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An occasional blog about populist politics and popular music, not necessarily at the same time. LinksLocal Links Social Media My Other Websites Music Politics Others Networking Music DatabaseArtist Search: Website SearchGoogle: Recent Reading
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Music Week [490 - 499]Monday, September 5, 2016 Music Week
Music: Current count 27090 [27056] rated (+34), 369 [370] unrated (-1). I've been having a lot of trouble thinking of things to listen to, although the list below is still pretty substantial. I finished looking up all the new jazz albums in Downbeat's Readers Poll ballot. Final tally is that I've listened to and rated 165 of 186 (88.71%) nominated albums, adding 53 albums since filling out the ballot. The remaining 21 by label: High Note/Savant: 7, CAM Jazz: 2, 1 each for 12 other labels (notably Anzic, ArtistShare, Cuneiform, Dark Key, Destiny, Fuzzy Music, Nessa -- at least those are the ones I've heard of). I should probably see whether Joe Fields is willing to turn service back on. The final grade tally: [A-] 18, [***] 31, [**] 47, [*] 41, [B] 16, [B-] 8, [C+] 1, [C] 1, [C-] 1. The grade curve bent slightly lower as I added more records, but last week's batch did reveal one more A- record, by Omar Sosa. Done with that, I scrounged around a few other lists. I checked out several Scandinavian jazz releases that Chris Monsen likes: Anna Högberg, Moskus, Hanna Paulsberg, Rønnings Jazzmaskin; also, less impressively, Monsen's non-jazz favorites: Bent Shapes, Cobalt, White Denim. I checked out a couple of well-regarded recent rap albums -- De La Soul, Young Thug -- the former is a favorite of my nephew, but I had trouble focusing on it. Also liked Britney Spears, recommended by Robert Christgau -- his other pick, Tegan and Sara's Love You to Death, was an A- here back in July. Still boycotting All Music Guide. For all its problems, that's taking a toll on my ability to find information necessary for reviewing records off streaming services. One thing I did use last week, for the first time in several years, was Spotify. Hard to search, and I rather hate the user interface, but I found two records there that had eluded me on Napster (Rhapsody): Anna Högberg: Attack and Waco Brothers: Going Down in History. Both came highly recommended, got two plays, and wound up high-B+. But by and large I'm not finding much there that's not already available on Napster, so I'm not convinced I need to pay up yet. That project I mentioned above: I've started assembling all of my old Jazz Consumer Guide columns into reference book form, using a wysiwyg word processor (Libre Office) instead of my usual hand-coded HTML. I've finished sorting the 27 columns (26 from the Village Voice), a little more than 1000 records from 2004-11, which with default formats runs 120 pages -- looks a lot like this index. A few decisions to date: I've decided to separate the individual artist and group records, and to pull the pre-2000 archival material out into an appendix at the end. I've changed the grade scale to 1-10, with A- at 8 (but I've generally nudged pick hits up to 9), so B is at 4 and the lower grades are mushed together. This is part of a broader project to collect my writings and recast them as a series of books -- this is the third I've opened, but the only one so far I've put much writing into. Working title is Recorded Jazz in the Early 21st Century: A Consumer Guide. Like the Jazz Consumer Guide, it mostly consists of nugget-sized reviews and one-liners. I expect to add a brief biographical intro to each artist/group, which will allow me to cut some redundancies out of the reviews. Then the much larger task will be to go through my thousands of other reviews -- the oldest prospect and surplus notes, Jazz Prospecting, Recycled Goods, and Rhapsody Streamnotes -- and pick out records worth mentioning and recast them into form. Then there's the question of what's missing and should be added. I'm thinking it would be nice for the project to span two decades, 2000-2019, although obviously I'm missing a few year fore and aft. Also not sure how much more work I want to put into this, so I may consider the option of recruiting a collaborator to finish it off. But it's pretty clear from looking at what I got so far that I've already put in most of the work, and that I can offer a wider-ranging survey of contemporary jazz than pretty much anyone. When I clean things up a bit, I figure the next step will be to post a PDF and solicit comments. More on that later. By the way, Michael Tatum's latest brilliant A Downloader's Diary is archived here. I'm pleased to provide an archive and indexing for all of his columns. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, August 29, 2016 Music Week
