A Belated Best Of

Jeff — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 04:34:24 +0000

It’s a bit late, but I’ve decided to finally throw together my “best albums of 2008″ list. I spent too long thinking about it, and then spent some time procrastinating after that, and now it’s March of 2009 and I feel a bit silly. To make up for that, I’ve dug up representative videos for each album, some of them offical and some of them fan made (but interesting). All of these albums are still in heavy rotation on my iPod. 2008 was a good year for music.

2008 was also a good year for buying music on Amazon Mp3, which has become my digital music destination of choice simply because of the daily deals they have. For example, the newest Lily Allen album was $3.99 on the day it came out. I’ve also bought several pretty great albums for $1.99 a pop when they were on sale. Everything in the list below is available on the site, and a decent number of the albums are less than $10 to purchase.

My list and a collection of music videos follows after the jump…

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Post tags: Acid Tongue, Amazon Mp3, digital, Elbow, Four Tet, Four Tet Ringer, Jenny Lewis, Laura Marling Alas, Lily Allen, list, Music, Q Tip, Videos

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Jenny Lewis vs. Rilo Kiley

Jeff — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 05:24:21 +0000

A bit of background: although I enjoy Rilo Kiley’s music, I’ve never been a huge fan. They are a nice little indie band that does quirk and usually does it fairly well. I have several of their albums, but I haven’t listened to them much recently.

The first time I heard their most recent album, “Under the Blacklight“, I was turned off pretty quickly and ended up deleting it from my hard drive. From that first impression, it seemed clear that they had decided to jettison everything intimate and quirky about their sound in an effort to make it big in the mainstream, and I found the results lacking.

As for Jenny Lewis, I enjoyed her first album under her own name, thought it was a nice change of pace, but, again, I didn’t think it was anything earth-shattering. It seemed more like Neko Case-lite with a girl group spin. It’s one of those albums that I appreciate but never listened to that much or that often. However, when her second album, “Acid Tongue“, came out, I listened to a few samples and was immediately hooked. I bought it pretty promptly and it’s not only in heavy rotation, it’s easily one of my most favorite albums of the year.

After listening to Acid Tongue a few dozen times, I started wondering if I had written off Under the Blacklight unfairly, so I decided to give it another spin and see if there were any hidden gems I missed the first time around. To make a long story short, there are definitely some pretty amazing songs on the album, but they’re the exception to the rule. Although my first impression was harsh, it wasn’t too far off base.

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Post tags: Acid Tongue, album, Earth, Girl Group, Jenny Lewis, Music, Rilo Kiley, sound

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Jeff James » Acid Tongue

A Belated Best Of

Jenny Lewis vs. Rilo Kiley