“What the F is up with all these damn lists?”
DrB swore he was going to ‘tone down’ the insane music exploration time-sink. Epic Fail. Another DrB year goes by, with the obsession over new music running rampant (as usual).
Quite a strange year in music, at least to my ears. What used to be the ‘recorded music industry’ has had it’s (largely internally driven) irrelevance soundly solidified. In a positive sense, this means the ever-present, pre-packaged drivel is easily avoided.
As a consequence, the wellspring of ‘micro-genres’ bubbling around the intarwebs is impressive in both it’s variety as well as it’s volume. The challenge today faced by your intrepid, more-than-slightly-obsessed, music concierge is to make some sense of how to access a broad range of styles, without being led-by-the-nose via various ‘filters’ (genre-specific blogs, p4k, ‘mainstream’ media, etc).
EPs and singles were everywhere, and in many cases represent some of the best releases of the year. Hopefully this can lead us (further) into a renaissance of innovative, creative music output. I still have hope for the full-album concept, but am resigned to the fact that the broad availability of quality long-form recordings has likely passed…
Despite telling myself (again, again, again, …) that I would cut back, I found/listened to a ridiculously large number of 2009 releases. Close to 400 albums, plus ~125 singles and EPs. Add onto that a few dozen live recordings. Whew.
In making this years list, these are a few DrB observations:
As usual, I am shocked by some of the reviews that certain crap albums get out in the wwworld, no accounting for taste (including mine) I suppose…
Nice recap. Where do you find the time?