SleepingPoliceman

One final installment. At this rate, we’ll have 2007 all wrapped up in time for the mid-year review for 2008. Still, better late than never, right? Right? Anyone?

As stated before, I fell behind and then totally away from writing full reviews of the shows I saw last year. Because of this, I’ve taken the opportunity here to write longer installments for the review-less shows here. So this post goes on for a while, and still doesn’t say all that I would have said in reviews at the time. If anyone wants more, I’ll give them more. But…nobody wants more, I’m sure.

Post 1 and Post 2 available here. Post 3 begins…right now:

(more…)

Continued on from installment #1, we carry on with the next segment of my way-too-late review of last year’s music scene. It’s album time…first the honorable mentions, and then the top 10. Ready? Good.

Part III: Albums of the Year – The Honorable Mentions

Instead of doing a top 13 like last year, I’m doing three honorable mentions and a top 10. Is this less wishy-washy? I don’t know. But here we are. The mentions that are deemed to be honorable happen after the jump.

(more…)

Well, as it’s almost the end of February, I guess it’s about time for me to hunker down and actually do my year-end reviews for 2007. I had this list pretty much finalized around the time I finished the always-popular 2k7 mix. But I wanted to make sure I took the time to write out my thoughts. Who benefits from that? You, the readers…naturally.

So this is quite late, especially when compared to last year and the year before that. I have no excuse for you.

This year this music review will be divided into three posts. This is mainly because I was so lax in writing concert reviews after seeing bands, so I want to give the top 10 show list its own full post. That will be part 3. First and foremost, though, let’s get to the first installment. Let’s hit it, after the jump.

(more…)

Things that might happen when you can’t fall asleep include finding a random blog post that has a compilation of WXPN’s “listener’s lists” of the top 50 albums from 1993 through 2006.

The lists are fascinating, and serve to show the whims and fickleness of even the highest quality radio listeners (for instance, they rank White Blood Cells and Get Behind Me Satan, but no love for Elephant?). There’s also the “whoops, we caught on a little too late” element of having inferior second albums by Franz Ferdinand and The Killers when the debuts are nowhere to be found. I was also amazed that even ‘XPN listeners missed out on either/or in the pre-Good Will Hunting era, but the inclusion of Gilbert’s thud more than makes up for that.

Even more engrossing: the challenge to see how many of these albums you have in your collection. From my quick tally, I believe I have 66 of the 700 listed here. (It would be much higher if I liked Beck and Dave Matthews, much lower if I didn’t like Sting and Radiohead.) And as I already sort of knew, I really took a big leap forward in my new music consumption in ‘05 and ‘06. Anyway, I don’t know if 66 is a high or low number…I guess being close to 10% is solid. Or shameful. I can never tell.

If you’re interested, my scrap notes for this trifle of an exercise are after the jump. (Feel free to check my math if you want…it’s late, and I’ve already screwed up simple arithmatic once this weekend.)

(more…)

Hot on the heels of Part 1, this is the conclusion of my too-long-delayed journey through my personal bests of 2k6. The top ten list and the awards after the jump.

(more…)

(Forgive me in advance for both the lateness of this, and also for the lack of links. I’ll be adding them in as soon as I have the time. edit: links have now been added. Don’t every say I don’t follow through on my promises. Sometimes.)

As discussed in last year’s review, my biggest problem in putting together an end-of-year movie list is that I never feel like I have seen all the movies I wanted to see or should have seen. In fact, looking back, I see that I still haven’t seen all of the 2005 movies I wanted to. (Someday I’ll catch The Constant Gardener, A History Of Violence and Grizzly Man.) Yet such is the nature of list-making…you have to make do with what you have at your disposal.

With that in mind, I should mention the following movies that I have wanted to see so as to weigh their merits for potential inclusion on this list: Thank You For Smoking, Notes On A Scandal, Cars, Inside Man, The Prestige, United 93, Babel, Little Children, Pan’s Labyrinth, Volver, The Good Shepherd and The Queen. In the future, I may change my tune and want to include one of those (or another movie I haven’t even thought of seeing yet) on some sort of revised list. But they have been excluded for now, having missed my personal cutoff date. (Which I guess is today.)

On to the list.

(more…)

Second verse same as the first. We conclude our look back at the music scene of 2k6 while I ponder, in the wake of a comment-less major Apple conference, what will ever get jz to start blogging again.

The rest of the music list (part 2, if you will) after the jump.

