Tops of My Pops for 7/1/07

A weekly look at what I'm listening to, from my Last.fm user stats:

Top Artists for the week ending July 1, 2007
1. DJ Shadow
2. Beastie Boys
2. Stars of the Lid
4. B. Fleischmann
5. Massive Attack
5. Radiohead
5. Spoon
8. David Bowie
8. James Brown
8. Josh Rouse
8. The Kleptones

The new all-instrumental Beastie Boys album, The Mix-Up, turns out not to be as punk-tinged as Mike D led us to believe, but it is at least a worthy equal to The In Sound from Way Out! (If you hadn't noticed already, the entire Beasties catalog is now available in the DRM-free iTunes Plus format)

Stars of the Lid just continue blowing me away with their latest, the two disc masterpiece And Their Refinement of the Decline. You'd think that as sublime as their sound is, it would start to sound tired or formulaic after a couple of albums. You'd be wrong...very, very wrong. Self-deprecating titles aside, they just keep getting better at taking my breath away.

Finally, it just doesn't get much better than DJ Shadow's amazing live album/DVD In Tune And On Time. I hope that he's figured out by now that all that brilliance he turned out preceding The Outsider wasn't just "hipster bullshit" after all.

Hmmm. That's a lot of things not being what they seem. I didn't realize I had a theme this week.

See also:
Gettin' stewy with it!
DJ Shadow's new video is Nintendo-riffic!
The 'Tops of My Pops' archives

Gettin' stewy with it!

Still trying to figure out what happened to DJ Shadow between The Private Press and The Outsider? It's called 'hyphy' and Jody Rosen over at Slate has got the 411 for the rest of us:

Go Dumb: Why hyphy is the best hip-hop right now

DJ Shadow's new video is Nintendo-riffic!

"This Time (I'm Gonna Try It My Way)", DJ Shadow's latest video off The Outsider was visualized by one of his fans as part of a competition. The winner is both cute and hilarious, using an animation style straight off an 8-bit Nintendo.

Watch it here.

Tops of My Pops for 10/8/06

A weekly look at what I'm listening to, from my Last.fm user stats:

Top Artists for the week ending Oct. 8, 2006
1. Beck
2. Vikter Duplaix
3. John Mayer
4. Andrew Weatherall
5. DJ Shadow
6. Section 25
7. David Bowie
8. Brian Eno
9. Wagon Christ
9. Harold Budd/Brian Eno

Still digesting the new releases from Beck, John Mayer and DJ Shadow, and I will not apologise for listening to any of them!

I'm enjoying all three (obviously for different reasons) but in particular spent the week playing The Information over and over again. This is the first time I've really felt like I was hearing producer Nigel Godrich's fingerprints on a Beck release – not that that's a bad thing. This one's a really hybrid of the silly quirky Beck with the introspective melodic Beck, all pretty perfectly balanced.

I'm enjoying The Outsider for what it is (Shadow's fuck-the-critics-I'm-gonna-have-fun album) and getting used to Mayer's new, more Clapton-esque stylings...not sure if it's made him better or worse in my book.

Also notably wedged in some time for listening to mixes by Duplaix (DJ-Kicks) and Weatherall (Fabric 19), and both ended up surprising me: Duplaix's was waaay better than I expected and Weatherall's was waaay worse.

See also:
The 'Tops of My Pops' archives