Not sure the 101 Dalmations montage works, but this is a great song.  My dog totally could have written this song.

YouTube - Your Adorable Beast.

My friend Tim’s effort to guilt all his friends into providing him new music to listen to — otherwise known as his annual “Top Tunes” email, has finally made it online on his new blog. Of course, this is a mutual benefit society and everybody in the loop finds some great new tunes this way…soooooo, without further ado, I present my list for the year.

There are likely some glaring omissions to this list since I put it together ad-hoc, but it’s all solid music. Add a couple of “rediscovered” gems at the end as a bonus incentive for paying attention. Enjoy.

Recent Stuff….

Avett Brothers, I and You and Love

Wussy, heart-on-your-sleeve, jam-grass…and I love it. More production on this record, but it doesn’t suffer because their material just keeps maturing. Love these guys.

Monsters of Folk

I’m not typically a big fan of supergroups. They are the musical equivalent of NBA All-Star games. Enough said. However, this one is more like the first Dream Team. It works and everybody brings their A-game and top quality material. And really with Conor Oberst and M. Ward, I don’t see how you could go wrong (Somebody from My Morning Jacket, too).

Rench, Worn Down Low

Everything I’ve heard from this guy is great. Mixed hip-hop DJ’ing with classic country and a sharp political wit and well selected covers. He was also involved in the great (free for download) Rap/Country mashup, Gangstagrass.

The Dodos, Visiter

Not really anything to say about this one, other than that it’s a fine record. If you like the Animal Collective, you’ll probably dig this…

Deer Tick, Born on Flag Day

This Brooklyn band reeks great influences, but keeps it’s own voice in there….great mix of mello and hard rocking stuff. I expect we’ll here more from them in the coming years. Their first record, “War Elephant” is excellent as well. They do a lot of great covers, too. Not on the record, but if you look around YouTube.

The Gourds, Haymaker!

Ok, so it’s getting boring that the Gourds are on my list every other year, I suppose. I just never find any bands that really stack up to them in my book. They’re records have been a little spotty on the last couple outings, but this one is solid back to front in both material and performance – one of their best.

Todd Snider, The Excitement Plan

Todd Snider is a gem. He’s a performer you may never quite grasp without listening to live performances, but he is our generation’s John Prine and you can’t really go wrong with his insight, humor and storytelling ability. If you don’t know Todd, I’d start with “Near Truths and Hotel Rooms” — but this is a fine record, too.

Tinted Windows

Oh crap…this, technically, is another “supergroup” — though it doesn’t really feel like it. Cheap Trick’s drummer, some guy from Smashing Pumpkins and that MMMBop kid (Yea, Hanson)…but, f*ck, it’s a great power pop record. This is a killing upbeat driving record, good at work, too.

Rediscoveries…

Richard Buckner, Bloomed

I liked this record when it came out in the mid-90s, and it has aged really well. I didn’t have a copy for years and re-downloaded it this year, and have listened to it dozens of times this year. I’d put it up against anything from Jay Farrar or any of the other alt-country songwriting heros for song quality. It’s also a really, really awesome rainy day record.

Yo La Tengo, Fakebook

Another old favorite that I spun again this year and found it holds up well. It is actually the only Yo La Tengo record I’ve connected with, but I love it. It’s a unique blend of folk/country/indie pop with a very happy edge to it. Also probably one of the only bands that really captured some of the Velvet Underground influences in a way that reflected the lighter, more pop side of that band that I loved.

Inspired by my buddy Tim’s annual email, I’ve posted some of the musical highlights of my year.  Unlike Tim, I am unable to summarize my musically year based on items released that year, so excuse the random assortment of new and old…but here’s what I’ve been listening to this year, in no particular order.

Deer Tick, War Elephant, Not at all what you would expect from the cover.  Moody pop with catchy melodies and a few rockers. 

Todd Snider, Near Truths and Hotel Rooms, My favorite songwriter at his laid back best live.

Frank Stokes, Creator of the Memphis Blues, In all my blues listening, I somehow passed over Frank until this year.  Great, Great acoustic blues.

My Morning Jacket, Evil Urges, Great band’s best record, IMHO.

Avett Brothers, Mignonette, Avetts continue to provide great new take on string band music. “Pretty Girl from Cedar Lane” is my favorite track.

Justin Townes Earle, The Good Life, Spawn of Steve puts up a fine mix of honkytonk, swing and fine songwriting.  This one was a bit of a surprise for me.  Not spectacular or life-changing, but a very solid and enjoyable record that I keep coming back to.

Chatham County Line, IV, “The Carolina” is the best new bluegrass song I’ve heard in years. The whole record captures the innocent purity of the best bluegrass, without ever falling into the schmaltzy, corny stuff that losses me on so many contemporary bluesgrass albums.

Blitzen Trapper, Furr, “Furr” and “God & Suicide” are highlights of this fine poppy, rock record. 

