Google, Amazon and Apple all want you to stick your music in a cloud. Meanwhile, as we all know, Facebook has teamed up with Spotify to hook you into a cloud with music already in it. I can't tell who's gonna win this fight, if anyone, so I'm trying everything. Here are my reviews of each puffy cloud:

1. Spotify - Unlike Amazon, Apple and Google, Spotify doesn't let you upload anything. Instead, you can play anything in their library for free (plus anything it finds on your hard drive). As the partnership with Facebook would suggest, Spotify places a strong emphasis on social listening. You can see what your friends are listening to, subscribe to their playlists and even listen to music together with Soundrop (one of several "apps" now available from within Spotify, which is itself a stand-alone application). Spotify is a lot of fun, simpler to use in many respects than the other 3 cloud apps, and is particularly suited for exploring new sounds. It's also great in that, although you do have to download the app to use it, you don't have to spend any time uploading or "matching" songs. There is also a mobile app for Android and iOS, but you'll have to pay $10 a month to use it.

2. iTunes Match - To use this, you need to have songs in an iTunes library and you can't have more than 25,000 songs (not including iTunes Store purchases). Assuming you meet those two qualifications, for $25 a year you can keep all your songs in the cloud. Since the iTunes Store likely already has a copy of most of the songs in your library, it only uploads what it needs to. This can save a whole lot of time and is one of the cooler features of iTunes Match. Obviously if you don't like iTunes and/or don't have an iOS device, this is not for you.

3. Google Music - You're limited to 20,000 songs but unlike Apple, Google actually lets you pick and choose what gets uploaded. If you have more than 20,000 songs, you can still use the service - you can either let Google choose 20,000 for you or pick them yourself. Upload speeds are good but unlike Apple, you really do have to upload every single song. Of course, since it's Google they not only support Android devices but also iOS (via HTML5). Google also supports a decent range of filetypes: not only mp3 and aac but also wma, ogg and FLAC (although some of these get transcoded to mp3 format after uploading, which is a bummer). But probably the nicest thing about Google Music is that you don't need to download a separate app to play your songs - they'll play right from your web browser on music.google.com. Actually, scratch that - the nicest thing about Google Music is that it's completely free.

4. Amazon Cloud Player - This is marketed more like a side benefit of buying Amazon Cloud storage. If you plunk down $20 (or more if you want more storage) for 20GB, you also get unlimited music uploading. Plus, like Google you can play your music from any web browser. There's also an app for Android and iPad (although not iPhone, oddly). This would probably beat Google Music's sorry ass except for two things: 1. Fewer file formats are supported (only mp3 and aac, although at least there are no transcoding shenanigans) and 2. The Uploader app is a total piece of shit. This really disappointed me - I was all set to let the uploader run for a week or so, uploading my 80,000+ songs (what, you don't have that many? I guess you must hate music) but then I noticed every time it would finish uploading a song, it would sit there for 2-3 minutes before continuing to the next one! If you do a little multiplication, that means it would take somewhere between 160,000-240,000 minutes to upload all of my songs. That's about 3-6 months. I think I'll wait for them to fix that bug.

Some thoughts on the possible end of mass-produced art and pop culture

I wrote a post a few months back about why I still buy CDs (instead of buying/stealing mp3s/AAC/etc). This has very little to do with wanting to support artists (although I do want to) and much more to do with wanting the best possible value for my money. No matter what price you pay for a CD, the long-term value is much higher than that of the equivalent mp3 (or AAC, or Ogg Vorbis, etc.) files. See that earlier post for some reasons why I believe this to be the case.

Meanwhile, however, I'm more convinced than ever that music has to be free. It already is free, of course. But much of the music business is still in denial about this. The record companies are dying (or just getting swallowed up by bigger and bigger media companies) - when I worked at the Archive of Contemporary Music this fall, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of self-produced CDs being made with absolutely no label backing. At most, a band/artist will hire a company to promote their music, but there really is no need for the service that labels provide anymore. Recording costs have gotten so cheap that if you can afford a MacBook, you can make an album. There's no reason to sign a contract that forces you into five or six figures' worth of debt that you may never be able to pay back.

I see us moving from a model of music distribution based on mass production, the inheritance of 100+ years of mechanically-reproduced media, to a service-oriented one via digital distribution. And there's no reason to limit this concept to music. It applies equally to film and other audiovisual media. We're already used to this model via services like Netflix, Spotify, and Rhapsody. Even good old cable TV is essentially a service model, albeit a more old-fashioned one.

