Hypocrite Listener 2010 Music Honors

Carlos D. Memorial Award for Sickest Bass Playing on a Rock Album:  Tame Impala, Innerspeaker

Runner Up:  Ariel Pink, Before Today

Sickest Bass Playing on a Non Rock Album: Cosmogramma

The Steven Ellison Genius Grant for Releasing Not One but Two Mindblowing Next Level Releases in One Year Because He’s Just Like That: Flying Lotus

Ice Cold


Award for Good Album Intractably Marred by Questionable Vocal Affectations:  Baths, Cerulean

Post-Dilla Postal Service
Runner up: Salem, King Knight

Most Rewarding Questionable Vocal Affectation:  Sam Herring, Future Islands

Ryan Adams Award for Free Download That Is Somehow Still a Waste of Money and Space: Girl Talk, All Day

This Asshole...

Best Apotheosis of Self Via Disjointed Paranoid Confessional Ramblings From an Artist Emerging from Self-Imposed Exile After a Previous Full Length’s Lukewarm Critical Reception and Amidst Talk of Said Artist Becoming a Parody of Himself:  Destroyer, Archer on the Beach

A cosmonaut in a breadline, etc.

Runner Up: Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Best Jump to Relative Hifi:  Beach House, Teen Dream

Deep blue pools of sexy melancholy

Worst Jump Back to Relative Lofi: Spoon, Transference

The less said the better

Best Production on a Lofi Release: Tie, Women, Public Strain and Ariel Pink, Before Today

The Wayne Coyne “If I was going to do shrooms, I’d want to do it with this guy” Award:  Dustin Wong

Best Chillwave Album Not Classified As or Affiliated With Chillwave:  Javelin, No Mas

Slept on

Stephen Malkmus Award for Best Song Imbued With a Humble Tossed-Off Perfection That’s Almost Infuriating Because You’re Pretty Sure It Was Written on the Spot:  Kurt Vile, I Got Religion

Best Moment to Be Justin Vernon, Or It Would Be if This Was All Recorded at Once: Monster

Nobody knew I was a muthafuckn monstah, nobody but Ye

Late Fall Mix

This cold weather and early evenings have gotten the best of me and I fear that cabin fever setting in way too soon.  Here's a technicolor mix for these grayscale days.  Sorry for the sloppy mixing.

Hypocrite Listener Fall Mix by nigelharsch

Women (Again)

I haven't been able to write anything better than this on Public Strain: 

"Post-indie rock indie rock is copies of copies of collages of copies; in the hands of Women, however, it’s not that cut ‘n dry. They work the degradation of the process, blow-up the resulting scuzz to canvas their gallery walls, splay melodies into abstractions into new melodies as they zoom in more and more. These aren’t Brooklyn hipsters dancing, it’s their dancing pixels. The subversion of staid indie rock becomes the subversion of a hundred different things, a hundred different roles, and Public Strain envelops all that, highlights all the contrasts and contradictions that are built into indie rock’s origins but have been lost over time through the genre’s maturation into a broad and often dull establishment, into Death Cab and shirt dresses and well-made music calledThe Suburbs. With gumption Public Strain breaks through the static of a moving yet flat image in order to bare the quaking microcosmos beneath. Its tracklist is a unified yet eclectic collection; “Bells” is dark ambient and “China Steps” is motorik with Sonic Youth guitars and “Venice Lockjaw” is aching balladry and “Eyesore” is perfection fucking chaos on top the whole indie canon and much of the rest is, at once, Nuggets (1972) and not Nuggets. Women have no use for indie rock as a market, a lifestyle, or even as a genre—it is merely the substance they break apart and unfurl into a letting of noise, of unseemly chords, of momentary transcendence, of their own identity." more

Bejar on Bejar

The impossible weight of his mythos is imploding on top of him.  I am so fucking excited.