The Thermals / Now We Can See (Kill Rock Stars)
The Thermals' prior record -- their third -- got all kinds of acclaim, but it sounded to me just like the first two. It was good, but it was sparse, the production was thin in a way that seemed affected and the songs lacked variation. Here they sound full and organic, with a rave-up tone from the moment the rhythm section kicks in on "When I Died." The tunes are still a little same-y, but the album demands repeated listening nonetheless and makes it hard to sit still while it's on.

Superdrag / Industry Giants (Superdrag Sound Laboratories)
I've recently come to realize that Superdrag is probably my favorite band of the past 15 years, even though they didn't release anything between 2002 and 2009, and I've never seen them live. Based on my iTunes ratings, their debut is my favorite album of all time, and their third record is pretty high as well. This one follows in the footsteps of those two, putting forth more terrifically catchy and aggressive power-pop, with a fuzzy sheen laid on top. I was concerned that John Davis' alcohol-fueled evangelical turn would make a Superdrag reunion impossible or intolerable, but the God stuff is sparing and reasonable here.

Kid, You'll Move Mountains / Loomings (self-released)
Even though for some reason it's taken almost a year, I'm glad to see that this record is finally getting a little recognition. This hardworking group from northeastern Illinois/southeastern Wisconsin has created an emotionally driven and atmospheric indie rock album that rewards repeated listens. It is not surprisingly reminiscent of the last Troubled Hubble album (KYMM contains two former Hubbles), but it's more strident and gets a lot of mileage out of the addition of keys and boy/girl harmonies. The Chicago rock press is finally waking up to these guys and hopefully everybody else will soon.

The Prodigy / Invaders Must Die (Cooking Vinyl)
Wait, what? Who saw this coming? The Prodigy all but disappeared after helping spur the brief late-90s wave of electronica break over America, with just one middling album between then and this one. But the break helped, I guess, and they've put together an incredible succession of catchy rave-ups on this record. The opening/title track in particular is a superb, driving anthem, and even the seemingly mediocre cuts stick with you after a couple plays. I suppose if this is what one good album every 12 years sounds like I can't really complain.

Office / Mecca (self-released)
I'm not sure if it says more about me or the industry that two of my top five records this year are self-released efforts from Chicago-area bands, but there you go. This one is a giveaway in the digital format (with a for-cash LP also available), and the KYMM album was available for free for a while as well. Where that one is a beginning, this one may be an end, as the members of Office are now scattered all over the place. The sad result is that hearing these lush pop tunes live is not in the offing for the near future, or maybe ever. These songs are catchy as swine flu, though, and you can't beat the price.

Death Cab For Cutie / The Open Door EP (Atlantic)
As hectic as my 2009 was, I never got around to writing up my top albums of 2008. If I had, Death Cab's Narrow Stairs would've been in at #4 and I would've had all kinds of things to say about how it was their best album ever and a surprise after their dull major-label debut. This EP is maybe even more of a surprise -- enough so that it's the first EP to ever make my year-end list -- in that it's not just tossed-off junk. These songs fit the tone and quality of Narrow Stairs quite well, but don't necessarily fit into the album's cycle; they all would make great singles. The only questionable bit is the inclusion of an unnecessary acoustic take on "Talking Bird," which is not a terribly memorable song to begin with.

Fastball / Little White Lies (Megaforce)
The Prodigy, Superdrag, now Fastball -- it's like 1998 all over again in this list, and it's going to get even sillier a couple spots down. I guess as a result of major-label drama these guys have been pretty much AWOL all decade, but while in hibernation they streamlined their sound and came out with one of the best simple power-pop records in recent years. I remember thinking that All the Pain Money Can Buy contained a lot of great songwriting way back when, and that some of it was maybe obscured by the radio-friendly production. This album strongly supports that notion, slotting nicely into the guitar-pop axis that runs through the Beatles and Cheap Trick.

The Bird and the Bee / Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future (Blue Note)
As so often happens when I love a debut album, this follow-up disappointed me at first, then grew on me, then quickly stopped growing on me, bringing me to the conclusion that I like it but that it's not that great. Sometimes, as here, one song has a lot to do with it -- "Diamond Dave" is incredibly stupid, but too catchy to give up on. Much of the rest is solidly enjoyable, but nothing hits the beautiful heights of the self-titled debut. Terrific musicianship and Inara George's incredible voice go a long way, though.

