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.

(click for the fullsize, it's awesome)

I love last.fm. And I love data visualization. Music + Data = Supah Sexeh. That's why I read Emo + Beer = Busted Career: P4M-style snark is boring without the graphs and charts).

A couple months ago there was that Waterloo Engineering project that made pie charts of how eclectic your tastes were. Nothing wrong with it, just not exciting. that, and it could only connect to last.fm for like a week, it tells everyone they don't have charts now.

I first saw Lee Byron's histograph on information aesthetics, and was seriously tempted to pay the man to make me one of them, although at the same time, I wondered if it was possible to extract the data mechanically. Fortunately, someone much smarter than me had the same thought, so you can get your own wave histogram chart here.

The history chart is fantastic. I love the way it reflects my life. you can clearly see when I changed jobs in August 2006, and stopped being able to listen to my own music at work. I ran the chart seperately for just that period, but even at that, it's a pretty dense year and a half:

Unfortunately that lull, despite the attempted resurgence in December, means that there's little documentation of the gradual shift in my tastes away from indie, and towards metal. When summer hours started this June, the list of bands is almost completely different:

what's abundantly clear, though, is how I listen to music. I jump from obsession to obsession, with little continuity in between. Dredg doesn't show up as an even ribbon, just a more common hotspot. Opeth is the exception, since their songs are so long. They rarely peek(or peak) out of the chart, but they're always present. There's probably some better graph to show the frequency and repetition in my taste, rather than ebb and flow. the pictures are still hot, though.

h/t jark

via wired.

kinda makes the DJ-ing thing a little more accessible. then again, I'm sure cut chemist would still blow my mind with the thing.

Okay, so there are tons of charts, tools and "eccentricity" calculators out there for your last.fm charts (fruits of an open API), but this is far and away my favorite. even if it does confuse logotypes with logos. And even if it's top-down, as far as what logos are included ¹ . And even though my new found love for invisible oranges means that most of my top metal bands don't have logos.

As far as logos vs. logotypes, while the chart (left) does stack neatly, logos are what you see on the right. they're the sort of thing that used to populate my notebooks in gradeschool. I can't complain, because it's still a badass tool, much as the inclusion of that really ancient queensryche logotype annoys me. ah well. via the last.fm blog.

1. like including ISIS, but not tool, WTF? (back ↩)