Laura Cantrell, Trains and Boats and Planes, She covers “The Wreck of the Edmunds Fitzgerald.”  Is any additional endorsement necessary?

My long-time friend and fellow music freak John “JP” Palmer is now working the 4-6am free-form programming slot on Tampa’s WMNF 88.5 Community Radio. This probably provides him a bit more satisfying creative outlet than his day job as a Bank Vice-President…at least, I assume it must to make the hours worth it.

Luckily, the show will be available via online archives for a week following the broadcasts.

The Asylum Street Spankers’ tribute to magnetic ribbons is brilliant. Love these guys. Watch some of their other ones while you’re there.

The Gourds are back with a new record and fancy new website. I’m a sucker for their obtuse mashup of traditional American music and obtuse lyrics. You gotta love a record that starts out: “Jammin’ on the old cartoons with the swagger of the immune, Sleeping like a fat racoon – diabetic on a honeymoon.” You can listen on the site, too. Sweet.

Elvis is so drippingly cool that I really found myself enjoying the superficially catastrophic pairing of his archive footage with Celine Dion on American Idol last night. Wow.

I’ve intended to do this for a while, but tonight I actual sat down for a few minutes and did it. Here for your listening pleasure, are a couple of quickie acoustic guitar ringtones. I gated them down and mixed them for looping. They probably don’t sound spectacular on a good speaker, but they sound pretty fine on my Treo. They are plain MP3 files. If you know how to load MP3 files on your phone you can probably use these as ringtones.

Personally, on my Treo, I use Ringo to assign tones to different users, and load the MP3s on an SD card with a card reader. Anyway, here they are. I think I may do a few more of these before I’m done.

Ringtone1

Preview:

Download

Ringtone2

Preview:

Download

The biggest and best things in my musical life this year are more about the distribution channel than the music. The first is eMusic, the second Pandora.

If you are a regular music consumer, ie, not a casual listener, but a person who regularly explores and purchases music, you need to get an eMusic account ASAP. eMusic represents what the future of music distribution should look like. There will be tweaks to the model, but the key is that the product you get through eMusic does not contain any DRM/copy-protection — just plain old MP3s. It’s the legal online way to not both give someone your money for music and be accused of being a thief at the same time. Their catalog is huge, representing most of the great indie labels in the US, like Bloodshot and Yep Roc, and tons of interesting catalog music as well from some of the great ethnic/folk re-issue labels like Arhoolie and Yazoo. Pop, rock, jazz, blues, classical, country and any other genre you can think of are well represented.

If you are a regular consumer of major label offerings, eMusic may not be for you — they do not have major label music. To me, however, the statement, “they do not have major label music,” lays on the connotation continuum somewhere near, “Sir, your ice cream sundae has no anchovies.”

Do not give iTunes your money. Do not give the Zune store your money. Somewhere down the road, you will regret it. Their copy protection is a built-in expiration date for the music you buy there. Just like an 8-track, one day you’ll be wonder how you go about playing it when the devices and software that support the copy protection go away.

The other distribution goodness is Pandora, which turns radio on it’s head. Pandora is a smart internet radio service that lets you build your own radio stations, by seeding the channels with songs and/or artists. The interesting part is that Pandora fills the stations using the database of the Music Genome Project. Most recommendation engines, like at Amazon.com or the like, are based on the flawed assumption that people have similar taste patterns. If person X buys both CD A and CD B, when someone else buys CD A they recommend CD B. Doesn’t really work and is easily manipulated for marketing purposes.

The Music Genome Project has actual trained musicians (some 40-50, I believe) that sit down, listen to CDs and classify each song based on a complex set of musical criteria regarding the tonality, instrumentation, tempo and other traits, then Pandora uses that database to recommend purely on musical traits of the songs you say you like. As you go, you can train it with a “thumbs up/thumbs down” model.

I’ve got a bout 7-8 different stations on Pandora for different moods. I find that it consistent brings out music I like that I’ve never heard of. It’s an awesome way to discover music.

Now on the actual music. Mind you, this isn’t a best of 2006 list in the normal sense — many of these records did not come out in 2006, but simply came to my attention this year. In all cases I’ve provided a link to a location where you can at least preview the record online.

