2013 Year-end Round-up

My Top-Scrobbled Albums released in 2013. 

I’ve said it before, but I’ll reiterate. It’s about this time of year, when I read various Top Album lists, and realize that I have overlooked tons of good albums, and I have a lot of listening to catch up on.

In light of that, I don't propose this as a Best-of list, but rather, a suggested listening list of Albums released in 2013, in case you have overlooked them.

If you haven’t heard these, they are all worth checking out.

The shear amount of listening, devotion, and work for me to prepare a real Top Albums list (that I would actually feel content with) is far too daunting of a task… Even for blog of this caliber! It’s a task that I would never to able to complete, so I have to settle with a mere list of suggestions.

Album-art Cloud of my Top-Scrobbled Albums during 2013. 
[There is no release-year restriction here, so it includes albums released in any year.]



Washed Out - Paracosm

You know that feeling when you listen to an album, and it seems so good and familiar that you question whether it is really a new album at all, or if you have just mistaken a past classic? Like you are hearing covers of songs you’ve known for a while, that you just can’t quite put your finger on?

Well that is how I feel about Washed Out's new album Paracosm. It seems so familiar and right-on-point, but refreshing at the same time. It’s quite enjoyable. The album has a great feeling to it: almost a state of being. The lyrics (which are pretty much indecipherable), are apparently not that important.  It’s just the ongoing vibe, which is fantastic. I love the album art too.

I think this the best release that Washed Out has had since his first official release, Life of Leisure, which is a fantastic, but short, album.

Life of Leisure
Life of Leisure

You probably will recognize "Feel it All Around"  from the opening sequence from Portlandia.



Also, if you like those albums, don't overlook his 2nd album, Within and Without, which I apparently have forgotten about for about 2 years!  It's overtly sexually charged album-art, gives new meaning to the title. 

Within and Without
Within and Without

Sleigh Bells - Bitter Rivals

Picture of Sleigh Bells

Several years ago when Sleigh Bells released their 1st album Treats, it was, well… a welcome treat. It was fun, interesting, very novel, and therefore made for a well-received and highly buzzworthy release.  As time has passed and they have released 2 more albums, they have remained true to their novel sound, but unfortunately they have lost something…. And just gotten more annoying.

I would say that the novelty has simply worn off, but I still like the 1st album (maybe not as much as when it was fresh, but I still really like it), so I guess the new albums have just gotten progressively crappier. I think they have just been trying too hard to crank out albums in an effort to remain relevant and not fade into obscurity. Unfortunately that has backfired.

Reign of Terror, their sophomore release, is pretty good. Enjoyable. Some good tracks that flow well. And…Not crazy noisy and annoying…

…which is more that I can say for the newest album, Biter Rivals, which is very busy and quite annoying. I fucking HATE the opening title-track. Total trash.  One second thought (and 2nd listen) this whole album is TRASH! I even hate the album-art! (and I really like the album-art from the 1st two…). What happened here?!

In Summary

I Love:
Treats
Treats

I Like:
Reign of Terror
Reign of Terror

I Hate:
Bitter Rivals

Deltron 3030 - Event II

13 years later, Deltron churns outs their 2nd album, Event II. Another enjoyable  hip-hop album brought to us by Dan the Automator and Del the Funky Homosapien, who prophesize about the post-apocalyptic, dystopian future which we are propelling our society into at full force. It is another cohesive and interesting concept album. The album is intended to be satirical look into an elaborately thought-out future, devastated by the repercussions of current status-quo. As always, it makes for a great vocabulary lesson.

The album is full of funny and sometimes corny lyrics, but occasionally ventures into the purely silly category. This is assisted by a few comedian cameos which are immediately recognizable from their distinct voices: Andy Samberg and David Cross.

