December 2008
8 posts
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Best Music of 2008: The Top 5
TV On The Radio – Dear Science
TV On The Radio’s 2006 effort Return to Cookie Mountain was a dense and textural album that was, at times, a challenging listen. All the while, it was thoroughly enjoyable and rightly found itself near the top of many a “Best of 2006” list. They have followed that album up this year with Dear Science, an album that satisfies the high expectations left by their last...
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Best Music of 2008: Albums #10-6
88 Keys – Death of Adam
88 Keys may not be the most well-known name, but most hip-hop fans should be familiar with some of his production work. The seminal track from the Black Star album, “Thieves In The Night”, is one of his creations. As are “Speed Law” and “Champion Requiem” from Mos Def’s solo works. This album is a great development of style. 88 Keys has a knack for looping beautiful horns...
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Best Music of 2008: Albums #15-11
Deerhunter - Microcastle/Weird Era Continued
It was late May. The release date for Microcastle was October. Yet, thanks to the internet, I was listening to it. For most artists this is a death sentence. In 1999 a Nas album was leaked online, so Nas rushed back to the studio for a few weeks and threw together some new tracks so that the album would be new material. What resulted was Nastradamus, a...
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Best Music of 2008: Albums #20-16
Time to keep it moving, here we have albums 20-16 from my best of 2008 list.
Okkervil River - The Stand-Ins
Another album full of melodic folk-rock to showcase the amazing song writing of Will Sheff. He is one of the most talented songwriters in rock music right now, and the lyrics can bring you back again and again looking for more. Though he isn’t all this has going for it, the band as a whole...
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Best Music of 2008: The Main Event (25-21)
Just like last year, the album reviews consist of a paragraph reviewing the album and a quick section for “Highlights” and “Lowlights”. Unless the album has no real lowlights, then I just left it out. New this year is that I’ve decided to upload either the music video, or the song with the album cover as the background, for one of the best (or most representative) tracks on the album. Most of them...
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Best Music of 2008: Mixtapes and Singles
My first interaction with music beyond the radio was in the realm of hip-hop, thus it’s still the genre I am most comfortable talking about, and the mixtape is a truly hip-hop phenomenon. What makes a good mixtape doesn’t always make a good album. There’s a different art form at work. An album is an artistic expression. A mixtape is an expression of pure talent. The idea behind a Fabolous or...
Best Music of 2008: The Beginning
It’s back. Just as always, the end of the year brings the musical year in review, as written by Sir Colin Anthony Sharp Esquire. The length of last year’s epic was comparable to The Odyssey and War & Peace, so this year I’m splitting it up with the help of this thing called a blog. I’ve had a tumblr blog registered for a while so that I can use a feature they have called the dashboard that...
