Year-End Stuff, Early Returns

My brilliant friends are preparing their year-end lists, which I’ll post here to showcase my good taste in friends (last year’s).  After that, I’ll post some longer thoughts (last year’s) and even-longer mixes.  For now, a bit of my stuff for that other place.  My take on Royksopp’s Junior, which I love, is at the top of this page.  A wee bit more on Here We Go Magic back here, and four track blurbs buried in here (#71, #59, #46, #35).

Even better!  A few of my favorite Pitchfork writers wrote about some of my favorite LPs:

Amy Granzin on Beast Rest Forth Mouth: “If Bear in Heaven’s reps weren’t working New Moon ticket queues with sound vans and promo swag, they missed a brilliant opportunity. No one’s nailed adolescent melodrama this well since, I dunno, My Chemical Romance?” By the way, there’s this, if you’re into that sort of thing.  More importantly (and relatedly), there’s this awesome extract from the before thing.

Douglas Wolk on Bird-Brains: “The album was very clearly made with nothing more than the tools at hand– a ukulele, a couple of pieces of percussion, a yard-sale keyboard, a loop pedal, a crappy cheap mic, some free audio software, and Garbus’ larynx, which gets to express everything her machines can’t take care of. The whole thing is held together with duct tape, but that’s what makes it shiny.”

Mark Richardson nails The Visitor: “The Visitor sometimes feels more like a perplexing sonic game than a proper album. It keeps pulling you back in, partly because you want to take another crack at it.”

Rob Mitchum on jj n° 2 (the album is not a huge favorite, but this passage nails it, and “Ecstasy,” so well): “Never mind that the centerpiece of the record is “Ecstasy”, which over the most enjoyable piece of copyright infringement this year manages to simultaneously recreate the experience of being on MDMA and hanging out with someone who’s rolling and can’t stop telling you about it. But it’s the other songs, with woozy stray passages of Toto and Taylor Dayne, blurts of movie dialogue, and moments of fashionable Afropop and acoustic folk slipping in and out of focus, that make this album fail its urine test.”

We’ll end there.

Filed under: ABC News  Bear in Heaven  Charlie Gibson Said My Name  ego-trip  Here We Go Magic  Jim O'Rourke  jj  Micachu & the Shapes  Pitchfork  Royksopp  Tune-Yards