But even Netflix et al. are not going far enough for me. What I see in our future is a lot more fragmentation. We've already gotten to the point where it's impossible to keep up on every aspect of popular culture because it's superabundant. The sheer volume of new works being produced is overwhelming. If you love film and that's your favorite passion, I bet you don't know as much about the current music scenes, and vice versa. And you can't even keep up with everything new in your favorite medium. You'll have to pick a genre or a style to focus on, and even then you might not be able to watch/hear/read everything. The only thing holding us together enough to have any kind of relatable conversation about culture right now is that we're still relying on a lot of the old-model media corporations, for the creation of new works if not for their distribution. If/when those conglomerates finally die out, we'll have nothing left but a network of independent artists promoting themselves. It'll be interesting to see what the impact of that will be on society (assuming it does happen).

We've been living with a shared popular culture for so long that we forget it really hasn't existed for very long. In fact, it's largely a 20th century phenomenon. I can envision a time where culture becomes almost entirely a local thing as it once was. Except that with the internet, the whole idea of "local" could be transformed. Local might just be whatever you and your friends happen to glom onto. Or art could just become another service like personal trainers and psychiatrists. You might hear a song or somebody might refer you and you pay the artist to write and record more songs for you. It could even be collaborative, depending on the temperament of the artist and how demanding you are.

I would imagine this might be worrying to many consumers of pop culture who are used to the way things work now. But I think a lot of visual artists and composers of classical music are already used to being commissioned or given grants. I can't see any reason why the same thing couldn't work on a smaller scale with indie musicians and their laptops.

Perhaps eventually we'll just pay artists to create something for us and we'll be free to do whatever we want with it - copy it, give it to our friends, even claim we wrote it ourselves if we want to be assholes like that. The whole concept of copyright isn't terribly relevant if the artist gets paid directly upfront for creating a work. Won't some people make careers by ripping off other artists? Yes, but that's already happened. Besides, think about the alternative (i.e. the current reality) - the copyright term is extended beyond all reason just so a huge company (*cough* Disney *cough*) can continue to profit off of a cartoon mouse that a dead guy thought up almost a hundred years ago. Does that really seem better to you?

Copyright was never intended to be abused in such a manner. Like all intellectual property laws, copyright is meant to encourage and reward innovation in our society. The idea is that if you protect the ideas of artists and inventors, they will be able to make a living from continuing to create more and more ideas. Thus both artist and society directly benefit. Well, if I have one or two good ideas that make me rich and I know that the copyright will never expire, and that my grandchildren will still be collecting royalties off of what I did, how does that encourage me to create anything else? (By the way, it also rewards my lineage just for being born. It's basically creating a new class of IP royalty.)

Of course, the reality is more complex than this. Creative people will often be creative no matter what. However, when corporations own intellectual property, therein lies a bigger problem. It's no longer a matter of rewarding an individual for his or her contribution to society or culture. It's allowing a corporation to continue to profit off of someone's creativity in perpetuity (every time the copyright term is about to expire, they just hire lobbyists to convince Congress to extend the term another 20 or 50 years). Large for-profit corporations are inherently conservative entities. Why would they take a risk on something new when they can simply keep making money off the same thing that's always worked for them? It's entirely possible (and I think inevitable) for copyright, having been stretched unduly way past its originally intended limits, to have the opposite effect it was intended to have: that is, it can impede progress, slow the flow of new ideas into common culture, stifle creativity.

Bad Special Effexor

I was listening to Grizzly Bear's album Veckatimest today and kind of basking in the laid-back beauty of it, when I suddenly recalled the last time I had listened to the album. It was back in 2009, a few months after I had quit taking Effexor. In order to mitigate the unusually intense withdrawal symptoms (anyone who has ever been on Effexor can tell you about the experience of missing just a single dose - it's not fun), I had devised a clever little method of tapering my doses and had successfully gotten myself down from 225mg a day all the way to zero. This was done gradually, over the course of 7 or 8 weeks. I was very careful. Nor did I let my guard down once this process was over. I had originally been prescribed antidepressants back in 2005 for (believe it or not) depression, so naturally I was on the lookout for returning signs of depression in myself. I did not anticipate what actually happened, which was that I slowly but steadily transitioned into a state of near-constant high-level panic and dread. I lost my appetite and started to lose weight (which seemed kind of nice at first). Then I began to sleep less and less, until finally I was barely able to get any sleep at all. Every time I would close my eyes and start to doze off, I would suddenly think something like "I could die in my sleep tonight!" Immediately I would feel a jolt of adrenaline and want to jump out of bed as if awakened from a nightmare.

This thought didn't exactly come out of nowhere, but a somewhat lengthy digression is necessary in order to explain the origin and nature of my death-obsessed horror. I grew up without religion - my father had been forced to go to church throughout his childhood and despised it, so had no intention of putting his children through a similar ordeal - and apart from a mild fascination with the Bible when I was about 10 or 11, I grew up with a vague, wishy-washy idea of God as this benevolent, Santa Claus type figure. My Bible reading and a few religious friends spooked me just enough so that when I first discovered my father's Frank Zappa albums and played the song in which the satirical rocker intoned with trademark cynicism, "If we're dumb, then God is dumb - and maybe even a little ugly on the side," I immediately turned the volume down on my stereo and waited, cowering, for the lightning to strike me. Later on, after I had determined, through careful experimentation, that punishment for listening to (or reading) heretical words was not forthcoming in any kind of timely manner from God Himself, my doubts about his existence grew apace. While part of me clung to my childish notions of a supreme and loving deity, the rational part of my brain decided that religion was pretty much not worth wasting much thought over.

