Couldn't agree more on #8 and #1 (which is mostly what matters) but, so little love for Something About Airplanes, even in the comments? I mean, I wouldn't want to go around throwing around inflammatory remarks like "if you prefer Narrow Stairs to SAA, you're not a real DCFC fan", but... it's a little bit like choosing We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank over This is a Long Trip etc. SAA maybe was less fully formed than later albums, but By God they would not be the band they are today without getting all that emo urgency and self-gratifyingly and opaquely detail-oriented lyrics out of their system. And while "Debate Exposes Doubt" and especially "Movie-Script Ending" would end up on my top 10 songs list, Airplanes works as an album better than The Photo Album at the very least, IMHO.
When we're all showing our kids 10-20 years from now the albums we made out to in high school, they are going to make that same face I imagine I made hearing "Afternoon Delight" for the first time - It's stuck somewhere between disgust, disappointment, and confusion.
Also, this song is pretty meh, and I'd like to think my high-school self would agree.
Huh... funny that. Because it seems that if anyone deserves a nod for quality performance shtick, Nate Ruess and Janelle Monae are up there - at the same time, Nate Ruess is uniquely unqualified for the "song" award, as he wrote what is, really, probably the worst (or at least most ubiquitously awful) song of the year =|
I echo Bon Iver's sentiment - "whats the difference between song and record?" Maybe I should listen to more records and less songs; judging from the Grammy results, "record" means "a song that is entirely less terrible than a 'song' " (no disrespectin The Format though...)
Playing instruments - generally better than listening to ol' Carly Rae and NOT playing them. Sure, even the fratty guy covering "I Will Follow You Into The Dark" in order to pick up chicks had to be inspired to learn even that much, and sure, for all we know David Guetta could inspire someone to pick up some mixing boards and a copy of Ableton (which isn't NECESSARILY a bad thing), but fine - M&S inspiring someone to learn an instrument - good stuff.
But let's consider where this path is headed. I often refer to this top-40 folkie shlock as "Spotify-Folk", since that's almost invariably where most people go to hear it (besides the 10^6+ who bought Babel, obviously) - the related artists for M&S? Not Iron & Wine or Fleet Foxes or other such highly visible/acclaimed folk acts (Starbucks-y as they may be) - it's an echo chamber of equally manufactured retro-posturing with the likes of The Lumineers (duh) and Edward Sharpe, PLUS the very same recent top-40 developments that M&S is supposedly serving as an alternative to (Imagine Dragons? AWOLNATION?!)
I'm no parent, and in no position to offer advice, but personally, I feel that sometimes it's better to refrain entirely than do something ostensibly good for all the wrong reasons. Maybe there's even still time to "homeschool", so to speak, on a strict academic diet of Laura Marling and Simon & Garfunkel - teach the children well, man.
"Think about the first “rock” or “alternative” band you ever liked. It probably wasn’t Radiohead, The Strokes, Pavement, The Stone Roses, Dinosaur Jr" - I think a short story might illustrate just how awful this analogy is:
The first "rock" album I got was Third Eye Blind's self-titled debut.
The first "alternative" album I got was Modest Mouse's Good News For People Who Love Bad News (as, I imagine, it was for many others, a few of them on this site). (note: Rock != 'Alternative')
There is NO REASON WHATSOEVER I should have become the listener I am today because of TEB (still love those guys, BTWs). GNFPWLBN, on the other hand, offered that slippery slope, for which I'll be forever indebted to that album.
There is always going to be a market for music perceived as "the other thing besides dance pop to play on top-40" - sometimes, they are going to be the MGMTs, the Modest Mouses, and the (mid 90s) Radioheads of the world, and offer a way OUT. And sometimes they are going to be the TEBs, Fall Out Boys, Lumineers, and M&Ss of the world, and give you just enough conviction you are listening to something "authentic" and "outsider" to, paradoxically enough, keep you in the bubble.
So yes, it's better to have M&S on the airwaves than to give that time to Pitbull, in much the same way I'd rather die of drug overdose than being burned at the stake - nonetheless, we can, and have done, better. And remember, Tom - there will always be a pop star slightly worse than the one you're defending. ALWAYS.
Man, as sad as it was to see them go, I feel like their god-given work here on this planet was probably done after Bedlam in Goliath. Frances just might be my favorite, but that doesn't really mean anything when TMV were almost exclusively about moments rather than songs or albums - going on the strength of just the furious, sublime melodic moments that emerge from the sea of skronk, Amputechture might even be in the same league as the first two (it is for me, at least). Octahedron was just a death bell though - subtlety never really did suit them, and after pushing the skronk->ambience->release formula as far as it would seem to go and backing down a bit for a concise "rock" album, there was just nowhere to go. I wish they could have gone out a better note album-wise, but "Zed and Two Naughts" alone is probably enough to redeem the tepid-ass tunes they'd been making for years. Sure, they're copping their own formula from "Take the Veil Cerpin Taxt", but I'm sure I'm not the only fan who got exactly the swan song they wanted.
tl;dr: RIP TMV (oh great gateway-band among gateway-bands), props Stereogum for the thoughtful love, and no one cares what you think about prog anyways, P4K (ESPECIALLY you, Brent DiCrescenzo)
Yo La Ten-Gogol Bordello
The Nep-Tune-Yards
Big Black Moth Super Rainbow
Cari-Boo Radleys
Erykah Ba-Do Make Say Think
Gregory and the Hawk and a Hacksaw
Ok, I'm done now, I swear.
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