December 2011
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Recommended Release (Dec. 27th)
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross - The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Soundtrack
Another title-in-progress segment, the Recommended Release section is something we’ll get up every Tuesday (preferably earlier), where we will look down our noses and snidely insinuate that if you aren’t listening to what we recommend, you’re listening to the wrong fucking music. This will usually be...
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2011: The End
We are just about at the end of 2011 - in a few days, we’ll be sending it off with ball drop kisses and obscene amounts of alcohol. We’ve all been making our lists, scouring our favorites (and, in the case of some lists, least favorites), and throwing as big a bash as we can. Has it been as fun as a Girl Talk show? I wouldn’t know - one of you should take me to one sometime...
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2011: The Underexposed
We here at Nothing Sounds Better understand how hectic the holiday season can be to music loves, what with End-Of-Year lists bombarding you at every angle, and your own familial duties and seasonal occupations getting in the way of musical research, it can be difficult to sift through and find the smaller impacts music has made on our lives in 2011. That’s why we have come together as a collective...
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Other News of Note
Apparently we don’t quite catch everything with our regular coverage, so every weekend we try to catch up on all those important recent events that we haven’t covered. Sometimes we use twitter for this as well.
Arcade Fire have released a traditional video and an interactive video for “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains). [link]
A new track from Atmosphere, featuring Kill...
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“Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” - The Mountain Goats
Happy holidays from you biggest fans at Nothing Sounds Better! To celebrate, we’ve been keeping this little cover by The Mountain Goats, brought to you by the A.V. Club, on repeat! So take a listen (even if you already have), and then head over to the band’s twitter, where John Darnielle, Ted Leo, John...
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2011 According to... Kevin Tappin
Read the rest of our end of the year coverage as well:
2011 According to… Tyler Hanan [link]
2011 According to… Nick Le [link]
2011 According to… Eric Kossina [link]
2011 According to… Kyle Minton [link]
2011 According to… Joe Brown [link]
EPs of the Year
Ricky Eat Acid - Like I Was Floating
Belle Adair - Belle Adair
Phantogram - Nightlife
Fonda -...
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2011 According to... Joe Brown
Read the rest of our end of the year coverage as well:
2011 According to… Tyler Hanan [link]
2011 According to… Nick Le [link]
2011 According to… Eric Kossina [link]
2011 According to… Kyle Minton [link]
I have always been someone who is unabashedly and irreconcilably susceptible to emotion. Overwrought, cheesy, saccharine emotion endlessly fascinate me. It is a...
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2011 According to... Kyle Minton
Read the rest of our end of the year coverage as well:
2011 According to… Tyler Hanan [link]
2011 According to… Nick Le [link]
2011 According to… Eric Kossina [link]
There is nothing I am more tired of in this season of lists than the arbitrary proclamation of having learned something in 365 days’ time, that seething need to present yourself as a changed or revolutionized...
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2011 According to... Eric Kossina
Read the rest of our end of the year coverage as well:
2011 According to… Tyler Hanan [link]
2011 According to… Nick Le [link]
Songs of the Year
These are in no particular order, I just wanted to make a mix that would flow and sound good from track to track. It is not a representation of my favorite songs but the following is a mix of songs that defined certain areas of my year....
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2011 According to... Nick Lê
Read the rest of our end of the year coverage as well:
2011 According to… Tyler Hanan [link]
I’m a twenty-one year old college senior with little direction in what to do with my life and a ton of other problems on the side. I guess I’m no different than anybody else my age. But rather than talk it out with my friends like a normal person, I tend to gravitate towards music to help...
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2011 According to... Tyler Hanan
Trying to quantify all the best a year has to offer is, if we’re honest, more than a bit audacious. We feel a need to catalogue and rate everything - albums, movies, books, singles, remixes, videos, sports plays, memes, celebrity faux pas - an endless parade of people trying to establish their knowledge of all that is worth knowing in a single year. I’m not here to trash this exponentially...
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Sleigh Bells - “Born To Lose”
Do you remember how much coverage I did for Fucked Up’s David Comes to Life? We might be heading toward a similar situation with Sleigh Bells. Today, we finally got to hear a piece of the upcoming Reign of Terror (Mom + Pop, February 14th), as the first song has been unveiled. There isn’t much to say - the track speaks for itself, and it...
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Make Do and Mend - Part and Parcel
Review: Nick Le [12/12/11]
Part and Parcel serves as a side step between Make Do and Mend’s 2010 debut End Measured Mile and their upcoming 2012 Rise Records release. Consisting of four re-worked tracks, an acoustic cover Touché Amoré’s “Home Away From Here,” and one brand new song, the EP displays a much softer side of the band that is usually known for their intensity, best seen in a live...
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Nothing Sounds 5
Weird mix - we have new tunes, old tunes, new tunes that sounds like old tunes, and vice versa. A number of them are favorites of mine from their time. I wasn’t sure how to end this one, none of these seemed right. Then I looked over at my roommate shoveling hot dogs down his throat, looked down at my tofu, and “Meat Is Murder” shoved all other possible closers out of my mind....
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Warren Franklin - Your Heart Belongs to the...
Review: Joe Brown [12/07/2011]
Entitling an album Your Heart Belongs to the Midwest creates a clear set of expectations for what the album should contain. The foremost of those expectations is the wrenching emotion prevalent in the music of Cap’n Jazz and the midwestern emo bands that formed in its wake. Those bands defined the sound of music for an entire region across all genres. Warren...
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An Interview: Jenn Wasner [Wye Oak]
Interview: Kyle Minton [10/26/2011]
If you have the chance to see Wye Oak in your lifetime of attending music shows, I mean it when I tell you that I hope it is as thunderous as it ought to be. Whilst standing in a sweaty, packed crowd in Asheville, North Carolina, my rib cage was rattled to the booming of “Holy Holy,” and just like that the deceptively docile appearance of the...
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Watch“Denial Isle” - QUALMS
Boston-based QUALMS released the first single from their yet-to-be-released debut album this month. “Denial Isle” is a glimmering piece of airy dream pop that flits and flutters through the eardrums. The voices of Justin Mantrell and Darin Thompson harmonize well over keys that never stray far from the simplicity of the song’s intro. It is...
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Nothing Sounds 4
The biggest problem I usually have with these mixes is a sudden desire for a songs of a vastly different tone halfway through making the mix. This one started with YACHT’s “Utopia” and a plan for an upbeat, mostly electronic playlist. As you can see, that direction quickly changed. There really is no specific genre now. There a few things I’m currently listening to, a few...
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Drake - Take Care
Review: Joe Brown [11/25/2011]
In general, I am wildly out of touch with the American zeitgeist when it comes to entertainment. My favorite current television shows are Community, Fringe and Breaking Bad, each of which average 4 million or less viewers weekly. My favorite movie of this year was Drive, the Ryan Gosling movie that caused a lady to file a lawsuit because she was expecting Fast Five...
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Watch“Even Though I’m A Woman” - Seeker Lover Keeper
My initial reaction: ‘well, he’s no Ryan Gosling, but I can dig the Tom Hardy-in-Inception look.’ While the crisply-filmed video may seem a little silly at first, paired as it is with the fragile, simple-yet-dreamy-yet-determined tune and lyrics that are beautiful while also being startlingly cutting, it is quite...
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