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Tuesday, January 16, 2007 Jim Connelly's Favorite Recordings Of 2006 Monday, January 15, 2007 Jesse Steichen's Favorite Recordings Of 2006 Friday, January 12, 2007 Bill Bentley's Favorite Recordings Of 2006 Wednesday, January 10, 2007 Tom Ridge's Favorite Recordings Of 2006 Thursday, January 4, 2007 Lee Templeton's Favorite Recordings Of 2006 Tuesday, January 2, 2007 Anthony Carew's 13 Fave Albums Of 2006 Monday, March 27, 2006 SXSW 2006: Finding Some Hope In Austin Tuesday, February 28, 2006 Letter From New Orleans Saturday, February 18, 2006 Jennifer Przybylski's Fave Albums of 2005 Tuesday, January 31, 2006 Music For Dwindling Days: Max Schaefer's Fave Recordings Of 2005 Wednesday, January 18, 2006 Sean Fennessey's 'Best-Of' 2005 Thursday, January 12, 2006 Lori Miller Barrett's Fave Albums Of 2005 Wednesday, January 11, 2006 Lee Templeton's Favorite Recordings of 2005 Thursday, January 5, 2006 Michael Lach - Old Soul Songs For A New World Order Wednesday, January 4, 2006 Found In Translation — Emme Stone's Year In Music 2005 Tuesday, January 3, 2006 Dave Allen's 'Best-Of' 2005 Monday, January 2, 2006 Steve Gozdecki's Favorite Albums Of 2005 Tuesday, December 20, 2005 Johnny Walker Black's Top 10 Of 2005 Monday, December 19, 2005 Neal Block's Favorite Recordings Of 2005 Thursday, December 15, 2005 Jenny Tatone's Year In Review Tuesday, December 13, 2005 Dave Renard's Fave Recordings Of 2005 Monday, December 12, 2005 Jennifer Kelly's Fave Recordings Of 2005 Thursday, December 8, 2005 Tom Ridge's Favorite Recordings Of 2005 Tuesday, December 6, 2005 Ben Gook's Beloved Albums Of 2005 Monday, December 5, 2005 Anthony Carew's Fave Albums Of 2005 Thursday, November 10, 2005 Prince, Spoon And The Magic Of The Dead Stop Monday, September 12, 2005 The Truth About America Monday, September 5, 2005 Tryin' To Wash Us Away Monday, August 1, 2005 A Psyche-Folk Heat Wave In Western Massachusetts Monday, July 18, 2005 Soggy But Happy At Glastonbury 2005 Monday, April 4, 2005 The SXSW Experience, Part 3: All Together Now Friday, April 1, 2005 The SXSW Experience, Part 2: Dr. Dog's Happy Chords Thursday, March 31, 2005 The SXSW Experience, Part 1: Waiting, Waiting And More Waiting Friday, March 25, 2005 Final Day At SXSW's Charnel House Monday, March 21, 2005 Day Three At SXSW Saturday, March 19, 2005 Day Two In SXSW's Hall Of Mirrors Thursday, March 17, 2005 Report #1: SXSW 2005 And Its Hall Of Mirrors Monday, February 14, 2005 Matt Landry's Fave Recordings Of 2004 Wednesday, February 2, 2005 David Howie's 'Moments' From The Year 2004 Thursday, January 27, 2005 Lori Miller Barrett's Fave Recordings Of 2004 Thursday, January 20, 2005 Noah Bonaparte's Fave Recordings Of 2004 Tuesday, January 18, 2005 Kevin John's Fave Albums Of 2004 Friday, January 14, 2005 Music For Those Nights: Max Schaefer's Fave Recordings Of 2004 Thursday, January 13, 2005 Dave Renard's Fave Recordings Of 2004 Wednesday, January 12, 2005 Neal Block's Top Ten Of 2004 Tuesday, January 11, 2005 Jenny Tatone's Fave Albums Of 2004 Monday, January 10, 2005 Wayne Robins' Top Ten Of 2004 Friday, January 7, 2005 Brian Orloff's Fave Albums Of 2004 Thursday, January 6, 2005 Johnny Walker (Black)'s Top 10 Of 2004 Wednesday, January 5, 2005 Jennifer Przybylski's Fave Albums (And Book) Of 2004 Tuesday, January 4, 2005 Mark Mordue's Fave Albums Of 2004 Monday, January 3, 2005 Lee Templeton's Fave Recordings Of 2004

Kevin John's Fave Albums Of 2004 10. Various artists, DFA Compilation #2 (DFA): Not all of this three-disc hipster stocking stuffer is stellar. The Juan Maclean drops three sulfur bombs after securing a spot in disco heaven with his masterpiece "Give Me Every Little Thing" (judiciously included on the third disc mix CD). And Black Dice are the emotional equivalent of a police raid on your favorite club (i.e. pure bummer). But Tim Goldsworthy and James Murphy's label demonstrates better than anything what it's like to be dancing with quotes in your thighs. Summoned spirit guides Liquid Liquid offer a hilarious parody of Junior Vasquez-style tribal house (you know, the real stuff). J.O.Y.'s great grating grrrlpunk insures that things don't get too mighty real. And at 15 minutes, Black Leotard Front's "Casual Friday" is too long to be totally fake. Instead, it points towards new avenues in disco as an album (gasp!) music, recalling such classic coked-out, jet-lagged, Guccied-up side-long spectaculars as Tantra's "The Hills of Katmandu" and Quartz's "Quartz." Alec R. Costandinos, your time has come again. 