311 / Uplifter (Volcano)
So yes, this. Having this record here is a lot like having the last Foo Fighters record in my 2007 list -- it's a solid batch of unspectacular rock radio tunes, enjoyable but not life-changing. The main difference is that I've been a big Foo fan since the first album (hell, since the first "Dave Grohl has a new project" story on MTV News, more accurately) and have never really cared about 311 one way or the other. But there's a lot of great, stupid party rock on display here, none of which I'll remember in six months.

Passion Pit / Manners (Frenchkiss)
What a weird record this is for me. Amid a cresting wave of blog bands that combine elements of electronica, folk, psychedelia and children's choirs -- all others of which I've detested -- comes this bunch of bleep-bloopers with a sickeningly catchy debut full-length. There's not a lot of middle ground here, either. The songs that hit, hit hard; the ones that don't just kind of mark time. The first two tracks, in particular, make a great, high-energy couplet to kick the album off.

Karmella's Game / You'll Be Sorry (Insubordination)
The debut EP from Karmella's Game is the highest-rated record on my iPod. It's a bracing burst of snotty synth-pop that they can probably never live up to on a full-length record. Their debut LP didn't do it, and neither does this one. In fact, on first listen I was kind of disappointed, despite liking most of these songs when I heard them live in 2008. But it says a lot for how good the band's style is that the album continually grew on me throughout the year and eventually got some pretty heavy rotation. It's the mark of a band with a lot of long-term potential, I think, and hopefully they'll get enough recognition soon for that to be the case.

White Rabbits / It's Frightening (TBD)
I didn't see Fort Nightly coming a couple years ago, and I didn't see the changes on this album coming either. This is a band with six guys in it -- six! -- and you'd never know by listening to this Britt Daniel-ized record. Even on stage, the thinning out of the band's sound is clear when they switch from older to newer songs. It actually works fairly well (though not as well as their debut), especially on Spoon-y songs like "They Done Wrong / We Done Wrong," but it's hard not to feel like something's being lost when the big noise isn't being brought. On the other hand, all that space gives Stephen Patterson's yelps a lot more room to set the mood.

Pearl Jam / Backspacer (Monkeywrench)
It's kind of a sad commentary that this is Pearl Jam's best work in over ten years. After three mediocre and meandering releases, they seem to have taken a page out of the R.E.M. book and trimmed a lot of musical fat. This is a streamlined rock record that doesn't fixate too much on flourishes or hooks, or give any attention to history. While the band's self-titled 2006 release seemed to try to reconcile everything the band had done over the past 15 years without regard to the moment, this is an album that works right now. It's not their best by quite a ways, but it's solid and enjoyable, and it sets the band back on the right track.

Jail / There's No Sky (Oh My My) (Decorated)
The last Jail (er, Jaill) release before their upcoming Sub Pop debut is their best on every measure -- songwriting, musicianship, production. It also hit at the perfect time, as their local fan base was cresting and the market for punchy guitar-pop was on the way up. It's hard to judge this record the same way I'd do for most others, because I've heard these songs live a zillion times and in nascent forms with various instrumentations, but maybe because of that it's easier to see how they benefited from a process of refinement. Without being overly slick, the songs are clean and catchy, and sound like they're starting to outgrow Milwaukee.

Anya Marina / Slow & Steady Seduction: Phase II (Chop Shop)
It seems like maybe once a year or so I look into an unknown opening act from a show that's coming up, enjoy their material, enjoy their set, and walk away feeling like I've got some new, obscure thing to keep an eye on. Several weeks later, usually in comments posted on my YouTube uploads, I discover that this obscure act has a song on TV and is suddenly caught by the hype machine. This year it was Anya Marina, whose sweet and sultry basement-pop made an ill-fitting but very charming start to the Virgins show we saw last February. She got a song onto How I Met Your Mother, so hopefully she'll be able to ride that to bigger and better things in the near future.

I was at a conference in Milwaukee and someone asked me if I was still blogging. To my semi-astonishment, I realized that I had three distinct blogs that were all sitting idle. The other two at least have a distinct purpose that I could jumpstart if I had a notion; this one, with no more podcast, is for what, free-form pontificating?

