I don’t remember where I heard this song. I’m guessing it was on a KEXP or NPR podcast. But, man, it just does everything right. It’s such a perfect indie pop song. The guitars on this song are just perfect; it feels very Shins-like, they’re glittery, and not overpowering. And the lyrics are catchy as hell. You’ll be singing this one out your car window this spring.
A bunch of bands I like a ton put out new albums in 2014. A few of them will show up over the course of the list, but many of them show up here. In fact, I think all of these artists (maybe save one) have been on a previous list.
Over their last two albums, Fanfarlo has shifted from Belle and Sebastian/Camera Obscura-style orchestral folk/pop into electro-tinged folk/pop. Their songs still have that driving back end, propelling the song along with beats that will have you tapping your foot, but they’re slightly less accessible than they once were (2009’s Reservoir might would rate highly in my favorite albums of the 2000s, with four or five amazing tracks).
“A Distance” bridges the gap nicely between their older folk and newer electronic sound. It uses synths to really make the song feel warm, rather than harsh, and blends in some great percussion and horns to really fill out the sound. It’s my favorite track off of this year’s Let’s Go Extinct, which was completely overlooked.
I liked Jenny Lewis’ last album (Acid Tongue), but it felt a bit like an extension of her former band Rilo Kiley’s least essential album, Under the Blacklight. On “Slippery Slopes”, it feels like she’s back. This is straight up 70s glossy rock, but it is unmistakably Jenny Lewis. This could have shown up on almost any Rilo Kiley album and felt right at home. It’s glossy, but it is not happy (like most of her songs), and it’s one that’ll stick with you once you hear it.
So, 2014 was the year of Sylvan Esso. We were lucky enough to catch them (with about 100 people) when they opened for Minor Alps at The Sinclair. A year later, they played their own sold out show at The Sinclair.
Amanda Meath’s voice is mesmerizing. Mesmerizing enough that you won’t even mind the silly “hanky panky” interlude at the end of the song.
Walk the Moon—Shut Up and Dance
Gosh, this song is just ridiculously catchy. Like the best of Walk the Moon’s stuff, you’ll be singing it next to your 8 year old niece and 55 year old aunt after Christmas dinner.
This song pushes all of my buttons. Hand claps, sing along chorus, and it’s just over 3 minutes long. That’s a recipe for success. For example …
Here’s a very Weezer-y 3 minute song. I’m not one of those folks who thinks everything Weezer has put out since Pinkerton has been crap. But, the hit to miss ration on some of their later albums has trended in the wrong direction. Everything Will Be Alright in the End flips that in the good direction. It’s not Weezer at their peak, but it’s good Weezer, with crunchy guitars, and it’s all chorus.
As I do most years, I’m about to start my top 10 list. It generally runs one song a day through the end of the year, or maybe two if I don’t have time to get a post out one day.
This year, I listened to a lot of music, but the stuff that stuck tended to be from established artists or is sort of indie-dance-pop. I don’t know why, it was just a softer, catchier year for me. Chalk it up to getting old. I just didn’t hear a lot of hip-hop this year, though I liked what I heard of Run the Jewels and the new stuff Kendrick Lamar debuted (but didn’t release) this year.
During this process, I do link off to Amazon via my Amazon Affiliate. If you buy a song (or maybe 10 songs?) I’ll get a little kick back. I don’t get rich off it – I think I’ve made like a couple of bucks over 5 years. When I can’t find a good Amazon link, I’ll probably use Spotify.
So, coming soon (tomorrow, maybe), I’ll have my “didn’t quite make the list” songs from 2014. Which you might call the “Honorable Mentions”.
I didn’t realize it until today, when I stumbled across the post describing the features in the most recent Instapaper release for iOS. I knew that it was now a system wide share extension (super helpful), but somehow missed that it will now read an article to you using text-to-speech. I thought that was a premium feature (and it might have been), but now it’s free. You just can’t setup a playlist to read back a number of articles in a row without being a premium user.
It’s a pretty awesome feature; the voice does a surprisingly good job. It’s a great little trick when out for a walk or in the car for a short ride.
I’m starting to prep my year end top 10 songs list, and I realized that I’ve been very, very slow about getting to new music this year. I have a queue about a mile long on Spotify of things I might like that I haven’t tried yet, a bunch of albums that I’ve only listened to once, and a bunch more that I’ve only heard when distracted by work.
Needless to say, I’ve got a lot of listening coming up in the next couple of weeks.
That being said, the 2014 list is shaping up to be a list that might have showed up at various points in the past couple of decades. Delta Spirit put out a really good album this year. Weezer had a sort of comeback album that sounds a lot more like The Blue (or Green) Album. The New Pornographers and Spoon both put out albums that hearken back to their best albums.
This is all a long-winded way of saying that this list may not look all that experimental. It just so happens that a lot of well established artists put out really good pop music this year. And who am I to argue with that.
I love Boston Cream Pie. So when I saw an article on Boston.com talking about how Bostonians don’t like Boston Cream Pie, I was intrigued. I bit the link bait.
