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This is really elegant. Nice.
This is really elegant. Nice.
This year has produced a selection of truly brilliant albums. I’ve reviewed my favourites for the year, and there’s something here for everyone. I’ll be posting one of my picks every day until the end of the year, and I’ll be adding it to one big collection page, if you don’t want to read them every day.
The album titles will all be affiliate links to Amazon, so if you like the sound of one of these, please support the artist by buying a copy, and I’ll get a small cut. Or, check them out on iTunes. I won’t get a cut, but you’ll be buying a great album.
With the housekeeping out of the way, here’s the first edition.
Bob Mould, the legendary Hüsker Dü and Sugar frontman, released his ninth studio record this year at the age of 51, and he’s still rocking harder than people half his age. Silver Age is packed with the honest, simple, and down-to-earth music you expect from a trio.
Silver Age was recorded with Jason Narducy on bass and backup vocals, and Jon Wurster on drums. Both of these musicians contribute significantly to the stripped-down sound on this album. It’s clear that it’s the raw essentials.
But don’t think that it’s a light and cuddly record by any means — this is Bob Mould. The guitars are loud and fierce, and the lyrics are piercing. “Never too old to contain my rage,” spits Mould on the album-titled song. Indeed, he may be over 50, but this is the most raw and direct Mould has been since — dare I say? — his Hüsker Dü days. I love this album.
Grandpa Anil Dash reminisces about the way the Web used to be, yells at clouds, shouts at you to get off his lawn:
We’ve lost key features that we used to rely on, and worse, we’ve abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world. To the credit of today’s social networks, they’ve brought in hundreds of millions of new participants to these networks, and they’ve certainly made a small number of people rich.
But they haven’t shown the web itself the respect and care it deserves, as a medium which has enabled them to succeed. And they’ve now narrowed the possibilites of the web for an entire generation of users who don’t realize how much more innovative and meaningful their experience could be.
There are a lot of good observations in this article, presented with a kind of view through rosy melancholic glasses. I miss the interoperability of various disparate services as much as the next guy, but the methods by which we’re able to manipulate content today are generally cleaner and more useful than they were five years ago.
This might be the email client I’ve been looking for.