To fill out the star-studded roster, the following are featured on a few tracks,
Zack De La Rocha (lead singer of Rage Against the Machine)
Damon Albarn  (of Blur and Gorillaz)

I've been a fan of Deltron since my sophmore year in college, when a friend of mine recommended Deltron’s original Album, Deltron 3030. It has been my almost exclusive venture into hip-hop and Deltron has always done a fair job of making it an enjoyable one.


Give this album a few listens, and you'll probably find yourself in nostalgia mode, cranking out Deltron's original epic classics.

Reflektor Guerrilla Marketing

While walking near Seattle Center yesterday, I noticed a faded but familiar symbol on the sidewalk.



I immediately thought this must be some part of a guerrilla marketing campaign for Arcade Fire's recently released album Reflektor. Turns out I was right. There apparently was a guerrilla marketing campaign in cities all over the world, teasing the new album art (and title), leading up to its release.

Some people were not too pleased about their property being "vandalized". Win Butler actually wrote an apology to them, saying that a miscommunication lead to some of the symbols being made with spraypaint instead of chalk that was supposed to wash off.

More examples of the symbols can be found on the Reflektor Instagram page.

Macklemore: Good-Samaritan or Sell-Out?


Seattle’s own multi-platinum superstar (albeit an independent one), Macklemore is currently on the cover to both of Seattle’s alternative weekly newspapers, and I find it hilarious that he is concurrently on both covers for such contradictory reasons.

Opportunist or Philanthropist?
The Stranger has an article about Macklemore helping a charity: Joining forces with Pearl Jam to [have their fans] compete to raise the most money for a youth homeless shelter, (which is set to close due to lost funding).

While simultaneously in the newspaper-dispenser literally touching it…

Seattle Weekly is running a cover-story about Macklemore selling-out: For using his song  “Wing$”, from his hit record The Heist, in a NBA commercial.

What is worse than him using “Wing$” in an NBA commercial, is the NBA choosing that song. It’s a very bizarre choice, given the song is about consumers being duped by marketing and gaining false hope that sneakers alone can buy an image and success; An image that the NBA clearly had a hand in perpetuating. But clearly no one cares about the meaning, as they edited the song by taking out all the anti-consumerism lyrics, adapting into a pro-NBA anthem.

Now there is no doubt that Macklemore sold-out here by whoring-out this song, but to many people he “sold-out” long ago anyway when he actually made money off his art and became famous, instead of fading into obscurity. But considering some of his “sell-out” power will be used to help the homeless, I guess it kind of evens out.


Anyway, I bring you back to the point of this article: His face is currently on the front of BOTH newspapers. 

any press is good press...


Oh, and he puts on a really great show too. For some coverage of his Sasquatch 2013 set, see my Sasquatch post.

'Track to the Future' Widget

 Click to go to the new Widget!
I am pleased to announce the newest addition to my line of Last.fm widgets:  a new music "self-discovery" tool that I have been thinking about (and working on) for a while. As I mentioned in my post 100,000 Last.fm Scrobbles!, I have wanted to do more with my cache of Last.fm data. 

It is a widget that displays an album art visualization for my Top Albums from a historical week, N-years-ago-today. It shows what I was listening to, a certain number of years ago (1 year, 2 years, etc). 

I'm calling it "Track to the Future" as it allows me to refer back to what I listened to in this week in the past 7 years, and I often find myself re-Scrobbling the track in the present week! Get it?

Click to go to the widget's dedicated page.
This widget is again made using a mashup of Yahoo Pipes and my Last.fm data. It links to Spotify to simplify sharing, (just click the Album Art).  And since the Last.fm API uses MusicBrainz' (“The Open Music Encyclopedia”) Identifiers (MBIDs) as its unique identifiers, I’d say it makes for quite a nifty little mashup!

I have previously completed 2 of my ideas within this family of tools: a widget to visualize my Top Albums of the Week, and one to show my albums in Heavy Rotation within the last month (see the sidebar).

