Vinyl In Alphabetical

211. Daft Punk's 'Discovery'

Sat, 18 May 2013 21:25:18 -0400

210. The Stooges' 'The Stooges'

Fri, 10 May 2013 16:57:10 -0400

209. Sufjan Stevens' 'Illinois'

Tue, 07 May 2013 21:47:53 -0400

I think if anyone tells you they’ve listened to this more than once all the way through since 2007, they are full of it. This album became a right of passage for anyone currently between 24 and 32, despite all odds. But at this point, when you are an adult, and not trying to establish your personal brand re: indie bands, all you can hear here are the flaws. The fact that “John Wayne Gacy” is top 10 dumbest songs ever—you are not just like a guy who raped kids, and pretending you are dulls the horrible realities of his crimes. The fact that this is at least 20 minutes too long. The fact that the lit-school affectations of this project are cool and all—writing an album about a state— but they are also something that is so easy to parody it’s too easy of a joke for Portlandia.

That said, this is maybe one of the most memorable albums of the era of indie when it was possible for an indie dude to be enormous on the internet, but make virtually no impact in the real world. A few years after this, bands could make a living touring for Mountain Dew and selling songs to Lincoln, but the best thing Sufjan could do was soundtrack indie movies and be a star on Pitchfork. I think for a lot of us, this dovetails with the era that we got way into this kind of music, and Sufjan will always have a stake over part of our hearts.

So, while I might not think this is as good as I thought it was when I was 19 and just starting to believe I could prove how “different” I was by listening to indie rock, this is one of those albums I’ll carry in my collection until I die.

208. St. Vincent's "Krokodil" 7-inch

Sun, 05 May 2013 19:02:01 -0400

As a record collector, I don’t really “get” the 7-inch collector. I’d rather blow my racks on full LPs than on a bunch of singles, so I’ve bought like 10 in the eight years I’ve been a serious collector. This is one of them, and I mostly bought it because it was the last copy at my local shop on Record Store Day 2012, and because this is sort of what 7-inches are for. This song—the most ripping, badass track by St. Vincent—wouldn’t have fit on any of Annie Clark’s solo albums, so burning this off as a single makes sense. But it’s still kind of a toss-off purchase. It’s a great song, but this isn’t the most responsible use of $7 in my life.

207. Spoon's 'Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga'

Sun, 05 May 2013 18:51:43 -0400

When Spoon’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga broke big and became one of those tentpole indie rock albums of recent vintage that people consider “classic” a week after it comes out, there was a small amount of backlash where people who rode for Spoon since Kill the Moonlight were claiming that the band wasn’t for them anymore. And that was certainly true; seeing Spoon at Lollapalooza after this album came out was a surprising thing. There were thousands of people who knew all the words to “The Underdog” and the other tracks from this album. It was not normal to the personal Spoon experience; knowing only two other people who know of the band, and listening to it alone in your bedroom.

But unlike the other indie bands who took a turn for bigger audiences, Spoon didn’t change at all: They made another album with warped and weird pop songs that somehow can be as catchy as anything on the radio, and it connected with a larger audience. It was hard to begrudge them anything; they deserved it (yes Future Vandross).

The more interesting thing to me, related to this album though, is how hard away from this they took their next album, Transference. It was like Britt Daniel saw what could happen if you totally nail a hit single, and was like, “Fuck this, I’m out.” It sorta seems like this might be the last “we’re gonna make catchy, beautiful songs” Spoon record, and I might be cool with this.

I don’t know if I have much more to add here, except that this album has actually aged better than a lot of other albums from 2007. It still sounds relatively fresh, even after I’ve listened to this thing a million times.

206. Spoon's 'Gimme Fiction'

Sun, 05 May 2013 18:33:38 -0400

I’d like to come here and pretend like I was up on the Internet, checking out indie bands, all the way back when I was like 15, on to the new shit before everyone. But I wasn’t. My window into music culture was Rolling Stone magazine, Spin, and that was it pretty much. I didn’t watch The OC, so I had no idea who Spoon were prior to 2005. And I found out about them in a pretty weird way: I was reading a Time magazine* in the waiting room of my dentist’s office, and they had a tiny blurb about new music releases in the culture pages. And the dude wrote a flowerly love letter to this album at the time of its release, calling it the album of the year, basically. The next time I was at the record store, I saw this on CD, and bought it.

