The List at the End of the Year

On the advice of a good friend, who asked me to quit complaining about year-end lists and compile one of my own, here are a bunch of albums that I felt were effective and moving works of art this year.

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If tears were liquor…

With his latest album “Blues Funeral”, Mark Lanegan has created a dream world where bluesmen play synthesizers and gospel music is as loud as heavy metal.

Awesome Tune: “Precious And Grace”

I’ve decided to start a new feature for songs that transcend themselves and enter the highest echelon of awesomeness. Awesome Tune will be this obviously-named recurring post, dedicated to greatest of the facemelters.

“Dust” Never Sleeps

This is not an album review. If it was, it would be a ridiculously late one, since the album came out in 1996. But I was indulging myself in vintage 90s rock music recently, and the thought came to me (as it always does in revisionist thinking) that this particular record was unfairly ignored in its own time. Listening to this record in its entirety for the first time in ten years brought back all kinds of memories, and in a moment of epiphany I realized how much of an influence it had on me as a younger man. The album of course is “Dust” by Screaming Trees, which turned out to be their swan song. But my personal history with the Trees goes a bit deeper…