Since then, although I had thought about death often over the years and wondered about its essential mysteriousness, I found it hard to wrap my brain around the concept of non-existence, so I preferred to hold out hope for some sort of afterlife, although of what kind I couldn't really imagine. Fast-forward to 2009 and I found myself confronted with the reality of death in a much more intense way than I had ever considered it before. Right at the time that I was becoming more and more anxious, my father unwittingly loaned me the book that would send me over the edge of panic and fear. It was called The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. A rather succinct and straightforwardly-written thesis on how the brain creates consciousness and the "illusion of the self" by German philosopher Thomas Metzinger. After reading the first few chapters, I was both convinced that the very notion of any kind of life after death was ludicrous (consciousness itself being a mere illusionary construct of the brain, a tenuous bundle of nerve cells) and utterly terrified of the fact that my future non-existence was more or less the only thing in the world that I could count on with utmost assurance. This book, combined with my rapidly developing state of anxiety, pretty much destroyed my fragile psyche.

In a futile attempt to escape this terror-ridden mental state, I would go on long walks around my neighborhood. One day I put the aforementioned Grizzly Bear album on my iPod. Listening to it then, the songs felt to me like a meaningless rattle of strings and drums, an absurd noise to make in the face of overwhelming, all-engulfing, terrifying, eternal nothingness. I don't mean that I actually thought any of this while listening - I mean that I *felt* it, directly - as directly as you feel the warmth of the sun on your face, and as strongly and thoroughly as you love whomever it is you love the most.

I know this will sound strange, but I think of that person who suffered as not exactly me but some other person who lived inside of me, and I feel sad for the suffering of this other me. His ordeals over the course of a few months seem to me now, while not nearly as horrible as those of countless others I've seen, heard or read about, just as pointlessly cruel.

Although I had good reasons for going off of Effexor, it was still a unilateral decision on my part. I, ultimately, have nobody to blame but myself for what happened. Still, I couldn't have known what would happen, so I don't necessarily think of it as a stupid mistake. Obviously, it was unwise to go off of a medication without a doctor's supervision. But I couldn't afford a doctor at the time; this was, in fact, the main reason I was going off the medication (Effexor is quite expensive, although I understand a generic version is available now). Furthermore, despite having seen psychiatrists and other mental health professionals for years beforehand, nobody had ever warned me that anything like what I experienced could happen to me if I went off my medication.

In the end, I think what this experience showed me is that what makes each of us recognizably ourselves can be altered (and in some cases, permanently so) to an arbitrary degree, by chemicals just as surely as by physical traumas. We are all such fragile creatures.

Why I still buy CDs

Everyone knows CDs suck. They're lame, outmoded, plastic replicas with all the soullessness of digital and none of the warmth of vinyl or analog tape. And even if you did want to listen to those godless bits and bytes, once you insert the disc into your computer and rip all the tracks, that CD is reduced to a superfluous hard copy. CDs are relics of the past, destined for the landfill, soon to be forgotten as we upload all music onto our hard drives and into the cloud. Right?

Not so fast. There are still good reasons to buy CDs. In fact, I will argue that it still makes more sense to buy them instead of mp3s (assuming you care about what happens to the music you purchase/acquire over the long term).

The kind of data compression used to encode audio in mp3 format is "lossy." This means that some of the original information that was there when the music was recorded is gone forever from that mp3. According to the creators of the compression algorithm that encodes mp3 files, the missing information would've been inaudible anyway, but many people can in fact hear the difference between an uncompressed audio file and an mp3. In any case, to me it seems absurd to pay for what is, essentially, a deliberately damaged file.

The thing is, CDs are still the only means by which to acquire uncompressed digital reproductions of most music. I would settle for purchasing music in a "lossless" compression format such as FLAC or Apple Lossless; the data compression tricks used in such formats allows for full recovery of all the information in the original, uncompressed file. However, the iTunes store doesn't even give you the option of purchasing in such formats. Neither does Amazon, nor most other vendors, large or small. Occasionally I'll come across smart, savvy, independent musicians or labels that sell their music in FLAC (or even uncompressed WAV), but these are still very much the exception. So until most music vendors start selling FLAC (or Apple Lossless), I will be buying CDs.