Music: Current count 27056 [27020] rated (+36), 370 [359] unrated (+11). Published Streamnotes last week, so most of the finds (4 of 5 pictured albums) are already known to you. I wrote there about catching up with the Downbeat Readers Poll albums ballot, and I've continued doing that -- only eleven more that I haven't looked up, so I'll probably finish this week, even if that means listening to Yellowjackets. Of course, that leaves 20 records I tried finding on Rhapsody (and often on Bandcamp) but failed. Of those, the ones I most miss are the HighNotes/Savants (JD Allen, Kenny Burrell, George Cables, Joey DeFrancesco, Tom Harrell, Jeremy Pelt, The Power Quintet) and Roscoe Mitchell's Celebrating Fred Anderson (Nessa). I'll publish a revised grade breakdown when I hit the bottom of the list. Needless to say, the curve has been edging down, with only the George Coleman and David Murray records (ones I picked off on the first day) joining the A-list. I got a letter from Oliver Weinding, who runs Babel Label and the Vortex Jazz Club in London, a while back, noting he's putting on a series of showcases for Intakt artists and mentioning my review of "the Lucas Niggli album" -- that would be Kalo-Yele, which I filed under the first name, Aly Keita, a balafon player from Côte D'Ivoire. That, by the way, is still my top-rated record this year. Don't know whether this will result in me getting any physical mail, but I'll point out that Babel's catalog is pretty much all on Bandcamp, and I think their material is well represented on Napster. I've long associated the label with guitarist Billy Jenkins, who I credit with five A- records and one full A: 1998's True Love Collection. I wanted to give you the Bandcamp link, but there doesn't seem to be one, and to top that it's out of print. Basically '60s cheese ("Mellow Yellow," "Everybody's Talking," "Feelin' Groovy," "Sunny," "Dancing in the Streets," with avant twists connecting it all together, including terrific work by Django Bates and Iain Ballamy. It's on my all-time list. Meanwhile, the Paul Dunmall record is here. I stopped using All Music Guide this week. Recently they added some JavaScript that broke on my browser, so whenever I went to a page they printed a message about something horrible happening then looped forever. I could still see their pages on a Chromebook I keep open on the desk nearby, but they decided to escalate their anti-Ad Blocker campaign and make their site unavailable unless users either allow ads, pay them money, or something else I don't understand (seems to be some kind of scam to sell your name to other advertisers). I'm not unsympathetic to people who'd like to make some money off their hard work, and I could probably afford to pay them something as much as I use their site, but I'm also retired, have no income to speak of, make all of my web work available gratis, and have contributed numerous corrections to their site, but mostly I don't like the way this has gone down. It does, however, mean that I have less access to information -- mostly using Discogs a lot, and should find a way to better use MusicBrainz, which is more dependably free, and which I contributed to for a while -- and that's bound to hurt my reviews (main frustrations to date: verifying dates and credits). More bad web news: I gather that Spin is shutting down its review section, starting by firing staff reviewers including Dan Weiss (check him out here). Back when I followed webzines better, Spin had one of the more reliable and adventurous review sections anywhere, including more hip-hop than any other non-specialist source. Supposedly Spin will limp on doing news and features, but even when I bought whole copies of their print magazine I rarely read anything but reviews -- I really don't know what else they have to offer. Weiss is so knowledgeable and so prolific I expect he'll land somewhere else, but those opportunities are vanishing -- and not just because people like me are too cheap to pay for professional work ("content-providers" get squeezed from both directions). Unpacking picked up this week with nearly everything I received actually scheduled for September or October release. But part of the reason for the uptick is that I went ahead and added six releases I received today -- I usually hold Monday's mail for the following week. PS: Just noticed Michael Tatum has a new Downloader's Diary. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, August 22, 2016 Music Week