Along with listening to the Black Keys when I was 18, listening to Gimme Fiction when I was 19 was probably the moment I became an “indie fan.” I fell head over heels for this album; I can’t listen to “I Summon You” without thinking of being 19 and being in love with this 24-year-old punk rock chick in one of my Political Science classes, and listening to that song over and over wistfully, like only a 19-year-old chubby dork could. “I Turn My Camera On” used to soundtrack my morning routine. I began telling everyone I knew about Spoon, and tried to find people who liked it as much as me. This lead me to discovering indie rock blogs like Pitchfork.

There are bands that become somehow untouchable and unexplainable to you; they become part of the deritrus of your pop cultural life, and you can’t comprehend a life without them existing somewhere in your frontal lobe, constantly on a loop. Spoon are one of those bands for me.

But another part of that is that those bands can’t ever top themselves at the exact moment they become “perfection” for you. So, while I can understand that some people ride for Series of Sneaks or Kill the Moonlight, or think Spoon peaked with Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, for me, Spoon will never be better than the chorus of “I Summon You,” and Gimme Fiction.

*- This is the part I am shaky on. It might have been People magazine.

205. Spaceghostpurrp's 'Mysterious Phonk: The Chronicles Of Spaceghostpurrp'

Sat, 04 May 2013 18:50:41 -0400

The five stages of grief of realizing that this album is actually a solid 6.5 instead of a solid 8.8:

Denial:

Anger:

Bargaining:

Depression:

Acceptance:

204. Solange's 'True EP'

Sat, 04 May 2013 18:39:41 -0400

Because of how history views the less famous siblings of famous people—as hangers on soaking up excess spotlight of their famous blood—it’s easy to sort of feel bad for Solange. She’s the little sister of a mega famous person, and she probably can’t get a word in edge-wise at Thanksgiving. I mean, how can you compete with a person who you shared a rec room with who now is playing the Super Bowl?

But, as True proves, sometimes it pays to be overshadowed. You can be left to make the kind of oddball, left-field, produced by Dev Hynes R&B that your sister never could. You could crib from the best of ’80s R&B, make an album that feels like ‘88, and surprise the living shit out of people. Beyonce is never going to blow as many minds with a new musical direction the way Solange did with this one.

Beyonce’s fans don’t want to hear this, but at this point, Solange has more room to do whatever she wants musically, and therefore, she’s more interesting. Not as a commentary about modern fame/celebrity or whatever, but as a performing artist, she’s crushing Bey.

203. The Smiths' 'The Queen is Dead'

Sat, 04 May 2013 18:12:54 -0400

I am in the middle of reading A Light That Never Goes Out, Tony Fletcher’s biography of the Smiths, mostly because the Smiths are maybe the most famous ’80s indie band I am the least educated on. I’ve listened to their records—enough to decide that The Queen Is Dead is the one I’d be willing to pay $20 Canadian for in a Montreal record store—but I haven’t dove into the sizable Smiths scholarship that exists in the music books section of the Amazon marketplace.

So, while I wish I could say more trenchant things than, “I really like this record, “Bigmouth Strikes Again” totally rules, and now I am reading a book about this band,” but sometimes that’s the way this blog crumbles.

202. Patti Smith's 'Horses'

Sat, 04 May 2013 17:52:35 -0400

When you start educating yourself on the history of punk in the U.S., you always eventually get around to Patti Smith. And you listen to her landmark debut, Horses, and you wonder, “This is punk? Television didn’t seem too punk, and this is even less punk. This sounds like classic rock.” And you maybe write it off for a few years, looking more towards the simplistic stereotypes of what a “punk” band “is.”

But then, over time, you realize that Patti Smith opening her major label-financed debut LP with “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine” is probably the most “punk” thing that has ever happened. It’s more punk than Sid Vicious. It’s more punk than the Clash. More punk than the Ramones. It’s more punk than hating your dad. It’s more punk than putting a safety pin through your perineum. It’s more punk than a mohawk. It’s more punk than Richard Hell’s entire existence. It’s more punk than Black Flag, Circle Jerks and the Germs combined. It’s more punk than Punk magazine. It’s more punk than Nirvana. It’s more punk than dying of a heroin overdose while wearing a leather jacket.