But let's say you're perfectly happy with mp3s and the way they sound. What do you care if some harmonic overtones in a part of the spectrum you can't hear anyway are missing? Well, consider the possibility that in the near future, someone may develop a more efficient compression algorithm than mp3. Actually, this has already happened - in fact, software engineers are constantly coming up with newer and better ways of compressing both audio and video. With some of these newer lossy formats, you can get sound quality as good as or better than the mp3s you now own but that take up less disk space. Sounds great, right? If you bought mp3s, though, you're going to have to repurchase all of your music in the new format. If you'd gotten CDs (or lossless-compressed digital files), this would never be a problem, because you'd always be starting with the original audio file(s).

[Note: You might be wondering why you can't simply convert mp3s into one of these newer formats directly. This is called "transcoding" and it always leads to degradation of audio quality. It might not be obvious at first, but after you've converted from mp3 to Ogg Vorbis and then AAC, you probably won't like the results.]

What about vinyl? Don't get me wrong, it's a lovely format. Putting a record on can be a kind of ritual and can make a listening experience seem special. However, this doesn't make analog discs in any way superior to digital ones. All the disadvantages of vinyl that most people were happy to rid themselves of with the advent of the CD are still there. Polyvinyl chloride discs are still big, bulky, heavy, slow, inconvenient, prone to wear and tear, and sound inferior on all but the most expensive audiophile equipment. I know many people will swear that there is some magical "warmth" imparted by the vinyl format that makes it superior, but I believe this is a kind of delusion. If that's how you prefer to listen, be my guest. But let's please have no illusions about superiority of sound quality.

So until I see a big move toward lossless or uncompressed audio becoming much more widely available for download online, I am going to stick with the only format currently available that allows me to get as close as possible to the music as it was recorded. I am not alone in feeling this way; in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if CDs get a slight boost in sales over the next few years. It won't be a mainstream phenomenon, so the bump may be very slight indeed. I'm not saying I expect to still be buying them ten years from now (although it's not impossible), but for those of us who passionately collect music that is relatively outside the mainstream, I think CDs will stay relatively popular for the short-term future.

Giacomo Puccini, Turandot

Well, I certainly wanted to enjoy Turandot, but my ability to do so was severely compromised by what are, to me, some major flaws in the libretto. As beautiful as the music is, it's hard not to notice the problems that Puccini himself died without overcoming. For starters, the whole thing is predicated on the notion of senseless murder ("Turandot the Pure /will be the bride of the man of royal blood/who shall solve the three riddles which she shall set./But if he fail in the test/he must submit his proud head to the sword!") That's a nice gimmick for a fairy tale, but it really doesn't make any sense. It's hard to imagine anyone actually being stupid enough to try this. He would have to be incredibly arrogant, and kind of an idiot as well. Enter Prince Calàf. As Act One opens, he's just been reunited with his blind father, the deposed king Timur, whom he had thought to be dead (and vice versa). Both are overjoyed to see each other (well, not literally in Timur's case because he's blind, but you take my meaning) and Calàf proclaims his eternal thanks to the servant girl Liù who was apparently responsible for leading his father to safety. A couple of minutes later, though, Calàf catches a glimpse of Princess Turandot and falls, apparently, madly in love with her, causing him to suddenly no longer care at all about the fate of his father or Liù.

And yeah, I get it, love makes you do some craaaazy things, but dude literally goes from "Oh daddy, I thought I'd never see you again! Thank you so much, Liù, for taking care of my father!" to, a minute later, "Hey Liù, if I die, take good care of pops for me, aight? I gotta go chase some royal tail. Peace!" Now, I understand that the librettists were trying to show the almost supernatural power of this sudden love spell under which Calàf has fallen under, which is why they spend half of Act One having everyone try to convince him not to pursue the princess. But then, if he's pretty much in thrall, is he really supposed to be brave? Zombies aren't brave. And if he's not in thrall, then he's really just an incredibly self-absorbed asshole. With drama, it's best for heroes to be at least somewhat sympathetic. Calàf, throughout the opera, is the opposite: his behavior is almost always reprehensible. And yet we are supposed to be on his side. This lack of a central, relatably human character ends up being the opera's fatal flaw, in my opinion at least.

In Act Two, we are introduced to Princess Turandot, who is revealed to be pretty much a psychopath who gleefully celebrates the beheading of every man who tries to win her hand. She tells us (and herself) that she's acting out of revenge for a female ancestor who was conquered by a man, but I am going to go out on a limb here and say that I don't agree that this justifies her heinous acts of gratuitous bloodshed.

This alone would be enough to ruin the opera for me. A Prince, who is either an asshole or a zombie, wasting his time and risking his life to marry a Princess whose chief pastime is cold-blooded murder? That would work for me only if the libretto's authors were aware of how crazy this is and played it as darkly comic, instead of the "love conquers all" theme that they were apparently going for.

