We don’t do many top lists. In fact, if you ask me what my favorite..whatever, is. I’ll fight the urge to kick you in the shin. It’s just too much pressure to consider what, for instance, my FAVORITE MOVIE OF ALL TIME (echo echo echo…) might be. What if my answer is Steel Magnolias, then days later Robocop is on TNT and I remember how much more I liked the ED-209 than Tom Skerritt? what..if?

My point here is not that I have great taste in movies, but rather to help you understand that when I make a list such as this, it’s not because these are necessarily the best albums of the year. These albums just happen to be what I found along the way, and liked enough to listen to again and again—and ultimately share with you…and because they were the best.

10 : KEXP Live at KEXP Vol. 4

The annual compilations of in-studio performances that our local ‘listener-powered’ radio station release are almost always a hit with me. This year, there are a few misses, but there’s a nice range of artists from Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings to The Ravonettes. If you’re interested in getting a copy, better hurry; it is now out of print and only available until supplies last.

On halloween, Charlie toured the KEXP studio, click here and here.

Sample track: (”Grounds For Divorce” by Elbow)
[audio:http://www.alphababy.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/2008_10.mp3]

9 : Delta Spirit Ode To Sunshine

This album didn’t get much press, but it was one that I instantly fell in love with. Raw, ‘vintage’, jazzy, bluesy—an all around good listen.

Sample track:
[audio:http://www.alphababy.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/2008_09.mp3]

8 : Vampire Weekend Vampire Weekend

To be honest, I was trying not to add this to the list. It got huge press and a lot of air-play and I was skeptical about the hype. I had the chance to see Vampire Weekend at the Crocodile last year, before it closed. While I thought they looked too young and hip with their old-school, oversized guitars and afro-pop beats to really be any good, I couldn’t help but do the “I’m too old and cool to dance, but I’ll move my old bald head to the beat”.

Their energy is incredible and any time I need a little pick-me-up, I make full use of these guys. Oh, and Charlie loves dancing along too.

Sample track:
[audio:http://www.alphababy.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/2008_08.mp3]

7 : Department of Eagles In Ear Park

This one took a few listens for me to truly appreciate. When I first started thinking about this list, it was maybe a runner up. Every time I listened it steadily moved up toward the top of the list.

If you want a treat, watch their Pitchfork.tv videos now posted on Department of Eagles’ site (specifically No One Does It Like You; apparently recorded on a rooftop in NYC.)

Sample track:
[audio:http://www.alphababy.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/2008_07.mp3]

6 : Hot Chip Made In the Dark

Just good ol’ fashion high-energy electronic beats. Their videos are always pretty interesting/funny; obviously they don’t take themselves too seriously, which I think is good for the genre.

Sample track:
[audio:http://www.alphababy.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/2008_06.mp3]

5 : Fleet Foxes Fleet Foxes

Another one that I was skeptical about, but what can I say? It’s good. Very good. Beautiful, in fact. Fleet Foxes have received a ton of press and reached the top of many lists, including KEXP’s top 90.3 albums of ‘08. It wasn’t my #1 but when I want something to calm my nerves and relax, I turn these guys up.

And if you want to hear a nice cover, Stockholm’s First Aid Kit did an incredible version of “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song”.

Sample track:
[audio:http://www.alphababy.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/2008_05.mp3]

4 : MGMT Oracular Spectacular

I’m not exactly sure if I can explain why this is #4 on the list. I am having trouble describing it’s goodness, so I’ll quote their horribly noisy and non-user-friendly website: “the duo’s much-anticipated first full-length album, an enigmatic and prophetic collection of hallucinatory sounds and hook-riddled pop tones for the new millennium.”

So, there you have it.

Sample track:
[audio:http://www.alphababy.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/2008_04.mp3]

3 : Dodos Visiter

Good, somewhat rough sounds of acoustic guitars, banjo, drum—it sounds like they make good use of the studio. Through the first part of the year, I listened to ‘Visiter’ a LOT. And it’s still one I come back to again and again.

