I’m sure I’m also speaking for the band when I give a huge thanks to La Blogotheque for choosing Forest Fire’s Survival as the Top Album of 2008 (above even Fleet Foxes, woohoo!)

Here’s my loose (i.e. poor) translation of Le Blogotheque’s éloge en français:

[Survival is] [a] rare album, released on a blog label, available only on the internet, that can be downloaded for free or for just a few dollars. An album that you can not find in a store, that hasn’t been criticized by Pitchfork, Mojo, or Inrocks, and that has had no advertising or publicity. An album that was intended to be forgotten at the end of the year. All the more reason to place this album at the top of the top.

It is an excellent album, and the one I listened to most this year. Raw, powerful songs, alternately nervous and hypnotic, like a drug-hazy stroll through the history of song.

I repeat today what I said 6 months ago: download Survival and you’ve made the best acquisition of the year.

Yes, the limited-edition CD (both “Giant-Size” and regular) is long sold-out, but as mentioned, you can still download the entire album, and I strongly urge you to do so.

The Catbirdseat Mix: January 2009

• Women - “Black Rice”
• Robert Pollard - “Imaginary Queen Anne”
• Lake - “Heaven”
• Graham Smith & KGW - “I Will Own You”
• The Tallest Man On Earth - “A Field of Birds”
• Jeff Hanson - “This Time It Will”
• The Clean - “Twist Top”
• Clear Tigers - “Boredom”
• Bom Bom -”Pop I Kras”
• Envelopes -”Free Jazz”
• East River Pipe - “Druglife”

[or subscribe to the podcast here.]

Tracklist:

• Spanish Gold, 2044
• Paper Lace
• Heartswarm
• Settle on Your Skin
• Ballad of a Swan Lake, Or, Daniel’s Song
• Peace
• Spider
• A Hand at Dusk
• Warlock Psychologist

No MP3, so here are some tracks from Beast Moans:

Our friends at Oregon’s Bend Bulletin sent over a link to their 2-part “Best of 2008″ Mix. Titled Near/Far 2008, it’s 1 “disc” of Oregonian bands, and 1 “disc” of national bands, including No Age, Jamie Lidell, Blitzen Trapper, and Pitchfork’s favorite, Fleet Foxes. Go on over and download the whole shebang, or heck, just cherry-pick the tracks you want– it’s all free and legal.

and while we’re on the subject, Matthew has just finished his 3-part “Favorites of 2008″ Fluxcast– be sure and check those out too.

All of you people that like good things, listen up: One of the hands-down classics of ’80s kiwi rock, The Clean’s Compilation, has just been reissued in an insanely-limited vinyl edition by Little Axe/Mississippi Records. There are only 300 copies, and they are apparently flying off the shelves very quickly– I don’t even know which store to send you to, so I’ll just tell you to Google it.

I can’t guarantee you the same intense happiness that I get from listening to the Clean, but I urge you to give it a shot and see:

I did a number of posts this year on an unassuming record by Colin McCann, guitarist for Wilderness. The Lord Dog Bird is a solo effort, done by McCann on his home four-track while Wilderness was on extended hiatus. It’s a slightly drony, atmospheric record, and one that J. Catbird nailed pretty accurately when she walked into the room and observed, “this sounds a bit like Peter Gabriel singing with Wolf Parade.”

I wasn’t originally planning to do yet another post on this record, but after seeing this note in a recent Jagjaguwar Year-End Wrap-Up email:

The Lord Dog Bird "The Lord Dog Bird" (8/5/08)
SUGGESTED LIST: Best Album You Never Heard

…and then this, in Sean’s “Best 50 Songs of 2008″ post:

#32- The Lord Dog Bird:
The same way that a lantern reminds me of a campfire,
this reminds me of early Wolf Parade...
and a woefully ignored album!

…I felt compelled to write this up. This record deserves to be heard, and you may just be pleasantly surprised. I’m not saying it’s a life-changer or anything; it’s really a very modest, unpretentious record… but it’s got that little spark of magic in it that I find so sorely lacking from so much of the music I hear today. So although I don’t do the “Top 10 Albums List” thing anymore, I will say this: The Lord Dog Bird is one of my favorite records I heard this year.

So I’m retiring that Twitter experiment, but in case you may find some value in my list of this week’s “picks,” I re-present them here:

• Cat Power - Dark End of the Street Dbl 10″ Vinyl EP
• Fennesz - June Vinyl
• The Jam - In The City Vinyl Reissue
• The Nerves - One Way Ticket
• Parenthetical Girls - Entanglements Vinyl
• Pavement - Brighten The Corners - Nicene Creedence Edition
• The Smiths - Singles Box (7-inch Singles) (* Amazon is saying “discontinued,” but check Rhino UK here)
• The Who - Quadrophenia Limited 2xLP Vinyl Reissue
• Thin Lizzy - Jailbreak Vinyl Reissue

I know there’s a whole lot of vinyl in that list, but that’s not entirely because of my preference; it also has to do with the fact that new album releases for the year pretty much cease in December. Matter of fact, this week is probably the last real week of releases for the year.

Preeminent Boston shoegaze/sneakyflute band Swirlies are back on active duty, and playing 3 East Coast shows in early 2009.

2/26 - Philadelphia, PA - Johnny Brenda’s
2/27 - NYC - Mercury Lounge
2/28 - Cambridge, MA - Middle East

I discovered them all those years ago only because there was a time when I bought almost anything that came out on Taang (Slapshot, anyone?).

These days, it looks like you can download pretty much all Swirlies albums for free, like They Spent Their Wild Youthful Days in the Glittering World of the Salons, which is here and What To Do About Them, which is here. It’s all kosher, I’m not sending you to Megaupload links there– the band themselves are the ones givin’ it all away.

One last thing: there’s also a Swirlies tribute album due at Archive.Org any day now. That one, too, is free.

I’m detecting an odd, if fascinating tone to the usual kvetching this time around. It’s not the same old sux/rulz dichotomy: rather, there seems to be a distinct lack of trust, a suspicion of the listmakers’ motives.

Scott also points out this post from BG’s Tumblr (who wonders just how often you listen to those albums you called “Best” last year) and the inevitable ILM thread which I’m certain you don’t want to get involved in.

Ultimately, I came to Raptoravatar’s response to Scott’s post, in which he proffered this:

I know that No Age’s Nouns is going to be in my top five and that I can make a case for it being a good record.  However, I know that when I’m talking about that record I’m also talking about this whole past summer where I listened to it almost every day.  My case for that record is as much about drunken late night bike rides where every speck of grime takes on a secret life, hitting taco trucks at 1 am, poetic graffitti in weird industrial areas, and giddy mosh pits as it is the hermeneutic of “Epic Punk” as understood through the influence of Husker Du.

And what struck me about that is that it rings of exactly what I think a Top/Best/Favorite list should be. It should be the music that, for whatever reason, just really resonated with the listmaker. The music that became part of their lives, instead of part of their “collection.” I realize that makes the lists WHOLLY idiosyncratic and subjective… but I feel like that’s the whole point. Music ain’t science, it ain’t statistics. It’s lust, and heartbreak, and anxiety, and confusion. It’s Elvis’ hips, and Joe Strummer’s guitar. It’s the too-short life of Ian Curtis.

It seems like at some point in the past few years, we decided that it was more important to value music against some nebulous set of criteria that we can apply numerical values to. Let’s keep it up and maybe one day, we can finally squeeze ALL the fun out of this.