This best of list has taken time to compile, all year I guess, and some of fallen off as the year has moved on, as it should be. I still need to put up slicks to look at and sample tracks to listen to, but I haven’t had the time or motivation, so until then Now that I’ve gotten the slicks and sample tracks all lined up, here are the ones that I think are the best from 2011. (and congrats to PJ on winning the Mercury prize…again)
UPDATE: My wife got a great picture of me enjoying myself at Euclid Records (see it at the bottom of this post) celebrating Record Store Day 2011 – such a great day! Thanks again to all at Euclid, thanks to Dave the St. Louis PBR rep and to RSD organizers everywhere!
BONUS: I’ve got a shot of the finished sign, installed in my yard, at the end of the post now. Enjoy, and I’ll see some of you Saturday!
As you should know by now, Record Store Day (April 16, 2011) is rapid approaching, and to me it’s more of a holiday than most holidays. As a quick intro, their site states that, “This is the one day that all of the independently owned record stores come together with artists to celebrate the art of music. Special vinyl and CD releases and various promotional products are made exclusively for the day and hundreds of artists in the United States and in various countries across the globe make special appearances and performances. Festivities include performances, cook-outs, body painting, meet & greets with artists, parades, djs spinning records and on and on. [...] Record Store Day is now celebrated the third Saturday every April.“ As I’ve blogged about it, each year, since it started – I wanted to do more this year, I wanted to promote Record Store Day to all the people in my neighborhood that might not appreciate the local record shop (Euclid Records) that I’ve spent time in for over 25 years. To do this my thought was one of getting offline, ya, going analog, taking it to the streets as it were, so I checked with @recordstoreday on Twitter to see if they had any ready made posters I could print out…
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!
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!
This year Mogwai will release a live cd and album, Special Moves, and a dvd, Burning, covering a three night set during the 2009 shows in Brooklyn. Here they are doing Mogwai Fear Satan, which while from the same tour, is not from the film, but is shot by the same people (thanks for the info Stuart, pictured above) so it’s a good look into what to expect. If it’s all like this it looks like the perfect live film in my opinion, focused on the band interactions and movement, not the audience. To find out more, and get a free mp3 download of 2 Rights Make 1 Wrong from the set, visit Special Moves. Can’t wait to see/hear this, after taking a long time to get into The Hawk Is Howling, I’m ready to see them live again. I was still ‘digesting’ the re-release of Young Team that I bought in London last year, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen them live as they haven’t toured St. Louis, and the Austin gigs were too long ago to count. Just can’t wait for this release.
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