erics head

It’s almost the end of another calendar year, which means music publications everywhere are announcing their “Best Of” lists covering the last twelve months of releases. Now, you could go and hunt them all down yourself, or — as I assume you’ve done for the past four years — you could take a look at my ‘meta-’ list which has added them all together to produce one super-list. Well, the ‘added them all together’ part is true, at least.

Bah! Enough pre-amble… I present to you the top three albums from 2011:

1. Bon Iver – Bon Iver
2. PJ Harvey – Let England Shake
3. St. Vincent – Strange Mercy

[Link: complete 75 Best Albums of 2011 list]

Normally, I would talk about how I’ve heard a few of the albums in the top 25, but am looking forward to hearing many more of them. This year, however, it’s become apparent that I’ve been far too obsessed with the Canadian indie scene (read: CBC Radio3) to really know too many of these albums! The first album on this list, that I actually own (not counting the free-to-download House of Balloons release) is #23: Destroyer, Kaputt. Now, I’ve heard a few of the other albums towards the top of the list, but I haven’t spent any considerable time with them.

I’m super-happy to see that Ryan Adams’ new disc, Ashes & Fire squeaked into the list. I got to see him on his solo tour recently and he’s in excellent form these days. That new album is a great return-to-form for him (nb: that doesn’t mean that I think this is Heartbreaker, Part 2!). I also decided on the way into work this morning that my song-of-the-year is either Big Blue Wave by Hey Ocean! or Traveller’s Digest by Library Voices… so, if you’re looking for super-up-beat party/summer tunes, check out these tunes!

So, rather than ramble on too much (more) about what I haven’t heard… what are your top-5 albums of the year? What, if anything, is missing from this list?

I’ve been doing this — a round-up of my acquisitions within a certain time frame — with albums/music recently, so I figured why not do this for the computer games I’ve purchased as well. Now, before you go running away, these aren’t expensive games… much like my musical tastes, my taste in video games these days is decidedly indie. “Indie”, in this case, roughly translates to incredible gameplay for an even more incredible price.

For those of you who don’t know, STEAM is likely the most well-known digital-distribution video game website out there. There are others, Good Old Games and Direct2Drive spring to mind immediately, along with the propriatory stores from Blizzard and EA… but for the latest and greatest, mainstream and indie, STEAM is my go-to pick. Although you can buy a game 24/7, there is always at least one game featured as the “deal of the day”, another game on sale as part of “midweek madness”, yet another deal to be had each weekend… and, if that wasn’t enough, about four-times a year STEAM has massive store-wide blow-out sales that offer tons and tons of excellent deals; often 50%, 66% or even 75% off the regular price!

As someone who doesn’t find themselves with 20-30 hours/week that they can dedicate to hard-core gaming anymore, my tastes in games have changed. No more World of Warcraft, no interest in trying out Skyrim right now… but don’t think I’m complaining. This change in play-style has revealed a whole new genre of games to me: games that get you right into the action, games that you can ‘win’ in under 20 hours (or less), and games that run flawlessly on my five-year-old PC. So, without any more of my generic rambling, here is what I’ve purchased from STEAM this year (in order of purchase, so far) and what I’ve thought about it:
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Late… but not as late as my last album round-up was! Actually, I wrote this at the same time as the last album round-up post, but didn’t want to put them both out at the same time. Does that make sense? It did to me at the time…

But, enough of my rambling about nothing, let’s get on to my ramblings about the albums that I’ve acquired in the first half of this year, shall we?

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File this under “better late than never” as I’m only about nine months late in doing this. I’d posted my Polaris 2011 pick on my other blog earlier in the week, but I’d since realized that it would have been more fitting to have posted it here instead. Rather than cross-post it, I thought I’d browse through the last few things I had actually written here to see if anything jumped out at me. It would seem that I’d started a bi-annual review of the albums I’d actually bought, but never finished it off… so, what better time than now to do that, right?

So, if you’re curious to see what I purchased between July and December last year, and what I still think of those albums now (again, rated out of 10), expand the post to keep reading!