Anyway, Act Three is where it all really falls apart for me. After having answered all three of Turandot's riddles, Calàf has, for reasons unknown to anyone but him, arbitrarily decided that he can win the Princess's heart by posing a "riddle" of his own: guess his name before sunrise and he will voluntarily put his head on the chopping block; otherwise, she has to marry him. This proclamation causes the princess to immediately order everyone under her command (which, I guess, is pretty much everyone in China) to find out what Calàf's name is before dawn, or else. Or else what? Death, that's what. Yes, the penalty for failure is death *again*. This princess LOVES MURDER.

Now, as you might expect, the princess's servants immediately go to Calàf and, in a kind of breathless desperation, plead with him, offering him pretty much anything he could possibly want if he will just tell them his name and GO AWAY. And then, when nothing they say gets through, they simply beg him to spare their lives from the cruel death that awaits them. And what is Calàf's response to all this? "Inutili preghiere! Inutili minacce!/Crollasse il mondo, voglio Turandot!" ["Useless entreaties! Vain threats!/Though the skies fall I will have Turandot!"] That's right. He doesn't even *pretend* to give a shit.

With daggers drawn, the servants insist that he relent. And just when they are about to give Calàf a well-deserved stabbing, a bunch of soldiers stomp in with none other than poor Liù and Timur. Having seen Calàf with them earlier, the servants know that they must know his name. The princess appears and the servants explain the situation. At this point Calàf does basically the only decent thing he does in the entire opera: he lies to Turandot, insisting that the two prisoners don't know him. Liù, in an incredibly selfless act of bravery that immediately makes her the opera's only true hero, says that she alone knows the prince's name.

Turandot orders the soldiers to restrain Calàf. They do their best to extract the name from Liù with the aid of torture, but she defiantly says that she'll die first. Turandot orders the soldiers to stop and asks Liù how she can be so courageous. Liù answers with a long speech declaring her hopelessly unrequited love for the prince. After her speech, she stabs herself with a soldier's dagger, martyring herself for her love.

What would you expect Calàf to do at this point? Surely not wait for everyone to leave and then start making out with Turandot (whom he calls "Principessa di morte"), but that's exactly what he does. As the New Grove Dictionary of Opera puts it:

Clearly the man who can persist in his wooing of a woman of whom he knows nothing, and whom he has every reason to dislike, immediately after a slave-girl has killed herself for his sake, is bound to forfeit our sympathy.

The princess says of her new lover, "C'era negli occhi tuoi/la superba certezza …/E t'ho odiato per quella …/E per quella t'ho amato" - ["In your eyes I saw/the proud certainty of victory …/And I hated you for it …/And for it I loved you"]. I guess this is supposed to come off as cosmic and grand, like Tristan und Isolde, but in light of what has just taken place minutes before on the stage, it sounds unbelievably crass, shallow and cold. Whatever romantic feelings have just been kindled between the two lovers seems to be based on physical attraction and a Romantic veneration of the ego reminiscent of the novels of Ayn Rand. (Seriously, doesn't Dominique give almost this exact same speech to Howard Roark at some point in The Fountainhead?) You can tell Puccini wanted Turandot to be about love as a transfiguring force, but he never quite figured out how to resolve these problems, so it comes off as being more about a young man's horny hubris and a girl who celebrates his utter lack of modesty or conscience.

I can see why people still like the opera, especially as stunning visual spectacle accompanied by some gorgeous orchestral and vocal music. I, in fact, enjoyed parts of this opera a great deal. But as a whole, it feels like an empty vessel, a failure whose parts are greater than their sum.

Jeff Beck, Blow By Blow

What if I told you that the most celebrated instrumental guitar album of all time ends with a keyboard solo, on a track dominated by a string section (orchestrated by none other than George Martin), and from which the last note of guitar had faded away 3 minutes earlier? That it is an album in which song structure, melody, flow and balance all trump showcases of instrumental virtuosity, guitar-based or otherwise? And that it contains not one but two Stevie Wonder songs (one of which appears on no other album)? Does that sound like crazy talk to you?

If so, then it appears you haven't been properly introduced to Jeff Beck's 1975 masterpiece, Blow By Blow. The first album credited just to Beck (rather than the Jeff Beck Group), he obviously decided that this was to be something special, a more personal statement, perhaps. After all, you don't start working on arrangements with George Martin unless you've got it in mind to do something out of the ordinary. Martin, who ended up producing the album, is probably not the first name that comes to mind when you think of instrumental jazz-fusion, but his talents were in fact remarkably well-suited to what Beck was trying to achieve: a harmonious blend of soaring melodies, funky grooves and moments of wild improvisational abandon. They succeeded, on every level, probably beyond their own expectations.