And then you listen to this album again, and it all makes sense. Patti Smith is punk as fuck, and this album totally rules.

201. Slint's 'Spiderland'

Thu, 02 May 2013 18:13:52 -0400

In the era of searching “literally any album ever.rar” in Google and being able to download literally any album ever (tho that might not work anymore?) it’s not hard to hear the supposedly great “classics” of genres you’re not familiar with. You Google, you download, and you are at least shoddily educated. It’s hard to argue that this is a bad thing.

I’ve never been much into “post-rock,” mostly because I am not stoned as much as I would want to be if I was going to listen to post-rock all the time, and also because I think bands like Do Make Say Think sort of suck. Prior to buying this copy of Slint’s Spiderland on vinyl in 2011, I had done the blasting through post-rock studies of googling albums on Rapidshare, but I hadn’t gotten around to listening to this. I bailed after trying to like one of five Sigur Ros albums.

So I can’t explain why I bought Spiderland that day in 2011. I had just read the 33 1/3 on the album, so that probably had something to do with it, but still, I have no idea why I spent $14.99 on this.

Especially since I don’t even particularly like this (sorry, post-rockists, if those exist). It’s fine. It’s not bad. But I can’t imagine a context other than a blog where I force myself to listen to every record I own from front to back to listen to this in full again. But I’m still going to hold on to it, because the dude that wrote that 33 1/3, and all the loyalists can’t be wrong, can they? I’ll try again in 10 years or something.

200. Sleigh Bells' 'Reign of Terror'

Thu, 02 May 2013 17:57:35 -0400

I (and Eric, R.I.P.) started this blog 269 days ago. I was a lot younger then. I think I had more hair. I was definitely prettier.

When I started this blog, I was in a weird spot; I had quit working as a regular music blogger, and apart from some spot work at Potholes writing when Andrew Martin would guilt trip me into doing some reviews (not really, that dude is cool) this was the only “creative outlet” I had going in my life. I poured a lot of myself into this thing at the outset, and I’ve tried hard to keep that up, despite getting a full-time day job, and freelancing more for other spots. But this I know for sure: Writing weird, semi-personal essays about my past, about my failed dreams and relationships, about my family, and about my mom’s Roberta Flack album is more personally fulfilling to me than waking up everyday and writing 12 blog posts about Fleet Foxes videos ever was. So, I guess this has been a success for me; not financially, not in notoriety, but in terms of making me feel like I have something I can be proud of.

So, here I am, 269 days in. Hitting record 200 with an album that sounds like it’s a pop confection, but is actually a bruising album about your dad dying, about feeling alone, about worrying things are only going to get worse, and about saying “fuck it” to everything. It’s an album I listened to a lot last summer when I experimented with online dating—which I tried out of loneliness and it only reinforced my idea that I am too weird for conversations with strangers—and it makes me feel sort of melancholy when I listen to it now. Which is basically the opposite of what you’d expect when it comes to a Sleigh Bells album. You aren’t supposed to feel anything. Their first album made you feel like you were drinking cheap beer on Venus, ready to snort space drugs off an alien priestess. This one makes me feel all sad.

I guess I should take the time to thank anyone who reads this blog regularly. You are all special flowers. I think I only have something like 70 records to go, so let’s do this. Maybe it’ll all be over in a year.

199. Sleigh Bells' 'Treats'

Wed, 01 May 2013 22:01:54 -0400

Back when the A.V. Club Madison was a running concern, and I could turn a quick buck writing concert reviews and play previews, I got asked to write a “Favorite Shows of 2010” thing, and back in 2010, there was one show in particular I remember fondly even now, in 2013: I saw Sleigh Bells open for Yeasayer like 4 days before Treats came out, and in terms of having my balls rocked off by a band, it’s that Sleigh Bells show and everything that came afterwards. It was a transcendent show. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

“My first full year of seeing shows in Madison got off to a slow start, but once it got going in April, it seemed like there was at least one can’t miss band to see each week. But no show was better than the 35 minutes I spent having my chest cavity imploded at the Majestic while watching Sleigh Bells open for Yeasayer. The show was in the few days before the duo’s excellent Treats came out, and while I had heard deliriously loud singles “Kids” and “Crown On The Ground,” I didn’t expect to be quite so sonically assaulted. I spent the band’s set alternately smiling my face off and stepping backwards to try to relieve some of the pressure on my torso. Granted, Yeasayer was terrible—the group confirmed every snarky Rusted Root comparison—but I would gladly pay double to see Sleigh Bells again.”

