Free Energy - Stuck On Nothing

A while back, The Aforementioned David Brusie recommended that I check out this band. I didn't pay much attention. Then I was at Grand Old Day in St. Paul this summer, and they happened to be playing. Holy cats, they were great. Total new-skool hippie band, and they couldn't have been having a better time.

Just think of it: A band playing on a stage next to Dixie's on a summer afternoon, everyone on stage with long hair, and the singer (who might be 10 years younger than me) points at the crowd during the chorus of the first album track:

"This is all we've got tonight
We are young and still alive
and now the time is on our side."

Old-style guitar rock. Sometimes with cowbell. Music to high-five strangers to.

Boogie Down Productions - Ghetto Music: The Blueprint of Hip Hop

The other night, the title track from this album showed up on the radio. It was weirdly awesome, in an old-skool kind of way. Turns out, the MC is KRS-One, and the album was released in 1989. You'd never know that it was that old. It's perfect.

Joshua Radin - Simple Times - Sky, Brand New Day, You Got Growin Up To Do (featuring Patty Griffin)

All in all a really great album, but those three songs I find particularly catchy. I find it hard to write, or read with lyrical music in general, but this album somehow breaks that rule (I wrote a couple of my very final seminary papers to this album). It's got a pleasant, folky, productive feel to it.

Two Star Symphony - Danse Macabre ...

My favorite sermon writing music is a station that I have created on Pandora Radio, seeded with the soundtrack by Clint Mansell from the movie "The Fountain." I get all kinds off eerie orchestral music, and I love it. This song "The 9th Level" popped up sounding like it had come from a Tim Burton film, but it took a lot of digging to find anything about it, or the band. I clicked the "buy it on Amazon" link Amazon didn't have anything by "Two Star Symphony." This of course made them all the more intriguing. After finding the official website/blog I found that this track was written as part of the "sophisticated and dark puppetry art (theater) in the three-part collaboration, Danse Macabre."

The Grates - Teeth Lost, Hearts Won

With bands like Bis and Yeah Yeah Yeahs slowly shifting over to a more electro-disco sound, it's kind of great to find a band that's still rocking that late-90's good-natured-Riot-Grrl rollerskate-punk sound. If Bikini Kill had to play at a high school sock hop, it would sound a lot like this.

The Magnetic Fields - Realism

So, I tend to listen to The Magnetic Fields a whole bunch at a time, and while that's always a great thing, it lets me forget how different in both form and content they are from other bands. They always have this weird folky instrumentation, and on this album in particular, the lyrics are really simple but describe situations that are kind of fascinating and weird, and combination of all of it makes me wistfully remember a fictional time when I was in the circus in spring and all day long clowns were straightforwardly professing either their love or dislike for each other, regardless of whether there happened to be an audience there right then or not.

They Might Be Giants - Here Comes Science

I've been really digging "Here Comes Science", TMBG's 4th children's album, the last few weeks.  Their other children's albums were varying degrees of ok.  But this one stands out from the others.  I think I actually like it better than their last "grown-up" album, The Else.

fun. - Aim and Ignite

I played this at Katie, and she said, "It this The Format?" Turns out, the lead guy is the same. I'm gonna go ahead and call this genre "Symphonic Pop". I'm a sucker for "Na na na na na na" choruses. And for albums where you probably need a decent pianist onstage.

Fanfarlo - Reservoir

This band is a weird collision of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Devotchka. It totally works.

Phoenix - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

Vaguely electro-indie band. If you're leaving in the early afternoon for a road-trip towards the West to find high adventure, you should probably be listening to this album all the way through, on repeat.