Pitchfork Media says (what I can’t): “Visiter alternates between longer, more improvisatory material and near-interludes, which can leave a slightly spotty impression on its first few listens. With more exposure, the record reveals the celebratory acoustics of Led Zeppelin III or a more song-oriented take on tourmates Akron/Family…” [MORE]

Sample track:
[audio:http://www.alphababy.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/2008_03.mp3]

2 : Girl Talk Feed the Animals

Alright kids, plug your ears. Girl Talk is a rather controversial ‘mash-up’ artist best described by Wired Magazine. It’s certainly not for everyone, but what I like most about this album (and his others) is his ability to take bad songs (old and new) mix them up a bit and make them very listenable. He takes a lot of rather hard-core hip-hop, old eighties favorites, and even modern pop; deconstructs the music; and molds them into his own masterpieces.

The controversy is that he uses a lot of artist’s and labels’ music without permission. In fact, the label he belonged to is called Illegal Art.

Need a pick-me-up? Grab a cup of coffee or pay what you want for Feed the Animals here.

Sample track: CAUTION: you may hear some explicit lyrics that you should probably just ignore.
[audio:http://www.alphababy.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/2008_02.mp3]

1 : Cloud Cult Feel Good Ghosts (Tea-Partying Through Tornadoes)

Here it is. My #1 pick for the year. It was by far the most listened to album in my iTunes. It was the top album on The Onion’s list—although, now I’m not sure if I should take that seriously..

The music is beautiful. It refreshes me without making me drowsy. It rarely grows old. I can almost always depend on it.

And, while I’m at it I owe an apology to Cloud Cult. Last year’s list was completely void of their 2007 release, The Meaning of 8, which, I will say I like even better than Feel Good Ghosts.

Sample track from Feel Good Ghosts:
[audio:http://www.alphababy.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/2008_01.mp3]

Sample track from 2007’s Meaning of 8:
[audio:http://www.alphababy.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/2007_01.mp3]

Other albums in my iTunes that got a fair amount of play (in alphabetical order):
Beck – Modern Guilt
Black Angels – Directions to See a Ghost
Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago
Brian Eno & David Byrne – Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
Cut Copy – In Ghost Colours
Death Cab For Cutie – Narrow Stairs
DeVotchKa – A Mad and Faithful Telling
Los Campesinos! – Hold On Now, Youngster
Magnetic Fields – Distortion
Of Montreal – Skeletal Lamping
Tapes ‘n Tapes – Walk It Off

And a couple of disappointments :
Snow Patrol – A Hundred Million Suns. I liked their last album (years ago, now). I was kind of looking forward to more. I gave this a listen and thought it was just a pile of crap.

My Morning Jacket – Evil Urges. The album isn’t horrible. It just got a lot of, what I thought was undeserved hype. I thought the album bordered on corny. But that’s just me.

So, there you have it. See you next year.

We spent last evening at the final Zoo Tunes concert of the season. The Avett brothers—one of my latest favorites—did not disappoint. They are one of those bands that bring an extraordinary amount of energy with them to their live shows. Just go see them, you’ll see.

Noooooooooooooooo

We were thrilled to have three of Charlie’s friends and their parents with us. It was a nice distraction for Charlie, although, it didn’t keep him from wanting to run away from us for the sake of doing so. I suppose it’s expected; he is two, after all. Unexpected, however, was what happened when we were in line waiting to get into the show. I wasn’t paying much attention, but suddenly Andrea paused and her eyes got really big. She nudged me and nodded toward a little girl and her mom right in front of us saying, under her breath, “that’s her.” I looked over, “that’s who?…oh…ohhhhh nooo.” Last August, while attending one of these concerts, we had a run-in with this…same…kid.

As we entered the venue, we made sure to stake out a place to sit a ways from them. Unfortunately, this little girl still managed to haunt us by making friends with the blanket behind us. AND she was eating ice cream. GAAAAAHHH.

The morning tickets went on sale for Zoo Tunes, I got up extra early to go stand in line. This year’s line-up included Indigo Girls, Taj Mahal, Emmylou Harris, Aimee Mann, yadda yadda yadda.. These are all fine performers, I’m sure; but seeing as how it turns out that I’m NOT made of money, we decided to pick two shows to buy tickets for. Andrew Bird and the Avett Brothers—both of which made my list of top 10 albums of 2007—happened to be playing this year’s Zoo Tunes. Andrew Bird was last Wednesday and throughout the day, Andrea’s sciatica became progressively uncomfortable. At the last minute, she decided it wasn’t in her best interest to sit on the hard ground for several hours. My ‘good husband’ instincts kicked in and I decided to give the tickets away and spend the evening pampering my suffering wife with massages and her favorite home-cooked meal followed by a series of decadent desserts…Of course, I’m slow and those instinct didn’t actually kick in until Andrew Bird’s encore.