Music: Current count 27020 [26996] rated (+24), 359 [357] unrated (+2). Spent much of last week trying to pull yesterday's Book Roundup post together, barely scratching up my quota (40) although I still have a dozen tabs open with more books, and those will lead to even more. Still, I imagine we'll have to wait for September/October to get a new batch. I didn't find any of this batch compelling enough to order, although I gave some thought to Barbara Ehrenreich's progeny -- Ben Ehrenreich (The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine) and Rosa Brooks (How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales From the Pentagon), David Daley's Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy, Steve Fraser's The Limousine Liberal: How an Incendiary Image United the Right and Fractured America. I might have added new books by Thomas Piketty and Jeremy Scahill, but they mostly remind me that I still haven't read older (and probably more important) books by them (Capital in the Twenty-First Century and Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, both sitting patiently on my shelf). On the other hand, I've already discovered that I missed two books by James K. Galbraith: Welcome to the Poisoned Chalice: The Destruction of Greece and the Future of Europe (2016, Yale University Press), and Inequality: What Everyone Needs to Know (paperback, 2016, Oxford University Press). I do intend to pick both of them up soon, and maybe also Joseph Stiglitz' The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe (2016, WW Norton). It's not so much that I feel a need to bone up on these subjects -- I think I understand the Euro issues pretty well (although I don't know much about the supposedly labrinthine EU bureaucracy), and I've been on record that increasing inequality is the main political problem of our time. Actually, I think I'll learn more about inequality from the Euro books, as it seems to me that Europe has, at least in terms of economic issues, been turned as far to the right by globalizing business interests (code name: neoliberalism) as the US, albeit without nearly as much focus on wrecking security nets as here -- although that's likely to change as inequality increases, and the code name there is austerity; Britain, for instance, avoided the Euro trap, but suffered a politically self-induced recession anyway). Rated count isn't anything to brag about, especially given that nearly half of it came from a deep dive into Barbara Dane's discography, and I didn't come up with anything I'd missed there nearly as good as her Anthology of American Folk Songs (1959) or her surprising new one, Throw It Away. Don Ewell and the Chambers Brothers were side trips from Dane. I also thought about taking a dive into Chucho Valdés after listening to somewhat less than half of his 2015 album, Tribute to Irakere (Live in Marciac), last week, but didn't get very far. I actually saw him live here shortly after we moved to Wichita -- the Village Vanguard album from the same period has long sat on my unrated shelf, and I'm sorry to say it doesn't quite live up to the memory, not that it isn't quite some show. The other new A- record this week is from Atmosphere, a Minnesota alt-rap duo I've been habitually giving high B+s to ever since their 1997-2002 A- streak (Overcast!, Lucy Ford, God Loves Ugly). I wrote it up after two spins, then was taken aback to find Dan Weiss panning it (4/10) in Spin, so much so that I replayed it from the second cut ("Ringo" -- Weiss calls it "terribly unfunny" and says it "might be the worst song they've ever made"). Still, the extra play only reinforced my initial impressions. (The album actually has mixed reviews -- 71/6 at etacritic, favorable reviews at AV Club and Exclaim, another pan at Pitchfork -- latter doesn't bother me at all.) Still not sure I didn't underestimate their 2014 album Southsiders, which Weiss likes and Christgau gave an A- to, but I gave them both basically the same shot. But that could also be said of their many in-between albums -- I've heard 10 overall, but have missed a couple along the way. Wasn't clear from Christgau's review of Mestre Cupijó, but it looks to me like the 2014 record is a compilation based on four 1973-78 LPs. Sounds to me closer to Colombia than to Brazil, but that's partly explained by geography, and possibly also by its vintage. I haven't heard The Rough Guide to Ethiopian Jazz yet, or any of Christgau's other recent world music picks (although I do have a download of Senegambia Rebel awaiting my attention). It's getting harder