My Favorites Albums of the Decade, Pt. 2

More of my favorite albums from the recently complete decade. First our recap from the previous post on this subject... 

1. Arcade Fire - Funeral, 2004 

2. Beck - Sea Change, 2002 

3. Cat Power - The Greatest, 2006 Here are some more but in no particular order... 

The Strokes - Is This It?, 2001 This great little album seemed to be everywhere during the early years of the decade. Lots of hype but a classic sound. They came out with two more albums that were a little poppier and more polished. Albert Hammond Jr came out with a couple decent solo albums and recently Julian Casablancas released a nice solo album. I used so many songs from this first Strokes album on various mixes over the decade that when I listen to it now it sounds like a greatest hit album. 

The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, 2002 The 90's was a great decade for the Flaming Lips with several uniquely weird albums but it was hard to imagine that they would reach the heights they climbed in the oughts. This album set the bar for the coming decade. Lots of great songs here. 

Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, 2002 You could write a whole essay on just the distribution of this album before you even get to the music. The music is incredible and one of my all time favorite albums. Wilco released three other studio albums and a live album during the decade. They are all worth having in your collection.

Bruce Springsteen - The Rising, 2002 I thought it was another great decade for The Boss. He started with a good live album with the reunited E-Street Band in 2001. The E-Street Band returned for the post-9/11 perspective of The Rising's awesome collection of songs. He followed that with the somber Devils & Dust and the return to rock of Magic. In between he released two more wonderful live albums. One a revered live concert from 1975 and the other from the Seeger Sessions band live in Dublin. And of course there was Springsteen's first cover album; We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions. He ended the decade with the release of Working on a Dream. It was hard to only choose one Springsteen album for my favorites of the decade but The Rising got the nod. 

David Bowie - Heathen, 2002 David Bowie has always been one of my all time favorite artist and I've enjoyed every phase of his long career. Heathen in 2002 and Reality in 2003 are two great albums. Some people called Heathen a comeback album as if his 90's output somehow didn't reach his high standards. He explored different genres and styles but always made them his own. In 2002 he released an album that was a return to his classic sound. He went on tour to support those two albums in 2003 but suffered a heart attack during that tour. The live album from that tour is being released in 2010. Heathen is full of wonderful songs including Bowie's cover of The Pixie's "Cactus". 

Damien Youth - Alchemy, 2006 I came across Damien Youth through a friend's music blog last year. His music was highly recommended and I looked around for his albums. Eventually I found this album of quality retro-acid-folk-rock that became one of my favorite albums of last year. I played it over and over again and I'm on the lookout for more Damien Youth albums. His sound is Syd Barrett/Robyn Hitchcock/David Bowie but always with his own clever feel to his songs. 

The Besnard Lakes - The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark, 2007 I found myself listening to this band from Montreal over and over again. There was something about their sound drew me back to them. They have haunting songs that seemly blend the Beach Boys, Velvet Underground, Roy Orbison, Pink Floyd, My Morning Jacket among others into a dreamy psychedelic mix. Stand out tracks... "Disaster", "For Agent 13", "And You Lied To Me", "Desolation". Looking forward to a new Besnard Lakes album coming out in 2010. More to come...

Looking for the perfect mix - Pt. 1

Is there such as thing as a perfect mix? Is it ever exactly right? Does it even matter now in the era of iPod playlists and the ability to instantly shuffle a group of songs? I've been making mixtapes for decades and this hobby has always been one of my favorite ways to relax. Sometimes I just throw things together but more often I am looking for that perfect mix. I've made hundreds of mixes over the years and I doubt there are very many, if any, perfect mixes scattered among the boxes of tapes stored up on the third floor. The method of creating mixes has drastically changed over the years. I would even venture to say that my very first mixes were really carefully selected stacks of 45 rpm singles playing on a record changer for parties in the 60s. Here is a link to an old 60s mix based on my stacks of 45s. The mixtape really began in the 70s with the coming of cassette tapes. They gave us the ability to pick songs from a vinyl album and record them out of context on a cassette tape. The cassette player in a car was a driving force to take your music on the road with you especially when commercial radio started fragmenting in the 70s. It was the late 70s that I really began mixing with a passion and really looking for that perfect mix. I would sit by the stereo with a stack of LPs carefully recording songs on that cassette tape. It was important to get those sound levels right and constructing the segues. I had many drawers full of tapes I made throughout the 80s and eventually added CDs to the mix. I worked in a bar playing records for about five years during the early to middle 80s and sometimes I recorded sets of music which made for interesting listening later on. I think the experience of spinning records for people in a public setting helped develop what works and what doesn't work in the selecting of songs for people. I was lucky in that the place I worked didn't require me to always be looking for ways to get people on the dance floor. Sometimes that was the case but most often I was just entertaining people with my selections. 

