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The real howler in this interview is when she waxes jealous about Kony 2012.

Adore is easily better than both Pisces and Gish.

I still don't fully understand why I'm supposed to care about Drake.

Tom, you're crazy. I agree that "Reflektor" is a half-baked video, but Corbijn's stuff is great, especially the early string of iconic Depeche Mode videos he did. Hell, he deserves Hall of Fame music video status if the only thing he had ever done was his video for U2's "One": http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=ftjEcrrf7r0

Ahhhh got it. You can perform all remaining penance by offering a tribute to "Almost Killed Me" next March.

"instead of Craig Finn’s gratuitous nasal sing-talking." Hey, fuck you.

"God Only Knows," followed closely by "Surf's Up"

Muzzle

Great piece. One of my favorite U2 albums -- probably top four or five for me -- and this absolutely gets some important things about the band correct, including the fact that this album has now become a residual casualty of Pop. I also agree with the take on U2's 2000s and the problems associated with their too-calculated recent work. I do quibble a bit with this though: "'The First Time' deals with a perennial topic of Bono’s — that of family ties, particularly the relationship between fathers and sons." Err, kind of. Essentially I read it as one of their most overtly Christian songs, of a piece with "Acrobat" and "Wake Up Dead Man" in terms of their '90s work -- less religious joy, more existential and spiritual despair about God's silence.

Yeah, for me, the biggest AD2 standouts have been kicking around for a while. That one since Labor Day of '11.

Because seriously, we're just picking runners up for "Get Lucky"

Here are some good runners up for "Get Lucky": Phoenix - "Trying to Be Cool" Classixx - "Long Lost" Todd Terje - "Strandbar" Holy Ghost - "Dumb Disco Ideas" Chvrches - "Gun" The National - "Sea of Love" Daft Punk - "Fragments of Time"

My 12 favorite so far: Classixx: Holding On Daft Punk - Random Access Memories Disclosure - Settle Kurt Vile - Wakin on a Pretty Daze The Men - New Moon My Bloody Valentine - m b v The National - Trouble Will Find Me Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - Push the Sky Away Phoenix - Bankrupt! Phosphorescent - Muchacho Savages - Silence Yourself Various Artists - After Dark 2

1. Rebellion (Lies) 2. Neighborhood 1 (Tunnels) 3. Keep the Car Running 4. We Used to Wait 5. Wake Up 6. Ready to Start 7. Neighborhood 3 (Power Out) 8. Intervention 9. Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains) 10. No Cars Go

"Fragments of Time" is my favorite thing on the album. They started with what "Digital Love" winked at and simply went all in this time.

This is so damn good. They had me from the "Seven Wonders" sample that opens this thing.

This interview makes me want to finally hear a quality rip of this album even more than I did before, which was already a lot.

"That comparison stems directly from the ’80s-inspired, falsetto-infused “Tap Out,” a song that trumps anything on Bankrupt! . . . " Everything on Bankrupt!, except, "Entertainment," "SOS in Bel Air," "Trying to Be Cool," "Bankrupt!," "Drakkar Noir," "Chloroform," and "Bourgeois."

Those are the five songs, exactly. My residual love for the Cars even makes me somewhat sympathetic towards "Two Kinds of Happiness."

I didn't get the Angles hate. I legitimately loved half of the tracks on that album.

This will be a commercial and critical trainwreck. Just a mess of an album. "All the Time" and "Welcome to Japan" are both quite good though.

Or even on the list, period.

"A lot of Biggie’s classics, however, like “Juicy” and “Hypnotize,” did not. Both are crucial to his career, but that doesn’t make them the best." What a load of silly contrarianism.

Its seems like the Postal Service were shoehorned into this piece out of nowhere. With a few minor rhetorical substitutions, the exact same thing could have been written at this time last year when James Mercer put out a new Shins album. Or two years ago when the Strokes came back.

People bring up CYHSY because they were the first post-Arcade Fire P4K bubble band. I don't think people are ridiculing them, so much as the 2k5-2k6 internet mindset that created them.

