How is it that the two top selling MP3 players are the two most DRM-encumbered? I think, though, that a survey would be more relevant. Something simple, like "What Do you use to listen to music on the road?" It would answer my nagging doubts: How many of those iPods go to repeat buyers? How many people use something that's not an MP3 player to play MP3's?

I fall into the latter category, the wifest into the former. I use my blackberry for music playing (with a decent pair of headphones and a decent music player, that scrobbles). I spent a long time worrying about what type of MP3 player to buy, so that DRM wouldn't be an issue. Then Amazon MP3 launched, and it all became moot. There's now (almost) no MP3 I can't find on Amazon, DownloadPunk, or Bleep. My music player is a MSD, so there's no worry about adding files from multiple machines.  I don't have to use special software (yes, iTunes is special in a short bus kinda way) to load music either.  Any fears of running out of battery are assuaged by the fact that i can charge it off any usb port.

7 Gravemakers and Gunslingers - Coheed and Cambria
Coheed finally has a woman singing for some of the characters, rather than Claudio singing falsetto. It actually makes them sound less twee, although that's also helped by their increasingly riff-based songs, and departure from the space-emo sound they started from. Both of the last two albums have started adding more and more instrumentation, high-gloss production, and anything else they can find, and I've yet to see them add more than their songwriting can absorb. Bigger and more epic just seems to suit them.

6 Type O Negative - Tripping a Blind Man
When Type O Negative was first popular, they really owned the goth metal aesthetic. By the time they got to "World Coming Down", they'd kind of jumped the shark as far as that atmosphere goes. It always had a limited appeal, and made several of my friends dismiss them outright. after a couple of "best of" releases, it seemed like they were done for. Their last two albums, though, have passed on the goth aesthetic, and gone straight for the self-deprecating humor, 3-act songwriting, and beatles-esque harmonies that have always made them great.

5 65daysofstatic - When We Were Younger & Better
These guys are a last.fm find, from my obsessive listening to dredg. There's a myth going around that the band formed to write a John Carpenter score, which is completely believable when you hear the band. All of their music follows violent storylines, at least in the fantasia world that I'm trapped in when I listen to it. The music is something like post-rock, something like industrial, and all instrumental. The soundscapes are all intensely memorable, which is a tribute to their songwriting. It took a while for this album to grow on me, since I just discovered them this year and was still obsessed with their last album.

4 Nine Inch Nails - Another Version of the Truth [Kronos Quartet]
Year Zero kinda slipped right past me. It's the first anything of his to do that since.... ever. Okay, since I started noticing him. The remix album, however, coincided with the launch of remix.nin.com, and my being reminded what a cool guy trent is. I picked up the remix album, and was immediately made happy by the daft-punk-gone-aggro "Meet Your Master" filtered through The Faint. The 14 minute "Me I'm Not" is also brilliant. This track, though, delivers on the hint of an idea from "Things Falling Apart"'s "The Frail" - the creepy string section that pushes a simple song into a mind-bending otherworldly soundtrack of doom.

3 Battles - Tonto (Four Tet remix)
I love Four Tet remixes. But I also really like Mirrored. I was completely non-plussed by their live performance at Pitchfork. I can't really explain what made me download the album after that experience. Nonetheless, I'm glad I did. The album is fantastic, and great for working to. Their music can border on the bland, in large doses, which I think is what happened at P4M Festival. Four Tet is great and teasing out the dark undercurrents in tracks they remix, which is what they've done to tonto (this track is from the tonto+ EP).

2 Burial - Archangel
Confession: I didn't even hear about Burial's debut album. Southern Comfort is by far my favorite song of his, but Untrue is the album that was released this year. The first single is more indicative of the brilliance of his self-titled debut, than the airy aesthetic of the rest of this years album. The songs ebb and flow in the way that great electronic music should, following from Massive Attack, DJ Shadow, and Roni Size. The wifest is weirded out by the traces of garage that linger in it, but I love the cool bits of actual dance music that hang in the shadows of what's essentially ambient music. The melodies in the foreground come and go, in the loose progressive style that I love dance music for.

1 Nahemah - Labyrinthine straight ways
The second Philosophy is an absolutely amazing album. I was only prevented from listening to it more by its absolutely devastating sadness. There were days I would sit down to work on something, put the album on, and be completely immobilized by the album. I haven't been this emotionally affected by an album since Cursive's Ugly Organ. The recommendation for this album came from invisibleoranges, and was the jumping off point for me being completely obsessed with everything he recommends. The keyboards on the album are the rare example of metal not being weakened by twee 80's sounds dumped in for filler. This is more like Opeth's "Baying of the Hounds", in that it draws from Moog-ish sounds that actually belong in a hard rock aesthetic.

it amuses me greatly that:

• Dream Theater is still around
• they are somehow popular now, despite still sounding to me like they're stuck in 1992
• that anyone with a vocal range like James LaBrie would even try to look like a badass.

click the picture for a free mp3
via blabbermouth

It's also annoying that last.fm has had sidebar widget-like charts for months now, with a built in player for previews and full songs (per artist approval), and the occasional MP3 download. We dont' get to use that player, because.....
choice is a bad thing? matt prefers pandora, because they're from the valley? i have no idea.

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