KWCW

The guitars are so technical and solid, how could you not like this one?

It’s spoon! defintely one of my favorite bands of all time and this release does not dissapoint.

“Pencil Rot” has to have the best intro to a quirky pop cd that i have ever heard.

Freak? Folk? Just Plain Crazy? Call it what you want, but its incredibly creative and makes for quite an interesting listen

Can this man write a song or what? Anyone who discovers a town who basically worships superman himself and writes a song about it (”Man of metropolis steals our hearts”) and who plays a mean banjo definitely makes my top 10.

Pure poppy goodness. Brilliant use of multiple bass lines that intertwine. If you ever get a chance to see this band live, jump at it!

Their best effort yet! Mass Romantic comes close, but isn’t quite as good. Dan Bejar’s additions match up to Carl Newman’s for the very first time.

The most immediate record Sigur Ros has released so far. Emotive, ambient with pounding drums and even a 2 minute long track for those without the patience for the epic-lengths.

The Welsh Gods pump out another masterpiece. Tell me lazer beam isn’t one of the catchiest songs you’ve heard all year.

Way more cohesive effort than You Forgot It in People. Even more members. Solid, clunky basslines. Great vocal addtions from Feist. I want them to play my birthday party.

broadcast - tender buttons
if i ever become a haute couture model with a strong coke addiction, i will vomit into the toilet to this record. that’s how much i love it.

jens lekman - oh you’re so silent jens
the most charming swedish record since Ace of Base’s The Sign. plus, he writes songs about anti-war demonstrations. i always wished i would meet a girl at an iraq war protest.

tom vek - we have sound
people keep on describing this record as ‘proletarian’, but i think it’s more of a party boy record. and i like that.

joggers - with a cape and a cane
this record could go it alone on the sheer awesomeness of ‘wicked light sleeper’, but it is so much more. i am still tearing away at the many, many guitar riffs in this jungle.

stephen malkmus - face the truth
everything from a drugged-robot groove (’kindling for the master’) to a song about putting on cleats to climb a shitpile (’pencil rot’). who needs drugs when you have this?

wilderness - wilderness
my friend nick shouts loud at his band’s shows. i think if he listened to this record, he’d have a much better idea of how to do it.

fiery furnaces - ep
this is the fiery furnaces record that convinced me that it matters both very much and not at all what the lyrics are. and any remake of ‘tropical iceland’ is a good one. ff get extra credit for continuing songs about seafaring.

decemberists - picaresque
here the merry band of portland anachronistics eliminate the weaker material that plagued their earlier albums, and pare down the sound to unleash a barrow full of compelling sounds and stories.

wolf parade - apologies to the queen mary
i’m pretty sure i would be held back in hipster school if this didn’t make the list somewhere.

double - loose in the air
this band mostly qualifies because i think of them as an ‘evil’ french kicks. though to be fair the french kicks are themselves dastardly bastards from what i hear. and by ‘what i hear i mean’ their music. duh.

“Slow Burn”, the first track on Hudson Bell’s sophomore release When the Sun is the Moon, begins with a sort of natural sonic emanation that one would expect from the p- and s-waves of an earthquake, quietly rippling through the hillside until the guitarist hits the fuzz pedal and it’s taken straight on into shoegazing territory. Bell’s vocals crow with a timbre reminiscent of those of Issac Brock on “Trailer Trash”, and the singer’s questionably-tuned guitar only furthers the album’s comparison to the earlier work of Modest Mouse and Built to Spill.

The most notable track on the album is “Atlantis Nights”, an uptempo shuffle with meandering guitar fills and the chorus asking “Atlantis, how did it come to this?”. Asking these sort of questions about the apocalypse of a mythological society is exactly what makes Bell and his cohorts so unnaturally charming: while seemingly eccentric, Bell’s goal is not to alienate the listener, though this is not to say that the songs are immediately accessible. “Sea Horse,” a longer track on the album, sounds like yet another ‘acoustic rumination on existential matters’, so subtly grows and grows in volume and sheer size that it turns into a long groove like Songs:Ohia’s “Farewell Transmission”, if less country and solemn.