Whoops. This one snuck up on me. Well, anyway, I gave you my spiel last year. Show some love, people.

Here is Pitchfork's rundown of all the special releases and in-store performances, plus other helpful links.

I'm hoping to grab the Wild Beasts' "Albatross" 7", the James Blake vinyl release, and the Trash Talk / Wavves split 7"!

I don't mean that as a bad thing. It's just that they have weirdly similar career trajectories, and I feel almost exactly the same about both bands.

2000, Coldplay releases Parachutes; it flies under the radar but in retrospect is a killer album. 2001, The Strokes release Is This It?; it does well but really gains stature stature over time. Both albums are front to back gems and highly re-listenable.

Again one year apart, both release good but not great sophomore albums under the weight of Next Big Thing hype. Is This It? is a better album than Parachutes, but I prefer A Rush of Blood to the Head to Room on Fire, so I say they come out a wash. At this point, both bands are pretty well overrated. They date movie stars.

Smothered with unrealistic expectations, they each drop unlistenable duds the third time around (again, The Strokes one year after Coldplay). Popular opinion turns drastically against them. The Coldplay backlash is more vitriolic (probably because expectations were loftier. That, and they're soft.), but both bands are now, generally speaking, Not Who We Thought They Were. They disappear for a while.

Here's where I get to my point. They probably stayed away long enough that nobody really cared anymore either way. Everybody sold their stock and no longer has a stake in the outcome. This mellowing gives them freedom from expectations again, and they both bang out competent, professional, polished, and generally decent albums. And we probably have enough lingering love that they still benefit from what we liked about them in the first place. I liked Viva La Vida okay, because, I don't know, I had no reason not to like it. And I'm enjoying Angles this week because I just don't need a whole lot from The Strokes right now. A couple good hooks, that unfazeable croon, and a nice pace, and y'know what, I'm good.

The lesson, as always, expectations are everything.

As you know, I think very highly of Wild Beasts. Or as JV likes to call them, Vampire Opera. So you could guess that I went epileptic when I saw this:



And now, this:

Wild Beasts - Albatross by 1FTP

JV said she thought it was going to be totally different. Sounds like she's on to something. I say Bring. That. Sh!%.

I would bet a pantless day at work that this thing is going to make like Godzilla.

2 months and counting...

Anne Litt (my DJ crush) just dropped this one out of nowhere on Weekend Becomes Eclectic. Always loved this song, this video, Helena Christensen. Just salacious.



Got-DAMN!

Ahhh, the first day of mix season. The smell of hot dogs and freshly cut grass; the crack of the bat in the distance.

I put in the time this winter, fine-tuned my swing and loaded up on HGH, to bring you the most competitive, highest quality, diversified musical entertainment. Enjoy.

Volume 1

Toro y Moi - Go With You
James Blake - Lindisfarne II
Aloe Blacc - Good Things
Jamie Lidell - Enough's Enough
Ghostface Killah - Ghetto (Feat. Raekwon, Cappadonna & U-God)
Drake - Over (Dirty)
Cassius - I <3 U SO
The Roots - Right On
Kid Cudi - Mr. Rager
Mount Kimbie - Ode To Bear
Theophilus London - Life Of a Lover
M.I.A. - It Takes A Muscle
Panda Bear - Last Night At The Jetty

Volume 2

Generationals - Say For Certain
Peter, Bjorn and John - Eyes
Working For A Nuclear Free City - Silent Times
Twin Shadow - At My Heels
Girls - Alright
The Strokes - I'll Try Anything Once
Destroyer - Blue Eyes
Tennis - Marathon
Timber Timbre - Lay Down In the Tall Grass
Beach House - I Do Not Care For The Winter Sun
Iron & Wine - Big Burned Hand
Phosphorescent - It's Hard to Be Humble (When You're from Alabama)
Deerhoof - Qui Dorm, Només Somia
Akron/Family - I'll Be On The Water
Givers - Saw You First

A girl snaps a huge bubble from her chewing gum. She sucks the shrapnel back in to her mouth, takes the ball between her fingers and stretches it awayyy from her face until it's barely a string. Then she twirls it around a finger, slowly gathering the gum back up into a whole. She skins it off her finger, gives it a chew, fills up another big one, and lets it POP!

This is what a James Blake song is like.

There is so much tension, so much time that elapses between those moments of gratification, that it always borders on driving you crazy. Last year's three EPs - The Bells Sketch, CMYK, and Klavierwerke - are experiments in teasing out little snippets of gorgeousness, a distorted R&B hook here, a couple notes of piano there, while grounding the listener in these stretchy, spacey, pulsating beats. You never know when to expect the payout, and it's usually gone before you can get your hands around it. He just has a brilliant and totally original sense of time and space that takes a little getting used to but can reorient how you expect to be stimulated by a song.

JB is movin up in the world, beyond the beats and into the traditional song format. But he brought all his tricks with him, and the result is essentially an R&B album but unlike any you've heard. The combination is bizarre but very exciting.

This Feist cover is the perfect example of what's possible. The original is rich and lovely and everything you want in a song, but by stripping it down to a few key parts and filling in the rest with little ticks and wobbles - dark matter - and a heavy dose of force-fed patience, you get something else altogether: tense and unsentimental, but beautiful in its own right. It's a style that implicates rather than tells you outright what to feel or hear or whatever it is you want to experience in music.

Austin-based, electronic ambient texture pimp daddies Stars of the Lid are the soundtrack to the vast emptiness of walking on the moon (next time you're there...) or watching the world come slowly to life as dawn breaks over a solitary garden. It's slow going, the shifts in sensations almost undetectable (this is not music you would ever want to see live), but it is massive and inspirational.

Perfect for sleeping/reading/working/yoga/meditating/i don't really do most of these things but I can imagine...

Love LOVE and Their Refinement of the Decline and The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid.

Stars of the Lid - Requiem For Dying Mothers, Part 1 by starclubyeah