Ultranormal

Category: music

  • My Favorite Albums of 2023

    I am apparently not in the musical consumption mainstream. I still love sitting down to a meal of an entire album instead of singles. I keep my playlist of favorites from the year still, but I love albums.

    This year, I’m trying to avoid albums by artists I’ve called out in previous years, so even though they were great, no New Pornographers (but go listen anyway).

    This post might grow as I listen to things from the year this week, but here’s my list of favorite albums of the year!

    In no particular order:

    • Archimède: Fréres: They’re French, sing in French, and write super poppy songs you’ll sing along with even if you don’t understand a word they’re saying.
    • Nakhane: Bastard Jargon: Nakhane has a voice you can’t ignore, gorgeous and magnetic. It’ll pull you in, hold you close and then break your heart.
    • SUSS: SUSS: Like William Tyler, SUSS are writing soundtracks for movies that don’t exist, for sweeping desert vistas and alien cowboys. They make perfect music for deep work.
    • Killer Mike: Michael: This album is deeply personal and has the first hip hop song to ever make me cry.
    • Film School: Field: This band speaks to my early 2000’s indie soul. Fuzzy guitars, catchy tunes, and… just got get lost in it.
    • The Beths: Expert in a Dying Field: The Beths are new to me this year, and I’m sad it took me this long to discover them. They’re cute without being cloying, with amazing harmonies and very clever lyrics. Strong Dean & Britta or The Submarines vibes.
    • The Rural Alberta Advantage: The Rise & The Fall: I think this band invented Stadium Folk. It’s acoustic AND epic and you’ll probably love it.

    And an honorable mention to Rubblebucket, who I discovered this year, but the album I fell in love with was last year’s Earth Worship, especially Geometry.

    And another for Skinshape, who released one of the dreamiest songs I’ve heard in a long time, The Ocean. The whole album is great, but that song is just so old school dreamy soul, I think I listened to it on repeat for at least two days.

    I wish you happy listening on this final week of 2023 and a thousand great musical discoveries for 2024!

  • My Favorite Songs of 2020

    I don’t even have anything pithy to say about 2020. Everyone’s already said it, and everyone knows it, so it doesn’t need to be said.

    But, on the bright side, a lot of great music was released this year! Every year, I keep a playlist of songs I like that were released that year. It’s a good way not to forget something that I liked, and I can always go back and cherrypick songs for my annual roadtrip playlist, or rediscover albums I’ve forgotten from past years’ lists.

    This year’s playlist is the longest since 2015, clocking it at almost exactly 18 hours. 2015’s was almost 24 hours. Here’s 2020’s playlist in all its glory. Enjoy!

    And if you want to see past years’ lists, they’re here:

  • Kevin’s Year in Music: 2015

    It’s been a great year for actual music, but a sad one for me personally. Why? Rdio died. I loved Rdio for years – even when I was working at a music startup building a competing service, I still loved Rdio. And now it’s gone. I tried Google Music, and had to give up on it because it lacks any idea of social, and does some very strange things with explicit lyrics. Now I’m on Spotify and it’s all right. It’s not perfect. It’s definitely not Rdio – but it’ll do.

    Enough sadness, let’s get on to the music! Last year, I just threw together a list of the albums I liked and put them in three categories. That was a cop out and saved me from having to pick a single album. This year, I’m picking a single album that is my favorite of the year! And then a couple more than I really liked.

    My album of the year is…

    Sometimes I Sit and Think and Sometimes I Just Sit by Courtney Barnett! It’s funny. It’s fun to sing along with, and the songs are actually about things. This album came out early on this year and I kept going back to it all year.

    It was really hard to pick just one album but I did it. Courtney’s biggest competition was from an artist that my friend Bryan told me about – Ghostpoet. His album, Shedding Skin, is fantastic. It reminds me a lot of Massive Attack, which is always a good thing. You should listen to it, a lot.