to do basic research on downloaded/streamed albums here, which is to say it's getting harder to write reviews. Part of this is that AMG added some new JavaScript to their site that totally breaks it for me, so they're no longer usable as a reference site. I suppose one might blame this on me, as I'm still doing my writing work on a machine running Ubuntu 12.04, and the Firefox browser there is horribly buggy, crashing every 2-3 days. The longer I wait the harder it gets to upgrade -- at this point I almost have to rebuild the system from scratch, something I don't look forward to. I did, however, manage to upgrade my secondary system -- the one I use for music streaming -- from 14.04 to 16.04. Took all night, but I'm pleased to say nothing serious broke. Good chance I'll go ahead and post Streamnotes sometime this week rather than waiting for the tail end of August. Currently have 101 records in the draft file, including 16 A-. Perhaps a bit long on jazz since I've mostly been picking unserviced, previously unheard records off Downbeat's album ballot. Will be glad to see August gone, although here at least it's been pretty mild compared to past years (hint: grass is still green). New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, August 15, 2016 Music Week
Music: Current count 26996 [26901] rated (+95), 357 [420] unrated (-63). Early last week I got up and found my new jazz queue was practically empty -- at least didn't have anything I particularly wanted to listen to. I wound up playing something from the travel case for breakfast, then took a look at the Downbeat ballot albums list I had saved and started looking things up on Rhapsody. By the end of the day, I had two very solid A-list albums: new works by George Coleman and David Murray I wasn't aware existed. I kept looking up ballot albums for the rest of the week, but didn't find any more A-list. The tally so far: [A-] 2, [***] 4, [**] 4, [*] 7, [B] 2. That brings the percentage of the 186 ballot albums I've heard up from 60.21% to 70.43%. That also skews the grade curve down a bit, although it still centers on mid-B+ (was 26-35-20, now 30-39-27). That leaves 58 albums, the majority most likely not on Rhapsody. At some point I started wondering why, if the queue was empty, the unrated count was stuck around 440 even though it had been down around 400 before I took my June trip and fell behind. So I took a close look at the ratings database and found nearly sixty albums that I had done but hadn't written down the grade for. The actual newly rated count this week is close to the 36 albums listed below -- a pretty healthy weekly count, but way short of the humanly impossible 96 reported above. As I've explained before, the unrateds shot up over a decade ago when Wichita's local record stores went out of business and I bought boxloads of stuff I still haven't gotten to. The list also includes some LPs I didn't remember well enough to jot down when I first constructed the ratings list in the late 1990s -- of course, I wonder now how many of those I still have, since I sold off most of my vinyl in 1999. There are also a few promos from the mid-'00s that I didn't get to but didn't dispose of, but probably no more than a dozen promos from this decade -- I've been doing a pretty good job of getting through the new stuff even if I haven't made much progress with the old. At some point I should make a serious effort to knock down that backlog, even if it just means reclassifying things I no longer have (or cannot find). That would be one of those decluttering projects we talk about doing but I never seem to be able to find time for. Besides, even if the promo stream is drying up -- this month's dearth is partly seasonal but last week's haul is one of the lamest ever. (Two more records arrived today, but I'm pretty sure if I hadn't held last Monday's mail back I'd be empty below. As it is, I won't be empty next week, but might not see a rebound either.) I made phat thai last week, and finally jotted down the recipe I use -- been meaning to do that for some time, especially as I take various liberties with the cookbook (which, by the way, Michael Tatum recommended to me). Laura doesn't like bean sprouts, and I don't like cayenne, so I leave those things out (but I've found that a couple dried Chinese chili peppers don't hurt, as long as I pitch them before serving). Nice thing about the dish is that I can do all the prep, including soaking, and cook the thing in less than an hour. And with shrimp in the freezer, the only thing I have to worry about having fresh is the scallions. I've had a few recipes online for