Sound Obsession

In recent years I've had trouble coming up with ten albums I really liked.  This year I had trouble paring down about thirty albums.  Suffice it to say, 2013 was a great year for music.  The following are my honorable mentions - ten albums that I really enjoyed, but didn't quite make my final "top ten."  Some came very close, but I had to make some tough decisions.  This is basically my runners-up list - not ranked, but ordered alphabetically.* Enjoy. . . . ASG: Blood Drive (6.5/10) 6. I hadn't heard of Wilmington, North Carolina, stoner/sludge rockers ASG until earlier this summer.  Turns out Blood Drive is their fifth album and it sounds like a lost gem from 1992.  All the hallmarks of that era are preserved and resurrected brilliantly here as if Creed and Nickleback never existed to piss all over them - the angst, the beauty, and the riffs.  Vocalist Jason Shi displays uncanny range, emulating both Perry Farrell's nasal rasp a...

Neko Case Date:  October 31, 2013 Venue:  Lincoln Theater, Washington, DC Every year it seems, in a subconscious effort to give myself a little break from the aggressive rock and electronic music that typically gets my adrenaline pumping, I gravitate to some form of innocuous, vaguely acoustic, pretty music.  I call it "chicken soup" music, and it usually comes in the form of some kind of tepid contemporary "Americana."  Nice melodies, nice singing, a lil' bit country, a lil' bit rock & roll - major plus for some pedal or lap-steel guitar .  Whatever evokes windswept southwestern deserts or misty Appalachian hills.  In recent years it's been Robert Plant with Alison Krauss, Patty Griffin, or Calexico.  This time it's Neko Case, who just put out a graceful new record called The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You . What is this, a concert for ants?! The veteran alterna-country/indie-pop singer...