    There were a lot of really good albums that came out this year. So many that my Kevin’s 2015 Favorites playlist has 340 songs in it and if you listened to it all at once, it would take 23 hours and 29 minutes. So, get started!

  • Importing Rdio Playlists (and Your Collection) Into Google Music

    My beloved Rdio is dying, and soon. They ran out of money, sold all their assets in a fire sale and have given their users about a week to find a new music home. I tried Apple Music, but quickly ran into limitations (song limit, my patience with their awful UI, horrible apps for importing songs, etc). Asking around, it looked like Google Music was the next best option.

    And then the problem was, how to I get almost 5 years of musical history from Rdio into Google Music? All those favorites playlists from 2011-2015, the road trip playlists, the special occasion playlists… all of those will just disappear.

    It took a lot of experimentation, but I found a way to export my playlists (and entire collection) from Rdio to Google Music. Here’s what you need (sorry, this is going to require some Terminal time):

    • First, you need to install the Rdio Enhancer Chrome Add-on.
    • Sign up for the Google Music free trial.
    • Install gmusic-playlist – it’s a python library for interacting with Google Music. It has some dependencies, so you’ll need to follow the README instructions carefully.

    After you’ve gotten those installed, you need to do the following to save your playlists and collection in a format that’ll work with the importer:

    • Go to Rdio in Chrome.
    • Click Favorites.
    • You should see an Export CSV button. Click it. Depending on the size of your library, this could take a while. It’s going to generate CSV files for your entire collection. My 35,000 song collection took 3 CSV files, and about 5 minutes to generate and download them. Chrome will probably ask you if this site can download multiple files. Say yes and wait for all of them to download (15,000 songs per file).
    • Once you have all those files, it’s time to do playlists!

    For each playlist you want to save:

    • Click its link in the left nav bar.
    • Click the 3 dots in a circle button (next to the share button), then “Extras”, then “Export to CSV”.
    • That’ll download another CSV file.
    • You should open up each CSV and delete the first line (the header) or you’ll end up with “Did She Mention My Name” by Gordon Lightfoot in all of your playlists. If that doesn’t bother you, go ahead skip this step.

    Now that you have your collection and all the files you want to save, it’s time to set up the gmusic-playlist importer. After you unzip it, open the folder and then open preferences.py in your favorite text editor and make the following changes:

    • username should be your google login email address.
    • Change the track_info_order line to look like this: track\_info\_order = \['title','artist','album','trackNumber'\] (the only change is to change “songid” to “trackNumber”).
    • Change allow_duplicates to True.
    • Change search_personal_library to False.
    • Save the file.

    Now you can follow the gmusic-playlist directions to import all those CSVs. Google Music has a limit of 1,000 songs per playlist, so your collection will be broken up, but at least you’ll have all your songs!

    Update: I tried to like Google Music. I really did. But, it has some fatal flaws:

    • Their new releases page is bad and not updated with actual new releases.
    • There’s no social at all. It’s awful.
    • The Web UI is just broken enough to be really frustrating, and all the web apps for it are hamstrung by the web’s brokenness.
    • They do very strange things with explicit lyrics.

    So, I was going to update this post with instructions on how to import your official Rdio export into Google Music, but… don’t do that.

    I’m trying out Spotify Premium again for the first time since I started using Rdio, and they’ve paid attention. Social is better. Sharing is better. The queue is persistent between sessions. They have more music than Rdio did, or that Google Music has. Their new releases page is actually mostly up to date.

    Instead of using this process to import things to Google Music, use the official Spotify Rdio Import tool. It takes about five minutes and works really well.

  • Kevin’s Favorite Albums of 2014

    I can’t believe the last time I did this was in 2011, but it’s time to do it again! 2014 was a great year for music! Again! My 2014 Favorites has 256 songs on it. Last year’s has almost 350, but I think that’s more about me being more selective about what goes on it than the quality of the year.

