Pithy Title Here

Wow. I did this post every year for a long time. Then, I don't know, things got busy and things got dark and things got crazy. I remember it mainly being too busy in 2018, but both years were pretty weak on the album front. There were bright spots, sure. But we want to do a top 10 here and if I can only list six albums that I think were well put together, then... eek. More than a handful answered the call in 2020, though. In fact, i previous versions of this blog, I did a whole "honorable mention" thing, but we're going to skip that and say a nice thing about a bunch of albums that didn't make my top 10: The Weeknd was solid with After Hours and "Blinding Lights" is a legit thing . Fleet Foxes put out Shore and helped us all agree that The Crack Up never happened. Phantogram kept just being workmanlike dependable on Ceremony . The Death Stranding soundtrack was an easy listen and included Chvrches' title track that is immediately one of that ba

Speed It's the speed that really shocks you, when you think about it. We think of fire as hot. We may love the smell of a cozy fire on a cool night. But our relationship with fire tends to involve measures to keep fire stationary. It's called a fire place , after all, not a fire-go-round. But when Seattle turned from a gloriously sunny Labor Day to a smoke-choked dusk in a matter of minutes, it was the speed everyone was talking about. Winds in excess of 50 MPH whipped in from the east, bringing with them all the smoke from Eastern WA wildfires and, as always when the east winds come down the Cascades, heat (we are farther north than Montreal here, but it will be 90 degrees the next two days.) Since July 1, Seattle has managed to record a big 0.17" of rainfall. While summer is hardly the rainy season in the Pacific Northwest, that total is still less than a tenth of average. And this is the "wet" side of the mountains.  This time of year, the state, like its West