many years, but I've been pretty erratic about adding to them. In fact, I have two sets, one "old" (which dates to 2000) and "new" (which starts in 2007, using a newer look and feel). At one point I meant to convert all the "old" to "new" format, and develop the code to where everything is cross-indexed by ingredients, cuisine, and even dinner party (so one can tell which dishes went together, even how often I make them -- if I bothered to keep track). But I never finished that code, never converted all the "old" to "new," and have only sporadically added things, mostly when I wanted to pass a recipe on. This is actually one of those, and this time I added some new code to display a picture of the finished dish. Looks pretty good, I think. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, August 8, 2016 Music Week
Music: Current count 26901 [26875] rated (+26), 420 [423] unrated (-3). Another week that's liable to make people think I'm an easy grader, or at least one that has a few soft spots that make him an easy mark: six A- records, eleven (or twelve counting the grade change) high B+, that's something like 65%. In my defense, several things came into alignment this past week. Main one was that I did a major update of Robert Christgau's website, which got me rumaging through recent EW lists for things I hadn't gotten to yet, which yielded two solid A- records (Konono No. 1, Lori McKenna) and a bunch of just-unders (Leland Sundries, Dawn Oberg, Walter Salas-Humara, older Lori McKenna). I also caught up with a purple patch in the new jazz queue: a batch of Clean Feeds, plus new albums by old favorites Stephan Crump and Steve Lehman. Also stumbled upon some old records I had been looking for (Peter Kuhn, Ellery Eskelin, Audio One), looked up some big-name recent jazz I didn't get in the mail (Kenny Garrett, Charlie Hunter, Joe Lovano, Markus Stockhausen). Didn't leave much time for bottom trawling. In this company, the dud of the week was Garrett's Do Your Dance -- something I might of suspected given that he snagged the cover of Downbeat (nearly all of my old JCG duds had been on Downbeat's cover). I don't usually make a point of linking to music, but the search for Crump's cover led me to his Bandcamp page. Note that to start with the first cut, you have to scroll down to the song listing and pick it from there. More records there, including some early ones I should check out, but I don't see my favorite one, 2010's Reclamation. I reviewed this from CD, but Bandcamp is one of the best things that's happened for someone who wants to review a broad swathe of records like I do. Also, I think, good for customers, who among other things get to sanity check reviewers like me. While I'm at it, here's a YouTube link for the song of the week, Dawn Oberg's "Republican Jesus", from her short 2015 LP Bring. Probably the most pointed political song since Todd Snider's "Conservative Christian, Right Wing, Republican, Straight White White American Male" -- actually more pointed since the analysis is deeper and more detailed, but the subject is pretty much the same. A couple things I could use some feedback on:
Follow the Contact link for an email address, or comment on Facebook of something like that. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Grade changes:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, August 1, 2016 Music Week
Music: Current count 26875 [26851] rated (+24), 423 [431] unrated (-8). Not a particularly strong rated count -- especially given that I wrapped up a Streamnotes column, but still finding exceptional numbers of A- records, and they take more time than B or low B+ records. Also, almost everything below is jazz, and most of it (aside from the Hersch oldies) came from my mail queue (down lower now than it's been in about three months). One mistake from Streamnotes is that I omitted the Rent Romus album cover. I'll rectify that in the faux blog, but probably not in the Serendipity version. (Not sure how the relative performance of those is holding up. I have managed to keep adding new entries to Serendipity, but rarely see them, and find it more work to edit.) Surprise star this week is Peter Kuhn, who plays clarinet, bass clarinet, and some sax, and recorded a bit 1979-81, dropped out for a long stretch, and re-surfaced last year. I didn't recall the name, but thanks to Rick Lopez' dilligence I did list his albums in the discography to my mammoth William Parker-Matthew Shipp Consumer Guide (from 2003, I think). I tried to find Kuhn's other albums for Hat and Soul Note on Rhapsody (err, ugh, Napster), but only tracked down The Kill (misfiled under Denis Charles -- seems to have been his real name, although I notice now that I used the Americanized "Dennis" last week, something else to fix). Getting pretty close to doing a major update to Robert Christgau's website: not many new articles -- latest is his review of Jon Savage's 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded -- and no new-old pieces (maybe someone should organize a scavenger hunt), but I finally managed to bring the Consumer Guide database up to the moment (July 29). Now if only I can remember that bug (revision incompatibility) I had to work around to import the new database. I'll tweet when I get it done. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
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Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, July 25, 2016 Music Week
Music: Current count 26851 [26822] rated (+29), 431 [435] unrated (-4). Much better than average week of mail: two packages from Clean Feed in Portugal, one from Fou in France, the new Steve Lehman from Pi, and a new Stephan Crump with Ellery Eskelin and Tyshawn Sorey. Didn't quite make the 30 rated mark, although there's some chance that I missed counting something (found two of those earlier today). Not sure why given that I hardly ventured outside the house (temperature was into triple digits all week, and that's not the "feels like" figure although it certainly does). Probably because I mostly worked from the new jazz queue, and made an effort to play some downloads I've collected but find annoying to bother with. I think Thumbscrew got five plays before I gave up on it, but others got cut short -- Anat Fort, perhaps. Two HMs I probably should have given another spin: Domo Genesis and André Gonçalves. The former is a rapper and I've been having a lot of trouble parsing them on Rhapsody. The latter is very minimal-concept electronica (although on a jazz label). The Fred Hersch Solo is from last year. It finished 11th in the Jazz Critics Poll, second highest among records I hadn't heard (after 3rd place Jack DeJohnette, ahead of Roscoe Mitchell at 31 and Brad Mehldau at 34). Its publicist didn't service me at the time, probably recognizing that I'm usually a wet blanket as far as solo piano is concerned, but I found it on her annual wrap up (along with Ran Blake's solo Ghost Tones, 27th in the Poll). I'm duly impressed after two plays, although I'm still undecided about Hersch's new trio (which I did receive), tauntingly titled Sunday Night at the Vanguard -- either A- or very high B+ (find out next week, or probably sooner, as I should have a Rhapsody Streamnotes column sometime this week). Rich Halley and The Paranoid Style also got quite a bit of play, both winding up slightly above the A- line. The saxophonist's album is a bit scattered with more unison playing than I'd like and the trombonist very hit-and-mess plus I'm never sure what Vince Golia is up to, but it has more thrilling moments than anything I can recall in the last couple months. I'm still having trouble with Elizabeth Nelson's sociopolitical theorizing, but ultimately went with the review she provided in a lyric: "it can't all be that bad because it's also entertaining." New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, July 18, 2016 Music Week
Music: Current count 26822 [26780] rated (+42), 435 [445] unrated (-10). High rated count is a combination of factors: I've been taking the new jazz queue FIFO, and ran through a dull patch -- only records that got as many as three plays were Evenfall, Mathias Landaeus, and Joel Miller (more of an art rock album), with only a couple more getting two plays; quite a few EPs and short albums among the streaming picks (the Sheer Mag 7-inchers are really 4-song EPs, the Michete and Wire EPs are 23-29 minute albums, Modern Baseball's LP barely tops 30 minutes), so they go fast. (On the other hand, the Drake album is insanely long.) I continued to check out stuff from various mid-year best-of lists, with the usual mixed results. I've also been working on Christgau's database, and am finally up to date locally, which is to say almost a year ahead of what you see on the site. I'm waiting for some people (including Bob) to do some proofreading before I update the site. Work on that reminded me to check out The Rough Guide to South African Jazz and God Don't Never Change: The Songs of Blind Willie Johnson -- two records that weren't on Rhapsody when I previously checked, but are now. (Speaking of which, their rebranding as Napster has taken place. Ugh!) Also checked out Christgau's rap picks from last week: Vic Mensa and Joey