Some random thoughts to unceremoniously kick off another year of Hypocrite Listener

I haven't posted anything in a while, and not for lack of trying.  In the past month, I've started out on several Big Idea writing projects for the site which never really took hold.  Of those failed efforts there was:
    
A misguided attempt to defend Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeroes as harmless hippie nostalgia.  That one fell apart pretty quickly.  I still enjoy three of their songs immensely.  "40 Days," "Carries On" and "Home" are serviceable, enjoyable, and in some moments even impressive.  However, I'm not sure I want to put myself in the icky position of defending them with anything resembling criticality.  And what's more, I don't think the band needs any critical support.  It's a Get On The Bus kind of thing, either you want to hang with the dirty hippies or your disgusted by it.  Me, I don't mind their cotton candy spirituality, these songs are fun to sing along to.

A massive top 20 albums of the aughts list which was growing into a sprawling directionless mess of my own mixture of personal history and half baked cultural criticism.  Even though reading it was becoming more and more painful, it took me way too long to finally just abandon ship and come back to reality.  I almost deleted my blogger account twice, that's how fed up with my own writing I'd become.  Chalk it up to a chemically altered cabin fever and just generally having too much time on my hands, most of which is spent behind a keyboard.  However, I did put Girls Can Tell at number two and felt better about myself for some reason.

A review of the new Spoon album, Transference.  This might actually happen, I'm still listening to the album.   The guys still can't seem to make a truly mediocre album, and even though some of these songs are the band's most underdeveloped, at least their studio trickery keeps it interesting.  It's also good to see Britt trying to push himself further, even if the results are mixed.  "Who Makes Your Money" is the required A+ track that seals the band's credibility and thwart's any accusations of laurel resting or half-assing.  I'll wait to see how well it stands up over the year.

I've also been wondering how to feel about this Surfer Blood album.  I like it, it's solid and serviceable.  It has held up to a couple of listens and is pretty close to the music my band makes, or I could see being lumped in with them if we were ever lucky to be in that position.  But I'm not sure how I feel them in the context of Japanadroids or Cymbal's Eat Guitars.  I'm not sure how good I feel about the return of the straight up indie-rock record.

And there's the noble project of trying to develop a more coherent way of approaching music.  This comes from my embarrassingly late-blooming intellectual curiosity in music.  As much as I've tended to like critically acclaimed and/or "challenging" music, I've actually never wanted too put much thought into it.  So I've got a lot of unconnected dots of interest and conjecture when it comes to how I feel about music.  I like Daft Pop's project of articulating subjective thoughts on music, I also like No Trivia's more analytic "I'm gonna break this down for you" style of writing, and even the Wire's wry seriousness.  And as much as I could just keep doing the whole personal anecdote thing, I'm pretty bored with my own personal cosmology.  Need to find something difficult to do and do it right.

Also wondering why so (it seems to me, in my personal context) many people are really pretty bored with new music right now.  I chalk it up to getting older. But how fucking depressing is that?  At 23 I'm already getting to old to give a fuck about new bands?  Is it me, or is the music industry so lazy that it can only focus it's attentions on the fickle tastes of the desperately hip, the ravenous star worship of the young or the staid tastes and nostalgia of the old and boring?  Was it just always like this?  Are the 20's inherently a darker and more pessimistic time, or is this a product of living in an era of diminishing returns and low hopes.  It's ridiculous saying this after 09 gave me not one but three fantastic favorite new albums and plenty of big events to get excited about.  It could be another symptom of the New Year slump, something  I seemed to skip last year because of Merriweather and the inauguration.  Also, I'd like to take a moment to say Fuck You to all those selfish, hypocritical Massachusetts voters who thought it was more important to elect a Senator who drives a truck, watches sports, and "get's them" than to elect someone who would vote to make Ted Kennedy's dream a reality.  Yes, the bill sucks, the Dems wasted time, Martha Coakley is a terrible candidate, I know.  But don't you see what you've given the GOP?  If state healthcare insurance is good enough for you, why isn't it good enough for the rest of us?  I digress...

Overly ambitious content is on it's way.  Thanks for reading.