Justin Townes Earle, “Harlem River Blues” find it on Harlem River Blues (2010) I was never a Steve Earle fan. His music always struck me as self-conscious as his politics, with every moment too carefully considered and dropped on you with a huge expectation that you’re supposed to respond to it in a certain way. [...]

Are we still using the word “chillwave” or is that done? I mean, I guess it doesn’t really matter when you’re talking about a track and an album that came out last July and was popular with those quick-to-pounce music bloggers about, oh, three years before that. They were done with chillwave about thirty seconds [...]

Summer Fiction, “Throw Your Arms Around Me” (2010) get it on Summer Fiction Like all music blogs, we get a pretty good amount of mail from bands, labels and PR firms asking us to listen to their stuff and post it. Most of these are annoying cut-and-paste jobs and get ignored. But a couple months [...]

People, my January is going to be batshit crazy insane. It’s the best kind of batshit, though, like the guano that they make really high quality stuff out of. You know what I’m talking about? Like they make perfume and car wax and Taco Bell meat out of it. That shit. Point being that, between [...]

Dean & Britta, “I’ll Keep It With Mine (Scott Hardkiss remix)” (2010) find it on 13 Most Beautiful: Songs For Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests Now that we’re done (mostly) with the year-end list gluttony, we can get on to that other musical pastime that marks the end of the year: trying to find all of [...]

click here to skip the intro & go straight to the list >> When you’re a highly self-conscious person like me, compiling a year-end list means that you have to shrug off a lot of nagging thoughts: whether the ranking’s exactly right and how dumb it is to rank art anyway; whether there was a [...]

The Ladybug Transistor, “A Life Less True (demo)” A few weeks ago, I bought the posthumous 7″ from The Lucksmiths, and in the package from Australia came a sampler from the label, The Lost and Lonesome Recording Company. Record label samplers usually aren’t packed with gems, so I imported the CD skeptically, mostly to get [...]

Sun Airway, “Shared Piano” (2010) find it on Nocturne Of Exploded Crystal Chandelier I don’t know what form compilations will take a couple decades from now, but whatever form they’re in, someone needs to put together a comp of gauzy, dreamy songs from these last few years. Carefully picked, it could be a hell of [...]

The Love Language, “Heart To Tell” (2010) find it on Libraries Some Fridays, my decision on the best song of the week is easy. But most Fridays, there’s several candidates battling it out, and it’s one particular factor that makes me pick one over the other. Sometimes, it’s something as surface as just having more [...]

Darren Hanlon, “Scenes From A Separation” (2010) find it on I Will Love You At All I first heard Darren Hanlon around 2001, after a comparison of him to the Lucksmiths led to an immediate purchase of his first album. I fell in love with the song “Hiccups” immediately, but lost track of his career [...]