Album #6

A note of clarification about yesterday's #7 album of the year - The Airborne Toxic Event's "The Airborne Toxic Event."

It's not true that I couldn't find one favorable review. It's just that the ones who didn't like it, really didn't like it. For instance Pitchfork Media gave the album a 1.6. Out of ten. 1.6. For God's sake, Madonna's new album got a 5.3, and there's no way "Hard Candy" is over three times better than The Airborne Toxic Event.

I hate bush-league crap like that. Regard an excerpt from the review...
"The Airborne Toxic Event is an album that's almost insulting in its unoriginality; while the sound most outsiders attribute to Los Angeles has been marginalized to Metal Skool and the average customer at the Sunset Boulevard Guitar Center, TATE embodies the Hollywood ideal of paying lip service to the innovations of mavericks while trying to figure out how to reduce it to formula."

Bullcrap. That's a good album.

On to #6. Ray LaMontagne's "Gossip in the Grain"

Says the All Music Guide: "Ray LaMontagne's third album, Gossip in the Grain is as different from 2007's Till the Sun Turns Black as that album was from 2006's Trouble. The deep, heart-of-night atmospherics of the preceding disc have been jettisoned in favor of a brightly lit palette of textures and instruments that legendary producer and multi-instrumentalist Ethan Johns uses to illustrate LaMontagne's considerable ambitions as a writer."

Says the Boston Globe: "It flows much like a classic Van Morrison album and shares a sleepy kinship with work by contemporaries Cat Power and Ryan Adams as it moves from crisp Southern soul to raw-boned blues to gossamer acoustic folk-pop."

Says the Austin Chronicle: "It finds the perfect balance between his raw emotional pull, singed in the soft sway of "Let It Be Me" and on desperate ballad "Winter Birds," with Ethan Johns' deftly layered production and arrangements, which accents "I Still Care for You" with haunting steel and hazy reverb and "Sarah" with delicate strings."

Says I: "Top Ten Album of the Year!"