UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

This year’s list requires an asterisk. Or two. I have not yet listened to the Gone Girl soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. If past experience with their soundtrack work is any indication, I’m likely to consider it the best album of 2014.

I’m not sure why I haven’t listened to it yet. I haven’t seen the movie (or read the book). But that didn’t stop me in the past. I only managed to sit through half of The Social Network and I never saw The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo either. And yet, I bought and thoroughly enjoyed both of those soundtracks.

Beyond that omission, the list this year also suffers from my general lack of enthusiasm for the music that came out this year. I bought far fewer albums than I have in most years over the past 15 years (ever since Kid A awakened me from the disinterest in what was happening in contemporary music that plagued me throughout the ’90s).

Nevertheless, here’s the list.

5. “Weird Al” Yankovic — Mandatory Fun
I was a huge “Weird Al” fan as a kid. I owned several of his parodies on 45, and had the full Dare to Be Stupid album on vinyl as well. But as an adult, I stopped paying attention except when songs like “All About the Pentiums” or “White and Nerdy” would blip into the collective geek consciousness. Al’s genius with this album was to release a video a day for 8 days around the release of the album. It really got my attention, and got his songs into my brain enough that I had to buy it. Songs like “Foil” and “Word Crimes” are pure “Weird Al” genius, but don’t write off his clever style parodies like the epic “Jackson Park Express.” I still feel a little weird putting Al on the list, but this album really was one of the best I heard this year.

4. Foo Fighters — Sonic Highways
This is a solid Foo Fighters album. I wasn’t really into them for their first 3 albums or so, but from In Your Honor onward, they’ve been my favorite rock band doing new music. In fact I sometimes think they’re the only commercially successful band still producing new, good music I would unambiguously assign to that genre. The band made a huge deal out of Sonic Highways, but to be honest… I think it’s probably their weakest album since I really got into listening to them. I do like it, but I’ll take Wasting Light over this any day.

3. Aphex Twin — Syro
I really dig the music Richard D. James produces. But I have to confess I haven’t gotten into much of it because I find most of his cover art so off-putting. Superficial and silly, but there it is. Syro features a simple green cover with his logo symbol though, so it doesn’t bother me… probably because I have never figured out what it’s supposed to represent.

2. Tycho — Awake
I’ve been a big Tycho fan since I first heard their previous album. I regret missing the chance to see them at First Avenue this year. I actually had tickets to the show but I wasn’t feeling well that night and blew it off. A big regret, to be sure, but it’s tempered by having this great album to listen to. Definitely my favorite of the year. At least, other than…

1. Room 34 — 5mi
Yeah, that’s me. It’s unbelievably conceited to rank my own album at the top of the list, but to be honest, this is just about the only album that I’ve really found compelling all year, and it’s the one I’m most proud of to date. I’ve probably listened to it hundreds of times by now.

The inspiration came in early July, when I was running in a 5-mile race. I had never run any significant distance without listening to music, but somehow I had arrived at the race that day without my earbuds, forcing me to listen to nothing but the sound of my own breathing and footsteps (and, to a lesser extent, those of the runners around me, but it was a small race, so I was alone for most of it).

The rhythmic counterpoint of my steps and breathing became embedded in my brain, and a couple of days later I sat down to compose a piece of music based on it, played at a tempo equal to my running pace, and built on a 1000-measure structure. At just over 43 minutes, the piece came out almost precisely as long as the time it took me to complete the race.

5mi is a single, uninterrupted piece of music consisting of 11 distinct musical sections. It was composed and recorded in its entirety in a single 4-hour session. The 11 track names are inspired by locations near the 5-mile race route, in my hometown of Austin, Minnesota.

The album is available on iTunes, Spotify, and other streaming/download services.

Side note: After the 5-mile race, I actually started to embrace the idea of running without headphones. At the end of October, I ran in my first ever half marathon. Just under 2 hours of running, with no music. I might even have to credit the lack of music with my good time. I found the chatter of the 9:10/mile pace runner so annoying that I sped up to get out of earshot from him, knocking my time down to a 9:06 pace and finishing the race in 1:59:05.

Dishonorable Mention: Yes — Heaven and Earth
This album most certainly is not in my top 5 for the year. But I still feel compelled to mention it here simply because it is so absolutely terrible. I have been a Yes fan for most of my life (ever since I first heard “Owner of a Lonely Heart” as a 9-year-old). Some of their music is my favorite music ever. I would put at least four of their albums in my “desert island selection” (The Yes Album, Fragile, Close to the Edge, Relayer). But they also have several mediocre albums (Tormato, Big Generator, Talk) and a few truly awful ones (Union, Open Your Eyes, Magnification).