You may realize that all of these tools are built to display my own listening data. That is because I actually use these tools as memory-hooks to remind myself of past listening, as a way to visualize my Scrobbling history, as simple music “self-discovery” tools, and a place to direct others who may be interested. However, all of these widgets can be easily copied and altered to work any Last.fm user (provided you have some Last.fm data), so if you are interested in them, let me know, and I’ll start working on making them public.

100,000 Last.fm Scrobbles!


I have reached a music-listening  milestone in my life. I have scrobbled 100,000 tracks on Last.fm. It is an extremely pointless milestone, but a milestone nonetheless! This event occurred on October 9th 2013.

What does that mean?  It means that I have listened to 100,000 tracks on a computer (or smartphone) capable of logging and reporting those listens to the Last.fm service. Logging a track in this way is known as “Scrobbling”.

Of course that means that I have listened to much more music than that, when you include non-scrobble-able media: radio, vinyl, iPod (iPods are supposed to Scrobble, but I have never gotten it to work), and other sources.

So even though this milestone doesn’t actually mean anything, it is interesting. I have always been interested in the Last.fm database of my listening history. It just silently scrobbles tracks; collecting data about my music listening history. This data has the potential to be used in a number of cool ways.

I have patiently waited for others to write useful apps, widgets, etc so I can reap the benefits of having accumulated so much data. About a year ago I got tired of waiting for others to write some of the specific code that I so desperately wanted, so I did it myself. I combined the powers of Yahoo Pipes and the Last.fm API to create a widget that displays the album art of my Top Albums of the week. [ Click the link to check it out!]

It is dynamically updated based on my real-time scrobbles, so that whenever you like, you can see what albums have had my attention in the last week. Pretty nifty, huh!? Since I have really no coding background, I’m quite proud of that feat.There is SO much more that can be done with this data, I just need to figure out how to do it, because I have some cool ideas for apps, widget, visualizations, etc.

Some Stats about my 100,000 Scrobbles
Start Date:                                  December 10th 2006  (I was in college in those days)
Date of 100,000th Scrobble:          October 9th 2013
Length of Time Scrobbling:           Almost 7 years of music listening data!
Average Tracks per day:               40
Artists in my library:                     1,953


Milestone Tracks: Think of this list as a grab-sample for the respective timeperiod. An interesting look into a music listening history.

