i hate the sound of guitars

Holy crap, I haven’t written about Mixtapes before? Really!? I have literally listened to this band more than any other artist this year.
Mixtapes live in a weird intersection between well-produced pop-punk and lo-fi indie pop. On the one hand they have a fatter drum sound than I expect from low-budget indies; on the other, [...]

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The Death Set fuse fast, guitar-based pop with electronic and and hip-hop-influenced conventions; they remind me (thanks in part to some sneery vox) of The Beastie Boys (or P.W.E.I.) if they hadn’t switched from punk to hip-hop/electro but had completely integrated the forms. Michel Poiccard may alienate a few fans who preferred the thin, even [...]

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with The Ackleys:
The Ackleys (2005); Forget Forget, Derive Derive (EP, 2006)
Indie-power-pop. Splashy drums, some keyboards give it a slightly new-wave sheen.
as King Everything:
The Drought (2008)
Mostly acoustic guitar/vocal
with P.S. Eliot:
The Bike Wreck Demo (2008, read about Bike Wreck demo here), Introverted Romance in Our Troubled Minds (2009), Living in Squalor (EP, 2010, pay-what-you-want download), Sadie (2011)
Except [...]

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2007 is the year that I started listening to music mostly on computers. My office-mate persuaded me to experiment with iTunes, and I started using its rating system to help me assemble the inevitable year’s best list. Then I discovered last.fm and let it track my listening patterns.
The upshot of all this is that The [...]

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