Previously: I hope you took a few minutes to explore the outstanding recipients of this year’s Gold and Platinum LP awards. Honorable Mentions, too.

I don’t think many readers will find much controversy in the assertion that things have been hard over the past few years, and 2010 and 2011 were especially hellish in my neck of the woods. So it’s no surprise to find artists focusing on the difficulties they see (and often live themselves). It’s rare, though, to find someone who’s singing about the bad times with as much depth and empathy as we find in Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit’s Here We Rest, my 2011 CD of the Year. Full story »

Previously: the 2011 Gold LPs and the Honorable Mentions.

The Platinum LPs, awarded for exceptional artistic merit, are always the point where this process begins to wear on me. I want to make sure I have included all the worthy bands and that my words do those acknowledged justice. I never feel like I have succeeded on either count, and this year seems even worse than usual. So my apologies to the artists here: my remarks are in no way up to the standards of the music you produced last year.

[sigh] So here we go.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: Belong
It seems like each year there’s that one band, sort of an accessible, trendy indie outfit that pegs everybody’s hip meters and makes it okay to like intelligent guitar pop. Full story »

I mentioned that 2011 was a great year for music in part 1, right? Well, the sheer number of Gold LPs (awarded for outstanding merit) should serve to illustrate the point a bit. So let’s get to it.

First, let me disqualify a CD.

Paul Lewis: Bag Of Rain
If my objectivity is clouded by close personal relationships, it’s absolutely obliterated by great self-interest. And since I was fortunate enough to contribute lyrics for two of the tracks on Bag of Rain, I’m not even going to pretend that I’m being critical. I can say, however, that Paul is an outstanding tunesmith and an even better singer – I’ve been saying he has one of the best voices in the business since the first time I saw him perform in the late 1980s. These qualities have only improved with time. “Platform of Our Lives,” for instance, displays a rare emotional vulnerability, and Paul the singer understands when to coat a tune in velvet and when to stomp the accelerator. Full story »

I feel like a broken record, but man, what a great year. I just saw a comment on a Facebook thread this morning where somebody said that there hasn’t been any good music since 1990 and I can’t help feeling sorry for people who think that way. I know, radio has abandoned us. And I know it’s hard to put as much time into finding the good stuff as maybe we’d like. But trust me, there’s fantastic music being made and in this series (this post will be followed by the Gold LP, Platinum LP and CD of the Year awards) I’ll do what I can to point readers at the best of what I heard last year.

One caveat, based on something I’m becoming more aware of lately. I’m not a record reviewer. I’ve done that from time to time, but I never liked the nuts and bolts of being a pure critic and I never thought I was very good at it. Still, this list, through the years, has worked to be as critically honest as possible. Full story »

The Sing-Off was a bit of a disappointment this year.

Last season was the show’s high water mark to date, with four or five legitimate A-level contenders and two acts – Committed (the winner) and Street Corner Symphony (runner-up) – that stand head and shoulders above everybody else in the show’s three seasons to date. (And please, click those links to see what I’m talking about.) Season 2 just shimmered, from the first note to the last, with depth and resonance and nuance and soul. It was a show that, week in and week out, was a must-see and a joy to listen to (especially if you were DVRing and could ffwd through Nick Lachey and Nicole Scherzinger).

This season, though, something was different, and I didn’t really detect it until we’d gotten the first few bands out of the way. Full story »

Since we’re reclaiming our stake on Freddie Mercury this week, I suppose we need to reclaim all of him—including the schmaltz-fest that was Flash Gordon.

It’s common practice today for a band to accept a few bucks from someone who wants to appropriate its music for a soundtrack. Back in 1980, not so much. But Queen went far beyond that, aligning themselves so closely with science fiction schlock that they actually wrote the soundtrack.

And I loved every note of it.

Full story »

When I first moved to Boulder, Colorado in 1993 there were three big local bands: Big Head Todd & the Monsters, The Samples and The Reejers. BHTM were and still are an outstanding blues/rock band. The Samples were an alt act that reminded me at times of The Police and at other times of Johnny Clegg & Savuka (although both comparisons are misleading – Sean Kelly’s voice had a sort of Stingish quality about it and the Savuka reference is mainly about Jeep MacNichol’s drumming). The Reejers were a hard, noisy industrial-edged grunge act, I guess you’d say. All three of these were, in my view, outstanding bands, and they represented a broad diversity of sound. I was in heaven.

But then Boulder went 100% hippie on us and has since been defined by bands like Leftover Salmon, The String Cheese Incident and Yonder Mountain String Band.  Full story »

We all have our favorite artists and songs and albums. Even those of us who listen to a lot of different styles and have thousands of CDs in our collections undoubtedly have a few we keep coming back to more than others. While I have never really had this discussion with anyone, I imagine that there are all kinds of reasons why certain songs and collections draw us back.

The albums I have listened to the most would surprise most people, I suspect. Those who know me would probably think I’ve spun U2′s War or Unforgettable Fire the most, or REM’s Reckoning, or maybe one of the Police’s CDs. Maybe even something by Queen. And they’d be close, because I have in fact played the hell out of those albums. My original copy of A Night at the Opera - back in the days of the vinyl LP – was so worn I was expecting the needle to carve completely through the record at any moment.