I was a little nervous about trying to handle Charlie alone—about him annoying others by sticking his paws into their potato salad or singing along to the band too loudly. However, he and I managed to make it through the entire show. In fact, Charlie did amazingly well—even when I left him alone to go to the beer garden*. Andrew Bird was great. He really is an incredible musician; I don’t suggest you pass up the opportunity to see him…that is, unless you have sciatica. Then you can stay home..but try not to think about how much fun everybody else is having.

I told Charlie we were seeing Andrew Bird…he was very confused.

By the way, next month’s Avett Brothers show is apparently not sold out yet. If you are in Seattle, you should really consider treating yourself. See you there.

*joke. there is no reason for you to call CPS. I did not leave Charlie unattended to go to the beer garden..I snuck him in under my jacket.

Wednesday night I scraped myself out of bed to go with Jon to see The Swell Season or, as they’re now more commonly known, the Oscar winning couple from the movie, Once. We found out that our friend, the famous Sizzle was going to be at the show. Sizzle, being the on-the-ball blogger that she is, summed up the show quite nicely here. Of course she had a different perspective on the show—she was front and center, while we were way up in the balcony. We don’t usually mind the balcony, our only problem was that we were seated near one of the entrances and could hear any lobby-conversation, clear as a bell. It got out of hand when the security guards—"Sgt. Hightower" and "Mongo"—with absolutely nothing better to do, decided to hang out right outside of the theater and talk philosophy…or maybe it was wrestling…Either way, Jon finally got up and asked them to go do something else, which apparently didn’t make them happy, but it did shut them up.

All-in-all, The show was just amazing. Plus we got to see Sizzle, who, as far as we know is the size of an ant (’hellloooo down there!’). And if THAT wasn’t enough, Sherman Alexie, winner of the 2007 National Book Award and writer of the book/screenplay Smoke Signals was sitting behind us. That’s right, we had better seats than Mr. Alexie.

If you have the opportunity—if they’re coming to your town, don’t pass up seeing The Swell Season.

There are a couple of triggers have gotten me out of the house lately. 1)When it’s warm and sunny and Charlie is determined to go outside. “OUUT? OUUT? OUUT? OUUT?” with his shoes in one hand reaching for the doorknob with the other. And 2)When the local high school marching band practices by marching up our street, dancing to songs such as ‘Thriller’ How can we resist our own personal parade?

this one got me out of bed and interrupted Charlie’s bath time. “THRILLERR…”

Last Friday was the Dave Brubeck and Ramsey Lewis concert at the Paramount. The show was phenomenal, just as expected. I was a bit surprised that the legendary Brubeck performed first. Although, in retrospect, it made the most sense. The guy is…well, old; He’s about the age of Charlie’s GREAT Grandpa and if there’s any correlation there, he should have been asleep in his easy-chair midway through his set. Given the fact that his biggest songs were released almost FIFTY years ago, I expected the average age of Brubeck’s audience to also be on the older side. And, while I was righter than I thought, I was amazed by how energized the folks around us became during the performance. Especially the woman sitting next to me—I’m not sure she realized the noises that she was making, but I’ll just say they made us youngsters a liiittle uncomfortable.

"The Great Performer", Ramsay Lewis and his Trio were incredible. Although also not a group of youngsters, they brought a lot of liveliness to the evening that made me glad they closed the show.

In order to get the tickets to Brubeck as early as I did, I had to purchase a Seattle Theater Group package, which means I had to buy tickets to at least two other shows. One of those other shows happened to be Dan Zanes on Saturday. We knew Charlie was a little young to truly appreciate it, but we figured he’d enjoy watching the lights and shiny instruments. We stayed in our seats the entire time, but it didn’t take long for the aisles and area in front of the stage to become saturated with sub-five-year-olds. As the kids became excited by songs they were familiar with, they’d jump up and down making the room look like giant baby mosh-pit. I thought about crowd-surfing Charlie, but Andrea didn’t seem to think it was a good idea.

photo courtesy: Brian Romero

While I’m on the subject of music, ZooTunes released their line-up and it includes Andrew Bird and the Avett Brothers—two of the artists on my top-ten of 2007! I just saw the Avett Brothers at Neumos—a local venue—a couple of weeks ago and they were magnificent—more than worth seeing again. We’ll be in line for tickets on Monday AM. And lastly, I had lunch with Duff McKagen from G&R and Velvet Revolver last week. He’s friends with a co-worker (and also former-rock-star) and now officially sits on our advisory board. He was extremely nice and surprisingly down-to-earth.