(more…)

I still don’t know where that last year went. But, apparently, it is over. And while a lot of websites and what-have-you do their yearly review in December (when the year isn’t over yet), you’re getting the SP review now, in early January. Not as early January as anyone would have liked, but here we are.

For those of you who may have missed it, last year’s review can be found here. You can also check out the 2k6 mix, which previewed some of this post. Whereas last year the music review was one giant post, I think it will be split into two this year. So, after the jump, you can find the first part of the oh-so-verbose discussion of tunes in ‘06.

(more…)

Some long-gestating posts to come later in the week. I was too busy today to get any of them done. Instead, I give you this as a stopgap:

The Phoenix: The 40 Greatest Concerts in Boston History

Very interesting article. Of course there’s a little of the “too-cool-for-school” rock snob posturing throughout. For instance, I somehow find it hard to believe that a Talking Heads concert with only three audience members was really one of the 40 best rock concerts ever in Boston. I think it’s more likely that someone who works at the Phoenix loved the idea that he would get the opportunity to talk about how cool he is because he was one of the three. Whatever, dude…that and a buck twenty-five gets you a Charlie ticket.

Still, a lot of the shows they talk about are legendary, or at least should be. Having reviewed the list, I can unfortunately say I only attended 2.5% of the greatest shows. My only brush with this list was the ‘98 Beastie Boys show that I went to because Brian won free tickets, ironically enough, on ‘FNX. It was a great show, featuring stuff from their new album (and my favorite, even though I know it’s not their best), Hello Nasty, and concluding with Money Mark doing handstands on his keyboards on the edge of a revolving stage while banging out “Sabotage.”

Still, that show didn’t even come close to making my personal top ten concerts list last December. Which just goes to show once again that I’m not cool enough for the Phoenix.

But…hot damn, how great would it have been to have seen The Who or Zeppelin at the old Tea Party? Or even the Beatles at Suffolk Downs. If only there was some way to go back in time and see what a show like that would have been like. If only…

Sorry for the radio silence over the long weekend. But…isn’t getting away what long weekends are all about?

Lots to talk about, but first I want to talk briefly about this Newbury Comics/WFNX poll to find the top 50 Alternative albums of all time. A noble pursuit, and as someone who loves lists, I couldn’t not take a few moments to participate.

But…well, check out the list they have up there for potential candidates. OK, I recognize that this is, ultimately, just a ploy to get people into record stores to buy CDs; the exercise has more to do with moving old stock and less to do with any quest for accurate musical rankings. Nevertheless, who the hell culled these choices? Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I always thought the alternative genre implied music that was, you know, an alternative to the popular music of 1980s. The definition from the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on alt-rock:

The terms alternative rock and alternative music[1] (also simply called alternative) were coined in the 1980s to describe punk rock-inspired bands on independent record labels that didn’t fit into the mainstream genres of the time.[2] As a specific genre of music, alternative rock consists of various subgenres that emerged from the indie music scene starting in the 1980s and became popular or well known by the 1990s, such as indie rock, grunge, gothic rock, and college rock.

That seems like a fair definition – I don’t know how one could argue that, at the very least, alternative rock is music that was somewhat underground in the 80s that became popular and mainstream with the rise of grunge in the early 90s. Given that, I don’t really see room for an 80s Bowie album on the list, let alone a 70s one. As much as I love the Police, how could four of their albums be considered in any way alternative, when they were all smash pop hits out of the gate in the late 70s/early 80s? Same question for any U2 album after The Joshua Tree…even with “alternative” as the new standard for popular, how can All That You Can’t Leave Behind be put on a list like this?

The most egregious example, more egregious than Lenny Kravitz (middle-of-the-road nothing rock by time 5 came out), Keane (derivative twee Britpop couldn’t be alternative in 2003, no matter how much I like it), and Run DMC (rap isn’t alternative, even if guitars are sampled), would have to be…Duran Duran’s Rio. Maybe I’m too young to remember it correctly, but weren’t they derided as empty MTV pop in the 80s? Is there a band that could be more anathema to the punk ethos? Just because time has smiled favorably upon them, and just because you can play “Hungry Like The Wolf” on Leftover Lunch, doesn’t mean the band can be called alternative in any logical or conceivable way.

Dear ‘FNX and Newbury Comics: why don’t you get your genre definitions straight before you start trying to assemble a definitive list of anything? Get that straight, then we can talk. Until then, I’m not voting for nothin’.

(But keep Gabriel’s So on the list. It obviously shouldn’t be on there either, but I’ll take any chance I can get to vote for the man.)