However, the primary reason for me to make mixes was to entertain myself both in the act of creating the mix and to play it back later. It was a hobby. I often also made mixes for other people whether for them personally or to play at parties and weddings. I've always hated playing the radio in the car and have always tried to have some mixtapes in the car. That has always been especially important for long trips. So for a long time I created mixes in one or two sittings. I'd grab a pile of source material and sit there arranging the songs in a way that made sense to me. The pile of records gradually turned into a pile of CDs through the 90s. I've had personal computers since about 1984 but my computer suddenly became an important tool in my mix making in the early 00s when I got a CD burner. Now I had the option of making mixes directly to CD. Wow. I quickly moved to that process but it did have pitfalls. It took up lots of space to have music on your hard drive back then. Hard drives were just not big enough. At the start of my computer use for mix making I could only make one mix at a time because of space restraints. I would copy the songs to the hard drive, make the mix, burn the CD and then delete the songs so I could do it again. Eventually I got larger and larger hard drives and I started keeping more and more music on my computer. I got an iTunes to organize the music and eventually got an iPod too. A big one. Throughout the 00's I put more music on my computer and if fact have been trying to put all my music on the computer. A daunting and time consuming job but most of it is there now. My latest upgrade included a multiple terabyte hard drive and multiple terabyte external drive for backup. That's a lot of space but only if I slow down my accumulation of music. That extra space and all those songs residing on my computer has meant that I can make more than one mix at a time. In fact my iTunes capability to create playlists means that I have an unlimited ability to make an infinite number of ongoing mixes. That overwhelming capacity has actually slowed me down considerably. I have too many mixes going and my time is often spent bouncing around between various mixes as I strive for that perfect mix. After all that... sometimes making a perfect mix is not what I'm trying to do. Sometimes I'm just throwing together a bunch of songs to fill up some space; to put on a disc for listening to in the car. So sometimes some sort of collection of songs evolve over time and I burn the disc several times before I get it right. I'm still searching for that perfect mix...

Nixonland... the book

Nixonland: the rise of a president and the fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein A political history of endless war, riots, assassinations, social upheaval, civil rights, Southern resistance, drug culture, anti-war protests and the Southern Strategy that led twice to the election of Richard Nixon by the so called "Silent Majority" in 1968 and 1972. The story is basically how we went from Lyndon Johnson's landslide Democratic victory in 1964 to Richard Nixon's equally landslide Republican reelection only eight years later. I liked how the author used the different perspectives on events that have become available to historians. We get the story as it appeared to people at the time through official announcements and current news reporting and of course I remember that time vividly. We get various views of the events from written memoirs of participants and we get the benefit of many official documents released in recent years. Best of all and most telling we now have Nixon's own words; his crazy ranting. You really get to see that the differences in politics today have been with us for a long time and actually are not as divisive today as there were then. You also see the results today of that Southern Strategy from Nixon's time that has shifted the Republican Party to the South.

Are Corporations People?

The activists Supreme Court thinks so and their ruling this week gives corporations expanded power over our everyday lives and clearly ensures that the rights of American citizens will come in far behind Wall Street and our old friends the Military-Industrial Complex. Soon Corporate America will be pushing their 2nd Amendment rights and every company will have their very own Blackwater style militia to enforce their perception of the American Dream. This is a battle that has been going on ever since the original right wing Americans filibustered their way putting slave holding rights into the Constitution. The Supreme Court ruled that corporations were people back in the 1880s as a sop to the Railroad Robber Barons. The link to the timeline below illustrates this long sorry history of our steady march toward fascism. I don't use the word fascism lightly. Here is the definition of fascism. This Supreme Court ruling would allow Osama Bin Ladin to donate to Sarah Palin's presidential campaign. Lets call it Al Qaeda Inc. Special interest and lobbying will now take on new meanings and new powers. This is a serious blow to democracy in America. Timeline of Personhood Rights and Powers I've read the Wall Street Journal and the conservative blogs which think this is some great return to freedom and the taking away of unwarranted power concentrated in the "liberal mainstream media" which by the way is all corporate owned. I just don't agree with any of it.

My Favorites Albums of the Decade, Pt. 1

I'm not going to make a list of what I consider the best of the decade but rather I'm listing my favorites. There's a difference there in that yeah maybe I could agree with the critics that Radiohead's Kid A may be the most important album of the decade and would be on the top of their list. I have it. I liked it. I played it a fair amount when it first came out but it never stayed in heavy rotation. I only went back again to it recently to what all the fuss was about. It holds up. It influenced lots of other music throughout the decade. It was a pretty great headphones listen. However, I didn't play it a lot. I didn't use very many songs on my mixes. It wasn't one of my favorite albums of the decade. These are some of my favorite albums of the decade. It took a while to come up with what I would consider to my favorite album of the decade. My number one. I played it a lot. I used lots of different songs on various mixes. It sounds like a greatest hit album to me now. Arcade Fire - Funeral, 2004 Great songs. Great production. A solid album from start to finish. The thing that put it over the top for me was seeing them on Austin City Limits recently. The songs really came alive watching them perform these songs and their Neon Bible album. I was amazed at their instrumentation. Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels) is the first song from this album and starts off the mix of my favorite albums of the decade. Here is the video of the song from their record company. It kind of sucks but the song is awesome. 

