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The 2008 Music List

I enjoy listening to music immensely. I used to fancy myself a collector, and having a Tower Records employee for a roommate didn?t really help that situation. When I happened to travel to other towns I would lookup the used music shops and spends more time than I really should have flipping through CDs and vinyl. There was a brief period of time when I thought I could make a nice chunk of change going around buying up rarities and selling them online. This was, of course, before the days of eBay, Amazon, and every other interweb outlet for used music. To further carbon date myself, CDNow still existed and had a telnet interface. Normally this is when I would yell at the kids to get off my internet and then regale them with stories about how we used to have modems and resumable downloads with Z-Term. But, I digress?as I am want to do. My intake of new music has certainly slowed down. As with all people growing older, I attribute this to the crop of bands ?today? being mostly crap. Luckily for me, this is a timeless truth. So now even when I venture into the realm of ?new? music, it almost has to pass a litmus test of sounding vaguely like a band that I already like. As a for instance, Joy Division leads me to Interpol, which in turns leads me to the Editors. Unfortunately, none of these bands had an album release in 2008 (Joy Division ?Best Of? doesn?t count, Interpol?s Our Love to Admire and Editors? An End Has A Start were both 2007). The good news is that technology is getting close to that point where it almost seems like magic. I use the soundamus service to find new releases based on music that I already like. It takes the bands that I?ve told last.fm that I like/listen to and runs that through Amazon to give me a calendar of releases that I?m probably going to be interested in, be it bands I already listen to or ones that Amazon thinks I?ll like. This is incredibly cool, even when it only tells me about bands I already like (see: Oasis, James, Flogging Molly, The Killers, etc.) The following list are the albums that I bought in 2008. Yes, I know that 2008 isn?t over yet, but my soundamus calendar tells me that there aren?t any interesting releases (not counting singles or EPs) coming out in December. This isn?t a review and they aren?t ranked, although I hope to write more about the music of 2008 that I really liked next month. The band links are to last.fm pages and the album links are to Amazon MP3, with the lone exception of Chinese Democracy. Bloc Party - Intimacy Bomb The Bass - Future Chaos The Charlatans - You Cross My Path Flogging Molly - Float Gnarls Barkley - The Odd Couple Guns N? Roses - Chinese Democracy (iTunes) James - Hey Ma Kaiser Chiefs - Off With Their Heads Keane - Perfect Symmetry The Killers - Day & Age KMFDM - Brimborium The Kooks - Konk Ladytron - Velocifero Meat Beat Manifesto - Autoimmune Moby - Last Night Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts I-IV Nine Inch Nails - The Slip Oasis - Dig Out Your Soul Ok Go & Bonerama - You?re Not ALone The Raconteurs - Consolers Of The Lonely Thievery Corporation - Radio Retaliation The Ting Tings - We Started Nothing TV On The Radio - Dear Science Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend The Verve - Forth We Are Scientists - Brain Thrust Mastery Weezer - Weezer (Red Album) So, there it is.