Tag Archives: imogean heap

Best music of 2010

Sleigh Bells

Sleigh Bells

As always, this was a big music year for me, while attending less live shows I think I’ve bought and listened to more music to (sort of) make up for it. I’m also enjoying the home stereo even more now with my early 70s McIntosh MA-6100 pre-amp/amp, and now even some respectable headphones for work, the Grado SR60i. This year bands introduced via Twitter from other music freaks have greatly helped diversify my palate. I can highly recommend the following for this: @captainsdead, @truersound and @somevelvetblog. (if have other suggestions, leave them in the comments!) So here are the releases that I spent the most time with in 2010, each with a track from each release for you to hear/sample. Leave me feedback as to how my tastes compare to yours, as well as anything I may have missed. Finally, as always with music, see the bands when you can and buy locally, buy often.

1-2-3-4…GO!

Best music of 2009

live photo of Part Chimp courtesy of Last.FM

Well 2009 was another stellar year for music if you ask me, and as usual, my yearly ‘top’ list is going on a month late. I always have these grand designs of writting a short paragragh about each selection, why I picked it, how I first heard it, etc, but you know how that goes.  I will say that this year, while I’ve gotten into many bands the way I have in years past (trolling record stores, randomly listening to anything I can find online), I’ve also found things I wouldn’t have found thanks to my Twitter account.  While those who don’t get  Twitter think it’s just folks updating what they had for breakfast, if you stick around, dig deeper and find the right people to follow, it’s amazing wealth of information.  Not requiring the effort of say a blog post allows rapid, unvarnished opinions, spouted out between people’s day to day tasks, which I always prefer since I feel I’m more lucid after a few cups of coffee while something is blaring in my ears. New this year is the reissues section, what with things like OK Computer and Young Team being reissued, I can’t help but highlight them.

As always I want to give a hat tip to the fabulous folks at my neighborhood record store, Euclid Records, where I bought almost all of these discs over the past year.  I also want to recognize people like Ryan, Anthony, Mary, @fcervantes, @plasmatron, @koppper @crankin and Yvonne for a continued stream of what has their attention at any particular time – grabbing stuff and listening to it later when I have more time always reveals new sounds to me, so thanks for that. Also, as always, this list will be added to my ever expanding Noise page here, listing my favs from 2001 to the present.

Ok enough of this babble, hell, I already have a couple of possible contenders for next years list!