As if the last picture of my older brother wasn’t bad enough – here’s another pic from that night. This was actually one of the better ones. You can imagine what Christmas photos were like growing up as a kid. My mom would try so hard to get my brother to appear less than retarded but she never succeeded – even when my Dad would step in to regulate and tell him to “cut the shit” it never worked. Someday…
I was recently asked for my top 3 albums of 2007. At the time I didn’t have a concrete answer because: 1) three is a tough number to narrow it down to and 2) I knew I would overlook an album or two. So with some time to think it over here are my top 5 albums of 2007:
I think I first heard about Andrew Bird from an article in the Chicago issue of Stop Smiling. This album received a number of solid reviews so I decided to pick it up without having heard any previous Andrew Bird material and needless to say I was bowled over. Bird has a rare combination of musicianship, lyricism and vocal range that is hard to find today. I have since picked up all of his albums but I gotta say I like “Armchair” the most.
Was a bit disappointed with the last Spoon album “Gimme Fiction” so my expectations were not all that high for this follow-up. When I first heard pieces of the album from the Spoon site I became slowly more excited for the release. The addition of horns really seemed to have opened up the material – not as easy to pull off live but still a nice change.
I love “The Search” for a number of reasons but one thing that really sticks out for me is the wide variance of emotions Jay Farrar is able to capture over the course of the album. For a while I felt Jeff Tweedy had overshadowed Jay Farrar as the more successful member of Uncle Tupelo (and he probably still is) but I think Son Volt has continued to produced compelling stuff while the last Wilco album was 90% shit.
Another band I hadn’t listened to before picking up their latest album. Animal Collective material isn’t for everyone seeing as they don’t really have choruses, anthemic hooks or even completely coherent lyrics but there’s a unique sound and mash-up quality to their stuff that’s totally original.
This was a hard choice – there were a number of albums left off this list. “Cease to Begin” is fantastic album but I must admit for album of 10 songs running a total of 35 minutes it had some less-than-stellar material thrown in. Enough harping, definitely worth picking up.
Runner-Ups: