Favre still sucks!

The 2006 Chicago Bears decided to finally make an appearance during the 2007 season this afternoon and win a football game. Actually, it was more like the 2005 Bears, with Orton at the helm. He played decently, but it was the old defense and special teams that came through today like they used to do regularly. The best part about it: they showed up against the ****ing Packers and made Brett Favre look like a chump, AGAIN. Da Bears!

My 2007 Albums List

1. Radiohead – “In Rainbows”
2. Dinosaur Jr. – “Beyond”
3. Adam Franklin – “Bolts of Melody”
4. Low – “Drums and Guns”
5. Wilco – “Sky Blue Sky”
6. Spoon – “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga”
7. Arcade Fire – “Neon Bible”
8. Smashing Pumpkins – “Zeitgeist”
9. Stars – “In Our Bedroom After the War”
10. Of Montreal – “Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?”
11. The Besnard Lakes – “The Besnard Lakes are the Dark Horse”
12. New Pornographers – “Challengers”
13. Deerhoof – “Friend Opportunity”
14. The Sea and Cake – “Everybody”

This year I could not decide on #15. My nostalgic pick would be Rush, but I'd really just be lying to myself if I said "Snakes and Arrows" belonged here. I like the Kanye West album, but I'm just not a big hip-hop fan and don't see it making much of a lasting impact on me. Here are a few other decent albums I heard, even though none of them really strike me as great or list-worthy.

Rush – Snakes and Arrows
Kanye West - Graduation
Deerhunter - Cryptograms
The Clientele – God Save the Clientele
Battles - Mirrored
Common – Finding Forever
Fountains of Wayne – Traffic and Weather
Bloc Party – A Weekend in the City
Mika – Life in Cartoon Motion

Of course there are hundreds of 2007 albums I have NOT HEARD yet. A list like mine doesn't really carry that much weight when you consider I've only heard about 30 new records this year, and they are primarily albums I sought out because I knew I'd like them. I'd like to be able to absorb everything and judge my favorites without bias towards albums I know I will like, but that's just not realistic. And there are even a few albums I wanted to hear and never got around to, like the Shins, Apples in Stereo, The National, Menomena, Ted Leo, Andrew Bird, and Baroness!

Soon I will post a track listing of my 2007 mix CD. I'll need another day or two to whittle it down to a manageable number of songs.

Hopefully tomorrow

I'm shooting for tomorrow afternoon to get my 2007 album list posted and create a Best-of-2007 Mix. I need to re-listen to the Fountains of Wayne and Deerhunter albums to see if they are any good, and check a few dates on albums that may or may not have come out LAST year, and if so, cannot be included. But I've got the day off tomorrow (and the rest of the year, actually), so I should have time to sit and ponder these things.

Yesterday I read Pitchfork's top 50 and realized I had not even heard of half their albums. Not surprised, though; hipsters have a special way of making obscure crap sound really important. Take their #1 album, for example: Panda Bear's "Person Pitch." I had read another glowing review of this album, so I tracked it down through some "underground" (read: illegal) channels and downloaded it. I don't get it. It sounds like a dude hanging out in a cave 50 yards from the microphone, making up chants and repeating melodies with no choruses. It doesn't sound like songs, yet people are calling it the most perfect album of the year. Huh?

The Songs in my Head

Hall and Oates. I would have assumed it was called, "You Make My Dreams Come True," but the title is simply "You Make My Dreams." Was someone too lazy to write out the rest, or was there not enough space on the album jacket to fit it? Can you imagine them singing the chorus and skipping the "come true" part? "YOU MAKE-A MY DREAMS -- ...yeah, that's all really."

The Songs in my Head

I've had "House of Pain" by Van Halen in my head a couple times recently, including right now. not sure why cuz I haven't listened to it lately, but I'm not complaining. "House of Pain" and "Girl Gone Bad" are kind of the forgotten final tracks from VH's 1984 album. It's a pretty neat tune, too - there are like 3 or 4 different sections to the song, probably written independently of each other, but fused together into a clever 3 minute job. The part in my head is the lead riff and chorus, but I like the sped-up middle and the back-to-basics ending as well. Some might say that the parts don't really go together that well, and that the song is kind of a mish-mash. But I tend to like songs that start in one place and go someplace so far off that by the end of the song, you've forgotten the beginning. My band Kemman has a lot of songs that do that. (We are playing tonight at the Underground Lounge.)

Wait for it...

I'm still trying to cram a few more 2007 releases down my throat before I post my list of favorite albums from the year. I've been reading lots of other people's lists and of course they are loaded with albums I've never heard, so I thought I might sample a few of them.

I picked up the new Besnard Lakes album at Hard Boiled Records on Roscoe the other day. I was a little apprehensive at first, but it's actually pretty neat. It just might crack the top 15.

One album that I have NOT seen on ANYONE's 2007 list is "Bolts of Melody" by Adam Franklin. Franklin was the singer/guitarist in Swervedriver, and lately had been making music under the name Toshack Highway. This is his first "solo" album, and it quickly grew to be one of my favorites. It's more laid back than Swervedriver, of course, but it's not boring (at least to me).

I saw him play at the Empty Bottle back in October (in fact I went there right from the Van Halen concert at the United Center.) He and his band played several songs from the new album and they sounded great. For whatever reason, I really like his song structures and vocal delivery.

Anyway, look for my list in a couple weeks.

The Songs in My Head

I almost always have SOME song in my head, and very often I don't even consciously notice it. My idea behind this series was to post whatever song was in my head at posting time. But now that I have a chance to post, I am actually listening to music, so the song in my head is the song playing right now: "Puss" by The Jesus Lizard. But it doesn't really count since it's actually playing.

So I will mention a song I had in my head recently: "For Your Life" by Led Zeppelin. The other day, that song was really stuck in there. What adjectives can you use to describe the severity of a song getting stuck in your head? It was stuck in my head real hard? It was stuck firmly? It was un-stickable? It was stuck with resounding presence? Speaking of presence, that song was stuck so thick(?), I had to listen to the entire album from which it came, Presence. A pretty underrated Zep album, it's got some great tunes on it. "Nobody's Fault But Mine" is probably the hit, I guess, but "Hots On For Nowhere" is possibly Zeppelin's most fun song, and nothing even comes close to the power of "Achilles Last Stand." What an epic tune. "For Your Life" is good, too. I dunno why it was in my head though. Just came up on my internal shuffle, I guess.

2006 Revisited

OK. Hindsight being 50/50 and all... My top 15 of 2006 does need a little re-working. I mean, I have more opinions on records than the Cubs have middle infielders (if you don't know, they have a LOT), and they change all the time. But I think this list is a little more accurate. Maybe.

While I like the Frank Black album, I don't think it's one of his best, and I honestly never listen to it anymore, so it's getting bumped. Also, even though I kind of like it, the Thom Yorke album really doesnt belong in that list. Despite my early infatuation, the Flaming Lips record was not properly ranked at number 4, and Don Caballero gets better with every listen. I added an extra album too, because, it's my list and I wanted to.

1. Yo La Tengo – "I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass"
2. Secret Machines – “Ten Silver Drops”
3. Mew – “And the Glass Handed Kites” (this might be a 2005 release overseas, but I'm counting it as 2006)
4. Phoenix - "It's Never Been Like That"
5. Don Caballero – “World Class Listening Problem”
6. Mastodon – “Blood Mountain”
7. Flaming Lips – “At War With the Mystics”
8. Belle and Sebastian – “The Life Pursuit”
9. Loose Fur – “Born Again in the USA”
10. Sloan – “Never Hear the End of It”
11. Futureheads – “News and Tributes”
12. Kooks – “Inside In/Inside Out”
13. Killers – “Sam’s Town”
14. Slayer – “Christ Illusion”
15. TV On The Radio – "Return to Cookie Mountain"
15. Robert Pollard - Normal Happiness