A blog and nothing but since 2003. Some tech, lots of music, and if rambling was money, drinks are on me.
Will the 2008 Year In Music please answer the white courtesy phone
As may be obvious already, I have a pretty grand ambition for this new blog. I want to have one blog, with three different themes that act as their own site. These themes will be tech, music and miscellaneous crap. I’m hoping to write a lot more about all three.
There’s a number of tricky points with this bold, earth-shaking, baby-scaring plan, not in the least of which is search engine optimization, along with subdomain parsing, time-allocating, word-smithing, rss-ing, blog-promoting and…
…new music. Is it just me, or is the 2008 year in music really taking it’s sweet-ass time getting revved up? Magnetic Fields, Vampire Weekend and the Helio Sequence have all put out good-to-great albums, but there’s still nothing revelatory. This time last year, I practically already had a decent year-end mix going, but this year…I dunno. What am I missing so far? Any rock that’s rocking you rockers that you found under a rock that I don’t know about?
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February 15th, 2008 at 12:21 am
I’ve been thinking the same thing recently. Xtian sent me an email today about how good Nada Surf’s Lucky is, and I agree with him to some extent, as it’s certainly more memorable than their last outing. But they tend to lean quite a bit towards acoustic-based power pop (a strangely familiar description), while I think they have the potential to be much more dynamic and interesting than that. Their mood swings on Let Go were just fantastic, and though they get a little moody on this latest, I just find myself wishing they would go further. Their live show I saw in November? September? was great but lacking in the same sort of way.
Anyway, there’s my year in music so far. I think Lucky is the only 2008 record I’ve heard. Can that be right?
February 15th, 2008 at 8:58 am
Have you heard the new Headlights record yet?
I’m waiting for this year to shake me up a bit musically, but I think I’m going to have to wait til March for that.
February 15th, 2008 at 9:21 am
Wow! This looks terrific, Reid! I think that you’ve got something here! I look forward to hearing about your thoughts on this year’s music. I got nothin’.
February 16th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
“Magnetic Fields, Vampire Weekend and the Helio Sequence have all put out good-to-great albums, but there’s still nothing revelatory.”
It does kinda seem like 2008 is off to a slow start. A lot of albums I was expecting have been pushed back, too. So there’s that. I’d just like to add though that my favourite album so far is “The Evening Descends” by Evangelicals, and I think it’s pretty revelatory.
February 16th, 2008 at 6:32 pm
ohh, and i like the new blog layout.
February 18th, 2008 at 11:20 am
In reverse order:
Thanks, Thomas! It’s good to see you around here. I’ve gotten some good stuff off of your blog.
MA, thanks. I haven’t done a whole lot of customizing to the template, but I like the cleaner look. All in due time. As far as the year’s music goes, I’ll be writing once a week with my favorite current song of that week, so keep an eye out for that. Or you could just come back at the year-end
Liz, I’m listening to the Headlights previews on Amazon and it sounds awesome. It’s definitely a pickup tomorrow. Thanks for the tip.
Aitch, weren’t you going to be posting mp3s more regularly? What do I have to do to get you to start that? Do I have to come down there and kick your ass? And by “kick your ass”, I mean “bring you some of my mom’s cookies”.