Full story »

And so we arrive at the last day of 30-Day Song Challenge, the Sequel, which followed hot on the heels of the original Challenge – so 60 songs in slightly more than a couple of months (actually, given my cheating, it was quite a bit more than 60 songs, wasn’t it?)

I wanted to end The Sequel with a nod to the timelessness of music. As anyone with ears and even a hint of critical awareness knows, a vast majority of popular music is disposable. Some of it might hold up for a few listens, but it’s built to be more fad than trend (or even fashion). Hear today, gong tomorrow. Full story »

I really enjoyed the original 30-Day Song Challenge and my hat’s off to whoever created it. But it seemed a little obvious to me in places, so when I set out to create the sequel I wanted to tackle some ideas that we may not think about as often as we might. Today, one of the big ones.

We here in the US think of rock and roll as something that’s pretty much American and British, with perhaps a bit of Canadian and Aussie thrown in. In other words, Anglo. Full story »

I seem to discover lots of news bands that I like every year, and since this particular day of the challenge doesn’t ask me to pick my favorite – just a band I like – let’s keep it simple and pick one without overthinking it. Because if I start thinking about this one I’ll be here all night.

Two-Door Cinema Club is one of my favorite finds of the past couple of years. Crisp, smart indie pop that owes a great deal to the late ’70s New Wave and bands like XTC and Haircut 100 (although when they’re asked about their influences they don’t really talk about New Wave). Love this one. Full story »

It seems that America now officially believes in torture as a primary tool of investigation. And back in 2008, I did a little story on how, believe it or not, we are using music as an implement of torture. So I suppose today’s challenge has a dark side, huh?

Mercifully for those suspected terrorists in captivity, DJ EIT (Enhanced Interrogation Techniques) lacks imagination (although, +1 for the “Barney Theme Song” and Meow Mix jingle). Still, nothing at all from the Disco era? Full story »

We’re going in a slightly different direction today. I mean, for a variety of artistic and intellectual reasons I’d love to have dinner with the greatest bands ever – The Fabs, The Stones, The Who, Zep, Floyd, U2, REM, Van Morrison, and a bunch of others. Then there’s this class of really cool, past and present indie artists from then and now, like Jeff Foster and Don Dixon and The Lost Patrol and Jag Star and Paul Lewis and Fiction 8 and Space Team Electra, but I have had dinner with some of them (and have reasonable expectations of dining with the rest of them some day).

But today, I’m thinking about personal realities. Full story »

When it comes to exercise I’ve always been a team sports guy. Hoops, baseball, soccer – if there’s a ball to hit, throw, kick, dribble or shoot I could go all freakin’ day in just about any conditions you can imagine. But running for the sake of running? Hate it. Weights? I do it because I need to, but I don’t enjoy it, even if I do like the results.

This is just my psychology. So the music I work out to (these days I ride my bike more than anything) has to take me somewhere else, somewhere away from the boredom and pain that accompanies exercising alone. Full story »

So much of popular music is about sex and nothing else, and we have seen more sexcess than we probably know how to process. Perhaps so much that we occasionally grow numb to it.

I can think of dozens of really sexy women in music, but since it seems like sexy is a prerequisite to even get in the door, it really takes a bit extra to rise above the noise.

Enter Alison Goldfrapp. Full story »

I’ve noted a couple of times as I have worked through the original 30-Day Song Challenge and The Sequel how powerfully I associate music with family and my childhood. If you’d grown up where I did, you’d perhaps understand why the movie Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? was more than just a really good comedy. The soundtrack was loaded with dark, downtrodden Appalachian hillbilly spirituals, the music of hopeless lives waiting on Jesus because there was nothing else to hope for. Full story »

The guy can’t sing (phrasing, anyone?) He can’t write songs. And while I’ve heard guitarists defend him, I’ve personally never seen or heard him play anything that strikes me as being more than sort of marginally competent.

I would ask you to explain to me what the big deal is, but I’m afraid you’d try. So here’s a song by Dave Matthews, and the less said about it the better. I don’t necessarily recommend that you listen to it.

Moving along…. Full story »

Here’s one I’ve been waiting on.

Few things reveal more about a society than its music. Plato explained that when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state change with them. Argue chicken and egg on this if you like, but Jimmy Swaggart bitched about it and Pop Will Eat Itself sampled his rant in the intro to Cure for Sanity. Plato, Jimmy Swaggart and PWEI can’t all be wrong.

Whether music causes the widespread rot of the fabric of society or merely holds a mirror up to it, the disturbing truth is that we live in the Age of American Idol, the shallowest, most cynical and relentlessly vapid corporate put-up job in entertainment history. Full story »

I’ve always felt strongly attuned to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous short story, “Ethan Brand.” The title character forsakes his life to search the world for the unpardonable sin. He finds it. It ends badly for him. The nature of the sin?

He remembered with what tenderness, with what love and sympathy for mankind, and what pity for human guilt and woe, he had first begun to contemplate those ideas which afterwards became the inspiration of his life; with what reverence he had then looked into the heart of man, viewing it as a temple originally divine, and, however desecrated, still to be held sacred by a brother; Full story »

When we’re kids we like the damnedest things, don’t we? There was a moment, I guess during the summer of 1972, when my two favorite songs were the Jackson 5′s “Rockin’ Robin”…

Full story »