In the Changer: A Is For . . .

In the last three months I have been downloading all of my cd's into my iTunes. I received an iPod Nano for Christmas, which forced me to go through my album collection and cull about 8 gigs worth of music, which, it turned out, made up an infinitesimal percentage of my collection. So now I have decided to get everything downloaded, the whole collection, onto iTunes and eventually get an iPod that will hold the whole thing while appreciating my uber-nano that has my absolute favorite stuff on it. So far I am at the L's and am about 7000 songs in. (To get a sense of how anal I am when it comes to my music -- and to see how you compare -- I organize my collection alphabetically by artist and then within artist I organize chronologically by release date. I suppose I must have toilet trained to the soundtrack of my Mom's poorly organized skipping records and malfunctioning eight-tracks or something.)

At the same time I have been listening to an ever growing mass of new or newish cds that I had not fully made it through in the last year or so. This means that even more than normal I have been pretty well absorbed in music around the clock these days. Herewith a return to my semi-regular feature, "In the Changer" in which I provide capsule reviews of what is in that immense stack of new stuff. The piles have grown so unwieldy that I will present each entry alphabetically (knowing that as time passes I'll get new cd's from the early part of the ABC's that I'll slip in. I'm something of a fetishist with my music collection, but I'm not going to sacrifice foolish consistency to miss the chance to make smartass observations, draw insightful conclusions, drop annoying references, or even come up with the occasional savvy observation about a new cd.)

Let's start with the "A's":

American Football: American Football I got this one from Tootle in an October trip to Atlanta. Imagine, if you can, Pinback meeting The Sea and Cake meeting The Western Keys. That is to say, imagine three very good indie bands that you may well not know. American Football is a pretty good synthesis of these three bands. Shimmery guitars, lyrics that are somewhat oblique but not annoyingly so, and a midtempo attack. It's good. Definitely worth your while. So, by the way, are Pinback, The Western Keys, and The Sea and Cake. Grade: B+.

Appendix Out: Daylight Saving Another one from Tootle from that same trip. (I promise, this is mere coincidence.) Imagine, if you can, American Music Club meeting Mazzy Star meeting Cosigner and you'll have a starting point. (I also promise that this will be the last time I play the "imagine x + y + z = this band" game in this installment.) I don't like American Music Club and Mazzy Star to anywhere near the degree of the other bands in the previous entry. Naturally I love Cosigner because they are wicked awesome. In any case, I actively disliked this album upon first listen, which is why I have an ardent policy of multiple listens before I pass judgment on an album. This one grew on me into a solid B.

Archers of Loaf: Icky Metal This was a replacement purchase. Somewhere between Beijing and Johannesburg and Oxford and Odessa I lost my copy of this cd last summer and I needed a new copy. I became a big fan of these guys when I lived in Charlotte in the mid-90s and saw them once there and a couple of times in their home base of Chapel Hill. Although the album as a whole does not always cohere fully, it has one of my favorite songs of all time, "Web in Front," (an A+) and combines enough great songs with an undeniable personal nostalgia factor to earn it an A-.

Arctic Monkeys: Whatever People Say I Am That's What I Am Not These Sheffield (UK) boys put out this wry, self aware album that looks into the nightclub, going out every night, hipster culture from an interesting vantage point: Critical, but well aware that their observations come from firmly within that culture. Some people will probably say that they sound like a lot of other bands. Maybe. But I might argue that the Arctic Monkeys are the best embodiment of their breed. Or at least that this catchy album is worth a B+.

Arrested Development: 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life Of . . . Arrested Development's patchouli doused hip hop crystallized in my mind as being better than it actually is with repeated listens over the transom of about fifteen years. There are some unquestionable highs. "People Everyday," "Mr. Wendel," and "U" are spectacular. But some of the message has not aged all that well. Still, I wish there were more hip hop artists expanding from the status quo today. Sometimes it seems as if The Roots are the only guys making this sort of effort. That's more than likely not true, but whatever is out there has not captured a slice of the zitgeist in the same way that Arrested Development did in the early nineties. B+