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So I’m a liar. It’s not the first time and it won’t be the last. Between some job-related scrambling and a three-day-long headache that ended with a CAT scan and a few many fistfuls of Advil/Tylenol/HeavierStuff, I didn’t manage to get this thing online before the new year swung around.

The good news is, three days in, this year is basically the same as the last, so you can still listen to this. It’s cool. I promise.

I know 2016 was supposedly an annus horribilis -- and we did lose many more musical icons (not to be confused with Mandy Moore, Musical Icon) in a single revolution than we ever should* -- but honestly, if 2016 had ended on November 7th, I think we’d all be talking about the year just past in much different terms. And while I’m pretty dubious that 2017 will be anything but a disaster for our most vulnerable and an introduction to vulnerability for a whole bunch more of us (who hadn’t considered we’d be there, perhaps ever, in our lifetimes), the truth is 2016 itself was actually a pretty good year -- personally, and I think collectively. So while next year’s mixtape might just be a track-list etched by a thousand bent fingernails on the walls of the work camp, this year’s mix pretty fairly reflects what was, by and large, a positive experience when lived from day to day. I’m gonna miss it like candy.

The seventh** edition of my year-end mixtape arrives in much the same way last year’s did: with maybe six songs that were locks to make this list from the jump, and then a lot of rooting through the 300-odd tracks on my Top Tracks of 2016 playlist***. I’ve, as always, avoided any big pop hits -- otherwise this years list might just be O.T. Genasis feat. Young Dolph on loop -- but I’ve backed away from the tradition of keeping tracks from my Top Ten albums off of the list. Truth is, even when I wasn’t listening to those albums, it was certain tracks from those albums I kept coming back to, and this year’s mix would feel incomplete without them. They’re the anchor pieces.

If last year’s mix trended darker, this year’s feels a little brighter, a little more hopeful. It's not all wide-eyed; if anything, this year’s selections are a little more introspective than the last. But even its denser moments generally offer something to dream on.

It’s also the first mix I’ve made where every track is available on Spotify****. That’s probably largely reflective of my listening habits -- Spotify’s ease of use, and of playlist compilation, led me to spending less time on SoundCloud and the like, because even once you find something good, it’s frankly a pain to grab music from elsewhere and then sync it to Spotify, especially when I often go weeks without touching my MacBook. I do 90% of my personal computing on my mobile now. The medium is the message, or something. (The message, however, is rarely on Medium.)

Enough of the rambles; on with the show.

Makeup For The Silence - Best Of 2016

Empty - Garbage

Purge - Frameworks

Fall On Me - Kitten

Bury It - CHVRCHES (feat. Hayley Williams)

Tiger Hologram - Swet Shop Boys

Zadok - Myrone

Bottle It Up - Sherwood

Me & Magdalena (Version 2) - The Monkees

Sell My Head - Tancred

Humblest Pleasures - Turnover

Blood In The Cut - K. Flay

Goodness, Pt. 2 - The Hotelier

Broken Drum - Cash Cash (feat. Fitz of Fitz & the Tantrums)

I Am Chemistry - Yeasayer

No Time Valentine - Roy English

All Night - King Neptune

Rebecca - Against Me!

U-turn - Tegan & Sara

The Sound - The 1975

May I Have This Dance - Francis & the Lights

Deep Six Textbook - Let’s Eat Grandma

17th Street Treatment Centre - John K. Samson

click image to download

I’ll be back tomorrow with some more thoughts on the Year In Music and my personal listening habits, and then we’ll get into the business of counting down. I’m not sure I’ll go in quite as deep as I typically do this time around (that aforementioned work stuff, again), but I’m not ruling it out either.

*one of whom will be showing up on my Top Ten in the coming weeks

**You can always find the complete collection of mixes which have appeared on Makeup For The Silence, as well as all the playlists I’ve contributed to elsewhere, right over here.

***I’ve archived my 2016 list and rolled my 2017 one right on top, so if you were subscribed, you should be following 2017 now. If not, follow along right here.

****...for now. Of course, tracks on Spotify come and go on the wind and the whim, so I still strongly recommending downloading. That said, you can stream it here.

I’m Still Here

... for now.

Turns out it’s been an entire year since I posted something over here.

I hope you’ve been well.

Between moving and working and having a kid and Tumblr’s transformation from a repository of great music writing/writers to whatever you’d call a kudzu patch if kudzu was made entirely of animated GIFs of TV shows I don’t watch, it just hasn’t happened. Indeed, if you were paying attention, you’d have noticed I never even wrote up last year’s Top Ten list. (If you want to see what albums made it, click over to my Lists page -- it’s largely the same as what I voted for in last year’s Pazz & Jop.)