1st track:
-
16-Dec-06
1000th track:
-
13-Jan-07
2000th track:
-
4-Feb-07
3000th track:
-
22-Feb-07
4000th track:
-
21-Mar-07
5000th track:
-
18-Apr-07
6000th track:
-
18-May-07
7000th track:
-
30-Jun-07
8000th track:
-
2-Aug-07
9000th track:
-
30-Sep-07
10000th track:
-
20-Oct-07
11000th track:
-
7-Nov-07
12000th track:
-
28-Nov-07
13000th track:
-
20-Dec-07
14000th track:
-
17-Jan-08
15000th track:
-
6-Feb-08
16000th track:
-
5-Mar-08
17000th track:
-
21-Mar-08
18000th track:
-
9-Apr-08
19000th track:
-
1-May-08
20000th track:
-
23-May-08
21000th track:
-
20-Jun-08
22000th track:
-
7-Jul-08
23000th track:
-
11-Oct-08
24000th track:
-
20-Nov-08
25000th track:
-
8-Dec-08
26000th track:
-
14-Jan-09
27000th track:
-
8-Feb-09
28000th track:
-
6-Mar-09
29000th track:
-
4-May-09
30000th track:
-
17-Jun-09
31000th track:
-
1-Jul-09
32000th track:
-
15-Jul-09
33000th track:
-
3-Aug-09
34000th track:
-
17-Aug-09
35000th track:
-
31-Aug-09
36000th track:
-
15-Sep-09
37000th track:
-
1-Oct-09
38000th track:
-
16-Oct-09
39000th track:
-
30-Oct-09
40000th track:
-
20-Nov-09
41000th track:
-
15-Dec-09
42000th track:
-
3-Jan-10
43000th track:
-
16-Jan-10
44000th track:
-
31-Jan-10
45000th track:
-
16-Feb-10
46000th track:
-
29-Mar-10
47000th track:
-
16-Apr-10
48000th track:
-
10-May-10
49000th track:
-
1-Jun-10
50000th track:
-
23-Jun-10
51000th track:
-
15-Jul-10
52000th track:
-
1-Aug-10
53000th track:
-
26-Aug-10
54000th track:
-
4-Oct-10
55000th track:
-
27-Oct-10
56000th track:
-
15-Nov-10
57000th track:
-
24-Dec-10
58000th track:
-
28-Jan-11
59000th track:
-
16-Feb-11
60000th track:
-
10-Mar-11
61000th track:
-
30-Mar-11
62000th track:
-
23-Apr-11
63000th track:
-
8-Jun-11
64000th track:
-
5-Jul-11
65000th track:
-
18-Aug-11
66000th track:
-
27-Sep-11
67000th track:
-
27-Oct-11
68000th track:
-
11-Nov-11
69000th track:
-
6-Dec-11
70000th track:
-
12-Jan-12
71000th track:
-
27-Jan-12
72000th track:
-
8-Feb-12
73000th track:
-
27-Feb-12
74000th track:
-
8-Mar-12
75000th track:
-
4-Apr-12
76000th track:
-
19-Apr-12
77000th track:
-
2-May-12
78000th track:
-
16-May-12
79000th track:
-
1-Jun-12
80000th track:
-
20-Jun-12
81000th track:
-
4-Jul-12
82000th track:
-
25-Jul-12
83000th track:
-
14-Aug-12
84000th track:
-
13-Sep-12
85000th track:
-
28-Sep-12
86000th track:
-
21-Oct-12
87000th track:
-
7-Nov-12
88000th track:
-
11-Dec-12
89000th track:
-
6-Jan-13
90000th track:
-
5-Feb-13
91000th track:
-
7-Mar-13
92000th track:
-
5-Apr-13
93000th track:
-
30-Apr-13
94000th track:
-
16-May-13
95000th track:
-
6-Jun-13
96000th track:
-
24-Jun-13
97000th track:
-
16-Jul-13
98000th track:
-
10-Aug-13
99000th track:
-
20-Aug-13
100000th track:
-
9-Oct-13
101000th track:
-
30-Oct-13


As of this Milestone here are my charts.


Top Artists
Rank
Artist
Scrobbles
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15


Top Albums
Rank
Album
Scrobbles
1
M83 – Hurry Up, We're Dreaming
2
Harlem Shakes – Technicolor Health
3
TV on the Radio – Dear Science
4
Crystal Castles – Crystal Castles
5
Yeasayer – ODD BLOOD
6
The Knife – Silent Shout
7
Band of Horses – Everything All the Time
8
Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues
9
Deer Tick – War Elephant
10
Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes
11
The Head and the Heart – The Head and The Heart
12
Andrew Bird – The Mysterious Production of Eggs
13
Passion Pit – Manners
14
Andrew Bird – Armchair Apocrypha
15
St. Vincent – Actor


Top Tracks
Rank
Track
Scrobbles
1
Band of Horses – The Funeral
82
2
Harlem Shakes – Niagara Falls
77
3
The Knife – Na Na Na
4
Yeasayer – Ambling Alp
5
Harlem Shakes – Sunlight
6
Harlem Shakes – Strictly Game
7
Harlem Shakes – Unhurried Hearts (Passaic Pastoral)
8
Mew – Special
9
Harlem Shakes – TFO
10
Yeasayer – I Remember
11
Yeasayer – Madder Red
12
The Knife – Silent Shout
69
13
Harlem Shakes – Nothing But Change, Part II
14
Yeasayer – The Children
68