Top 5 Albums of 2012: The Contenders

It’s that time of year again. Looking back through my library, I am reaffirming what I observed when I checked out The Current’s Top 89 of 2012 polling the other day: I really have not been following new music this year.

I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve been much more wrapped up in my business, too busy making my own music (currently working on my third full-length album of the year), or just disinterested in what I’m hearing on the airwaves, but the numbers don’t lie: in 2011 I bought about 50 new albums. This year the number is around 20.

In the past I have eschewed self-published albums here, but as the quality of self-published music increases, and the barriers to self-publication fall with new Internet tools, the idea of signed acts being of inherently higher quality than indie stuff is more ludicrous than ever (and, truly, it always was). I’m still considering the vanity factor and leaving my own albums out of the running, but there’s some other great indie stuff I need to put on equal footing with the kinds of music you can buy on CD at Target or Best Buy. I’m also eliminating my previous restrictions against EPs and live albums, if for no other reason than to pad out this list just a bit.

So, here’s the list. The top 5 itself will be selected from this esteemed group of artists and albums:

  • Absinthe & The Dirty Floors: Side 2
  • Aimee Mann: Charmer
  • Air: Le voyage dans la lune
  • Andre LaFosse: Do the Math
  • Andre LaFosse: The Hard Bargain
  • another cultural landslide: last days last days
  • The Beach Boys: That’s Why God Made the Radio
  • Ben Folds Five: The Sound of the Life of the Mind
  • Coheed and Cambria: The Afterman: Ascension
  • Com Truise: In Decay
  • The Darcys: AJA
  • Donald Fagen: Sunken Condos
  • Field Music: Plumb
  • Grizzly Bear: Shields
  • Muse: The 2nd Law
  • Pinback: Information Retrieved
  • Return to Forever: The Mothership Returns (Live)
  • Rush: Clockwork Angels
  • The Shins: Port of Morrow
  • The Shiny Lights: Morocco

OK, I can be honest and knock a few contenders out right now: there is no way That’s Why God Made the Radio or The Sound of the Life of the Mind will make the list.

This new effort from the Beach Boys is surprising mainly in that it doesn’t completely suck like I expected it to. No, the main reason it’s surprising is that Brian Wilson and Mike Love managed tolerate each other long enough to finish the album (but not the tour). But that shock aside, there are a couple of outstanding tracks, along with a couple of truly appalling ones. (All of which were written by Brian Wilson; the rest are merely mediocre and pointless.)

The Ben Folds Five album is certainly my biggest disappointment of the year though. I’m not sure why, though I suspect it’s mainly just that in the decade-plus since the band’s previous album, my musical interests and those of Mr. Folds have gone in exact opposite directions. Either that or he’s just become a humorless middle-aged hack musical competition judge. Or both. (Full disclosure: I haven’t even listened to the entire album yet. Much like with the last two Phish studio albums, I just can’t do it.)

I’m also going to eliminate the Muse and Coheed and Cambria albums. I just haven’t listened to them enough to be able to judge them properly, but I suppose my lack of enthusiasm for them says enough anyway.

What do Made-in-USA iMacs, fracking in North Dakota, and right-to-work in Michigan have in common?

Yesterday I blogged about the huge glowing area in North Dakota that is experiencing a shale oil boom thanks to hydraulic fracturing (fracking). This morning I tweeted about new legislation passed to make Michigan a right-to-work state. And for the past few days I’ve been reading enthusiastic news that Apple is resuming manufacturing in the United States.

What do these things all have in common? Well… the always insightful Jason Kottke has the answer.

We’re witnessing an interesting cycle in the US economy right now. Changes in China in recent years have presented new challenges to its burgeoning manufacturing base; meanwhile here in the US the combination of Great Recession-related unemployment, the GOP’s 30-year experiment in rolling back labor rights, and (as Kottke notes) the artificially low price of natural gas here due to the fracking boom, have suddenly made the United States a much more desirable place for manufacturing. But will it last, and at what cost?