Purp. Both good records, but I wound up with reservations about each. Still, Mensa's "16 Shots" is timely, urgent even, and may be something to return to. Purp's mixtape is stronger musically. Still, my picks this week lean toward electropop and new wave. Best I've heard from Wire in over a decade. I counted it as an EP, but it runs eight songs, 25:55. I've added a "Artist Search" form to the "fake blog" left navigation menu. I would have liked to make it available on all standard pages, but I'm temporarily confused about how to do that. The search page is here. New Steve Lehman album and a bunch of new Clean Feeds came in the mail today, so it'll be tempting to break FIFO order on the new jazz queue. Here's an early report from Cleveland where my nephew Mike is covering the Republican Convention for Fusion. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Grade changes:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, July 11, 2016 Music WeekMusic Week
Music: Current count 26780 [26750] rated (+30), 445 [449] unrated (-4). Fairly respectable week, again boosted by looking for records that had showed up on various mid-year lists: last week I identified Anohni, Kaytranada, and Mitski as among the fifteen most frequently cited albums so far (at this point the others I haven't gotten to are Beyoncé, James Blake, and Tim Hecker. Not far down the list were Blood Orange, Car Seat Headrest, and The 1975, and also mentioned were Angry Angles, Frankie Cosmos, Theo Croker, Fruit Bats, Robert Glasper, The Julie Ruin, King, Jeff Parker, and Leon Vynehall. Needless to say, some are better than others, but the only touted records not worth my trouble this week were by Carrie Underwood (Christgau likes them). Also played enough out of my jazz queue to modestly reduce the backlog, with two records (David Greenberger, Jon Lundbom) edging over the A- threshold, and three more (Sylvie Courvoisier, Fresh Cut Orchestra, Jürgen Wuchner) just missing. I should also note that I had to resort to Rhapsody for five of this week's jazz albums (Croker, Alan Ferber, Glasper, René Marie, Parker). They didn't fare to well, although three of them appeared on The Observer's mid-year jazz list (as well as Jack DeJohnette [A-], Alfredo Rodriguez [**], Julian Lage [*], Logan Richardson [*], Snarky Puppy [C+], and 2 records I haven't heard yet: Anat Fort, Marquis Hill -- not what I'd call a good list). I'll try to get to more listed records in the next couple weeks. Some brief notes on Downbeat's Critics Poll results, posted in their August 2016 issue:
For more, see my ballot and notes. One last thing: I hacked together a little script which gives you a form to type a name in and prints out my grade list. Try it. Initial version only matched an exact (complete) string, but I've since modified it to allow you to use lower case instead of caps, and to map most accented characters to their accentless bases. The changes make it quite a bit slower, which you may (or may not) notice. In any case, it saves you from having to scan through the many flat files I've been building on every update. So far, this took me just a couple hours. Adding reviews would be a huge undertaking. Don't expect it any time soon. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Monday, July 4, 2016 Music Week
Music: Current count 26750 [26732] rated (+18), 449 [438] unrated (+11). Recovery from whatever struck me the previous week was slow, partly because I never seem to feel like doing much of anything anyways these days. I did manage to post a Rhapsody Streamnotes for June, and filed a tweet to that effect, but promoting the event on Facebook seemed like too much effort -- or maybe just not worth the trouble, as travel and illness had made the column much shorter and sparser than usual. This week's count is way short as well, but I came up with more than a few A-list adds. One thing that helped there was seeing more than a few mid-year best-of lists. Dan Weiss suggested Eric Prydz (3), The Goon Sax (5), Brandy Clark (18), and a few others I haven't gotten to yet (Konono No. 1, Tweet, The Paranoid Style, Sheer Mag, Wire, Mitski, The Julie Ruin, Fruit Bats, Angry Angles). I haven't been cataloguing these lists, but have started to add some records to my Music Tracking list. Last year's list was pretty deep (3077 records) whereas this year's is still sketchy (488) -- mostly records I've heard (373) plus a few that I may want to check out eventually (actually, up to 635 after I added the records from the "so far" lists below). For whatever it may be worth, here are some lists I've consulted: Brooklyn Magazine, Complex, Consequence