01. The Walkmen – new LP : 2006 : potential album cover?
02. Band of Horses – Everything All the Time : 3.21.06 : Funeral (mp3)
03. Cat Power – The Greatest : 01.24.06 : tour dates
04. The Meeting Places – new LP : 2006 : Freeze our Stares (mp3)
05. The Shins – Wincing the Night Away or Sleeping Lessons : 04.01.06 : short interview
06. Radiohead – new LP : 02.01.06-03.01.06 : potential tracklist
07. I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness – Fear Is On Our Side : 03.07.06 : According to Plan
08. Silversun Pickups - new LP : 2006
09. Sonic Youth – new LP : 2006
10. Ole – Ten Minute Academy : 2006 : Serenade (mp3)
Posted on Sunday 1 January 2006
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[...] I feel like I have to get this post out, mostly because I am floating in a pool of dissappointment. Granted this was my most anticpated album of the year, so I admit my expectations were, well, honestly unmeetable. Especially given the new material that I heard at the Sunset Junction Streetfair at the end of last summer was uncompelling. At that show they pulled some crazy switcharoo where the bassist and guitarist decided to exchange instruments, but apparently not talent. I excused that performance as some kind of drunken charade. Still I had faith they could pull it off. But the new album really doesn’t get much cleaner than the sound at that show, the production intentionally emphasizing a more relaxed, less polished, rawer sound that in the end simply comes across feeling somewhat unfinished. What the album lacks more than anything else is a sense of direction or the kind of cohesivness galvanized by emotive song writing on previous albums. While rawness of the sound, the raspy crooon of Hamilton Leithauser, the emphatic drumming by Matt Barrick is consistently there, the brooding conflicted confessions like “The Rat” or “Rue the Day” are no where to be found. Instead we get atmospherically correct, but unprovoking tracks like “Lost in Boston” which has fallen from the cathartic howls of tracks like “Little House of Savages” to describing drunken escades at Fleet Week. [...]