Oh hey look I'm blogging again how bout that

Herro!

Before our regularly scheduled music update, I wanted to better address why I stopped blogging last year in the first place. Short answer: Music is dead. Long answer: Last year did kind of kill my enthusiasm for music. That's not to say there weren't "good" or even "great" releases last year -- there were plenty of bands I heard people raving about, and plenty of albums people seemed to be in love with. (Ex: Girls, The Pains of Being Young at Heart, jj, Bibio, tune-yards [or however the crap they spell their name], etc., etc.) But there were very few albums last year that really felt... different. Take, for example, the overwhelming popularity of surf-rock-inspired lo-fi. Sure, at first it felt kind of novel, if riding on the tail of Ariel Pink, but two months and twenty other albums later it was just TOO MUCH. If I have to here another washed out, three chord ballad crooned by a dude/chick with dirty waist-long hair, I will take your distortion pedal and crack it over your head. (Exceptions: I do like Dum Dum Girls and Crocodiles. But that's about it.)

Most of the other albums I gave a quick listen to last year had one or two decent tracks if they were lucky, but the albums that stood out from beginning to end are few and far between. I wasn't into the xx's debut at first (after their stellar early tracks, I honestly thought it was a bit of a let-down -- too sweet) though admittedly it's grown on me in the past few months. I really dug Atlas Sound's new album for a few weeks, it wasn't one of those "epic" albums I play over and over again for months. In the past couple months I've really gotten into Crocodiles, which, as I said before, for me is a total exception to the rule for mediocre lo-fi bands, I think because their melodies are far better constructed than all those bands who use fuzz to make up for the fact they can't sing....(cough GIRLS). Fuck Button's album was great, though more like a debut 2.0 than a follow-up, and though obviously MPP was a wonderful pop album, let's not lie. AnCo's done better. (DON'T YOU DARE CONTEST THAT OR I WILL ASSUME YOU ARE A 14-YO GIRL) But honestly, I spent most of last year discovering or re-discovering albums released before or waaay before 2009. I swear I'm not tryna sound jaded about recent music -- I'm just bored. (Those are different, right?)

Which brings me to newish/not-new-at-all stuff I've been listening to since the fall. That's not lo-fi or a Beach House knock-off or associated with Animal Collective or any of its members. First of all, if you haven't jumped on the Emeralds bandwagon yet, you're missing out:

It sounds like... that ^

I'm not gonna post just a track because this a band best enjoyed in context. I HIGHLY recommend the Overlook Tour CS, and the self-titled is great as well. (Try Stratosphering for a taste.)

Cover art for album by band with silly name*

A similar ambient/electro project is *Oneohtrix Point Never (yeah, try and recall that name in regular conversation). I'd describe ONP as a lil more synth-y LAZER-y, a lil less, uh, underwater-y? I mean, definitely check it out, but moreso...

As it turns out, dude from Emeralds and dude from Oneohtrix Point Never collaborated on a project about a year ago. It's call Skyramps. The album's called Days of Thunder. And it's AWESOME. In the trippy, nature-y, wanna-take-peyote-and-wander-in-meadows sort of way.

SRSLY YOU NEED THIS

So that's it really -- some fun ambient that other blogs will have told you about already, and 1/2 of my lame excuses for losing interest in music last year. (Other 1/2: Hipsters killed music. More on that some other time.)