten too big to have the “indie cred” that they had after their first album, but this record has some really great tunes on it. If your mom likes Bruce Springsteen, she may like this album. (just saw this: cool?)
Feist: the Reminder- Feist had an amazing year. Apparently, getting on an Ipod commercial is about the equivalent of being one of Oprah’s favorite things. Your mom may already own this album.
The Shins: Wincing the Night Away- This was the major album of our California road trip over the summer. The Shins are one of the only bands that Tina really likes on this list, so they got a lot of love on Highway 1. There are a couple of really sweet tunes on this, my favorite of the three Shins albums. There is also a high possibility that your mom may like the Shins.
4. Iron and Wine: The Shepherd’s Dog- this one scores high on the sweet-o-meter but low on the your-mom-o-meter. I can’t think of anything else to say, so why don’t you just see for yourself.
3. Wilco: Sky Blue Sky- If the first half of the year belonged to My Morning Jacket, the second half was all about the Wilco. I have had Wilco on my Ipod for at least a few years, but never really “got” it. Then, while watching their hour-long Austin City Limits show (ACL is my gateway to cool, in case you haven’t noticed) I was BLOWN AWAY by what was happening on stage. It was exactly as I was describing in my post about the Jimmy Eat World show, except the opposite. These guys were creating something intensely personal and incredibly new on stage. The current lead guitarist of Wilco, Nels Cline, is—well—you’ll have to watch him in action to see what I mean. Your mom will not think that Jeff Tweedy is cute unless he is clean shaven (even then it's a stretch).
2. Andrew Bird: Armchair Apocrypha- Andrew Bird is my new favorite. I have been raving about him for months on the blog already, so no need to do that anymore. Please, please—if this guy plays your town—go and see him. You will not be disappointed. (it makes me kind of proud that I have been listening to AB via Squirrel Nut Zippers for years—though his solo stuff is so much different—and so much better—than his fiddle work with the SNZ). Your mom will be excited that, at least for somebody’s kid, those violin lessons paid off. There is something else Bird is known for; can you guess it?
1. Radiohead: In Rainbows- see this post for some Radiohead love. I love, love, love this tune and this tune and this tune especially. This gets my vote for second best Radiohead album ever (just beneath Kid A). Too bad for yooz who didn’t get the album free from the bad while you could, you can always buy it on o1.01.08 when it comes out for realsies. Your mom won’t understand when you tell her that Radiohead is our generation’s Beatles—maybe you don’t understand yet either. You will.

Honorable mention goes to these two bands that I am starting to dig, but haven’t spent a lot of time with yet. One may bloom into a longer term relationship, whilst the other is bound to remain a fling.

The National: Boxer
Band of Horses: Cease to Begin (this one is my favorite of the two.)


And albums that just keep hanging on for me from 2006:

• John Mayer: Continuum- I just love that JM is a blues guitarist disguised as a pop star. His guitar playing and song writing is of the kind that I would imagine myself to inhabit if I were actually a talented guitar player or songwriter. I mention Continuum here because I’m still listening to it and it is still getting better.
• James Morrison: Undiscovered- this is kind of a cheat because I didn’t get this album till that stop at Amoeba mentioned here, and didn’t technically listen to James Morrison till 2007, but I couldn’t put him on my list above because his album came out last year. I feel a bit funny about this one for some reason, but I don’t know why. Like the other JM, this JM writes a killer song, has a killer voice and I would love to be able to write a ballad as catchy as this song here.
• My Brightest Diamond: Bring Me the Workhorse: see my love for Shara Warden here and get excited about the next album to be released in 2008 sometime. I love great female vocalists.

Speaking of, here is some great local, female vocaled music worth checking out:
Awake and Alert: Devil In A Lambskin Suit (Mesa, AZ) (if you watch the video on this site, you’ll see yours truly sitting on screen-right during the set-up montage. Watch for my flip-flopped feet.)
Headlights: Kill them with Kindness (Champaign-Urbana, IL)


Also scheduled for 2008, a double Cure album. Here’s to hoping it’s good. And here’s to hoping you have yourself a merry little Christmas and a happy new year.

If you have had a great time surfing my favorite tunes and wish you could have some more, please listen to this great podcast where most of the bands I mentioned also get mentioned, but with some really great commentary and clips.

Feel free to comment with your favorites from last year as well--though they need not be "new in 2007." What are you all listening to? What am I missing out on?

breakin' (the electric booger-loo)

The first few days of break have been fun, if chaotic. Tina's twist has made for busy dad.

We did have fun today building this snowman.

Things in the queue:

• Blog my "best music of 2007" list (i know you've been waiting)
• Record some music... my "hummingbird" and "transparent, see?" (or sometimes titled as the response to that question: "transparent, si!") are in serious need of tape so I can move on and write some new tunes or something (gotta get some music recording software for this as I lost my old program in a hard drive crash over summer time). Once they are done, I will hook y'all up with some linkage.
  
• Watch two documentaries among other "catch-up" movie watching: "king of kong" and "helvetica"
• read some non-requireds, including the latest addition of our department's arty zine (or "arts and literary journal") 9th letter that has been sitting on my shelf since August.
• Play with photoshop and learn some really basic design techniques (gonna have to check out a book or something).
• figure out spring schedule
• start reading my textbook that I am teaching next semester
• roll up to Chicago to retrieve fab sis-in-law. Hoping for some cool lessons from her.
  

happies to report:

• quit the caffeine cold turkey a few days before I started writing final papers and stuff. Thought that 7 Zeros a day was just too much. I jonze after the cokage though and have been trying to fight it off with diet root beer and Illinois's favorite non-sugared carbonated beverage La Croix. Used to make me gag, now--not as much.
• made cool new header for this blog by ripping off some cool design and searching the last hour for cool fonts
• finally finished The Devil in the White City--the book that I started at the end of the summer--it stinks to only have read one fun book in 3 months. 'twas good, though I liked the world's fair stuff more than the murderer profile business. We are going to one of the few remaining buildings from said fair which currently is the home of this xzibit (not this one)
  
• Am more and more amazed each day (especially being home now 24/7) at the feat that is being a mother and the amazing one that my wife is (especially since she has been off her feet). Tina should wear a cowboy hat and shaps because what she does with the kids is nothing short of wrangling a herd (and a very cute herd at that) of cattle.
  
• have decided that writing in complete sentences is for the birds
• got back major paper that I spent nearly every waking moment last week writing with high marks and compliments (as well as compelling critique--which is so great... when there are equal portions of both).
  

we'll talk soon.

Thanks everybody!

my paper is in revision status at the moment...but I'll be done tomorrow morning for sure!
I appreciate those who responded to my questions--especially those of you who I don't know! Wow!
So, with vacation right around the corner, be expecting some fun posts from me in the near future!
It's close to midnight and I am feeling very exclamatory!
My blog still thinks its in Arizona! See below post time!

What blogging is like for me... (a reader survey)

Writing...we're all doing more of it, aren't we fellow bloggers? I am now halfway done (ok, maybe 3/8ths) done with the writing I need to accomplish by late next week. This past week's writing was tortuous. Really, really hard--the kind of hard where it takes halves of hours to write single sentences.

That kind of writing is difficult to get through. It becomes not fun. It threatens to engulf your sanity... and it really did engulf mine. Brain power was lost to the extent that I lost my PDA one day and only a few days later lost my wallet. These are costly tragedies for another post. (Wallet search swallowed up nearly a whole work day yesterday to no avail--PDA search will resume on Sunday when I return to the scene of the crime-of-memory).

As I start the writing for my last project, which is also my first serious seminar paper proper and I am hoping to have a different experience. I want to have some fun with this business because the subject is right for it (see below), the professor is open to fun-serious approaches to topi, and I really can't endure another week of brain wringing. I mean, it was my PDA and wallet last week, next week by this time I could very well be leaving the house without any pants on.

My writing project on the plate for the next 7 days, is really an extension of what I was trying to muddle through in this post a few months ago. Which means that it is about the very thing that I am doing right now: Blogging (specifically, genres of personal writing on the web)--and here's where you can help, dear readers!

I am interested in examining the following questions and your takes on them would be very (very!) useful:

1. Do you imagine your blogging to have an underlying theme?
2. What is it about blogging that is attractive to you? What makes it worth your while? What "work" does it get done? In essence, why do you blog?
3. How much do you worry about your posts--what you write, what not to write, who you might offend, etc. and connected to this question--do you think much about how others may perceive you via your blog? (this may be especially true when you think about people who you may not have ever met who read your blog and get a sense of the "you" presented there.)
4. How often do you read blogs of people you have never met? What attracts you to those blogs, for which there is no real "communication" factor involved?
5. Finally, do you use any kind of rss feed reader to view your blogs (do you even know what that is?--if not please indicate)? If not, do you use tool bar bookmarks--or just links from the blogs you read to the other blogs you read?

Sorry. I know that is a lot. Feel free to answer only those that you want--but the information that you doll out will be very useful to me so, if you have the time, put some thought into it!

UPDATE! Found the wallet this evening in the one place that we hadn't looked because...well you'll see why. I went in to Jonas's room to get him a belt, and saw something dark in the crib. Who knows how it got in there--just glad that it was and not in the hands of some, dark, dishonest stranger .