The thing I think about now, is how irrelevant Sleigh Bells made Yeasayer seem. I was so-so on Yeasayer before that show, and then seeing them after being carpet-bombed by Sleigh Bells just made them seem out of touch, and worst, impossibly lame. Like, how horrible of a opening band for them; they have to follow up “Crown on the Ground” with a bunch of boring ass shit from Odd Blood. They didn’t even try to top them; they just rolled over. I haven’t listened to them at all since.

***

The only problem with seeing a lot of the songs on Treats live before hearing them on wax is that they never, ever seem loud enough. I’ve listened to this album probably 100 times, and it never can pack enough oomph. I blew out a speaker in my old Saturn listening to this, and even then, rattling windows and blowing up stereo components, it didn’t feel like it did live. This record doesn’t come close. The only time their music felt like it did when I saw them live is when I saw them alive, again, in 2012. I guess that’s probably not good for Sleigh Bells’ record product, but I guess this is an endorsement: see these guys live. Your chest cavity will never be the same.

198. Simon & Garfunkel's 'The Graduate' OST

Wed, 01 May 2013 21:32:10 -0400

My dad occasionally reads this blog, I guess—or he did when it started—and according to my mom, he teared up reading the thing I wrote about feeling like I didn’t really “know” him until I started listening to the Beatles and we could talk about it. As part of that post, I talked about how it was weird to me that he’d write something inside of his records; it turns out that was the call signal/year for a radio station where he got the record from. It was disappointing to find out, because it ruined the myth I built up for myself about my dad.

This record—Simon & Garfunkel’s soundtrack for The Graduate—has stuff written in it too. It says “1973: Gift from Jim, Dale and Steve.” See, my dad got this record from three of his brothers when he graduated college, because, clearly, the Winistorfers are good at tying important events to popular culture. There’s no mystery here, but it’s crazy to me that I am getting to this about 39 years and 11 months from when my dad got this record. Like, this record followed my dad around for damn near 40 years. Whenever I think about stuff I’ve had for a long time—a Lando Calrissan action figure is probably my oldest possession in my apartment—I can’t imagine holding on to it for another 25 years. But I guess my dad knows that you keep records and ephemera like it to prove you existed, to make you remember stuff like how your brothers wouldn’t include their youngest brother in on your graduation gift because he was too young to pay any money and they wouldn’t put his name on it. I want to keep this thing for another 40 years.

A fact that I’ve learned for sure: My dad played the ever-living shit out of this, to the point where I couldn’t even play the second side. At all. It skipped and jumped and crackled and popped so bad I thought I’d implode my roommate’s turntable.

So, shouts out to my dad and his 40th high school anniversary/destroying a copy of a Simon & Garfunkel album I wasn’t that hyped to listen to anyways.

NYZD: "Being a Das Racist fan means hoping that every new release will be the one where people realize that there is something...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:41:54 -0400

NYZD: "Being a Das Racist fan means hoping that every new release will be the one where people realize that there is something...:

potholesinmyblog:

zachdionne:

Nicely said by Andrew Winistorfer at Potholes in My Blog. I’ve thought about DR a lot this year—and been continually thankful for their thought-provoking stuff—but haven’t managed to express any of it as eloquently as this writer, who also adds: “For those willing to dive into Wild Water…

<3

Whoa.

197. Paul Simon's 'Graceland'

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:55:53 -0400

Graceland is, without question, Paul Simon’s best solo album. But a series of things have happened since that make it seem less great.:

1. Vampire Weekend stole the sound and taught a new generation about Gap-friendly African music (I don’t mean this as a pejorative, I love Vampire Weekend)

2. We’ve become uneasy with the fact that a little, white nerdy guy co-opted African music for an album that was sort of like a mid-life crisis.