Yes! Plenty of research has shown the high levels of expressive motivation held by bloggers, and I am no exception. So here's what's been on my mind: When did we all start to shit our pants over safety so much?

My perception of this history of this phenomenon is truncated by the fact that I'm only 30, but my sense is that for centuries, probably up until the post-WWII era, death was understood to be a part of life. You tried to avoid it, obviously, but illness and famine and industrial accidents happened. Infant mortality was high. Wars were fought sword-to-sword, and they were fought relatively often. You did what you could.

Over the last half-century, things have changed dramatically. Medical technology has evolved as quickly as any other sector, and more quickly than most. Dangerous workplaces have implemented safety provisions (as the behest of government regulation, for the most part) and become less dangerous. We don't go to war like we used to -- wars are primarily rationalized as defensive, fought with fewer troops and with fewer direct confrontations. We've got way more food than we need (and by "we," I mean the west). And yet, just in my lifetime, we have become a society in which children are supervised and thoroughly padded throughout the vast majority of their leisure time, and in which no one bats an eye when the president says his job is to "provide security for the American people" (it's actually to preserve and defend the Constitution -- says so right in the oath!).

You might think I have some theory I'm leading towards, and I do. We've reached a point where we are much closer to functional immortality than we've ever been before. Obviously we're not there yet -- people are still dying in massive numbers, after all -- but the number of problems we can't fix or easily avoid is much, much smaller than it ever was. This is the uncanny valley of mortality. As we get closer and closer to solving the problem of death, we completely lose our minds about it, giving over huge amounts of power to those how suggest they can get us to the promised land. Now, I don't know if this is true, of course, but I'm fairly confident that the manic fear of death is on an upward trajectory within American society. I'm hopeful that the General Social Survey has some helpful data on this and will be taking a look into it.

Black Francis "The Holiday Song" (10.4 MB) from Come On Pilgrim High Noon Saloon Madison, WI July 11, 2009

It's sort of fitting that this podcast should end with Frank Black playing an early Pixies song, since seeing the Pixies in late 2004 was what prompted me to get a small digital camera I could take into shows. This show provided as much excitement as that Pixies show, surprisingly, with so many songs I really wanted to hear ("Cactus" and "Bullet" were the highlights).

Now I'm on sort of a permanent holiday. I hope to get back to something like this in the near future, but it'll be more irregular and a bit thicker. I'm thinking about getting into the show-booking business, and it might be tied to that. We'll see. Until then, it's been fun.

As of yesterday, we've left Madison and now live in Carbondale, IL. I updated my Where I've Lived on Facebook and everything, which makes it really official. I'm starting on the faculty at Southern Illinois University in a couple weeks and I think we're going to find it much harder to go to shows down here, so things with the blog and the podcast will probably be changing quite a bit. With any luck I'll be able to coax my friends from Madison, Milwaukee and Chicago down here to play once in a while, but that's just a possibility at this point. I have one more podcast episode to post, and we'll be posting updates somewhere about the work we do on the house we bought. Keep your eyes pealed for what's next.

Black Francis "Angels Come to Comfort You" (19.1 MB) from Bluefinger High Noon Saloon Madison, WI July 11, 2009

It was an odd coincidence that our last two High Noon shows were of the intimate, semi-acoustic variety. Opening for Frank Black was Mark Waldoch of Milwaukee's Celebrated Working Man, kind of the mirror-image of Jon Auer. While playing he was supremely confident and poised, but between songs he seemed a little overwhelmed by opening for a legend and playing to a legend's crowd. He actually complimented the audience for their kindness and the weird thing was he was right -- it was the nicest High Noon crowd I've ever seen.

But then I got to thinking, I've never heard of this supposed Milwaukee-based Celebrated Working Man, and I've never seen this guy before. He's kind of a big guy and his material is not terribly different from Frank Black's recent work. What if Mark Waldoch doesn't exist, but is a persona Frank takes on -- a wig, some make-up, an outfit just the negative of what he wears for his set -- and identifies as from a band in a nearby city? It would be like the time U2 opened for themselves way back when. Maybe Frank's next album would be called The Celebrated Working Man and include the songs he played as Waldoch, etc.