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Considering that I’d finished compiling this list more than a month ago now, I’m way behind in publishing my annual meta- Best Albums list for 2010. But, better late than never I guess… so, without any more excuses, I present the list (and my ramblings about it):

Top 3 Albums for 2010:

1. The Arcade Fire, The Suburbs
2. LCD Soundsystem, This Is Happening
3. The National, High Violet

For whatever it’s worth, this is the first year since 2007 where I’ve actually owned an album in the top three before the end of the year (and this year, I own two of them). Perhaps not coincidentally, two of the three artists responsible for the top three albums this year had albums in the top three in 2007; The National’s album that year was ranked #17. Other albums that made the top 25 which I’ve enjoyed this year include: The Black Keys (#09), Yeasayer (#12), Sleigh Bells (#14) and Caribou (#17)… a very diverse set of albums I think!

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The internet is a big place, I don’t think I can understate that enough. There are lots of sites out there that collect great links and videos and photos and such in an attempt to reduce the signal-to-noice ratio of the average web-user. The question is, however, where do you go to find more of the good stuff? Do you just wait until someone else sends you another great link? Start googling away and hope to find something good by chance? Just like in the brick & mortar world, there are brands popping up on-line as well; like one thing they’ve done? You’ll probably like other things they’ve done too!

Now, I assume that this is nothing new, but I’ve recently come across two of these, what I’ll call “Micro Networks”, that I thought I’d highlight here: FrogPants Studios and 5by5 Studios. In the case of FrogPants, I found myself listening to one podcast they had and, when looking for something else to listen to, rather than sift through the iTunes listings or best of lists, I choose instead to “stick with the brand” and find something else on the network to enjoy, based on the assumption that it would be of similar quality to what I was already listening to. And, of course, it was.

What I really like about these ‘micro networks’ is that they’re being managed by a very small team of people (if not one individual with a handful of co-workers who assist with the technical aspects of the organization) and are maintaining a “quality over quantity” mentality for their line-ups. The Instance, the podcast that really introduced me to the FrogPants family, really impressed me on my first listen. It was by no means my first podcast, but it sounded so much more professional than anything else I’d heard previously. Theme music, professional sounding bumpers between segments, solid audio quality and, best of all, two co-hosts who really (really!) work well together. I didn’t know that podcasts could be this good.

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This past Sunday night I finally had the chance to see How to Train Your Dragon (official site / IMDB listing) thanks to My Girlfriend Fiancée who was kind enough to rent it for me after I’d made a comment about it last week. This was a movie that didn’t immediately catch my eye when it was promoted in theatres – it looked like just another kiddie animated movie – but it was RandyDeluxe’s repeated high praise for the film both on The Instance (WoW podcast) and on his website, along with strong MetaCritic reviews that pushed me to see it.

The film is incredibly well voice-cast; the art is a great mix of comic and stylized; the plot and story are well paced and filled with surprises, heart-felt moments and exciting action sequences. Jay Baruchel is perfectly cast as the (voice of the) lead character, the mighty viking, Hiccup. The various types of dragons are amusing and well thought out, especially the illusive night fury.

Without spoiling too much of the story, the dragon that Hiccup trains (thus the movie title) is extremely well done; think the velociraptors in Jurrassic Park (#1). As their relationship grows, their acceptance of each other is very believable and the emotions seen on the face of the dragon (they don’t speak English, which is a nice bit of ‘realism’) throughout is quite convincing.

Coming in at about 1h40m, the movie never drags. Hiccup’s relationship with his father (voiced somewhat predictably, but still quite appropriately, by Gerard Butler) and his employer, Gobber (voiced ever-so-well by late late night host, Craig Ferguson) are excellent and provide great secondary story-arcs throughout the film. The ‘romantic’ story between Hiccup and Astrid isn’t overwhelming and does provide some motivation and humour along the way. All-in-all, the whole thing comes together just perfectly.

If you didn’t get a chance to see the movie in the theatre, it’s out on DVD/Blu-ray now and I’d strongly recommend it. [Eric's Rating: 85%]