    I decided to break up the list into three sections, because I don’t think it’s fair to compare albums by bands I’ve loved for years with new stuff that jumped out enough to be considered. I’m getting older and though I’m trying really hard not to let my musical taste calcify, well, I think it’s inevitable. Also, the “throwbacks” fit a theme for me. They’re all committed to a sound from the past and pull it off expertly. All four albums will have you grinning from ear to ear just to hear great new songs in styles you thought were dead.

    Repeat Offenders

    Throwbacks

    The New Kids

    And there you have it… my favorite albums of 2014. Enjoy!

  • My Most Played Songs

    I can’t remember when I did it, but a few years ago I reset all the play counts in iTunes. That was years ago at this point, and since switching to Rdio for most of my music listening, I only use iTunes for things I can’t get on Rdio, live shows from nyctaper or podcasts. I was looking for something new to choose for This is My Jam, and decided I’d just pick the song I’ve played the most in iTunes. And then I decided I might as well share my “historical” top ten songs as shown by what I actually listened to. So, here they are, followed by the number of times I’ve listened to them according to iTunes. Excuse the profanity, that is really the name of the band (and they’re awesome):

    1. Lovely Allen by Holy Fuck – 153
    2. Pullin Punches by Arkells – 150
    3. Fresh Blood by Eels – 137
    4. Working Full-Time by The Constantines – 122
    5. Happy by The Wrens – 113
    6. Your Hand in Mine by Explosions in the Sky – 111
    7. Dance Like a Monkey by New York Dolls – 106 (this one’s skewed because I accidentally left it on repeat one day where I had a lot of meetings and I forgot to pause it – still, it’s a great song. The video is killer)
    8. I Play My Kazoo by Grand Analog – 102
    9. Soon Enough by The Constantines – 101
    10. Violet Light by Raised by Swans – 101

    I also went ahead and created a playlist in Rdio with Trnsmit with my top 100 songs (Rdio doesn’t have all of them, so it’ll be less than 100, but whatever).

    It’s funny that the bands I consider my all-time favorites don’t show up until farther down the list (Massive Attack shows up at number 13 with Paradise Circus and Morphine doesn’t show up until number 26 with Come Along). The Constantines show up a ton in the top 50, but that’s mostly because my “Best of the Constantines” playlist was a constant companion for almost a year when I had to crank out code on a deadline.

    Oh well, there you go, my top 10 songs played in iTunes. I wish I could do the same in Rdio. I have a feeling it would be dominated by Library Voices.

    And yes, this post is instead of writing one about my time at SxSW this year or my new job at Rails Machine that I start in a few weeks. I might write those blog posts later.

  • My Annual SxSW Prep: Listening to Tons of Music!

    This is odd because I’ve never stayed for the Music portion of SxSW, but every year for the past five or six, I’ve downloaded the massive torrent of free songs from the artists playing SxSW and tried to listen and rate all of them. To give you some idea of the scale, the 2011 torrent had over 1000 songs in it, released in two parts. That’s a lot of music to listen to, and I usually forget to post my top-rated stuff here, but I think I’ve actually listened to everything for at least the last three years (even when I haven’t gone to SxSW).

    I’ve figured out a workflow for getting through and rating everything using iTunes’ Smart Playlists that I figure might help you if you want to do the same thing:

    1. Download the torrent and then put all the songs in a single regular playlist.
    2. Create a new Smart Playlist for the songs you haven’t listened to and haven’t skipped. It took a little while to get this set up correctly, but it should be something like this (and then sorted by artist):
      • Playlist – is – Your SxSW Torrent playlist (mine’s called SxSW 2012)
      • Plays – is less than – 1
      • Skips – is less than – 1
      • Rating – is not – 1 star
      • Rating – is not – 2 stars
    3. Create another Smart Playlist for things you’ve listened to but haven’t rated:
      • Playlist – is – SxSW 2012
      • Rating – is – no stars
      • Plays – is greater than – 0 (this removes any that you skipped, which you can assume you want to leave 0 stars)
    4. I also created one like the unrated, but where the Rating is greater than 3 to find my favorites.