of Sound, Digital Spy, EW, Fact, Fuse, Gigwise, Gorilla vs. Bear, Guardian, Mashable, Metacritic, Mojo, Newsday, NME, NPR, Observer: Hip-Hop, Observer: Jazz, Okayplayer, Pigeons & Planes, Rolling Stone, Spin, Stereogum, The Telegraph, USA Today, Vulture, XXL. I didn't tally them, but offhand the top slot seems to be between Beyoncé and Chance the Rapper, trailed by (in unranked order, my grades in brackets): Anderson .Paak [A-], Radiohead [B], Rihanna [A-], Kanye West [***]; maybe also: Anohni [*], James Blake, David Bowie [***], Tim Hecker, Kaytranada, Kendrick Lamar [***], Mitski, Parquet Courts [A-], Sturgill Simpson [***]. Other names that have popped up (probably incomplete, omitting EPs and compilations, * indicates a few mentions [as best I recall], titles only where I'm aware of multiples): *The 1975 [*], Aesop Rock [A-], Africans With Mainframes, Afro Celt Sound System, All Saints, The Anchoress, Applewood Road, ASAP Ferg, Aurora, Autechre, A-WA, Katy B [**], Baauer, Juliana Barwick, Bas, Be, Bendik, Big Thief, BJ the Chicago Kid [A-], Bjarki, Blood Orange, The Body, Boosie BadAzz, Borderland [Juan Atkins/Moritz von Oswald], Brockhampton, Brothers Osborne, *Car Seat Headrest, Jazz Cartier, Cavern of Anti-Matter, Helena Celle, *Chairlift, A.Chal, Christine and the Queens, Brandy Clark [A-], Cobalt, Kweku Collins, The Coral, Frankie Cosmos, Theo Croker, The Cult, Denzel Curry, Lucy Dacus [***], Daughter, Death Grips, Deftones, Jack DeJohnette [A-], DIIV, J Dilla, DJ Marfox, DJ Shadow [*], John Doe, *Drake, DVSN, Bob Dylan, Open Mike Eagle + Paul White [***], Robert Ellis, Elzhi, Brian Eno [*], Explosions in the Sky, Brian Fallon, The Field, Field Music [B], Flatbush Zombies [**], Floorplan, Flume, Anat Fort, Foxes, Freeway, Eleanor Friedberger, Frightened Rabbit, Robbie Fulks [A-], Future (EVOL), Gallant, Jack Garratt, *Kevin Gates [*], *Domo Genesis, Vince Gill, Robert Glasper, GLOSS, Gojira, Ariana Grande [*], The Greys, Steve Gunn, Bret Harris, PJ Harvey [**], Fay Hield and the Hurricane Party, Marquis Hill, Heron Oblivion, *Hinds, The Hotelier, Into It Over It, Ital Tek, Vijay Iyer/Wadada Leo Smith [**], Elton John, Johnhyun, Majid Jordan, Kamaiyah [**], Kano, Elon Katz, Charles Kelley, KING, Kvelertak, Julian Lage [*], Ray LaMontagne, *Jessy Lanza, *Lapsley, The Last Shadow Puppets, Klara Lewis, Mr. Lif [***], Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Yachty, Kedr Livanskiy, Night Lovell, Lucius, Luh, Loretta Lynn [**], Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Post Malone, Megadeth, Michete, Modern Baseball, Mogwai, Money, The Monkees, Moodymann, Kevin Morby, *Maren Morris, Mothers, *Bob Mould, Mozzy, Mudcrutch, Mystery Jets, Nada Surf, Marissa Nadler, Oddisee [*], Panic! at the Disco, Oranssi Pazuzu, Jeff Parker, Pet Shop Boys [A-], Pinegrove [*], Rachel Platten, Polica, *Iggy Pop [*], A Pregnant Light, *Margo Price [A-], Pup [C+], Joey Purp, Corinne Bailey Rae, Bonnie Raitt [A-], The Range, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Logan Richardson [*], Alfredo Rodriguez [**], Carrie Rodriguez, Royce da 5'9", Xenia Rubinos, Huerco S, Samlyam, Santigold, *Savages, SBTRKT, School of Seven Bells, Ty Segall, Shearwater, Sia, *Paul Simon [*], Sioux Falls, *Skepta, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Snarky Puppy (Kulcha Vulcha) [C+], Soulwax, Vic Spencer/Chris Crack, *Esperanza Spalding [B], Mavis Staples [**], Gwen Stefani [A-], Sunflower Bean, Swans, Teho Teardo and Blixa Bargeld, Teen Suicide, *Tegan and Sara, Tindersticks, Rokia Traore, Twenty88, William Tyler, Underworld [**], Maria Usbeck, Vektor, Villagers, Violent Soho, Leon Vynehall, Weezer, Westside Gunn, Wet [B], White Denim, *White Lung [**], Whitney, Lucinda Williams, YG, Yo Gotti, Young Dolph, *Young Thug (Slime Season 3) [**], Yung Lean, Zayn, ZelooperZ, Yumi Zouma. As of midyear (well, today) I have 40 records on my A-list (vs. 161 on my 2015 A-list, or about one-quarter as many in one-half the time). My list includes 20 jazz records (1 listed above), and 21 non-jazz (12 listed above, plus: The Coathangers, Elizabeth Cook, Dori Freeman, Gambari Band, Del McCoury, Eric Prydz, Tacocat, Wussy, Young Thug: I'm Up). Christgau, by the way, has 9 A-list albums (not counting compilations) not listed above: four of mine plus Homeboy Sandman, Konono No. 1, Buddy Miller, Thao & the Get Down Set Down, Waco Brothers. New records rated this week:
Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:
Old music rated this week:
Grade changes:
Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:
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