{"id":277,"date":"2009-09-10T05:00:54","date_gmt":"2009-09-10T10:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.efsavage.com\/blog\/?p=277"},"modified":"2009-09-10T00:16:19","modified_gmt":"2009-09-10T05:16:19","slug":"album-of-the-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/efsavage.com\/blog\/posts\/album-of-the-year\/","title":{"rendered":"Album of the Year?"},"content":{"rendered":"

My venerable iPod had a bad run-in with an open sunroof and some precipitation, and my other one is still packed, along with my music drive. After a couple months of tinkering with Pandora and Last.fm, I needed to go out and find some good music the old fashioned way. That means without the benefit of a recommendation engine that thinks my affinities for various flavors of hip-hop and bands from France (Daft Punk, Air) mean I will like French hip-hop. Which I don’t. Because it’s horrible. French is well suited for poetry and indignation, but rapping … non<\/em>.<\/p>\n

So, I trawled the Amazon mp3 store for a while and ended up with a basket of albums:<\/p>\n

1. Lily Allen’s “It’s Not Me, It’s You”<\/a> – Decent but disposable pop, previous album was far more interesting.
\n2. Franz Ferdinand’s “Tonight”<\/a> – Low expectations were met, I don’t even know if I’ve listened to it twice.
\n3. Andrew Bird’s “Noble Beast”<\/a> – I haven’t really give this one a chance yet, it’s kind of wimpy and I haven’t really found the right situation to listen to it yet.<\/p>\n

Then things started to get interesting.<\/p>\n

4. Passion Pit’s “Manners”<\/a> – As long as you skip the first song, this is a great, fun album. There’s hints of Michael Jackson, Daft Punk, some 70s and 80s pop, but it’s fresh, not retro. I was hooked on it for a week or so.<\/p>\n

One of my favorite albums from 2008, though it was released in 2007, was Panda Bear’s “Person Pitch”<\/a>, which might best be described as listening to a Beach Boys cover band playing at Arlington station while you’re at Symphony. I never realized that Panda Bear was a part of the Animal Collective, but when I found out, I bought:<\/p>\n

5. Animal Collective’s “Merriweather Post Pavilion”<\/a> – This is a complicated album, that I just couldn’t really get into at first, but after a while, I came back to it and enjoyed it much more.<\/p>\n

Serendipity struck when I bought the final album in the list, thinking it was another Animal Collective member, which it’s not, but given the name you can understand my confusion.<\/p>\n

6. Grizzly Bear’s “Veckatimest”<\/a> – The first time I listened to this album I was picking on some Radiohead wannabe vibes, but then I tried again and picked up a couple things and liked it more. Then again, and again, and again, for my entire commute to and from work each day. Each day I have a different favorite song. I haven’t enjoyed an album this much in years, probably since Atmosphere’s “Sevens Travels”<\/a>. If you want something interesting, a little outside of the box but not as weird as Panda Bear or as over the top as Passion Pit, you should definitely check it out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My venerable iPod had a bad run-in with an open sunroof and some precipitation, and my other one is still packed, along with my music drive. After a couple months of tinkering with Pandora and Last.fm, I needed to go out and find some good music the old fashioned way. That means without the benefit… <\/p>\n

Continue reading Album of the Year?<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"series":[],"class_list":["post-277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1AkJt-4t","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/efsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/efsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/efsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/efsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/efsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/efsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":282,"href":"https:\/\/efsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277\/revisions\/282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/efsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/efsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/efsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/efsavage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}