Massachusetts’ favorite pie is pumpkin, followed closely by apple, then pecan and blueberry, according to Facebook data. Boston crème pie came in dead last.
Well, I’ll be. Dead last. Except, in the next sentence …
Boston.com collected Facebook data on Nov. 20 that reflected 85,900 mentions or likes from Massachusetts residents expressing interest in these types of pies.
Folks are more than 30 times as interested in pumpkin pie (44,000) as they are in Boston crème pie (1,420).
Well, no shit. On a single day, a couple of weeks after Halloween and the week before Thanksgiving, from posters to Facebook, pumpkin pie got more mentions on Facebook. Surely that means it’s true year round. And is not, you know, indicative of the slice of time and audience.
There was a point in time when Boston.com was worth reading.
We just moved into our new house (hooray!). It has an enormous tree that hangs over the yard. On the day we moved in, here’s what that looked like:
I spent a few hours raking leaves into piles (before I had any yard waste bags).
After bagging the leaves, it looked like this:
Not bad, right?
A few hours later …
Stupid tree.
No blocking. If a consumer requests access to a website or service, and the content is legal, your ISP should not be permitted to block it. That way, every player — not just those commercially affiliated with an ISP — gets a fair shot at your business.No throttling. Nor should ISPs be able to intentionally slow down some content or speed up others — through a process often called “throttling” — based on the type of service or your ISP’s preferences.
Increased transparency. The connection between consumers and ISPs — the so-called “last mile” — is not the only place some sites might get special treatment. So, I am also asking the FCC to make full use of the transparency authorities the court recently upheld, and if necessary to apply net neutrality rules to points of interconnection between the ISP and the rest of the Internet.
No paid prioritization. Simply put: No service should be stuck in a “slow lane” because it does not pay a fee. That kind of gatekeeping would undermine the level playing field essential to the Internet’s growth. So, as I have before, I am asking for an explicit ban on paid prioritization and any other restriction that has a similar effect.
So, I guess it takes getting your ass kicked in the mid-term elections and realizing you’ve got nothing to lose to go out and fight for the things you campaigned on.
Better late than never.
Posts will likely be short for a while. We’re in the process of buying a house and moving. Hooray!
However, over the past 3 months, while house hunting, open housing, making offers, accepting offers, and everything else that goes into the process, nothing has been more clear to me than the fact that the process of buying and selling a home needs to be massively disrupted.
When making what is likely the biggest purchase you’ll have made to that point, you basically see a house for 30 minutes in as optimal a situation as possible. You have to go through agents on both sides because, well, why would you be able to act on your own? That would be cutting out the middle man. The hilarious part of it all is that the least expensive part of the entire thing are the lawyers, who basically have the whole thing covered and end up costing pennies out of the whole process.
Companies like Redfin, Trulia, and Zillow are helping with connecting buyers and sellers, but really, they’re now just full of buyer’s agents and seller’s agents. It’s a market where it’s very hard to actually find the real person on the other side. That probably works fine when the market is hopping, but if/when the market comes down, the loads of agents just hanging around the market and acting as gatekeepers will get churned out and replaced by either a) nothing, or b) real, value added agents.
During this process, there are lots of places where I’d happily pay someone to solve a problem with skills I don’t have (a mortgage, legal documents, moving). Those services seem to be priced appropriately. The real estate agent side of things is a place where the price you pay seems to dwarf the services rendered. The interwebs have a tendency to solve that problem over time. I expect that by the next time I buy a home, it’ll be a very different experience.
Post-Script: I did some googling around to see if I’m the only one who feels this way. I’m clearly not. This post resonated so strongly with me. I heard nearly every one of those canards during our buying process.
Post-Post-Script: Our agent was quite nice, and I don’t think doing anything that was deceptive or misleading. It’s really just a case where the goals of the real estate agent are not aligned with the goals of the buyers/sellers. They don’t get paid for their time, just for the sale. Like car dealers, the folks working the floor of your local Home Depot, or the folks calling you to offer you some new phone service, they make money when you buy something. And they don’t, when you don’t.
Depressing article from the Times this week …
Under Dodd-Frank, the general rule was to be that if a lender wanted to securitize mortgages, that lender had to keep at least 5 percent of the risk. There was an exception. The lender didn’t need to retain any risk in mortgages deemed to be supersafe. Those mortgages were to be known as Qualified Residential Mortgages, or Q.R.M., in the jargon that promptly developed.
In 2011, when the regulators first proposed rules to carry out the risk-retention law, the idea was that there would be a two-tier mortgage market. Mortgages deemed to be Q.R.M. would be characterized by substantial down payments that would minimize the risk of default, while the other tier would include riskier mortgages — although still safer than some of the ridiculous mortgages that characterized the boom — and could be securitized only if those responsible for either the loans or the securitizations kept some of the risk.
But when the final rule was adopted this week, that idea was dropped.
“The loophole has eaten the rule, and there is no residential mortgage risk retention,” said Barney Frank, the
former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and the Frank in Dodd-Frank.
Because what could go wrong if banks take on a bunch of risky mortgages that eventually go belly up?