My head almost exploded trying to figure out which song from Blow By Blow to present here. For an instrumental album showcasing Jeff Beck's guitar magic, you wouldn't think that narrative flow would figure into its construction so much, but you'd be wrong. The fact is, this damn thing is so expertly crafted that choosing one piece from it only makes me think about the pieces I'm leaving behind. One reason for this is that, as originally presented on vinyl, most of the songs on each side segued directly into one another. But this isn't like Miles Ahead where, to me at least, the songs could've gone in any order and are just made to segue as a kind of production trick. Here, the album is conceived as a unit of artistic presentation, much like the Beatles' output beginning with Revolver. (No doubt Martin has everything to do with the album's cohesive structure, not to mention the inclusion of a reggae-tinged version of "She's A Woman.") Just as Sgt. Pepper wouldn't be the same album if "A Day In The Life" was shoved in the middle somewhere, every song on Blow By Blow is placed where it is as carefully as syllables in a line of poetry.

This is still more of a feat when you learn that about half of the tracks on the album were basically fashioned out of live-in-studio jams. I reckon the key here was Beck's choice of sidemen: keyboardist Max Middleton (who worked on the Sgt. Pepper film soundtrack with Martin), Chinese-Jamaican bassist Phil Chen and Guyanese-born, Trinidadian-raised drummer Richard Bailey. These are tasteful session players who know how to lay down seriously funky grooves without stepping on each other's toes. (Chen's playing, particularly on "Constipated Duck" - a title you must love or else you lack a soul - is some of the best 70's funk bass I've heard outside of a Parliament/Funkadelic or Sly & The Family Stone record.)

So anyway, call me unoriginal but I chose the first song on the album. Entitled "You Know What I Mean," I think it's a perfect introduction to the unique charms of this album: the funky upbeatness, the breezy, carefree nature of the melodies, the conversational tone of Beck's guitar. What I hope this song also demonstrates is the album's accessibility. Blow By Blow was not a #4 Billboard chart hit by accident; i.e., it's not just for wonky guitar fanatics or jazzbos. It's something special, an instrumental album that isn't all about itself in the way too many such albums are nowadays (too many albums in general, actually, but that's another topic). To put it more simply, it is fun to listen to.

You can probably find all the songs from the album on YouTube, but then you won't experience the magic of this album's flow and great segues. Do yourself a favor and download the highest-quality version of Blow By Blow you can find. It's an album that benefits greatly from high fidelity sound reproduction.

Best of 2009 Pt. XI: Runner-ups

Veckatimest
Grizzly Bear

There's something sinister about the way the drummer for Grizzly Bear plays. I'm not referring to the way he looks - I've never seen him. But there is something alternately robotic and primordial about his approach. It's distinctly not human - in fact, I'd be impressed but not surprised if drummer Christopher Bear was an actual fucking grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horribilis in scientific terms). Hey, if they can dance and play with those little red balls, they can probably hit the drums with those paws. Okay, so that's a pretty crazy idea, but I swear it's the kind of stuff I think of when I listen to these guys. Hauntingly beautiful, like a natural vista of forest and mountain ranges, you might not realize how much you like this music until long after you first hear it.

Superficial Gossip
Ringo Shiina

In Japan, I get the feeling that even the more popular singer/songwriters feel less constrained by genre and era than they do in the U.S. and EU countries. Despite being one of the top female pop musicians/icons in her country, Ringo Shiina leaps across and between genre boundaries as often as the most experimental groups here. Shiina is so famous and renowned in her home country that, at the ripe old age of 30, she has already received an award from the Japanese goverment for her work. On this album, she moves comfortably from soul/R&B to funk to jazz to 50's musical to modern rock and electro - and she succeeds on all fronts, crafting an album so catchy and so unpredictable that I bet Mike Patton would kill to have made this. Awesome.

Carboniferous
Zu
Remember the band Morphine? Imagine if, after Mark Sandman died, they hired a new bass player and changed their sound to all-instrumental math-metal (a la Meshuggah) and made a ton of records in Italy, before signing to Ipecac and getting Mike Patton to do some guest vocals. That's pretty much how this sounds. Um, did I mention that it's awesome? Yeah, it is.

Le Mani Destre Recise Degli Ultimi Uomini
Secret Chiefs 3 (as Traditionalists)

Trey Spruance is the kind of genius I can never get enough of. He and his group of ridiulously talented musicians, the Secret Chiefs 3, are so multifaceted in the sheer number of genres they're capable of tackling that they've had to subdivide themselves into fictional "satellite bands" that specialize in particular sub-categories of music. In this case, we have one of the satellite bands, Traditionalists, making an album-length soundtrack to an imaginary Italian thriller/horror film. It's of course unbelievably amazing and well worth your time and $$$ - I just wish the film was real.