9. The Soft Pink Truth, Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Soft Pink Truth? (Tigerbeat6): One thing we can always be certain of in most punk rock is the flesh-and-blood male body powering the music. Only the most firm-footed fella could brave those hardcore winds. Fresh from his microhouse name-that-tune fest, Do You Party?, Matmos' Drew Daniel asks if robotic vocals or even vocals stitched together from mini bits of other songs can pack as much protest as punk proper. And if those don't work, what about jerky rhythms that could warm a leatherette? On that level alone, Daniel's half-hour term paper would earn about an A-. But his choice of targets actually doubles as an alternative, queer history of punk. We get homosexuals (Nervous Gender), a Homosexual (L. Voag — see below), "Homo-sexual" (rescued from the speed freak unintelligibility of the Angry Samoans) and a homosexual icon (um, Carol Channing). A Roland TB-303-esque bass line licks Ian Mackaye's sweaty toes, showing him up for the cocktease he can be even (or especially) when yelping "I don't fuck!" And who the hell were Teddy & the Frat Girls? The best piece of music criticism I heard all year. 8. Todd Snider, East Nashville Skyline (Oh Boy): A sort of Gen-X John Prine, Snider is currently recovering from an OxyContin addiction. But beyond "it's later than you think," there is surprisingly no moralizing on this, his finest album. In fact, morals are a structured absence in his creepy, clipped narratives, especially on "The Ballad of the Kingsmen," which provided the most shocking musical moment of 2004. It's about the moral relativism that greets songs like "Louie Louie" once they're let loose in the culturesphere. And what does Snider follow it up with? An extremely peculiar soliloquy in the voice of a guy asking to borrow money from his friend, Mike Tyson. 7. Grandaddy, Artist's Choice: Below the Radio (Ultra): Mix CDs happen all the time in the dance world. But they should happen even more in the self-satisfied world of indie rock. Free from the imperatives of beat matching and keeping the party going 'til the break of dawn, it's amazing that they don't. So thank Grandaddy's Jason Lytle for this fantastic community service — an indie-rock mix tape for the masses. Appropriately, the dullest cut is by the most famous artist here and, also appropriately, it's the opener (Beck's "We Live Again"). But it's followed hard by the best, Beulah's "Burned by the Sun," a title that gets at the atmosphere Lytle generates. The focal point is the Meat Puppets at their most dazed and confused, and from Earlimart (who?) to Jackpot (who?) to Virgil Shaw (who?), the coulda-been-a-hits just keep on comin'. It's not only dance-floor maniacs who get blissed out. 6. Various artists, Beautiful Dreamer: The Songs of Stephen Foster (Emergent): As Ken Emerson makes clear in "Doo-Dah!," Stephen Foster's decision to make a living as a songwriter was no heroic gesture. It was Bartleby-like invitation to slack. The same cannot be said of the mostly genteel singer/songwriters entrusted with his legacy here. They epitomize rock as the careful, straight and narrow path it sometimes is. But that only deepens this tribute album's dramatic impact. It does nothing less than mine out the parameters of American democracy just as it's fading out under four more years of Bush bullying and making it difficult for more and more toilers to keep on the straight and narrow. That's why Michelle Shocked is on it. Recall that she chickened out of doing the cover of her 1992 major-label release Arkansas Traveler in blackface (to quote Christgau). But also recall that she was dropped from Mercury anyway. 