Well, I just imagined it. Waldoch was in the audience during Frank's set, while Frank was clearly onstage. But still, I think this is something to think about for his next tour.

Black Francis Medley: "Brackish Boy," "Crackity Jones" and "Two Reelers" (34.8 MB) from Frank Black, Doolittle and Teenager of the Year High Noon Saloon Madison, WI July 11, 2009

I never would've guessed this show would be such a blast, especially considering how little I know of Frank Black's solo material (and yet, he'll always be Frank Black to me for some reason). Opening his bottle of wine and launching the show with this medley got the crowd going quick, and was a surprising burst of energy from the nearly empty stage.

The Hold Steady "Stevie Nix" (27.3 MB) from Separation Sunday Majestic Theatre Madison, WI July 10, 2009

One nice thing about Hold Steady is that they frequently pull out deep cuts from their first two albums, which were a little under the radar. Last time we saw them I recorded "Modesto Is Not That Sweet," an Australian bonus track from their first record; this time the highlight was probably this rollicking meditation on age from Separation Sunday, which they followed immediately with "Multitude of Casualties" and later with "How a Resurrection Really Feels." The showcase of older songs was certainly appreciated by the sell-out crowd, many of whom were probably also at last year's sold-out Stay Positive tour stop.

The Hold Steady "Yeah Sapphire" (18.1 MB) from Stay Positive Majestic Theatre Madison, WI July 10, 2009

If I'd ever gotten around to writing up my top albums of 2008, the Hold Steady's Stay Positive would've been their second-straight #1. Though not as instantly enthralling and masterwork-level as their previous effort, it was a hugely engaging, progressive step for the band and a victory lap of sorts after the success of Boys and Girls in America. The opener, "Constructive Summer," is the most viscerally inspiring song I've heard in years, while the title track is the band's salute to its scene and its fans, and the positive rage that fuels them both. Elsewhere they add some new flourishes to their sound, particularly on "Navy Sheets."

This song is very much in the classic Hold Steady mold, launching with competing guitar and piano lines and giving Craig Finn's poetry some room to stretch; "If I cross myself when I cum/would you maybe receive me?" is one of those lines that implicates love, lust, religion and insecurity the way few other songwriters ever have. I was particularly excited to catch it live because it's one of the songs from Stay Positive that I didn't react strongly to at first, but that's grown on me a lot since the record came out and we saw them last.

The Hold Steady "Girls Like Status" (16.7 MB) from Boys and Girls in America Majestic Theatre Madison, WI July 10, 2009

I hate the Majestic and I love the Hold Steady, and love always wins. I'd wanted to shoot video from the main floor for this show, but for a variety of reasons (mainly the woman in front of us who kept whipping her arm back into my face) it didn't happen. But no matter, the show was great as always. It was the second time in the last three shows that they played this somewhat obscure tune -- a bonus track from the Australian and iTunes releases of Boys and Girls in America. Oddly, I think I still haven't seen them do "Ask Her For Adderall" live.

Fountains of Wayne "Hey Julie" (13.9 MB) from Welcome Interstate Managers High Noon Saloon Madison, WI July 8, 2009

What do you do when you bring people up out of the audience to play incidental percussion parts, but then one of them starts singing unsolicited back-up vocals? Apparently, you just go with it. The guy on the right sang, I think, the entire song, and I don't think the band actually noticed. Meanwhile, the scarf-wearer on the left was on stage for the second time of the night -- he was also picked to come up and play a piano line during Jon Auer's solo opening set.

About that set: wow, so weird. Auer is best known as the guy from the Posies, and there were a handful of Posies fans in the otherwise inattentive crowd. This is pretty par for the course at the High Noon -- openers get talked over, and that goes double for solo acoustic openers. This makes Auer's decision to play a song unamplified, from the middle of the floor, and facing the stage, all the more inexplicable. He stopped during the song twice to shout at the crowd to shut up (it didn't work, obviously), and even standing right behind him I couldn't hear any of it. He ended his set by covering Joe Jackson's "Is She Really Going Out With Him," which he mocked repeatedly. The whole thing was quite a big fail, which is why the headliners got episode #500 and he didn't.