While I’ve slowed down a bit, I’m still doing regular music writing, albeit largely in print. Tumblr, in its infinite glitchiness, has eaten all of my links on a number of my subpages, including my clips page, so I’ve been very delinquent in updating it and linking out copies of my print pieces. That said, I’ve got some story ideas I’d like to pick up on in the new year, and while I should be more diligent on pitching new outlets, I also have a few that I don’t think will find a home if I don’t make one for them. (The nice part about having a day job -- I can afford to pursue things I won’t get paid for, if I can find the time.) Plus, I’d like to start putting my small-but-not-Twitter-small ideas down again. So I’m hoping that in 2017, I’ll be doing more writing over here... kinda.

Kinda, because I’m sort of over Tumblr, and one of those first when-I-find-time projects will be to move Makeup For The Silence elsewhere. If you happen to visit via actually typing the site name in a browser or with a bookmark or something, you’ve got nothing to worry about -- wherever I go, the URL will follow. If you follow along via Tumblr dashboard...maybe? I may still keep the blog portion of the site here (with a little necessary pruning) and just port all the static pages elsewhere. Or I might move my blogging to a Wordpress or to Medium or somewhere else. If I do that, I’ll be sure to let you know, repeatedly.

But before those things happen, I’m going to proceed with the end of the year as I typically do, last year excepted. So, tomorrow, the year-end mixtape will go up. On Friday (or maybe tomorrow too), some thoughts on 2016 in music and outside of it, and maybe some numbers and links and stuff to go along with them. And then once the new year rolls around, my Top Ten Albums Of 2016 -- with write-ups, I promise!

Here we go again...

#makeup for the silence #makeupforthesilence #top ten #top 10 #2016 #meta

If you are in the future, you are about to read my Top Twelve Albums of 2014

if you are in the present, we now return you to your regularly scheduled program, already in progress

(which is to say things are getting back to normal around here!)

((and don’t forget, you can find all my past Top Ten’s right here!)

#meta #text #makeupforthesilence #makeup for the silence #top ten #top 10 #2014

MY (WHOLLY IDIOSYNCRATIC) TOP TEN ALBUMS OF 2014

Starting today, I’ll be counting down my Top Albums of the last year, one each day until we hit #1.

As I've done for the last few years, I'm jettisoning the traditional "album" approach and will be considering each artist's entire output for the year. In an era ruled by digital releases, SoundCloud demos and artists who often see no reason to hold songs back just for the sake of selling them as a collection, it's the only approach that makes sense to me. Sure, many artists still work on a traditional release schedule -- it's just that I don't see any reason to penalize those who don't. If I could listen to it this year, it should count, regardless of how it's been packaged. And indeed, nearly half of this year's list contains EP's, 7"s, singles, demos, or other output outside of the traditional LP format.

That's not to say that those packaging decisions aren't important -- in fact, there are a few entries on this list that rank where they do specifically because they evidence craftsmanship in their sequencing and their curation. Making a great album is a larger task than releasing a handful of great singles, and there's a particular joy in listening to an album that holds your interest from front to back and compels you to pay attention. That joy is certainly a consideration; it's one, among many.

Finally, as usual, I couldn't hold myself to only 10 entries on this year's Top Ten list. So without further ado, here comes #12!

#top ten #top 10 #2014 #makeup for the silence #makeupforthesilence #meta #text

If you are in the future, you are about to read my Top Twelve Albums of 2013

if you are in the present, we now return you to your regularly scheduled program, already in progress

(which is to say things are getting back to normal around here!)

((and don’t forget, you can find all my past Top Ten’s right here!)

#meta #text #makeupforthesilence #makeup for the silence

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Simple Math 2013: Add It Up

Violent Femmes - Add It Up

I don't think I'm going to have nearly as much to say this time around as I did in last year's Simple Math. I once again fell short on plans to expand my writing venues (though, as usual, there is stuff brewing which may or may not come to fruition), but that said, I compensated by greatly expanding the sorts of pieces I wrote this year over at PropertyOfZack. (As always, links to everything I've written here). It's been comforting to see the site grow along with me, to see our staff grow and mature and, along with that, allow me to range further afield from the bread-and-butter reviews writing. I actually see myself doing more reviews this year -- I rather miss digging into a piece of work in detail like that -- but all the actual listening involved is terrible time-consuming, time I find myself less and less willing to dedicate. Domesticity is really underrated, isn't it?* I greatly enjoy having the freedom to spend time outside the review rubric, and I plan to continue taking advantage of that.

*There is one bit I need to work on for myself -- when I'm hanging out w my fiancee (feels great to type that, btw!) I need to get more OK with ignoring her to work on writing. It's not any pressure that she's ever put on me, it's merely that I feel neglectful when I'm ignoring her in favor of my own work. It's silly and I need to get over it.

