Year End Music Review

I've never really done this before (mainly because I'm usually slow to find and appreciate new music), but I think there are enough good albums from this year to justify a Top 5 List. I'll start by offering a few honorable mentions: Zach Hill Face Tat, Mossy Roots Rip Your Heart Out, Ariel Pink Before Today,  How to Dress Well Love Remains, and the Shannon and the Clams Christmas 7".
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In Praise of Small Things

Sometimes it helps to appreciate the less obvious details of the things that make up the fabric of existence around us. Here are some of my favorite of those details:

Jeffrey Leonard's "One Flap Down" Home Run Trot
As a kid, Jeffrey Leonard was one of my favorite players. He was a two-time all-star and he won the 1987 NLCS MVP Award despite the fact that the Giants lost the series to the Cardinals. But the two things I've always remembered best about him were his awesome nicknames ("HacMan", like PacMan, and "Penitentiary Face" because he never smiled) and his ridiculous "One Flap Down" home run trot. The "One Flap Down" was born sometime during the 1986 season when the HacMan decided to leave his left arm motionless while he rounded the bases after hitting a home run. The signature trot gained further notoriety during the afformentioned 1987 NLCS when Leonard employed it while running the bases after each of his four home runs in the series.
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More Favorite Albums From the 2000-2009

Let's discuss a few of these in one post, alright?

Animal Collective- Feels (2005)

Animal Collective is a band that frustrates me. They have quite a few songs that I love, and a lot of songs that I absolutely hate. Their inconsistency is especially obnoxious because I feel like it could easily be avoided. The Animal Collective songs that I tend to like are the ones that are actual pop songs, as opposed to the ones that are unfocused, meandering, 'experimental', etc. They could be a great band if they put the same amount of focus and effort into all of their songs that they put into the best of their songs. Feels has more of these focused pop songs than any of their other albums. Or at least, it has more of the pop songs that I like (I usually don't like electronic music, so a lot of Strawberry Jam and Merriweather Post Pavillion is boring to me, regardless of how focused the songs are).
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Jay-Z, Michael Jordan, and Unretiring

The Black Album is my favorite Jay-Z album and one of my favorite rap albums of all time. In fact, analyzing this album is one of the original reasons why I wanted to start a music blog. I'm not entirely sure why, but something about this album stimulates the critical portion of my brain. One of the reasons why this album is so ripe for analysis is because of its underlying concept as Jay-Z's farewell to rap.

Like most rappers, Jay-Z's favorite subject throughout his career has been himself. His songs are so full of auto-biographical details that even casual fans can tell his life story (or at least the life story he wants to present to the public), and this supposed final album is the perfect summation of that narrative. Of course, this artistic statement ultimately was not an accurate depiction of his career path, and his short-lived retirement drew the inevitable comparisons to Michael Jordan, the Patron Saint of Unretirement (though Brett Farve could also lay claim to that designation). Though the comparisons are apt, there is a critical distinction to be made between each man's botched attempt at retirement: Jay-Z's should-have-been-final-statement retains a greater semblance of its aura and significance than Jordan's specifically because it was an artistic statement rather than an athletic one.
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An Albatross- Blessphemy (of the Peace-Beast Feastgiver and the Bear Warp Kumite) (2006)

In the second post of my series discussing my favorite albums from the decade spanning 2000 to 2009, I'm going to write about An Albatross' aptly-named Blessphemy (of the Peace-Beast Feastgiver and the Bear Warp Kumite). For some reason, I remember listening to this album a lot while riding various buses around the City and the East Bay about 3 years ago. I also listened to it quite a bit during a figure drawing class I took at Berkeley around the same time.* This is an awesomely weird, noisy mess of an album that can be sometimes grating to listen to but can also be a lot of fun.

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The Mountain Goats- Tallahassee (2002)

Ok, so I realized that I have this blog, which I started to fulfill an assignment for my 4D Visual Dynamics class at CCA. I made one (sort of ridiculous) post 4 years ago, and I haven't really though of it much since then. I think it's time to change that. In what will be (hopefully) the first of many, many posts, I will discuss some of the things that are important to me. In this particular case, I will discuss music.

This is the first post in a series that will discuss, in no particular order, my favorite albums of the decade from 2000 to 2009. This particular post will be about the album Tallahassee by The Mountain Goats.

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