Inevitable decade end lists part 2.

I'm drunk and it's late and it's time for another installment of the decade end lists.

This is the part where I trashtalk a lot of highly acclaimed albums from the last ten years. Fun!

Arcade Fire - Funeral

Nothing says overindulgence like an unnecessary string orchestra. A collection of songs which are terribly precious and endearing and nostalgic is not a terrible thing, but when it's recorded like a major cinematic event it seems a little overdramatic. People love this album. I don't understand why.

Panda Bear - Person Pitch

The worship of Animal Collective came out of nowhere and always perplexed me until recently. This is a band which (admittedly) has very little musical skill, but maintains an excellent ability to write catchy pop hooks. After listening to their albums more I understand the appeal, but in many musical circles it seems like they are the band that exists to get the "album of the year" distinction just in case Radiohead didn't release and album that year.

Person Pitch is pretty bland, repetitive, and even after several years of hearing it in different contexts still sounds like a 16 year old with a delay pedal, a four track and a lot of Beach Boys records. Maybe he's the cleverest 16 year old you know but this album is not a very engaging listen.

Jay-Z after the Black Album

We get it. You have a lot of money and you sleep with beautiful women.

The beats are still hot though.

Beck - Sea Change

I remember the day I bought it very vividly. Several of my friends had gotten to the record store at 9am specifically to purchase it and by noon were already singing its praises. It seemed like a great idea: Beck making whimsical dance-y music and Nigel Godrich making it sound awesome.

The album was so far from dance-y I didn't know what to do. I remember listening to it once all the way through and feeling very lethargic and depressive after. It took a few listens of Hello Nasty to get the bad taste out of my mouth.

Portishead - Third

I keep hearing that this album was great and I don't know what you're all on.

The inevitable decade end music list.

I guess this is the place where people usually contemplate the role of digital music and the difference in how we listen to it. Sure, things are different now. From someone who has never owned an iPod, still burns mp3 CDs to listen to in the car and hasn't bought a new album in five years it would be insane to dismiss the significance of the mp3 era.

And what has really changed? Well. When I was 14 it was a pretty big deal to pony up $15 for the Tribe Called Quest album I had only head once, much less a collection of songs recorded from the radio in Baghdad or Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Sure, those are things I've listened to and enjoyed, but there are musical horizons I never would have broken without the wide and cheap availability that music comes with now.

So this decade was characterized by the wide distribution of musical styles that we never would have spent the money to become knowledgeable about, and the music itself reflects that more and more. Between the Timbaland-led pop revolution jacking beats from middle eastern music and samples from funk and soul, the U.K.'s Motown revival of artists from Jamie Lidell to Amy Winehouse, the Beach Boys on acid sounds of bands like Animal Collective and Radiohead it's easy to see how the availability of digital recording and distribution have changed things.

So I guess I'll start with the honorable mentions. Here are a couple of albums that never seem to find their way onto my playlist, but still are significant in some way.

Kid A

I would compare the release of this album to the fall of the Berlin Wall. We were all Radiohead fans and after years of obsessive listening to The Bends and OK Computer this album came so far out of left field that most of us just sat in mystified silence when we first listened to it. It just sounded different, and at the very beginning of a decade it encompassed a world of new possibilities. That winter I felt so cold and disconnected I must have listened to it 100 times. Within the next five years it had become the soundtrack of dozens of dreary parties where stoned 20somethings quietly sang or mouthed the words. In the same breath that Kid A defined the sound of a new decade of popular music outside the mainstream it laid the groundwork for my personal dissatisfaction with the whole scene.

Still, it's a great record. I'm just sick of hearing it.

Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea

Their releases were close enough that this felt like a companion piece to Kid A. That coupled with the Thom Yorke cameos and complete sidestep from another artist we were all familiar with made this another strange cult record. It got a lot of spins too, but it eventually wound up in a dusty pile with the other introspective and morose records from the beginning of the decade.

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Remember when everyone was crazy about this album? It seemed like it lasted no time at all. The leak, the record label SNAFU and the lore and hype that came from it seemed to overshadow the album itself. Jeff Tweedy, king of the hangover poets warbled and innovated, but while the critics lauded the album it always felt jarring and exhausting to listen to to me. The lead in to "Heavy Metal Drummer" always confused me. Did the album really need a single? Especially a single that sounded nothing like the rest of a concept album from a group of career underdogs?

Still, I remember crooning "disposable dixie cup drinkin'" at last call next to the Howard's jukebox, exchanging looks with the other habitual drunkards; it was the soundtrack to our realization that we had done this too many times.

Fleet Foxes

Much like YHF, this album showed up nearly a full year before its actual release. By the time things were sorted with the label and the album dropped behind a later-recorded but earlier-released EP we'd all been hearing it in every coffee shop and brunch place in Portland for months. Appropriately enough, they even toured behind Wilco and played to a packed house at the Doug Fir (I had to work) and then headlined Sasquatch (worked again) and finally made a return trip to an even bigger venue (work). But I hear they were really great.

