Sockpuppet Blog.

• Recreational Love by The Bird and the Bee: Not Bird and the Bee’s best album, but also not their worst. And even their worst album is still pretty darn good!
• The Caribbean: I seem to have gotten some of their music from the various SXSW Emerging Artists collections and it’s all pretty good. Guess I’m going to have to add some of their albums to my wishlist. Conveniently enough they have a discography purchase option, as all Bandcamp musicians should.
• Hotel Valentine by Cibo Matto: I used to be super into Cibo Matto in the late 90s. Viva! La Woman and Stereo Type A were both amazing, genre-defining experiences for me, and I saw them perform live in 1999 which was super amazing. So when Hotel Valentine came out, I bought it immediately, and then proceeded to not get around to listening to it until just now. It’s pretty okay, I guess.
• Warp20 (Chosen): As far as best-of collections of the state of electronic music in 2009 go, this one is super great.

Also, I want to ramble a little bit about the Last.fm yearly wrapup. It’s cool that it tells me my top listens in terms of artists and albums, but it’s a bit annoying that it doesn’t do anything to normalize albums based on their track count. Like, yes, I listened to all 100 tracks from Song Fight!’s A Grand Parade but that doesn’t mean I listened to it 100 times. There’s just 100 scrobbles from it due to my single listen of it.

I wish I could get counts of just albums, not individual tracks, so that I could better figure out which artists I listened to.

I definitely listened to a lot of Green Day, ambienteer, Benn Jordan (particularly the stuff he put in his massive Gumroad drop), and Jeremy Blake. But that’s also because those are artists I happen to own a lot of music of.

For much of the year I didn’t have AudioScrobbler running or forgot to sync play stats from my phone before they got lost forever (although now that I use PlexAmp as my primary mobile player that shouldn’t be a concern going forward), but I also know that I didn’t listen to music for much of it because I was so busy making it. For me, music has historically been what I listen to while working on other things, but since I’m basically full-time as a musician now, that doesn’t leave me a lot of time to listen to stuff, and after a day of working in the studio the last thing my ears need is to keep the fatigue going. So as of late I mostly just listen to music when I’m driving, and I don’t do a lot of that either.

It’s also a shame that the amazing music I heard on the now-departed Radio Free Fedi didn’t make it into AudioScrobbler either. There were some absolute bangers there. RFF was also a great place to get discovered in general. I hope more projects like it emerge and find a more sustainable path forward.

But in the meantime, sharing music discoveries is a big part of why I blog about what I listen to.