    What’s great about the unlistened Smart Playlist is that if I give something a rating of 1 or 2 stars, it automatically skips it and goes on to the next song.

    Hopefully this helps you better manage your SxSW torrent listening experience! I’ll try to remember to come back and share my favorites. I’m halfway through the B’s as I write this. Only 686 songs to go (and this is just the “Part 1” torrent)!

    Oh, and if you don’t want to bother with any of that, I made an Rdio playlist with the songs Rdio has out of the list (about 380 out of the 771 songs in Part 1).

  • Kevin’s Favorite Albums of 2011

    Hi, my name is Kevin, and I’m a music addict. I used to have a 2-3 album a week buying habit. But that’s all changed, thanks to Rdio. I go through the new releases every Tuesday and try to listen to all the interesting new stuff I can find. The good stuff gets added to my collection and the best stuff gets added to my phone. I now usually only buy one album a month, and that’s only because it’s not available on Rdio or is just that good. You might be saying to yourself, “But Kevin, you work on a music product. Why are you using Rdio?” Why? Because they do two different things. Rdio is good if you know exactly what you want to listen to (same with the other on-demand services like Spotify or Rhapsody). If you don’t, or want to discover new stuff, then radio services like SonicSeeds are what you want to use. I see us as complimentary to the on-demand services, not really completing with them (other than for ear time).

    The problem with Rdio is that it’s not easy to find the things you’ve added to your collection that were released in the past year, so this list isn’t complete yet. But, if you’re really eager to get the complete list, check back.

    And here it is, selections from my favorite albums of 2011. It was a great year for music, and I had a hard time choosing. I think there are about 20 albums represented here, all of them worth picking up or adding to your collection! Enjoy!

  • May 10 – The New Music That Makes Me Squee

    There’s a bumper crop of stuff I can’t wait to listen to today! Hooray! But, before I get into today’s music, it’s time to talk about work for just a sec. For the past several months, we’ve been working on a new product, and I’m really proud of it. It’s a new way to do web radio and it’s coming out later this summer. If you’re interested, and you should be, you can sign up for a beta invite and be one of the first people to experience it. I can’t wait to show it to you!

    Now, on to the music! And just like last week, I haven’t actually listened to these yet. I’ll try to come back and update things, but I’m pretty confident in today’s list.

    • The Burning Hell – Flux Capacitor – These guys are goofy and create some silly music, but it’s so damned good, I can’t help but dance along.
    • The Antlers – Burst Apart – Their first album, Hospice was heartbreaking and beautiful. I don’t know what to expect from this one, but I can’t wait to find out.
    • Sloan – The Double Cross – These guys are giants of Canadian indie rock and for good reason. They consistently produce tight killer rock songs.
    • Pearl and the Beard – Pearl and the Beard – I first heard them on nyctaper and quickly went and hunted down everything I could. I have high hopes for this one.
    • Black Moth Super Rainbow – Extra Flavor – I have a feeling this is mostly outtakes from their last album, but their last album was good enough that these should be pretty darn good.
    • Cornershop – Supercomputed – And you thought they only did Brimful of Asha. Their recent albums have been solid, and I didn’t even know this one was coming out. Happy surprise!

    There you go. If I find anything else, I’ll add it to the list. What are you listening to this week?

  • May 3 – New Music Tuesday

    I haven’t listened to any of these yet, but here’s the list of albums I gleaned from today’s new releases on Rdio. I’ll try to come back and update them once I’ve actually listened to them, but I’m a busy guy, so I’ll probably forget. Here’s the queue as it stands right now:

    There are some other things in the queue, but I have to go hop in the shower and get to work. I’ll try to hop back in and add other new stuff I find worth listening to and update the guesses with the results. Happy new music tuesday!

    What else should I be listening to?