Transatlanticism is a better album. We don't remember that though, because the Postal Service didn't stay around long enough to record lackluster or bad follow-ups during a gradual drift towards the middle.

Yorke would have to put out like seven albums in the next three years to earn the Soderbergh comparison. Also, he could promise to retire by age fifty. One of those two things.

I'm not sure I follow the logic that leads from Beach Fossils to Phoenix, but having read Ian's reviews for "Hurry Up, We're Dreaming," "Gossamer," and "Confess," I don't think the sound of this single is far off from things he has recently praised.

This is an incredibly good track, even for Kurt's high standards.

You're missing my point to some extent. I am simply saying that, for the most part, everyone in "indie culture" (for lack of a better term) are familiar with Mumford and the Mumford clones. It's totally ubiquitous, no matter how far gone any of us may be in our own little pockets of indiedom. I'm just arguing that many of us have heard Mumford, said "yeah, no thanks," and have moved the fuck on. This isn't 2003. Indie culture isn't missing out on great pop singles anymore. Just as importantly, mass culture isn't missing out on much of our good shit these days, either. My objection with your piece is that it makes martyrs out of a band that most of us neither care about nor particularly hate (and who, by the way, are conquering the world anyway). I also think you are assuming that the band's critics are playing an us v. them game that doesn't exist any more. I'm all for pop music and mass culture when they succeed. But the best arguments you give for Mumford seems to be a) they are popular, and therefore people should perhaps get over themselves and enjoy their formulaic 4/4 songs that end in big climaxes, and b) Zep and AC/DC were once slagged by the critics, too, even though we think they're awesome now. That's not an argument, it's a provocation. And a lot of indie-centric news and criticism I am reading these days falls along these lines: the new hippest thing is to obsess over and scribble about the most universally popular music imaginable.

My point is that for most of us, Mumford are an irrelevancy. They aren't constantly invoked in conversations as "what's wrong with pop." They aren't a punchline. They're just stupid bullshit that plays the mainstage while most of us are in the tents at festivals. But If you put up a neon sign that says "people who hate Mumford, please congregate here," don't be surprised if people show up. My point is that it is ridiculous that the indie press has taken to writing about stuff like Mumford, and Beyonce, and say, what Grimes thinks of them. We're aware mass culture exists, because, you know, it's mass culture. No one needs to defend it.

Trending indie publication strategy: show your enlightened, post-critical appreciation for the world by writing think pieces praising the most massively popular bullshit imaginable. Sub-strategy: set up straw man that said popular bullshit is taking a Nickleback-like drubbing everywhere.

This was actually a really good list.

"Message of Love" /thread

"Dig for Fire" Also, "Monkey Gone to Heaven" and "Gouge Away" are the "My Girls" and "Fireworks" of this list.

"Shut Up and Play the Hits"?

I love Wowee Zowee. Fucking love it. Bryan Charles nailed everything great about it in his 33 1/3 book. A total leftfield masterpiece that deserves all of the accolades it gets today, as well as an album that rightly deserves a vigorous defense in light of how misunderstood it was in its own time. That said, you really have to be consciously overthinking things to ever get to the point where you actually put it on after Slanted and Enchanted or Crooked Rain and go, "yeah, Wowee Zowee is better than those."

After one listen, this is an incredible album. It will deserve all the accolades that it gets in the dinosaur music press. The lead single was classic misdirection: this is some dark stuff. Bob outdoes Tom Waits at his own game on some of these tracks. And the band is ace -- just a great sounding record.

This list smacks of "legit AnCo fans don't dig the two or three songs that are more widely known outside of the AnCo cult."

The hardest kind of debut album to follow up is not necessarily one that is obviously great (tho' The xx's debut was certainly that), but one that arrives with a fully-formed, zeitgeist-capturing sound. Those bands can usually come back with a solid second album that replicates the sound of the first to reasonable acclaim, but the bigger test is coming up with something new for your third album. Compare what R.E.M. and Pavement did with their respective third albums to, say, what the Strokes and Interpol attempted more recently with their's. I am fascinated to see where The xx's story goes from here.