Wavering Radiant
Isis

Just putting out a new album automatically gets Isis a place on my "best of" list - all they have to do is not fuck it up, which they never do, so this one is pretty much a no-brainer for me. For those who don't know, Isis is pretty much the quintessential post-metal band, even though no one's exactly sure what post-metal is (hint: take sludge/doom metal, add keyboards - for atmosphere, not for virtuosic displays or solos - and long instrumental passages [some bands don't even have a vocalist], and you're pretty close). For those who do know the band, the question with regard to Isis is probably always going to be, "Is it as good as Oceanic?" The correct answer to that question will likewise always be: who cares? Oceanic is a great album but Isis have better things to do than satisfy fans of that album by making endless sequels to it. If you love Isis and want to hear something new from them, Wavering Radiant doesn't disappoint.

Black Clouds & Silver Linings
Dream Theater

Thank god for prog-metal. No need to worry whether or not I'm a dork for liking Dream Theater. I *know* I am. There are more chops on display on a single DT track than most bands ever use in their entire career. It's refreshing to me to hear a band that doesn't hold back - these guys know how to play the fuck out of their instruments and they're not afraid of doing so. As usual there are a lot of lengthy tracks here with lots of contrasting sections - if you don't like 20-minute-long songs, don't bother with this one - actually, don't bother with prog, period.

Octahedron
The Mars Volta

I have noticed a tendency for Cedric Bixler-Zavala to parody certain stock phrases in his lyrics as a way of saying something familiar/catchy while subverting cliche. So, for example, "Since we've been wrong" subverts the usual "since you've been gone." That's just one reason I dig The Mars Volta. Another one, of course, is composer/guitarist/multi-instrumentalist/mastermind Omar Rodriguez-Lopez's amazing musical gifts. This time around we get a bit more slow, melodic stuff, but if you're thinking this is a bid for mainstream success, how do you explain titles like "A Halo of Nembutals," and lyrics like "What a foul little temptress/your daughter's become"? And that's just one of the rare lines that doesn't sound like someone narrating their all-time worst acid trip. These guys are my favorite maniacs.

Middle Cyclone
Neko Case

I haven't heard any writer personify a tornado until Neko Case did it with the lead track on this album. "This Tornado Loves You" is one of the strangest love songs I've ever heard, but it's no less emotional for that. A lot of Neko's songs are like that - strange, yet strangely touching. All kinds of odd characters seem to inhabit the songs on this album, including birds, prison girls, and (I think) Sorrow. In "The Magpie To The Morning," besides the titular bird, there's also a mockingbird and a vulture, which "wheels and dives/Something on the thermals yanked his chain/He smelled your boring apex/Rotting on the train tracks/He laughed under his breath/Because you thought that you could outrun sorrow". On "Fever," Neko herself seems to be running from Death, whose "peculiar" songs she overhears. When he finally hears her "tiny heartbeat," he gives chase: "I heard him coming/shrapnel spitting from his wheels/His scything arms rake for my heels". Damn.

Best of 2009 Pt. X: Hold Time by M. Ward

For once an album whose charms aren't difficult to explain. M. Ward writes great songs, he covers other people's great songs (Buddy Holly, Don Gibson and Billie Holiday here), he plays great guitar, his voice is charming - what's not to love? Critics say Hold Time isn't as good as his earlier albums, which makes me glad I haven't heard them. I'll have something to look forward to, and if I disagree with the critics, even better.

I guess it's cheating to make this review so much shorter than the others, but I feel like if I kept going it would be just so many words. You should listen to this album - I think it's great. If I had to pick some adjectives to describe it, I'd say it was alternately blissful and contemplative - this is largely an upbeat album, as far as I can tell. Even the slow numbers seem more thoughtful than melancholy to me - like sitting back and gazing at the stars or watching the clouds go across the sky.

I think Hold Time is one of the best albums of 2009. Listen for yourself and decide if you think I'm right.

Best of 2009 Pt. IX: Moondagger by Deastro

When Deastro mastermind Randolph Chabot sings, "I'm a prophet of how things should be," he's not kidding, as far as I'm concerned. This is a fantastic album. Everything about it is close to perfect. Even the artwork for it is pretty much perfect. Chabot is an ambitious guy: his music is grandiose and majestic, like church music with a dance beat; meanwhile, his lyrics reference literature from Cormac McCarthy to medieval poetry (in the same stanza). He's young, he's talented and he's got a lot to beat his chest about.

Most of the tracks feature a traditional band with guitar, bass and drums and peppered with lots of synths. Besides sometimes sounding like disco church music, Deastro's songs remind me a bit of Deerhunter and Wolf Parade (maybe it's all that cavernous reverb), but a lot of the melodies seem more "naive" and carefree-sounding. New Order must also be mentioned, which seems like a clear reference point on "Kurgan Wave Number One" in particular. There's also a distinct Beach Boys-via-Panda Bear influence, which Chabot seems to directly acknowledge by directly quoting the vocal melody of "Bros" toward the end of one of the songs, the epically-titled "Daniel Johnston was stabbed in the heart with the MOONDAGGER by the King of Darkness and his Ghost is writing this song as a warning to all of us!"