3. Seriously, however much Ladysmith Black Mambazo made, it wasn’t enough.

4. The video from “You Can Call Me Al” stars Chevy Chase, and we all know Chevrolet Chase is an asshole.*

5. This is an album that is so totally uncool by modern standards—and not ironically uncool like Hall & Oates—that people underrate it in retrospect. It came out in the era when ’80s indie was blowing up. It doesn’t have the cache of the later Talking Heads albums. It’s corny. It’s not worthy of magazine cover retrospectives.

All of this is a shame, because this might be the album I’d pull out if I wanted to explain what music was like in the ’80s. Or at least what dorks listened to in the ’80s

*—This one is mostly because I wanted to make that Chevrolet Chase joke.

196. Shabazz Palaces' 'Live On KEXP'

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:09:49 -0400

I’ve seen Shabazz Palaces live twice since Black Up came out, and both times, it was an intriguing, bewitching experience. The first time, I saw them in Milwaukee, and their bass was so intense that I felt like I had vertigo. I turned to walk, and I almost fell down.

The last time was a week ago, and I got paid to see it. This is what it was like. This album is a live session the group did on Seattle radio, and it’s pretty close to capturing the live sound of the group; the bass is heavy, the sound is sprawling and everything is percussive and awesome.

195. Shabazz Palaces' 'Black Up'

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 17:26:59 -0400

I’ve been dragging my feet on writing about this record, mostly because I don’t think I can even write anything that will do this anywhere near “justice.” I reviewed this when it came out—and even though I had listened to it for close to 5 months (it got delayed)—it just doesn’t feel like I got that close to entirely capturing what this record is like. I feel like I only got the literal tip of the iceberg. It’s possible I’ve listened to this 200 times all the way through, and I’m not sure I can adequately describe the experience. This is a record that I know is a classic, but beyond that, my words fail me. So, here’s all I can offer: a GIF explanation of how this album makes me feel. In this gif-analogy, I am Ric Flair and Shabazz Palaces are Shawn Michaels.

194. Bob Seger And The Silver Bullet Band's 'Night Moves'

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 18:03:53 -0400

1. If you were to try to soundtrack a movie about America in the 1970’s, you would use a song by Thin Lizzy, probably from Jailbreak. But if you were going to try to make a movie about America in the ’70s, and you wanted to use music from the American band that most sounded like the 1970s, you’d pick something from Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band’s Night Moves. Seriously; this thing actually comes with a feathered haircut, a pair of bell bottoms, and a 12-pack of Budweiser. It’s flawless. It’s an album as a history lesson about the mood of a country. It’s an album that makes the Eagles entirely unnecessary.

2. The year after I graduated college, I lived in St. Cloud, Minn., and spent a bunch of weekends down in Minneapolis hanging out with my friend who lived there and his roommate. These weekends always ended with us going out and drinking ourselves into oblivion. Part of this routine was listening to the song “Night Moves” as the last song we’d listen to before we went out the door. It was a ritual my friend’s roommate had, and it never made much sense. I mean, it’s a song about making out with a childhood girlfriend.

But now I hear that song and I remember the time I got woken up at 5 am by this roommate, who got home an hour after us and was throwing a fit because he blew it with a woman he was trying to lay some night moves on. I think about the time we ate McDonalds at 3 AM, and I threw a street cone like 50 yards into an alley. I remember sitting in a shitty Dinkytown apartment, trying to extend my childhood for a little bit longer.

193. Gil Scott-Heron's 'Small Talk At 125th And Lenox'

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 17:46:39 -0400

I could probably count on one hand the poets I’ve actually read. I’m aware of a bunch of poets, but I’ve pretty much only read Ginsberg, Shakespeare, and this girl who wrote me love poems when we were in the 5th grade. So, I guess I can’t say for sure that Gil Scott-Heron is the “best” modern poet or whatever, but when you listen to this album, he’s got a way of making poetry seem like it could actually CHANGE things, that it could be used to indict people, that it could shatter your beliefs, and it could say things as powerful as “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” Gil never completely captured this mood again—how could you?—but his relevant poetry career all the way till he died in 2011 is pretty hard to ignore.