C.A.T. Revisited: Moby Grape

Moby Grape – Moby Grape (1967)

At the moment, I’m using my 30-year-old record player to listen to a vinyl copy of Moby Grape’s 50-year-old debut, an album I first listened to on mp3s downloaded from the song-sharing app Limewire. There have been many technological advances that have changed the way we listen to music (namely streaming) in the past 10 years, but this snapshot of my current listening habits is not a great example of that. Regardless, as we take a look back at 10 years of Mildly Pleased this week, we’ll take this particular Tuesday to look back at one of our longest-running features – Top Ten Thursdays. And we’ll do it by revisiting the first albums each of us ever christened classics back in 2008. Continue reading →

Rokk Talk Ep. 10: Everything In Its Right Place

Verse
Daft Punk, Eminem, LCD Soundsystem
The Hold Steady, Wilco, TV on the Radio
Fleet Foxes, Green Day, Arctic Monkeys, Coldplay
Jay Z, Alicia Keys, Yo La Tengo
Modest Mouse, Bon Iver, Godspeed You Black Emperor
Arcade Fire, Springsteen, Broken Social Scene
Radiohead, Brand New, everyone has U2
Outkast, Weezer, still haven’t heard Ween

Chorus
We didn’t start the podcast!
It was always playing what was Colin saying?
We didn’t start the podcast!
John and Sean, they were singing right along on…

Welcome to another edition of Rokk Talk! This week John, Colin, and special guest Sean talk about their top ten favorite albums of the 2000s. The reason?… Is you. Continue reading →

Sean’s Top 10 Albums of 2016

Is anything even good anymore? This last year has been a real challenge for my assumptions about myself and the world, and my inner turmoil definitely affected my media consumption. The fact that we all pay so much more attention to the news now, and the news tending to be so bad, drove me to spending a lot of time with multimedia comfort food; lots of movies and TV and old video games I didn’t have to think about too much. But music doesn’t have that escapist quality, tending often to be more reflective, as both Colin and John can tell you, which made my search for a joyous sound all the harder. This wasn’t a great musical year for me, is what I’m saying. I think a lot of albums that others would have called “great” were just “good” to me.

That being said, I do have a few honorable mentions. As always, this is a list that reflects my favorite albums based on my listening habits this last year. There are more albums that I liked and better albums that I didn’t spend as much time with, this is stuff from 2016 that I liked most in 2016. Of the five that just barely missed the cut, I Had a Dream That You Were Mine, that album from The Walkmen guy and the Vampire Weekend guy, is the one that makes me the most sad, since it would have been on all three of our lists. There are a couple Colin albums I’d like to listen to more, namely Pile by A Giant Dog and WORRY. by Jeff Rosenstock (which I foolishly ignored for too long). Where’d Your Weekend Go? by The Mowgli’s suits only nice weather listening, but “Spacin’ Out” is definitely 2016’s #1 summer jam. Speaking of jams, the title track from Big Thief’s Masterpiece is awesome. That surprise Childish Gambino release “Awaken My Love!” is cool too. Finally, Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool, which deftly showed off how much Jonny Greenwood had learned doing movie soundtracks, was quite good as well.
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John’s Top Ten Albums of 2016

I’m scared. I’m scared that even the slightest mention of a celebrity right now may inadvertently lead to their death. Less than a week ago my girlfriend and I were talking about Watership Down author Richard Adams (R.I.P. 1920-2016). And how many people had George Michaels “Last Christmas” on the brain before the Wham singer died ON Christmas? And now Carrie Fisher? It’s been that kind of year.

Music has been no exception, quite the contrary, it’s suffered some of the biggest blows. The loss of the Starman affected me the most, but no doubt I felt the loss of Prince, Glenn Frey, Maurice White and more. We lost two-thirds of Emerson Lake and Palmer, Phife Dog from A Tribe Called Quest, and many more talented people. The one silver lining is that we’ll always have the music. Music never dies. With that somber reminder out of the way let’s get to the list.

