i hate the sound of guitars

A very light listening week as I had to spend considerable time in music-free environments.

Young Marble Giants - I really don’t know this band nearly as well as I should
Sex Pistols - Marty and I were talking about Never Mind the Bollocks so of course I had to cue some up. That album is still […]

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Cultösaurus Erectus is the BÖC album that everyone likes better than I do. Conventional wisdom calls it a rebound from the disastrous Mirrors. but I think it’s actually a worse record (although perhaps not quite as dated production-wise). The band sounds unsure of its own identity. Presumably they were feeling pressured to repeat the success […]

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Colleen
Lali Puna
Biography of Ferns - ordered their new album Pastel Gothic quite some time ago, due to an email address mix-up it took a while to show up. I was a little disappointed that it overlaps so heavily with the previous ep Memory’s Savant
A+ setup - could have been a best-of contender if I’d hard […]

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Kimya Dawson (yeah, we saw Juno)
Colleen - if I’d waited another week or two to make the 2007 best-of list, Colleen’s Les Ondes Silencieuses would have been on it, although I don’t know what I would have bumped to make the room.
The Capstan Shafts (of course)
Stereolab
Old 97’s
Minutemen
Blue Öyster Cult (still)
The Kind of Punishment (thanks to […]

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We interrupt the continuing coverage of the Blue Öyster Cult catalog to bring you a late addition to the 2006 year’s best list…
On January 1st, 2008 I finally finished my “not quite the best of 2006″ mixes. Yes, six. The most recent addition to make the list was The Electric Kisses, a perfect fusion of […]

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This is not exactly a best-of, just a set (CD-sized, the first of two) of songs I really liked this year. I figure most of the folks I know are going to have heard the new Radiohead, Spoon, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, and so on, so I try to concentrate on things that get […]

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Since last.fm makes it so easy, I’m going to start posting my weekly top 10 most listened to artists. This doesn’t count anything I listen to on the iPod or the actual stereo, but it counts both the work and home computers, so i’t probably more-or-less representative.

Blue Öyster Cult - I’m still on that re-evaluating […]

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Mirrors is my pick for most-underrated BÖC album. It has a terrible rep, which I think is partly because it opens with “Dr. Music,” one of the worst tracks ever committed to tape by the classic lineup. (Discuss: are the harmonica squeals the kiss of death, or the synth-toms, or the faux-soul backing vocals, or […]

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