browsing all posts in "albums"
the power of my mind
Favorite albums of 2011. Turns out that I like punk rock, Canadian alt.country, and some other things (though I recognize those other things are not very far from punk rock). I have divided this year’s list up accordingly, mostly because I was not actually capable of listing only five. I was not intending to split the list this way when I started, but it works out nicely. Note that they’re in alphabetical order. Picking five was bad enough without having to rank them, too.
punk rock
- Fucked Up – David Comes To Life. Hardcore, or maybe post.hardcore I can get behind. It’s a punk rock opera, and yes, the woman gets fridged so David can come to life, but at least she has a name (Veronica)! Regardless, I’m so grateful I saw them a few times this year before they broke up (if indeed they have), and I’m grateful that someone recorded them playing it top-to-bottom in the round, but watching that video makes me regret not putting in more of an effort to go to that show.
- Mischief Brew – The Stone Operation. Best one yet from these anarcho.folk.punks. I’m really bummed I missed them when they came through Chicago.
- Old Man Markley – Guts ‘n’ Teeth. Bluegrass punks. A stranger on a sidewalk in San Diego told me to check them out. He wasn’t wrong; the title track is one of those songs I occasionally just put on repeat for the day.
- Touché Amoré – Parting the Sea Between Brightness and Me. This record clocks in at a whopping 20.8 minutes, but it blows me away every time I listen to it.
- Wild Flag – Wild Flag. If my house were not full of giant windows and shared walls and close neighbors, I would turn this to 11 and dance around naked. Alas, I have to settle for turning it to 10 and dancing in my pajamas.
canadian alt.country
- The Cowboy Junkies – Demons. Vic Chesnutt covers. The album so good I cannot bear to listen to it.
- The Deep Dark Woods – The Place We Left Behind. This is the album I listen to when I’m on airplanes, and it’s never a good idea. I keep doing it.
- Elliott BROOD – Days Into Years. Latest offering from the “death-country” three-piece I love beyond the telling of it. They’re touring it now; go see them. Some of my best live concert experiences have been with this band.
- Little Foot Long Foot – Oh, Hell. Some kind of fucked-up, bluesy garage-country album that kicks my ass every time. Also, they have a song called “Neko Case Hate Fucks Kurt Cobain,” and it is really good, okay? Okay.
- One Hundred Dollars – Songs of Man. Something of an update on the Cowboy Junkies, I suppose, with a little more punk rock somewhere in their DNA.
other things
- Dave Hause – Resolutions. If this album had been out in 2007, I’d've listened to it nonstop.
- Hey Rosetta! – Seeds. Canadian garage-rockers with a string section. This is the album for lying in the middle of the living room floor with the lights off and staring at the ceiling in the dark until it moves.
- The Pack A.D. – Unpersons. Sleaze with a swing and lot of garage.punk attitude. This album is good for fucking someone you don’t love on the kitchen floor. Also, doing dishes, as long as you don’t mind someone watching you accidentally grind against the dishwasher.
- Chuck Ragan – Covering Ground. If I were forced to pick a top five total, this would be on it. I fell in love with this record as it was being written and they were testing new songs on a live crowd, and I didn’t buy the damn thing until very late in the year, after I already knew most of it by heart. It didn’t disappoint me.
- Wugazi – 13 Chambers. There’s something really weird and hypnotic and compelling about this, and I actually like it way more than I like either Fugazi or Wu-Tang.
you look like a movie star
More random reviews from January-March releases. Canadians this time, genre unspecified. Now that I have learned about the “read more” functionality of this wordpress blog (strangely enough, you click the “read more” button and it inserts a link that says “read more”), I will be using it to say things like this: Below, you will find short reviews of the following bands’ new/upcoming/recent albums: Strippers Union, Cowboy Junkies, Timber Timbre, Jenn Grant, the Rural Alberta Advantage, and Memphis. YES, six reviews, although the Memphis review is inexplicably about the Pet Shop Boys. But whatever, my personal kanban board is going to look so good.
more fab than all the hipsters on broadway
You know, I don’t really think of myself as a long-winded person, but man, lately I have a lot of feelings. God. Okay, this is the second installment of random punk rock record reviews (Q1-2011-E02). Another double-header of shortish reviews of albums that came out sometime in the first quarter of 2011: New York Dolls, Aquabats. One day I’ll get caught up. Maybe. Sort of.
fading in and out already
Random Reviews: punk rock, Q1-2011-E01. I wanted to do a few more in this post, but time is short and I’m not going to listen to two tracks of something and write a review. Hopefully I’ll get to the other new stuff in my iTunes sometime this week. This post has Exene Cervenka’s Excitement of Maybe and Civet’s Love & War.
something as simple as rock & roll can save us all
I opened the page to write a new post, and I typed, “I’m not going to do a post about which albums I loved best in 2010.” I mean, who cares, and most of the albums I loved best in 2010 had nothing to do with 2010. Instead, I wrote for a long time about the top four shows I saw this year, and then I got stuck on number five. So I wrote a list of albums I loved best in 2010. I am not, however, going to comment on them, because then I’d be here until 2011.
we keep on repeating the past
Hey, an album review! Let’s all pretend I am going to keep doing this.
First Four EPs
OFF!
14 December 2010, Vice
seems your lifestyle ain’t so worthwhile after all
Social Distortion has a new album coming out in January, Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes, and I have been listening to it nonstop for a few days now, and I am not seeing a change in my habits in the near future. I wrote a really long and ridiculous track-by-track reaction email at three in the morning, and after a lot of soul-searching (there are a lot of reasons I’m not super comfortable with this), I have decided to clean up that email and post it under the guise of an “album review.” So here we go! Warning: long. Full of images, youtube embeds, and allcaps that walk the line between “indignant,” “horrified,” and “madly in love.”