The last album Yes produced that I thought was genuinely decent (if not actually good) was 1999’s The Ladder. In the past few years, the band has become a parody of itself, more Spinal Tap than Spinal Tap could ever have dreamed of being.

None of that prepared me for how awful Heaven and Earth is.

It took me months, and several attempts, before I could force myself to listen to the entire album, or even an entire song. Then I did it once and promptly deleted the album from my iTunes library. It is so bad, I want to forget that it even exists. I have never, ever found an album by any artist so absolutely appalling as this album. Although I have had only tepid enthusiasm for the albums I liked this year, Heaven and Earth definitely left the strongest impression on me. That’s worth noting in its own twisted way.

Getting closer… I’ve eliminated a few albums that just don’t stand a chance *cough* *Heaven and Earth* *cough*. Here are the top 10 contenders for the final list. The final list finalists, if you will.

Aphex Twin — Syro
Beck — Morning Phase
Com Truise — Wave 1
Foo Fighters — Sonic Highways
Lusine — Arterial [EP]
Room 34 — 5mi
Tycho — Awake
U2 — Songs of Innocence
“Weird Al” Yankovic — Mandatory Fun
Zero 7 — Simple Science [EP]

For the first time in the at-least-a-decade since I started doing these top 5 lists, I almost completely forgot to do one this year. It wasn’t until I happened to be on my blog this morning and my “On This Day” widget reminded me that I realized it was time for the list again.

Maybe I’ve just been too busy. Maybe there hasn’t been much good music this year (at least, good to my jaded and picky ears). Maybe it’s because I turned 40 this year and I’m now officially too old for anyone to care about my opinion on anything. Whatever the case, this year’s list was almost an afterthought. Almost.

But now I’ve remembered to do it, and if time allows I might just give the final list the attention it deserves. For now, we start off as in every year, with the list of contenders: all of the new albums I’ve purchased in 2014. (As if you needed further evidence of how out of touch and irrelevant I am… I not only still care about albums… I still buy music.)

Since my list of full albums this year is so short, I’ve decided to include for consideration EPs — even one that’s a reissue of an EP from 1996 — and, for the first time, my own music.

Aphex Twin — Syro
Beck — Morning Phase
Boards of Canada — Hi Scores 2014 Edition [EP]
Com Truise — Wave 1
The Darcys — Hymn for a Missing Girl [EP]
Foo Fighters — Sonic Highways
J. Law — The Phoenix
Jenny Lewis — The Voyager
Lusine — Arterial [EP]
Magma — Rïah Sahïltaahk
Pink Floyd — The Endless River
Room 34 — Thru
Room 34 — 5mi
Röyksopp & Robyn — Do It Again
Tycho — Awake
U2 — Songs of Innocence
Umphrey’s McGee — Similar Skin
“Weird Al” Yankovic — Mandatory Fun
Yes — Heaven and Earth
Zero 7 — Simple Science [EP]

Update (12 December 2014): I used a “smart playlist” in iTunes to find all of the music in my library that was released this year, but I discovered a couple of albums that I actually bought on CD (how quaint) were missing because Gracenote didn’t fill in the release year. And so we have the addition of Foo Fighters and Pink Floyd to the list. Wait, what year is it again? I also had to add in the new Yes album, which isn’t in my library anymore because it’s so awful I actually deleted it. (Spoiler: It’s not making the final list.)

In the process of searching for a solution to a very specific WordPress problem (getting the “Add Media” overlay to default to “none” for the link — no one I know ever wants it to default to inserting a link), I came upon a very useful general tip for WordPress.

WordPress stores a ton of settings in the wp_options data table. But a lot of those settings are not directly accessible for editing in WordPress admin. Or so I thought.

Turns out, it’s not linked anywhere in the admin interface, but if you have the Administrator role, you can access an All Settings page that allows you to edit any record in that table (except serialized data) by going to this URL:

http://YOUR_URL/wp-admin/options.php

Watch out… you have the potential to really mess things up here, which is why it’s not easier to get to. But it’s a handy way to easily update an option, if you know what you’re doing, without having to log into the database directly.

Oh… and if you want to fix the specific problem I was trying to solve at the beginning of this post, look for image_default_link_type and set it to “none”.

