This year just ceases to amaze me.

The Black Keys have finally hit their stride again. This time with more subtlety. In fact, upon further review, there's a lot of things out there that are really rocking some shit.

This year so far appears to be very much a mix between mediocre debuts and solid returns from a whole slue of the vanguard... and by vanguard I mean people who have come out with more than just a single good album.

It's late. I should get some sleep.

Mid Quarter Review transcends into something else.

Part of my reemergence into life has consisted of several things:

-Quitting smoking (FINALLY)

-Continuous running

-Having the next six months completely mapped out

-Getting the job I've always wanted

But one in particular is something I never thought I'd have to do, and that was to immerse myself once again into modern music.

I spent a lot of time this quarter going back to what I've loved for a long time.

But something got a hold of me that was slightly geriatric, a distaste for the modern scene.

I put a lot of money into a very well polished record collection, and at the same time woed about the lack of taste in what I saw in music in the year 2009.

It's now that sad (?) point in my life where I now realize that music simply does not cater to how I see fit. This is ironic because music has almost never done that* and yet I seem to be fixed on this idea.

Part of this might also be due to the fact that I began listening to beat and rhythm in an advanced, sort of fetishistic way at about the same time that a great turnover in music was beginning.

Garage rock was finally being articulated upon. Influences from soft rock were being polished to something better. It was as if the Quentin Tarantinos and the Jason Reitmans and the P.T. Andersons of the music world were finally being influenced and elaborating on what they love.

And the best thing about it was there was this popularized statement about it. Nitsuh Abebe wrote a great essay** about how indie is no longer a movement but a franchise. To me this was my moment to cherish. I remember after my family had moved into our new house and I started watching music oriented television they would have whole shows dedicated to the Phantom Planets and The Caesars type bands of the world. A show specifically was called "Next Big Thing". I didn't realize then, but it had appeared that the market had become self aware because the whole show was dedicated to nobodies that you were to call in and vote for***. They all sounded like The Kaiser Cheifs but to me this was that unintentional development of my full understanding. They tried to sell more shit to me, but I in return got angry at Metallica and apprehended The Secret Machines albums.

...and so you cut to 2010. People are already starting to "define" the decade's moves and shakes (whereas it was will be two more decades before we can actually get our meathooks around it). I look at the vast number of albums I own now and grow weary when I hear the last shreds of indie from emerging bands and the final wheezes of the once great giants (I think it's safe to say that I was disappointed by nearly every band I love these last two days).

This is because I am now an old man in such a rapid moving society. In 2006 when The Strokes released their last album SPIN did a cover story on them and the author had written about how had The Strokes released their first album in the early 1970s they would have made three Is This It's, two Room on Fire's, and one First Impression of Earth. Some of you may not understand that reference, but what it's saying is there was this availability to relax and move around in your space with music before the demand of instantaneous everything in our society. After broadcasting today on the radio and thumbing through hundreds of albums of bands I love and stumbling upon a resurrection of one in particular (I'll explain later) that I didn't know existed, I finally understood this. I honestly believe that, through a transactional analogy, if Led Zeppelin released their first album today, they would have stopped at Led Zeppelin. It's the reason nobody remembers hardly anything from the 90s unless they've reinvented themselves (be it intentional or not).

This tradeoff comes with the availability of all of this music literally minutes away.

...and so I sit here in truly the most jarring paradox. Would I have been able to experience this revelation without the use of the thing that destroyed how music grows?

People older than myself enjoy the art of bitching to me about music's lack of development, and I couldn't agree more. Unless technology is dismantled and society becomes both simultaneously healthy and patient once again, we will never have such a fluid ability to articulate our joys.

This is why Danger Mouse and James Mercer are now collaborating like retirees. This why James Murphy is fading and dressing like fucking Bryan Ferry. These people would have become legends in a much larger way then they are now.

As Wayne Coyne's hair grows progressively grayer, so does everything I love. It's a tough day to swallow when the new bands I enjoy look my age.

But with this comes a last hurrah. For you see this whole thought into 2001-2007 is simply what recalls when I listen to a particular album.

Earl Greyhound's Suspicious Package

Everything just stated comes to mind hearing an album like this.

What you probably don't know is that Earl Greyhound was one of those next big things that existed during that self aware heyday. In 2006 they released Soft Targets which was simultaneously hugely buzzed and terribly overlooked. In my desert island, that might be one of the top three. It was so organic, and yet so respecting of its influences that it came off as blooming and insatiable.

In four years they have not released a single LP (or EP for that matter) until this week (the album you see above), and it is beautiful. I mostly assumed that they were split and done. Instead, they did disappear but only to work on their craft and become more serious than all the other reemergence. It is not a Roky Erickson or a late-years Johnny Cash, because they never were well known. They are the same, without the label of once-was. It's as if they fell asleep for four years and awoke last week without the fucked out feeling the rest of us feel in our early adulthood, and yet I realize that they were there for all of it.

I feel the tree in this album is very symbolic of what has changed in merely four years. The tree is now is fruiting electronic bands like no other while we sit and relish in what once was.

My only hope is that they one day, everything will become as genuine as this band.

*negating 2003-2004

** This was from a Pitchfork article. I'm never that scholastic.

***Even more ironically, it was sponsored by Tower Records

The Most Polarizing Issue Ever.

Ok I've been put in a situation where everyone seems to be polarized.

This is the red state/blue state argument of hip music: Is MGMT's Congratulations good?

Kind of. I've heard both sides of the argument, and this is the argument:

I'll be generalizing both sides as "good" (as in "I thought it was good") and "bad" (as in "I thought it was bad")

ahem:

Good: MGMT's new album is good.

Bad: No it's not.

Good: (sounding wavy in tone) Yes it is.

Bad: No it isn't. Popularity and record sales have infected their sound and now it's bad.

Good: No. It's a concept album. They're trying to experiment a new sound.*

Bad: Wait, wait. Pet Sounds was a concept album. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was a concept album. Congratulations is NOT a concept album.

Good: Okay you can't compare everything to the Beatles and then say it sucks. That has to be a fallacy.

Bad: Okay, fine. How is Congratulations a concept album?

Good: It holds a theme of dealing with fame and fortune and experiencing it as a new reality, they would say another dimension.

Bad: Poor songsmithing doesn't mean you can get away was a loose thematic approach to being loaded.

Good: Fuck you.

Bad: Fuck you, too.

(Good and Bad do it while accidentally leaving MGMT's Congratulations on the iPod dock.)

*end scene*

It's difficult to come back after a very decent (some would say great, but I wouldn't) freshman album (ask Vampire Weekend, The Strokes, The Darkness, Coldplay, and most bands who first hit it big between 2000-2009*), and MGMT is no exception.

While I do enjoy the intricacies, you cannot not give the people what they are not expecting, but in that same vane can't rehash the old shit (or else feel the wrath of critical bloggers**). What I'm saying here is MGMT is fucked. They flew to high and are now orbiting accidentally around the planet until they burn up into the earths atmosphere.

But I enjoyed it, I'll just never remember it when I write my decade list in 2020.

*Despite Spoon still clamping on for dear life

**Self-awareness