I know you probably wanted to hear some details regarding Andrea and ‘Betababy’, but I figured I’d let her fill you all in on the gory details, cravings, and so forth. She’s been more-or-less out of commission, but as soon she’s able to open the lap-top and type without barfing on the keyboard, I’m sure she’ll tell you more than you want to hear. Or…perhaps I already did.

Since the new year, I’ve read several best-of-’07 posts in other blogs and thus have been inspired enough to give a bit of thought to what I saw or heard last year. Want to hear it? too bad. Here we go.

Movies:
Ok, i’ll be honest, we’re not big movie goers, especially since becoming parents. Even before that, we had a hard time finding the time to spend at the theater. Plus, you know that person who talks through the movie—asking irrelevant questions with obvious answers—and and kicks the seat in front of him/her? Well, without fail, I’m that person being kicked. With that, we saw two movies in the theater that were released in 2007. The Bourne Ultimatum and Juno. Both movies just splendid, especially Juno, and fall into my top 10 of 2007…top 2, in fact. We saw Superbad and Knocked-Up on DVD and have, but have not watched the latest Pirates of The Caribbean movie (great, now you know the level of our cinematic standards). I’d like to see the latest Coen Brothers movie, but will likely wait for the DVD. If anybody has any recommendations to fill in our top 10, we’d love to know what’s worth seeing.

Music:
Music, on the other hand, is almost always on in one form or another at home and I spend the bulk of my workday with larger than necessary headphones clamped to my head—mostly to drown out co-workers’ irrelevant questions with obvious answers, but also because I like music a lot. It gets me through most days. Also, Charlie enjoys dancing* along to whatever we happen to be listening to at home…including NPR talk radio, which is weird, but yet, so is his dancing. Anyway, 2007 brought us a lot of great music: Here are the top-ten that charlie enjoys dancing to:

*littlewhiteboy-style

10 : Iron & Wine The Shepard’s Dog

Sample track:
[audio:09 Boy with a Coin.mp3|loader=0xBCD77B]

9 : Spoon Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga

Sample track:
[audio:07 The Underdog.mp3|loader=0xBCD77B]

8 : Beirut The Flying Club Cup

Sample track:
[audio:02 Nantes.mp3|loader=0xBCD77B]

7 : Wilco Sky Blue Sky

Sample track:
[audio:10 Walken.mp3|loader=0xBCD77B]

6 : The National Boxer

Sample track:
[audio:02 Mistaken For Strangers.mp3|loader=0xBCD77B]

5 : Andrew Bird Armchair Apocrypha

Sample track:
[audio:02 Imitosis.mp3|loader=0xBCD77B]

4 : The Shins Wincing The Night Away

Sample track:
[audio:10 Girl Sailor 1.mp3|loader=0xBCD77B]

3 : LCD Soundsystem Sound Of Silver

Sample track:
[audio:03 North American Scum.mp3|loader=0xBCD77B]

2 : Band Of Horses Cease To Begin

Sample track:
[audio:05 The General Specific.mp3|loader=0xBCD77B]

1 : The Avett Brothers Emotionalism

Sample track:
[audio:4-02 Shame.mp3|loader=0xBCD77B]

Some runners up: ties for 11th place are: Jose Gonzalez – In Our Nature, Radiohead – In Rainbows, M.I.A. – Kala, The Juno Soundtrack, Tegan and Sara – The Con and since this is music Charlie dances to, I will also include For The Kids Three. Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible is a great album, but they failed to make my top 10 because I happened to see them perform every song from the album live and their lousy performance tainted their album for me.

There you have it. Again, if anybody has anything that you think Charlie should be dancing to but is not, let’s ‘hear’ it.