This year, I’m doing something slightly different. Given my propensity for catalog, I’m going to split my lists between new releases and catalog discoveries. The year-end favorite list is a time-honored rockist tradition, but how do you quantify a year-end favorite list of past titles? You don’t — it’s subjective.
Probably a more interesting list would be to pit 2010 against catalog. I think 2010 would lose that fight.
I’m fairly sure the first five slots of this list — although shifted from earlier drafts — are solid. The remaining five are malleable. In fact, I’m not sure how LCD Soundsystem made it on there. (Well, merit, of course, but I think I gave more spins to The Shape of Jazz to Come and Zenyatta Mondatta.) Comments provided for only the newest entries from previous drafts …
I spent most of December listening to the titles on the last On the playlist round-up because I was summoned to Honolulu for a family emergency. In short, my dad passed away.
It’s a saga I detail over at VexVox, but I pretty much flew out to Hawaiʻi at a moment’s notice, bringing only my most recent purchases. I wasn’t really in the frame of mind to shop for music — not that it stopped me from heading to Book-Off at Shirokiya in Ala Moana — so growth of the backlog was somewhat mitigated.
In fact, only two of these titles are actual physical purchases.
I use Music Collector to track my music catalog, and according to the database, I purchased only 53 titles with a 2010 release date. That number may be inaccurate since titles may be counted twice if I both downloaded it and bought a CD. Still, 53 is less than the number of titles I purchased that were released in 2009 (61), 2008 (96) or 2007 (92).
Another inaccuracy with the database is the date of purchase, which I don’t actively track but can approximate by the numerical ID of the database (high numbers == more recent purchase). So as an experiment, I cross-referenced my purchases in Quicken with my music database and grouped those purchases by year. Then I further grouped the results by release date. (I like data entry. Sue me.)
The earliest year I have purchase data is 2007, when I started tracking my finances in Quicken. In 2007, I purchased and downloaded 196 titles, 65 of which were released that year. That means 131 titles were catalog. (But I own 92 titles released in 2007. Why the discrepancy? Because 27 of those titles were purchased in subsequent years.) In 2008, I bought 69 new releases out of 159, with 90 catalog titles. In 2009, 51 out of 112 titles were new releases, leaving 61 catalog titles. 2010 — 53 out of 115, with 62 catalog titles.
The numbers are clear — catalog makes up the bulk of my listening now.
I’m once again participating in Holidailies but not with this site (although I’ve got enough backlogged content to supply more than a month of daily updates.)
I moved my Vox site, VexVox, to my personal domain, so I’ll be hanging out there for the entire month.
I could conceivably update both sites, but if you head over to VexVox, you’ll understand why I won’t. I’ve been in Honolulu for the last three weeks because of it.
August is no month to be working up a sweat in Austin, because thirty seconds outside will do that for you. So I opted to skip the gym for that entire month. But a slight change in my workout schedule managed to throw off my eating habits, and in due time, I packed on 10 pounds in the span of a summer.
So I’ve been hitting the elliptical machine mighty hard since September, which has staved off the gain but has not promoted any weight loss.
This past month has been following something of a new music theme, which is not conducive for thirty minutes at 160 strides per minute. So I need some new workout music because I need something other than Tokyo Jihen’s Sports to mark my pace.
The brouhaha over the special edition remasters of Duran Duran and Seven and the Ragged Tiger must have rankled the brass over at EMI. There was enough outcry that the label had to make a statement, but then stood by their work, which, when analyzed in a sound editor, isn’t all that great.
Of course, I was too bedazzled by the demos to notice the remastering.
After a few delays, special editions of Notorious and Big Thing are now available. This time, EMI opted not to boost the levels to the point they were squashed, but they still are squashed.
I noticed right away the mixes were pumping — soft parts would get loud, and loud parts would get soft, even though the overall level remained constant. So I fired up Sound Forge to confirm my suspicions — the transients were all cut off in the remasters. The result is something that may sound "louder" but isn’t.
That certainly addresses an issue from the previous special editions, but it also loses the spaciousness of the original mixes. Compare the Big Thing and Notorious special editions with some tracks from the Singles 1986-1995 boxed set, and you’ll hear the disparity.
The Singles 1986-1995 tracks are boosted significantly, but they don’t do a bad job of preserving the proportion of peaks. Not so with the special editions. They are flat, flat, flat.
The outcry from this set is going to be something fierce.
I knew going into it that Greg Kot’s Ripped covers a subset of what was already detailed in Steve Knopper’s Appetite for Self-Destruction. Perhaps Kot had something else to say about the period of time overlapping both books — the rise of the Internet in hastening the downfall of the major labels.
Ripped does indeed cover much more than just the effects of file sharing on the recorded music industry. Kot mentions how Youtube and Myspace boosted the careers of OK Go and Lily Allen. One chapter focuses on how protest songs against the Iraq War got squeezed out of radio but found audiences on the Net.
An overly long love letter to Radiohead covers the emerging marketing techniques used by major artists abandoning the label system, while another chapter briefly mentions artists who decide to remain in the system that fed their careers.
Kot takes a wide snapshot of the various ways creating and selling recorded music happens in the first decade of the 21st Century. But that’s all it is — a snapshot.
A few third quarter releases and some straggling second quarter discoveries finally rounded out the favorite edition list for 2010.
I’ll admit I’m not entirely passionate about the second half of the list as I am the first half, but I’m glad I’ve encountered enough new releases to stave off the avalanche of catalog that’s been dominating my playlist.
While Tokyo Jihen has a strangehold on the top spot, I would like to mention my pick for single of the year: "Nirai Kanai" by Cocco. That mix of Okinawan chanting with her classic hard rock sound just pushes all the right buttons for me.
I’m not seeing anything spectacular on the release calendar for the rest of the year, so this list might be it.
It’s been three months since I started my new job, and I think the upheaval of such a change is just starting to settle down. (Evident in the fact I’ve made a virtual avalanche of posts.)
The job is busy enough to keep me off of social media for most of the day, and I actually like the fact I’m writing on my own time. Of course, it’s usually at 3 a.m. on those nights when I conk out on the futon too early.
The backlog, however, has gotten bigger these past months. I was proud when I managed to get it under 60 hours a few months ago. It’s sky-rocketed back up to 80.
By the time Duran Duran recorded Seven and the Ragged Tiger, the band had turned into international superstars. Touring kept them out of the studio, which meant little in the way of archival material.
The special edition of Seven and the Ragged Tiger does not hold any surprises for diligent fans who snatched up the singles boxed set from 2004 or the 12-inch compilations from the late ’90s.
"Is There Something I Should Know?" suffers from something of an identity crisis. US fans probably associate the track with the band’s self-titled debut, which shoe-horned the track in a 1983 reissue that came in the wake of the success of Rio. (I, for one, keep expecting to hear it after "Careless Memories".)
The track appears as a bonus, along with two versions of the B-side "Faith in This Colour". Of course, there’s "Secret Oktober" and the dance mix of "The Reflex", which is far superior than the album mix.
Very familiar territory for the schooled Duranie. That leaves the videos, which is where the true value of this reissue lies.