Honorable Mention
Leonard Cohen – You Want it Darker
Radiohead – A Moon Shaped Pool
Paul Simon – Stranger to Stranger

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Colin’s Top Ten Albums Of 2016

With George Michael’s passing yesterday (just, why?) it has continued to be abundantly clear that 2016 has not only been a hard year to be a human being, but also a hard year to be a music fan. And yet, even when we get bogged down with some beloved musician’s death or a million different news stories that should fill us with nothing but the utmost despair, music fights back. Take for instance the fact that even with the year not quite being over, just a few hours prior to the news of the reluctant gay icon’s passing, we also got a new Run The Jewels album that I’m sure will suitably rally us against whatever bullshit is headed our way in 2017.

So when I say 2016 was an overwhelmingly great year for music, it’s hard for me not to think that this was some sort of reaction to all the bad stuff that went down in 2016. Now, I can’t say that artists were making a conscious decision to make great albums this year, since I assume most artists are aiming to make great albums whenever they can. But I suppose it’s possible there was this feeling in the air that this shit really mattered in 2016. For me, music has always been the most immediate, gut-level art form, and so I think for that reason, a lot of musicians felt the need to speak from their guts, which in turn created a lot of albums that spoke to people’s guts, minds, bodies, souls, etc.

Anyways, enough about guts… on to the list. Continue reading →

I Had A Dream That 2016 Was Over

Hamilton Leithauser + Rostam – I Had A Dream That You Were Mine

At this particular point in time, it’s getting very hard for me to think about anything other than the election we’re currently sitting on the precipice of, and the possible terrible ramifications we could be looking at. I mean, sure there was that Cubs World Series victory that just happened, which was nice and all, but doesn’t it on some level feel like an inevitable sign of the apocalypse? I know, that’s being a bit over-dramatic. Since clearly it was just a nice thing that happened to a long-suffering baseball team that by no other reason than bad luck had to wait 108 years to see their bad luck dissipate amongst the drunken roars of Chicagoans the world over. Either way, it seems secondary to whatever the hell will happen on Tuesday, and in a way most of what has happened in this unrelentingly long year (pop culture included) seems secondary to whatever fate awaits us on Tuesday (trust me, this’ll become an album review eventually).

So hopefully, very hopefully, on Wednesday, we can finally begin to look back on this year with some sense of normalcy, and see that yeah, there was some horrible crap to come out of 2016, but maybe we can look towards the future with some sense of hope. I guess I’m talking about the kind of hope we saw back in 2008, on that Wednesday after Obama took the presidency and it seemed like America could truly be a better place (which it kind of technically was, but also not really). And listening to an album like Hamilton Leithauser’s latest, it’s hard not to be reminded of the early part of the Obama administration, as it marks a collaboration between two artists whose bands were at their peak in the late ’00s/early ’10s, when Obamtimism was at its peak.

I guess another thing that was remarkable about Hamilton Leithauser’s The Walkmen and Rostam Batmanglij’s Vampire Weekend, is they were both the rare indie bands that were able to age gracefully. Because sure, The Walkmen’s Bows + Arrows and Vampire Weekend’s debut were no doubt ’00s indie classics that reeked of the kind of bratty confidence that could only come from young men in their 20s. But I think you could make a case that these bands’ “mature” albums — 2010’s Lisbon and 2013’s Modern Vampires of The City — were the best things that they ever put out.

So perhaps it only makes sense that these two New Yorkers would end up collaborating in 2016, freed from the constraints of their respective bands, and record an album that has an heir of maturity and calm, in a year that’s been anything but. While at the same time, I Had A Dream retains that vocal-straining recklessness that has always made Leithauser such a thrilling singer to listen to, while Rostam adds a sound that has all of the pristine flourishes of a very classic-sounding pop record. Also, much like any Walkmen record, the album does feature one absolutely perfect single with “A 1000 Times”. It quickly became one of my favorite tracks of 2016, and I hope when I listen back to it in the future, the song’s doe-eyed romantic optimism will remind me that, hey, 2016 didn’t turn out so bad after all.

Favorite Tracks: “A 1000 Times”, “You Ain’t That Young Kid”, “1959”

John’s Top Ten Albums of 2013

I’ve never struggled to put together a “Top Ten Favorite Albums” list as much as I did in 2013. I agree with my colleague Mr. Colin Wessman that 2013 peaked in May, leaving the rest of the year to flounder. I literally spent the last month of 2013 desperately scrambling to put together something that didn’t suck. In the end, I’m satisfied with my choices and now have the confidence to live my life to the fullest.

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