There are two instrumentals on Moondagger and both are so well done that you realize this guy could easily get by without even bothering with lyrics. However, Chabot's lyrics are pretty great for the most part. Besides the literary references, religion (and perhaps the subversion of religion) comes up a lot: "I’m dancing for the world with a pentecostal fervor/While sonny the druggy cherokee gets his face kicked in/I’ve got a boombox blaring backward hallelujahs/I’ve got your picture in my pocket stained with rainbow watermarks." But even when he's writing a more traditional song of heartbreak, he saves himself from mediocrity via great lines like these (which to my mind recall Faust): "I’ll access the stars/I’ll read between the lines/Consort with scientists and maniacs/oh to find/A way back home a way back to your arms".

I realize that most of you aren't going to feel the way I do about this album, but I hope you'll give it a chance. The Pitchfork reviewer (I know I mention them too much) seemed almost offended that Chabot even *tried* to make an album as great as this. I hope most people aren't as arrogant and jaded as a lot of music critics seem to be - personally, I try not to lose my sense of wonder, my optimism, and most of all, my humility in the face of talent and hard work.

Maybe I feel compelled to say these things because this is the last review I'm finishing in this series. I hope you all like some of these albums half as much as I do - if not, I hope you all have music that you love just as much, or if not music, some other kind of art that fills you with joy and wonder the way the music of The Decemberists, John Zorn, Sunn 0))), Sunset Rubdown, Animal Collective, Dirty Projectors, Passion Pit, Bibio, Deastro and M. Ward has filled me with their new albums these past six months. Stay tuned as tomorrow I will present the runners up, albums that are also great but didn't quite make my own personal top 10.

Best of 2009 Pt. VIII: Ambivalence Avenue by Bibio

Like a lot of the best releases on Warp (one of my favorite record companies), Ambivalence Avenue is an album that rewards careful listening, especially in headphones. So much so that I didn't quite realize what was so great about it until I donned my own pair of Sennheisers and sat down to do nothing else but listen. Just one example: Fire Ant's stuttery, spaced-out middle section's cavernous excitement can really only be appreciated on a good pair of 'phones.

On the other hand, the title track, with its entrancing 3/4 rhythm and wonderful instrumental refrain, can be appreciated on any kind of sound system. Said refrain features the kind of cheery, unpretentious melody that one hardly seems to hear anymore. It almost reminds me of old Jethro Tull or some other 60's English folk-rock.

Jealous of Roses continues this exploration of the past with what sounds like late 60's funk à la Sly Stone: funky wah-wah guitars and falsetto vocals (mountainous gobs of spring reverb on the latter). All The Flowers shifts gears again, this time into some nice acoustic fingerpicking - I'm just guessing here but I think this is a pitch-shifted guitar and not some weird instrument with a sopranino range. Anyway, the sound is bright and bell-like, which seems to be a sound Bibio (aka Stephen Wilkinson, from somewhere in West Midlands, England) enjoys and may suggest a nostalgic looking-back to childhood.

Sugarette starts off with a high-pitched bell-like synth, a looped arpeggio that seems to linger after it disappears. Soon synth bleeps appear that sound straight out of Super Mario Bros. and take over the track - perhaps a reminiscence of a childhood spent playing Nintendo games (the aforementioned Fire Ant also features a recording of children playing some type of ancient video game). S'vive has as its foundation what sounds like a sample from a wind-up musicbox, all chimes and innocence.

There is a charming sense of wide-eyed wonder that pervades pretty much every minute of Ambivalence Avenue. Although in Jealous of Roses he chides, "You speak of love as a symptom of conformity," for the most part Wilkinson seems content simply to observe, record and report, rather than cast judgment, as in my favorite lyric moment on the album (from the track Haikuesque): "When she laughs/The piano in the hall/Plays a quiet note." This song also exemplifies another interesting feature of this album: many of the songs seem to "end" before the track itself does. In this case, after the song fades out, a recording of a man repeating a short prayer ("The Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me") plays over ambient synths, ending after a minute and fading out with the sound of tolling church bells. More reminders of childhood, perhaps?

But more than the innocence, more than the fun changes of sound and playing-with of genre, it's Bibio's sense of melody that gets me. He never seems to get bogged down in mere ambience or sounds and beats. There's always a strong melodic hook at play, no matter how weird things get. Even in Dwrcan, which features some of the album's most complex layering of beats and sounds, there are melodies that create lift and move the track along. So that when the glitchy, Autechre-ish beats appear about halfway through, you're already floating along on a cushion of airy, flowing notes and chords. Eventually the beats disappear and the last minute is a slow melody for ambient strings that fades out gradually. When all is silent, you may be tempted to play the whole album again. It's a temptation to which I've given in many times these past few weeks.