Tag: The New Pornographers

Mixinformation #1 (5/9/21): AgainstZapZepRollTayTesting+…

Posted on by Eric

Yet another attempt at launching a recurring DAE series, “Mixinformation” gathers for comment and inevitable digression eleven songs plucked on shuffle from the gargantuan greater playlist that provided the strange and lively partial soundtrack to my most recent road trip from the flats of Central Ohio to the hills of East Tennessee. Some 5,000 songs can’t fill or fit comfortably into any journey of just under 400 miles, of course, but that’s kind of the point. Music at its best challenges and comforts us in equal measure, makes the open road less lonely, more romantic, easier to eagerly embrace. Its companionship is invaluable, its worth incalculable. What follows is but chapter one in a serialized love letter of sorts…

Continue reading “Mixinformation #1 (5/9/21): AgainstZapZepRollTayTesting+…” →

My Top 20 Albums of 2019 + Supplemental Lists

Posted on by Eric

Introduction

Welcome, patient reader, to yet another self-indulgent, anticlimactic celebration of some of the best albums the realms of “Extreme Metal”, “Indie Rock”, and “Other” had to offer in 2019, now that the page on that year has been definitively turned. I’m glad you’re here. The following post does not/cannot include every great album 2019 produced, since, to maintain my precious sanity, I steadfastly refuse to listen to everything I could. Much of what I do try also kinda sucks. I dunno. More new music is available now than at any point in my life, but with considerably less general buzz around it, not to mention fewer reliable resources with which to uncover it. Every new release is not by rights worthy of inclusion in my personal collection, let alone these countdowns, but the ones that are have something in common. Continue reading “My Top 20 Albums of 2019 + Supplemental Lists” →

My Top 20 Albums of 2017 + supplemental lists

Posted on by Eric

2017-year-end.jpg

In what has become something of an unfortunate tradition inside a tradition, once again it takes me until February to officially close up business for the prior year (though the Valentine’s Day publishing date was an unexpected coincidence). I don’t know what to tell you. There’s not a lot to recommend researching, compiling, writing up, and releasing a comprehensive top twenty music countdown without fellow contributors to help shoulder the workload. I write professionally in addition to running this little backwater, and I can tell you that there are days when the last possible thing on my mind is trying to fill yet another blank page with pop culture ephemera. There’s also a level on which I was probably too consistently consumed with national and world events in 2017 to let the year’s roster of music go about its transporting and soothing work to the degree it was needed. Lord knows I could’ve used the break. Continue reading “My Top 20 Albums of 2017 + supplemental lists” →

My Top 20 Albums of 2014 + supplemental lists

Posted on by Eric

2014

Introduction

The (now officially) annual list of the prior year’s top 20 albums is, and will continue to be, a post that holds extra significance for me. After all, spending the better part of two months researching and writing the 2013 edition, only to find no acceptable place to post it, was the impetus for me to launch this blog in the first place. That was the best snap decision I’ve made in quite some time. Even though I fudged some of the housekeeping around it, for all intents and purposes that 2013 edition was the original centerpiece and first post ever for this blog, darkadaptedeye, 8000+ words long and self-indulgent to a fault. That was exactly one year and, now, seventy posts ago. Continue reading “My Top 20 Albums of 2014 + supplemental lists” →

Concert review: The New Pornographers

Posted on by Eric

TNP 2014

also appearing: Iron & Wine                                                                                                         Lifestyle Communities Pavilion, Columbus, Ohio – September 20, 2014

Despite five solid years now of reinforcement from the music journalism establishment, I can never quite bring myself to consider Vancouver, BC’s The New Pornographers a “supergroup”. Having read with zeal approximately every article published about them in that period, all of which invoke the label “supergroup”, I can say mine is at least a considered opinion. While technically true, the moniker still strikes me as a lazy sort of shorthand. My relationship with the band stretches from just after the release of the textured, understated (but commanding) Together in 2010 to just after the release of this summer’s celebratory Brill Bruisers, and in that time they went from complete unknowns (mine are the only eyes that matter) to one of my very favorites regardless of genre, a meteoric rise in my estimation that, while not without precedent, still has vanishingly few peers. Continue reading “Concert review: The New Pornographers” →