Yep. And that's it for now. I'll post the actual top albums in a bit.

This is the next part.

The end of my time in Philadelphia is advancing very quickly and there are a million implications jumbled up in all of that. I'm a bundle of emotions that conflict and stop and start, but for the most part life is still very exciting and I've been happy the entire time I've been here. Things are way serious with The Relationship and I feel pretty confident about it continuing through the next move and into the next (still fairly ubiquitous) stage of my life.

I've had some job offers. While the likelihood that I'll move to Chicago is by far the highest, there are a few things I'll be checking out first. I'll be flying into North Carolina to work for a company that wants me for the opening staff of their newest venture in the beginning of December, and between that, my departure from Philadelphia, the (brief) return to Ohio and my trip to Nicaragua things are getting very hectic. It's nice to have so many job offers cropping up at once, especially after my long spell of unemployment in Portland.

Still, with what will probably be a two month absence from the U.S. looming ahead I've been trying to spend as much time with the girlfriend as possible. I love what I'm doing and I'm happy with her but I look forward to the long span of downtime.

Obviously I haven't been blogging much lately and I'd like to say that I'm going to return to it but it just isn't that likely. My life is taking off from here. I've been doing things I never would have been able to before, and even as responsibilities mount I feel more confident and in control of what I'm doing. It's time for me to find a way to mix the previous transience of my lifestyle with the responsibilities and ongoing relationships that I've missed having all this time. I feel like I'm accomplishing a lot and there isn't a reason why I can't manage a 'normal' life alongside my desires to travel and learn new things.

So here is the part where I try to balance an insane number of things in my life. This is called learning by doing. Please feel free to withhold your criticisms until after I fuck it up.

A brief retrospective.

Four months in Philadelphia, and I have a comfortable bed, a good job, an awesome girlfriend, cool roommates and a nice house, a one way ticket to Costa Rica and $1000 in the bank. I even bought car insurance.

Life is fantastic and I feel I'm getting pretty good at all this.

Here is the news.

Okay okay. So I really love Philadelphia.

I suppose I'll tell you what's actually going on. I've been pretty quiet about that. I was trying not to be a dick? To certain people. I guess it doesn't matter because they're still pissed at me. And maybe you'd like to know.

First of all, I'm going to Nicaragua. I'm probably going to leave Philly on New Year's Day and driving to Ohio to spend a few days with friends and family before I fly into Costa Rica on January 6th. I bought a one way ticket and I have no idea how long I'll stay in Central America or where I'll end up going. I'm bringing a backpack and some malaria pills and we'll just see where it goes from there. I'll come back when I either run out of money or get bored. Or when my tan is so vibrant that it will blind the people awaiting my return in the midwest.

I have sort of half-thought ideas of taking a job somewhere in Nicaragua once I split with my traveling partner and working wherever I can until the language immersion makes my Spanish passable. Or maybe I'll just sit on tropical beaches, eat fruit and scuba dive. Many things are up in the air right now. These are very stressful decisions to make.

After Nicaragua, it's likely that I'll move to Chicago. There are lots of job opportunities there which sound promising but it's hard to say right now. March would probably be the best time to start looking for work there so the timing may be a little off if I spend a month or less in Central America. If that happens, who knows? Maybe I'll get a job in a smalltown diner and make burgers for drunk college douchebags for a few weeks.

There's been girl drama too. There is always girl drama. There is really no way I can explain it without being an asshole blogging about relationship issues in a one-sided way. So I won't. But I miss most of the people I've ever dated and I value their friendships.

I'm seeing someone new. Maybe it's serious. I think it's pretty serious. It raises lots of awkward questions about what happens when I go to Central America and if she's coming to Chicago. It's too early to really talk about that stuff, but we're thinking it. She wants me to come back to Philadelphia but won't ask for it. And she has a two year old daughter. So shit is complicated.

But I'm doing it anyway and I'm pretty crazy about her. So we'll see how it goes.

Bread is my life!

In a classic move I became drunk and distracted by a girl and forgot all about the bread I had scaled. That is until I woke up abruptly at five AM.

Now I'm sitting here watching my bread and occasionally filling the oven with steam while she sleeps. This has happened at least five times in the past.

Ridiculous.

Murmurs.

Work is totally destroying me right now. It's been a wash of twelve and fourteen hour days and my body just doesn't react to it as well as it used to. I'm sure it will get worse as time goes on, but it hurts plenty right now.

In spite of that I'm really happy. I've made lots of friends here and Philadelphia itself is a strangely fun place to live. And there is some romance, even though it comes with way too many questions and expectations. But I suppose there's no helping that.

I'm almost ready to stay in one place. Almost. No really.

Just not here.

Sorry I've been so quiet. My life has been engulfed and in the offtime I just have nothing to say.