5. Kanye West, The College Dropout (Roc-A-Fella): Gospel music for the here-and-now consumer culture. Wonder what Tom Smucker makes of it. 4. Caetano Veloso, A Foreign Sound (Nonesuch): Brazil's cultural ambassador collapses the entirety of 20th century American popular music (well, who's ever gotten closer?) into the transcendently pleasant dinner music of the 21st. It ends where it has to, at the beginning or, rather, a beginning — Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies" which Veloso has now stolen from the lips of Al Jolson where most of us first heard/saw it. And really, all that's missing is a cover of the culturally fraught "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?" 3. Rio Baile Funk, Favela Booty Beats (Essay): "Louie Louie" returns, this time in a snippet on "Pique Ta" from this in-yo-face compilation of funk carioca. From these shores, Richard Berry's paean to incomprehensibility provided an apt metaphor for the music's winning chaos. For transcendence, nothing beat it in 2004. I only hope it worked even better for the slum dwellers who shake to it in Brazil. 2. The Homosexuals, The Homosexuals' CD (Morphius): First time through Astral Glamour, Messthetics' three-disc oasis, I was depressed to discover that Guided by Voices had song-form-hating forefathers. But a trek through the liner notes revealed that these formerly phantomy DIYers were up to something deeper. More than any other band from Brit punk's first wave, The Homosexuals took the dub techniques of Jamaican studio magi to heart. In fact, they even applied it to their oeuvre itself, little of which was actually released under the name The Homosexuals. Everything about them was here one moment/faded-out the next, most perversely the guitars and vocals on the original (!) version of "Hearts in Exile," the A-side of their first single in 1978. Forcing various elements to enter and leave the room via the mixing-console-as-instrument, Bruno Wizard (né McQuillan), Anton Hayman and Jim Welton (AKA L. Voag) fashioned a vision of punk capable of infinite revisions rather than discrete sound punches. But for better or worse, discrete sound punches were their gift to history, and the best of them are so rich in sonic information that it's no wonder the Homos felt comfortable taking some of that info away and putting it back again. Impatient, constantly shifting classics like "Vociferous Slam," "Divorce Proceedings From Reality," and "Astral Glamour" remain songs, not collages (as per Chuck Eddy's dictum), in the end. That they all miraculously rocked out as well — perhaps propelled by the existential terror that any one ingredient could be gone with a simple lowering of levels — no doubt helped. You can figure all this out by listening to Morphius' superb one-disc reissue of the 1984 Recommended LP, larded with four tracks left off Astral Glamour, proving once again that indie concerns can be just as slimy as major labels (and tempting one to ignore the back cover plea: "Please support Messthetics by not copying, MP3-ing or renting [huh?] this recording."). There are only about five other tracks on Astral Glamour worth hearing. If the dribblings of Lee "Scratch" Perry, John Coltrane, and Jimi Hendrix (a spiritual forefather?) frequently yield diminishing returns, The Homosexuals' are somewhat paradoxically even worse, particularly the largely instrumental caterwaul of the awful George Harrasment/Masai Sleepwalking LP (included on Astral Glamour with versions featuring a newly recorded Bruno trying to remember lyrics over the original tracks). But even though the Morphius could still be winnowed down by a cut or two, it challenges Germ Free Adolescents as a marker of how much room there was to move around in punk, if not rock ‘n' roll itself. 1. M.I.A./Diplo, Piracy Funds Terrorism Volume 1 (Hollertronix): Jumpstarting the mix CD with the debut album (or vice-versa), DJ Diplo extends the pain in Claudine Clark's "Party Lights" to an hour. But the fish, the twist and the mashed potatoes have been replaced by "Buddy Nuh Done," a mangled "Sanford & Son" sample, and more funk carioca. And mom has been replaced by a bank of faceless terrorists. Beginning with drum beats as sloppy, unromantic gunfire and ending with an unwelcome vacation in Egypt courtesy of "Big Pimpin'," the bad times always pour into the good. And what can the title mean in the light of the illicit methods needed to acquire this thing in the first place? An ugly, ugly album for ugly, ugly times. The InsiderOne Daily Report appears on occasion.