{"id":3256,"date":"2008-12-29T10:01:37","date_gmt":"2008-12-29T10:01:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/12\/29\/best-music-of-2008\/"},"modified":"2008-12-29T10:01:37","modified_gmt":"2008-12-29T10:01:37","slug":"best-music-of-2008","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/12\/29\/best-music-of-2008\/","title":{"rendered":"Best Music of 2008"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is a much more idiosyncratic sampling than usual, for the simple reason that I bought very little music this year&#8211; probably the least since I started buying my own records. This was a combination of pre-SteelyKid austerity measures (do you know what day care costs these days?), post-SteelyKid lack of time to listen to music, and, most recently, a nearly full hard drive on my home computer (which will be replaced soon-ish, so I&#8217;m trying to eke out a few more weeks with this one).<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, here are the five-star songs from 2008:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;I&#8217;m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You ,&#8221; Black Kids. I only bought the single, because there&#8217;s only so much of this style I can take, but this one songs is brilliant.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;You Can&#8217;t Count On Me,&#8221; Counting Crows. Probably the most coherent song on what was a ridiculously overwrought album, even by the standards of Counting Crows.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;I Will Possess Your Heart,&#8221; Death Cab For Cutie. Creepiest. Song. Ever.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Your New Twin Sized Bed,&#8221; Death Cab For Cutie. Probably my favorite song off the album.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Mother Mary,&#8221; Foxboro Hottubs. A really fun song from a moonlighting Green Day.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Lost In The Light,&#8221; The Heavenly States. You probably haven&#8217;t heard this, but you should.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Sequestered In Memphis,&#8221; The Hold Steady. Makes no legal sense whatsoever, but it&#8217;s catchy. The best song on the record by a good margin.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Waterfall,&#8221; James. I&#8217;m probably overrating it, but I first heard it while watching the sun rise in the hospital parking lot after a donut run on the morning SteelyKid was born.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;I Make The Dough, You Get The Glory,&#8221; Kathleen Edwards. Just for the lyric &#8220;You&#8217;re the Great One, I&#8217;m Marty McSorley.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Time To Pretend ,&#8221; MGMT. As with the Black Kids, I only bought the single, because there&#8217;s only so much of this I can take. This one song is terrific, though.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Do The Panic ,&#8221; Phantom Planet. Earworm of the year, hands down.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Supernatural Superserious ,&#8221; R.E.M. I seem to be writing &#8220;best song off a disappointing album&#8221; a lot this year.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Fix It,&#8221; Ryan Adams. A pretty solid album from Adams and the Cardinals. This is my favorite, but most of the songs are good.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;A-Punk,&#8221; Vampire Weekend. Ivy League Afro-pop. I liked this album quite a bit, but they seemed to be struggling to fill it out. It&#8217;ll be interesting to see what they do for a follow-up.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Glad It&#8217;s Over,&#8221; Wilco. Jeff Tweedy is back from rehab, and writing songs again, as opposed to whatever the hell he was doing for the last couple of albums. I liked this enough to buy the whole <cite>Heroes<\/cite> soundtrack in order to get it.<\/li>\n<\/li>\n<p>Notable four-star songs include &#8220;Many Shades of Black&#8221; by the Raconteurs, about half the songs on the My Morning Jacket album, and pretty much the whole DapTone Records sampler. Oh, and &#8220;My Medicine&#8221; by Snoop Dogg.<\/p>\n<p>I bought so little music this year that I hesitate to dub anything &#8220;Album of the Year.&#8221; If I had to, though, I would go with the Death Cab record, which is solid start to finish, and was the only album to get two five-star ratings. The TV On the Radio record seems to be the critical darling this year, but I wasn&#8217;t blown away. It&#8217;s good, but not brilliant.<\/p>\n<p>My favorite song of the year would be a toss-up between &#8220;Do the Panic&#8221; and &#8220;Glad It&#8217;s Over.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>So, what am I missing? What should I fill that last 50MB of disk space with?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is a much more idiosyncratic sampling than usual, for the simple reason that I bought very little music this year&#8211; probably the least since I started buying my own records. This was a combination of pre-SteelyKid austerity measures (do you know what day care costs these days?), post-SteelyKid lack of time to listen to&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/12\/29\/best-music-of-2008\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Best Music of 2008<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3256\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}