  Here is a live version of this song. They are really fun to watch.

Beck - Sea Change, 2002 This album almost took my number one position. I've always liked Beck and have most of his albums. He is wonderfully talented songwriter and producer. His albums have always been an adventure to hear. Sea Change was different for me. It was where he decided to put all that talent towards creating a classic rock album. Not in that generic cliche of an abused genre but in the sense of putting together a collection of classic love songs. A break up album. A great album. It stands up to repeated listens over and over again. His production genius comes through in subtle ways as he lets emotions drive these songs. I've used many of these songs on various mixes. It is a timeless masterpiece. The Golden Age is the first song on the album and has been selected for this mix. Strange video but great performance. Cat Power - The Greatest, 2006 This is the first album I really listened to from Cat Power. I had heard a few songs here and there and I had her categorized as one of the many indie diary-rockers. This album changed my perception. I read a review of this album and thought I should check it out. She really reinvents herself here. She recorded the album in Memphis with some of the great soul music session musicians. She wanted to recreate the sound of some of the music she grew up with and that influenced her. She created a masterpiece. I love every song on this album and it has been on heavy rotation since the first time I heard it. It is one of those comfortable records that I keep nearby. I went back to check out some of her earlier albums and came to like Moon Pix, You Are Free and especially The Covers Record. Loved her cover album Jukebox from 2008 too. I'm looking forward to hearing another album of original material from her. There are so many great songs on this album and I used many of them on mixes. Could We sounds real nice following the Beck pick. More songs from my list should follow shortly in subsequent postings.

End of The Decade

The end of the decade is always a time of reflection and lots of lists. There is also always that little controversy among some people about whether this is indeed the actual end of a decade because some people insist that of course there never was a year zero therefore if you count back then the decades actually end in 10, 20, 30 etc. and we have another year left in this decade. Be that as it may... everyone conveniently groups decades in the familiar format that we all refer to as the 50s or the 90s no matter what the subject is. In music we've always had strong opinions about our music decades. The 60s invokes a certain sense of what the decade sounded like just as the 80s brings up a totally different picture. We all have our favorites from the different decades and this decade that recently came to an end is no different. Sometimes it takes a while for a decade to come into focus but everyone rushes to put out their list of favorite albums at the end of the decade. I thought it was interesting that the number one album of the decade for both Rolling Stone and Pitchfork was... Radiohead's Kid A. Rolling Stone Top 100 Albums of the Decade Pitchfork Top 200 Albums of the Decade And I thought those two were opposites but I guess it really was the critics choice. On average it was the top album of the decade among critics in general. Metacritic Best Albums of the Decade Roundup

So Many Lists

I've always enjoyed looking at all the various end of the year best of lists and of course especially the music ones. Rather than going all over the place looking for all the various list I've found a one stop site that collects best of lists... Metacritic. The people at Metacritic.com compile reviews from respected critics and publications for movies, DVDs, music, television and games. Then they compile their collected reviews into scores and rank materials based on those composite scores. Actually I have Metacritic bookmarked and look at it frequently throughout the year for album and movie reviews. The highest scoring album in 2009 according to Metacritic was Nirvana's live album of a 1992 concert. The highest scoring album of music from this year... Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion Here is Metacritic's top albums of 2009. I like to keep up with what the Brits are thinking about music so I check in on NME every now and then. I especially look in on their end of the year best of list. The top of their list... The Horrors - Primary Colours. Here is their complete top 50 albums of 2009. Closer to home. Paste Magazine picked The Avett Brothers - I And Love And You. The Paste 25 Best Albums of 2009. The 36 Awesomest Songs of 2009... according to Paste. Now here is Rolling Stone... always the obvious. Always the expected. U2 - No Line On The Horizon. Here is the Rolling Stone best 25 albums of 2009. Their 25 best songs of 2009. Pitchfork... a little more indie oriented. Their pick for the best album of 2009. Animal Collective. Here is their top 50 albums of 2009. AllMusic has a nice list of their favorite albums of the year listed alphabetically. No rankings. The AllMusic Favorite Albums of 2009.

New Year, New Decade

So it's a new year, a new decade and a new blog. Well, not exactly new but certainly a new focus. I've shut down my other websites... Brain Storm which was about aneurysms and related topics. I also finally closed by AlternaTime website which I really hadn't been updating very much the past several years. AlternaTime started out as a gopher in 1992 and became a website shortly after that. That site was a collection of timelines on the Internet and was very popular for a while. Things have changed. This will be my one personal online space besides Facebook. I'll continue to post music mixes here and occasional rants about whatever...