It's an easy knee jerk reaction at the end of every year, looking over "best of" lists, to think thatnothing interesting is going on. Music journalists comb through their year's listening and try to make it all seem more important than it was, jamming hyperbole on top of overstatement until Rolling Stone is trying to convince everyone that U2 released the best album of the year.
Fortunately the fact is that some interesting, strange, and compulsively listenable things happened and were released this year. In compiling my own list of high water marks I even began thinking that itwas (gasp!) a good year for music.
As far as I'm concerned "Best of" lists are a nonsense conceit that attempts to quantify the unquantifiable. So our list, which we'll reveal an entry at a time over the coming days should be viewed as a review of notable moments, cool stuff that happened, music worth revisiting. By the end, when we reset and refocus our ears for 2015 we should have a playlist that will refute the claim that "nothing interesting is going on."
MONSTER MAGNET: MILKING THE STARS
You could be forgiven for not knowing that Monster Magnet released an album this year. after all they just released one last year and this puts them off their long-established 1 every three years release schedule. But Dave Wyndorf got done mixing the last Monster Magnet album The Last Patrol, and wondered, "How would this sound if it were recorded in 1968?" This re-imagining is a pretty fair approximation of just that. They've turned down the gain a bit, added organs, and tweaked the arrangements. The songs have a whole different character to them, more acid trip than stoner sludge. Definitely a compelling experiment.
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