• Teddy Thompson, Separate Ways: Almost left this one out, but it’s got a strange hold on me. Yep, it’s Richard’s kid. He’s inherited his dad’s misogynistic bitterness and a good bit of his guitar-playing ability — yet seemed to have missed the ironic tone. The result is a rich melodic pop record that shimmers on the surface. After a few listens when you notice the lyrics, you start to wonder how this guy managed to make a record since he’s clearly clinically depressed and has a penchant for staying with women he hates. At any rate, I keep coming back to it, so here it is.
• Lonesome Bob, Things Fall Apart (1997): The drummer from the Ben Vaughn Combo also happens to be a great country songwriter. Who knew? Found this on one of Jon Langford’s best of eMusic lists and have been really digging it. The Waco Brother have covered his material. It’s sparse and the songs are right on.
• Patty Hurst Shifter, Too Crowded on the Losing End: This is the obligatory power-pop entry. Very enjoyable record, not quite a Myracle Brah record, but very good.
• Bobby Bare, Jr., Young Criminals’ Starvation League (2002) – F**ckin’ brilliant. Don’t know how I missed this one first time around. I’ve read really good things about his new release as well, but haven’t moved on to it yet. It meanders around indie pop/folk/country without ever really settling on what it is — but the songs are awesome.
• Paul Simon, Surprise: Paul Simon and Brian Eno? Yea, well it works. Simon seems to just keep coming up with relevant, mature songs. Excellent takes on parenting on this one as well. And Eno’s production is rich and dense as usual, and works well. Just goes to show, you lock a couple of old bald guys up in a room and good things happen.
• The Gourds, Heavy Ornamentals: The Gourds have been my favorite band for about 10 years now, but I must admit their previous couple of records felt a bit dry to me. For this one, they finally just sat down together in the studio and recorded the material live, like they should, and it shows. The energy is back on this one. Love these guys.
• Chatham County Line, Route 23 (2005): This is as close to a perfect bluegrass record as I have ever heard. Don’t know how else to put it. Chatham’s original material is completely true to the genre, and this record is just the right mix of heart-strings ballads, toe-tapping instrumentals, gospel tinged regret songs and just plain old love songs. The performance has dead on vocal and instrumental performances, without the showy overhead of a lot of modern bluegrass virtuosos. They have record both before and after this one, which are good as well, but this one’s just perfect.

I’ve posted about the CBGBs saga before, but it’s appeared that the end is near. Actually, I think it’s perfect that they are going to take everything out and build a replica of the original in Las Vegas. That’s just so strangely ironic, yet cool, at the same time. The home of the anti-establishment packaged as an oddity for the masses. You gotta love America.

This one still needs some work, but I haven’t posted any tunes of mine in a while, so I figured I’d go ahead an throw it up. So, without further ado, my GarageBand rendition of the Louvin Brother’s Let Her Go.

My friend Jim just IM’d me…"Hey, I’m on Jeff Tweedy’s tour bus." That’s Jeff Tweedy of Wilco.

"O," I say, "is it nice?"

"Yea, 42 inch plasmas in the bunk beds. How can you have wireless Internet in a moving bus?"

His job definitely seems more fun than mine at the moment.

Pandora is the best music-related technology I’ve run into in a long time. Simply put, it’s custom streaming radio based on your musical tastes. Doesn’t sound that revolutionary, but the “Music Genome” project underneath it does a really good job of coming up with new music that fits your tastes, based on seed artists and songs you provide it. And it’s recommendations aren’t based on what a record label is pushing, or what era it’s from, or how many other people bought it. Also, it’s free.

On a note tangentially related to my previous post regarding the Library of Congress, my friend Jon Kulp, whom was the other “fellow” in the Music Division when I was was there, has released a set of MP3s of new recordings of one of his song-cycles. It’s an excellent performance of some quite beautiful music.

Here’s a bit of GarageBand fun I did with the boys a couple of weeks ago: Five Little Monkeys. As usual, certified loop-free.

MPFreaker (Mac only) is a way cool app that searches a variety of Internet sources to locate the correct information and artwork for the songs in your MP3 collection, then updates the tags with that info. Sweet.

Also, the beta of AudioFaucet is finally out. It’s a renamed and updated version of iSeeiTunes, which won TiVo’s Home Media Option application contest. It’s far superior to TiVo’s own software — most especially since TiVo’s software is essentially broken on Tiger. AudioFaucet is Mac/Win and allows you to either stream MP3s to the TiVo, or remote control your iTunes application from the TiVo. It also has a much nicer display that shows Album art, your iTunes ratings, etc.

I ordered an M-Audio Keystation to complete my “home studio”. I debated getting a Yamaha with speakers and sounds on-board in case the boys want to play with it, but decided to go for the more compact MIDI-controller. We have a piano, after all. This should make it a lot more fun to play with GarageBand.

There will be many sad story of loss in the musical community from the fallout of Katrina, I’m sure. The death of Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown is one that struck me.

Saturday afternoon I had just be sorting out my remaining vinyl records to go on eBay, and the couple of Gatemouth records there haunted me. I really wanted to give them a spin, but I don’t have a record player anymore. Then I read of his passing on Sunday.

Gatemouth represented the best of American music. In this day of rigid genre classifications, he hopped gracefully between Blues, Cajun, Jazz, Country — whatever. I saw him live several times in the early 90s, some of the more all-a-round fun shows I’ve seen. I guess his signature pipe caught up with him, since he was suffering from lung cancer. Though he evacuated and dodge the storm/flood, I guess the loss was too much for him.

It’s also a reminder that the toll from Katrina is still mounting.