Everybody who’s anybody is using CSS preprocessors!

Or so it feels. I’m an old-school vanilla CSS curmudgeon, and the more I’ve dipped my toes into working with CSS preprocessors (specifically, SCSS with Compass), the less I like them.

As I see it, there are three main problems with vanilla CSS:

No variables. Honestly this is probably the only problem I really have with CSS. I’d like to be able to set variables for things like colors that I use throughout a site. To a lesser extent, I see the benefit of “mixins” — reusable chunks of CSS.

Redundant code. It really depends on how you conceptualize your CSS structures, but it is very easy to fall into a habit of writing the same CSS code over and over again, resulting in bloated, hard to maintain files. While I am guilty of this just like anyone else, I find that if you format your CSS code properly you can combine properties efficiently to avoid redundancy without needing any external solutions.

Lack of programmatic logic. Here I’m thinking about things like conditional statements, and also math operations. This is probably as much of a strength as a weakness. CSS is a stylesheet, not a program. It’s a set of rules to be applied to formatting a document. There’s nothing programmatic about it. But still, as CSS selectors become more complicated and convoluted, it is clear that in some cases light programming logic would be helpful.

The real question is, do CSS preprocessors actually solve these problems? Or, more specifically, do they solve them without introducing new problems that are at least as bad as the ones they’re trying to fix?

For me the answer has been, and continues to be, no, they don’t. But I’m trying to get a more tangible explanation for why that is, rather than the simple gut feeling that’s been driving me away from using them up to this point.

What are other people saying?

My first stop in trying to answer this question of why I dislike CSS preprocessors was Google. I wanted to see what other people were saying, pro and con. Here are some interesting blog posts I found, going back a few years to the early (or at least earlier) days of CSS preprocessors:

The problem with CSS pre-processors
This article by Miller Medeiros was the first one I came across a few months ago when I initially pondered this question, and at the time it was all I needed to satisfy myself that I was not crazy for wanting to avoid CSS preprocessors.

So, assuming preprocessors do solve the problems with vanilla CSS, what are the problems they introduce? And how bad are they, really?

I need to get specific to my own situation for a minute here. I have a former coworker who is a firm believer in SCSS, and now that he’s gone, I’m left to maintain and extend the code he was writing. This experience casts my aversion to CSS preprocessors into stark relief.

Maintenance can be a challenge

The most obvious issue with using a preprocessor is that the output CSS is not exactly easy to hand edit, and worse, you shouldn’t hand edit it, because your changes don’t end up back in the original SCSS (or whatever format you’re using) files. If someone else goes back in later and edits the original SCSS and generates new CSS, your changes will get lost.

But let’s set that matter aside for a minute. In a broader sense, one of the key challenges for any web developer is to build code that is easy to maintain. Not just for you to maintain, but for whoever comes after you to maintain. Face it, you’re not going to be working on this project forever. At some point, someone else is either going to need to take it over, or throw away what you did and start fresh.

If you’ve ever jumped into an existing project midstream, or been handed the task of maintaining something someone else built — especially if it’s something built by someone who is no longer around to answer your questions — you know that it’s rarely an ideal situation. Even if the previous developer left copious documentation, it can take hours of picking apart their code to really get a firm understanding of how it all works. This is true with plain CSS too, but at least with plain CSS it’s a lot less work to track down a particular piece of troublesome code.

It’s non-standard

What happens when certain features of your favorite preprocessor get rolled into a future version of vanilla CSS? What happens if similar (but incompatible) features of a different preprocessor become the standard? In short, what if everything you’re doing right now becomes obsolete? How long are you going to hang on to doing things your old way with your no-longer-relevant preprocessor, before you have to scrap it and start over, or at least rewrite big chunks of your code to fit the new way everyone is doing things?

Call me a curmudgeon, but having been a professional web developer for over 18 years I’ve seen a lot of technologies and design trends come and go. I’ve always been skeptical of anything non-standard. I never used VBScript or ActiveX, I never embraced Flash, and in general I’ve done everything I could to both champion and adhere to open standards as much as possible throughout my career.

Suffice to say, resisting CSS preprocessors is just in my blood. They just don’t feel right to me. I’d rather do without features I want, if they’re not part of the standard, than resort to a non-standard workaround to make them happen… especially if it looks like there’s a reasonable chance they’ll be added to the standard at some point in the not-too-distant future.