Apparently there is now a sprawling metropolis in northwestern North Dakota, or… something

As any regular reader of this irregularly-updated blog knows, I love maps. That I didn’t become a cartographer is mainly a result of the times in which we live, although given the tech geekery of GIS, it’s still not a convincing explanation.

Anyway, as a map lover, I geeked out today when The Atlantic Wire had a post about new nighttime satellite imagery released by NASA, including this amazing “map” of the US, with its major metropolitan areas aglow with artificial luminescence.

Knowing the US map as well as I do, I was immediately able to pick out most of the major cities. Starting with my home in Minneapolis, I proceeded to identify Chicago, Des Moines, Omaha, Kansas City, etc.

And that’s when it hit me. I know there’s no major US metropolitan area between Minneapolis and Seattle. So… what is that huge glowing area in what appears to be northwestern North Dakota? I wondered. Atlantic Wire’s Dashiell Bennett wondered the same thing, and came to the same conclusion as I did:

One thing that sticks out for us is the surprisingly large bright spot in what appears to be an otherwise dark North Dakota. Could that be the state’s exploding oil industry working overtime?

I’ve created an animated GIF illustrating the situation. Using the NASA photo published on the Atlantic Wire post, I overlaid a map outlining the state boundaries, dropped in markers for some recognizable cities in the western US and Canada, and then… that big weird area in North Dakota.

I decided to take a closer look at just what is around that huge glowing area in North Dakota. I zoomed the satellite photo and overlaid it on another map outlining counties and rivers in North Dakota to try to make sense of it. Surely North Dakota’s population centers must be near all of that light, right?

Not so.

At this level of zoom, on Google Maps, only four towns in the entire western half of the state are populous enough to be identified: Williston, Minot, Dickinson and Bismarck. And of those four, only Williston (population 14,716, according to the 2010 census) is in the glowing area.

So… yeah. This light is not coming from a city. At least, not a well-planned, livable city densely populated with humans. I’m no expert on the topic, but I am well aware of North Dakota’s current shale oil boom and the controversies of the hydraulic fracking techniques that must be used to extract it from the earth. It’s just kind of interesting, I think, to see yet another consequence of fracking: light pollution.

For further reading… well, just Google “Williston fracking”.

Rock opera update/teaser: a first listen!

Anyone who follows me on Twitter or Facebook probably knows by now that I’m working on a semi-top-secret (wha??) rock opera. Yes, it’s true!

I am not yet ready to reveal the full details of the project, but suffice to say it is in the late stages. It’s mostly down to recording vocals, which is sure to be the most time-consuming part of the process. I am shooting for a January-February 2013 release date at this point.

But it’s time for a first listen now! Of the 11 tracks on the album, 7 will have vocals. But I’ve made one of the instrumental tracks available in a rough mix form now on Alonetone. You can check it out here! (Or, if your browser is adequately HTML5-itized, you can play it below.)

All of the sounds on this track come from Atari 2600 video games. Specifically, they come from actual Atari and Activision games that were available in the early 1980s. I sampled these sounds out of the commercial emulators for these games that are available for the iPhone, created a software instrument from the samples (using this technique), and played them on my keyboard to produce the music you hear. The sounds are minimally processed… other than some EQ and reverb, they sound exactly like they did in the original games (especially Super Breakout, which provides most of the “melodies” you hear).

Quick Mac Tip: Fix missing background on second display

At work, I plug my 11-inch MacBook Air into a 23-inch LCD, which I use as my primary screen, with the Mac’s display as a secondary screen. Frequently, due to some combination of not closing it then unplugging the Mini DisplayPort plug in the proper order, or… something… I will find that when I open up my computer the next day, my desktop background (a.k.a. “wallpaper” for recent Windows switchers) on the MacBook Air is gone, replaced with a far-too-bright light gray generic background. Yuck!

Previously I had resorted to logging out and back in, or even rebooting, to fix this problem, but yesterday I searched and found an answer. It’s really simple! But it does require opening Terminal.

Go into Applications > Utilities and open Terminal. Then at the command prompt, type this (and, of course, hit Return):

killall Dock

That’s it! The Dock will quit and automatically restart, and the desktop will be restored!