Cuban Linx: Year-End Lists, The End of Audiophilia, ’07 Twee Pop, New Clientele


The Boss takes a minute to decompress / Photo by TomVu

The New York Times writes about the death of the audiophile in the wake of the MP3 era. Now we just need a major publication to do a feature on the loudness war so we can all pop in our earbuds, listen to the embarrassingly mastered new Springsteen album and be depressed together.

Speaking of Springsteen, the Boss is doing well on year-end lists so far: Magic ranks highly on Harp and Paste‘s predictably guitar-playing-white-people-oriented lists, though it didn’t place on Stylus‘ Pitchfork-lite top 50. Biggest surprise so far? The mag-folkies and webzine-hipsters are both loving M.I.A.‘s Kala, a record I found disappointing and – for lack of a better word – boring; then again, it’s gotten nothing but good reviews. With her much-vaunted background, political bent and melting-pot sound, it’s no wonder she’s a critical darling, but I’ll be interested in seeing how she does with the average-Joe bloggers over the coming weeks.

Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands writes about the twee-leaning 1900s. On that front, I haven’t had the chance to write about the fantastic new Pants Yell! album yet, but take a listen on Hypem before it drops next week.

Spin has a new Clientele jam from the soundtrack of new film The Bigtop. Though the track was written by director Devon Reed, it’s got all the lush beauty of anything from this year’s wonderful God Save the Clientele.

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