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Funny, I'd never heard that Unconditionally song before, until just tonight! It was playing over the speakers at Target, and OMG holy cow! un-CON-di-TION-a-lly. That's amazing that nobody hears that and says "Hey, this is really weird and not really how English works." It just reeks of cramming some halfassed lyrics into a melody that wasn't intended for them.

Hot take: "Song 2" is a shameless retread of The Rentals "Friends of P".

Back when In Evening Air came out, I was immediately hooked by these guys, but at the same time, I never in a hundred years would've put money down on them becoming this universally beloved, late-night-show-stealing indie crossover success. But I'm totally cool with it. (Just wish this Late Night audio mix wasn't so rough. And that I didn't have Jimmy Fallon's shrill "Future Islands!" stuck in my head).

Whichever part of the team is responsible for syllable emphasis placement needs to have a talk with HR. DIS-tor-SHUN? zom-BIE? rhy-THM? hap-PIL-ly? un-DER? Unless that's a thing that singers do now?

Yell yes to 2:15 and 3:43. I haven't loved anything they've done since Women As Lovers, but this really does it for me. Love it.

Bad and Bigotee

Well this'll probably make Shut Up Dude this week, but I'll just go ahead with it: Is there any point soon where we'll start a slow but steady backlash period on Beyonce? Shit like this just happens more often than probably should... smaller, lesser known artists coming out and saying, "Hey, Beyonce copied my work without credit or compensation", and the world at large responding to them with "You should consider yourself lucky that Queen Bey took interest in your dumb work at all." Even if it doesn't necessarily hold up in court or whatever, it's still an unfortunate trend. She's a good performer (duh), and clearly has enough taste to get good people working with and around her (and has enough cultural capital built up that she can get basically any artist in the world to come work for her). But at some point I just have a hard time knowing what BEYONCE has to say, what she has to bring to the table, other than molding other people's ideas into her own image. Ready for your downvotes.

No, I like with Greenwood's TWBB work, that was a good pairing. The Master's score was fine. Inherent Vice, I don't even remember the score from it, but to me was something that Brion could've totally nailed, given the tone of the movie. And from what little we know of the movie yet, I'd like to hear Brion's take on this new one. Just given that PTA/Brion had such a perfect partnership up through Punch Drunk Love (which is an incredible soundtrack on its own, maybe my favorite all time to just listen to as an album), it just sort of bums me out that Jon's seemingly been kicked to the curb for the sexier Jonny. I've sort of been wondering what's going on behind the scenes in the Hollywood film scoring world. It seems like Jon Brion just hasn't had a good movie gig in a long time now. Lots of little things here and there (Apataow comedies, whatever), but he's just not getting the high profile Eternal Sunshines and Punch Drunk Loves that he used to. And then I heard Aimee Mann on some podcast a year or two ago, and she was talking about him, and she sounded sort of sad about him... like there's something going on behind the scenes there that she didn't really want to touch on. Very odd. All the more reason for PTA to help him get his mojo back!

I miss Jon Brion.

Good.

"Phil Elverum covering the Band" ... I didn't think this could possibly be correct, but it's not too far off.

I like this.

So good. Totally shameless and unapologetic about their influences, but that doesn't even matter because they're legit good at it.

This is the best.

I'm not usually much of a FJM fan—I see his talent, but for whatever reason he usually rubs me the wrong way. But this is 'holy shit' good.

(Upon writing this comment, I've gone back and scanned through Mount Eerie a little, and apparently I have very skewed memories of it! There's other voices on it, but it's still very much Elverum in the lead most of the time. Weird. I'm definitely going to have to sit down and give it another reevaluation one of these days!)

I personally felt (at the time, especially, since I very rarely go back to listen to it) that Mount Eerie was paced in a way that just made it hard to really get into; more prolonged instrumental stuff than IWHWSITW and TGP2, though clearly that's the route he wanted to go when he switched his "band" name to Mount Eerie from then on. And even then a lot of the more song-based stuff on it leaned into the other contributors so much that it didn't even really feel like a Microphones album. It was like a K Records group project or something. That sounds really harsh though... I liked it, I still like it. I just think The Glow Pt 2 was damn near impossible to top.

Almost too good! I don't necessarily LOVE everything else he's done, but I absolutely respect his entire body of work AS a body of work. But The Glow Pt. 2 is so good, and so perfect, that it's hard to get the same satisfaction out of any other single album he's made. I'd say start with It Was Hot We Stayed In The Water... then maybe Clear Moon... then if you like what you hear, go ahead and jump into Glow Pt 2 for the full payoff. Point is, Phil Elverum is a treasure, and what he's going through is awful. But I think it's a beautiful thing that he had to even post this "don't come to my show". Because even though I can't (though I considered for half a minute what it would take to get there), I would absolutely love to go.

I'm a bit of a metal outsider; I follow the scene from a distance, and sample as many of the more acclaimed new releases as I can, but honestly only a tiny bit of it really hits me in a deep way. What gets me about the "world" of metal that this preamble is trying to make sense of, as I see it from my arm's length, is that you Metal Guys seem obsessed with sub-genre. There's so much focus on the details of what bucket a band fits into, or which two or three buckets they're combining, and the music in turn just starts to feel like an assembly line of bands who don't have the guts to try anything new or truly make something great. The ones who seem to get credit for experimenting are often just taking one sub-genre, and adding some identifiers from another on top of it. It's rare that I really hear anything truly new or fresh or musically progressive in metal. And it seems that for a big part of the community, that's not the point. It's a contest to see who can be the MOST. That said, here's my very short list of metal releases that really impressed me this year. (AGAIN, noting that I'm a tourist. I don't live in Metal World. I do think I know music, and I like to think I have good taste in general.) I'll probably get laughed out of this comment thread, but I'm curious to hear the opinions of those more metal-centric than me: 1. Moon Tooth - Chromoparagon This is actually my #2 album overall this year. The near nu-metal/Incubus vibe almost makes it too embarrassing for me to even mention in mixed company, but I think what these guys are doing on this album is incredible. Talking about sub-genre, it seems to pretty much blow away any of those walls. It's just guys with crazy chops having a blast playing smart interesting music (and major chords!), and a singer who isn't afraid to actually sing. A little corny, but amazingly good. 2. Katatonia - Fall of Hearts I feel like Katatonia has been doing the thing they do for long enough now that nobody pays them much attention. But this is their best album in a while, just track after track of perfectly constructed Katatonianess. 3. VRTRA - My Bones Hold a Stillness Technically an EP, but whatever. Also it probably plays too many of those sub-genre games that I was complaining about before, but I just thing it's GREAT. Total intensity, but with some really good riffs hidden back there. 4. Astronoid - Air I thought it got more praise than it deserved at first, but I found myself coming back to it all the time, and now I just chill out and let it win me over. 5. Opeth - Sorceress Full disclosure, I'm an absolute Opeth fanboy, so grain of salt. But I think Sorceress is easily their best since Ghost Reveries (Watershed did nothing for me). Heads and shoulders better than their last two prog experiments, though on first listen I was pissed and ready to give up on them forever. But it totally grew on me. It's worth giving a second chance if you wrote it off.

These guys are better than everyone else.