I would like, this year, to start writing more for other outlets, just as I said I would last year and the year before; it's the stuff that comes before the writing that keeps holding me up. Perhaps I really need to commit to exploring my options more, and to knocking on doors -- they ain't gonna open themselves. One Week One Band was a blast, and I want to keep pushing myself on that sort of thing as well -- I've had a couple ideas in the past for true deep dives -- either a) writing my way through a band's catalog (see either my friend Will Stegemann's A Year Of Billy Joel or the great Matthew Perpetua's REM blog Pop Songs 07-08 for some ideas), or else b) working on a book / extensive series of articles similar to Steven Hyden's marvelous Whatever Happened To Alternative Nation (though, as is typical of me, probably regarding subject matter about which I'd prove not just the author but also the majority of the audience). Perhaps by actually announcing it here I'll motivate myself to do more than think about it and begin at least putting some preliminary content down.

I also totally failed on last year's pledge to listen to fewer podcasts; indeed, it only got worse this year. There's such a glut of content out there, good content, that it's literally impossible for me to keep up on it all, and the truth is a lot of times I enjoy listening to music discussion (or some of the other stuff I keep up on via podcast, like sports and tech) even more than I enjoy listening to the music being discussed. I do want to listen to more music in 2014, but I think what I really need to do is to just listen to what I enjoy and resolve to not give myself unnecessary agita over it. I started listening to music because I enjoyed it; if I'm listening to podcasts because I enjoy them, I shouldn't feel any sort of angst over that. If someone wants to pay me for my listening time, I'll listen to what I need to; outside of that, my plan is to simply take pleasure in listening to whatever pleases me.

So how did I spend my listening time this year? As of December 31st, 2013:

By my count, over the course of the year I listened to 139 LPs, EPs, 7"s, splits or comps released in 2013.

There were 1,588 songs released in 2013 added to my iTunes this year.

In total, songs from 2013 added to my iTunes library this year received 2,293 plays. I had an additional 544 streams on Spotify. In total**, I had 2,837 plays this year. **I also had a number of plays via YouTube and Bandcamp, unfortunately I don't really have a way to tally them.

My albums with the most track plays were***:

Kanye West - Yeezus (136)

Fall Out Boy - Save Rock And Roll (90)

The Summer Set - Legendary (71)

Transit - Young New England (67)

Little Bombs - New Album Demos (49) ***as always, this skews toward albums I reviewed / was planning to review. Excluding Legendary and Young New England, Sparks The Rescue - Truth Inside The Fiction (35) would have been next up

My most played songs were****

Cassadee Pope - Good Times (17)

Fall Out Boy - My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark (15)

Kanye West - New Slaves (14)

Kanye West - On Sight (14)

Kanye West - I'm In It (14) ****I honestly have no explanation for that Cassadee Pope track -- I can't even remember what it sounds like. It might be a scrobbling error. Moving past tracks where the whole album received a great deal of play and on to true(r) singles, The Reign Of Kindo - Feeling In The Night and Francis & the Lights - Etc. both clock in at (11).

I attended 58 individual shows this year, along with 2 days of Skate & Surf, 34 shows over 6 days of SXSW, 1 day of Governor's Ball, 1 day of Warped Tour, 3 days of Riot Fest Chicago, 14 shows over 3 days of CMJ, and 5 shows during a Las Vegas trip, for a total of 118 shows.

At these shows/festivals, I saw (by my inexact count) 309 different sets played.

While I only wrote 3 album/single reviews this year (along with 7 lighthearted Christmas reviews), I refocused much of my writing time to other music-related writing. I wrote 1 live performance review, took part in 28 interviews, wholly authored 2 feature pieces and contributed to 29 others, filed 8 pieces from SXSW and 1 from Riot Fest, contributed entries/blurbs to 23 POZ Staff Playlists, and wrote 17 pieces on The Maine for One Week One Band. It's easily the most writing I've done in a year yet.

The full list of albums and EPs from 2013***** that I’ve listened to this year, alphabetical by artist, is after the cut.

#simple math #top ten #top 10 #meta #makeupforthesilence #makeup for the silence #2013 #music #mp3 #violent femmes #add it up

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Simple Math 2012: Everything Counts

Depeche Mode - Everything Counts

I'm not really one for New Years resolutions. That said, as long as we're using the turn of the calendar to drop another breadcrumb onto this trail we call life (and grind out lists, because everybody loves lists!), I might as well take this moment to reflect on whatever got accomplished over the past twelve months, and set out some goals for the year ahead.

One place where I fell short of my plans was in the writing department. I actually stepped up my game a bit, writing more on PropertyOfZack than ever (despite mentally checking out for the final two months of the year). But I had hoped to branch out more, both in terms of places where my writing appears and in terms of the kinds of pieces I'm writing. On the former, I did some work for a site that never got off the ground, and made some halfhearted attempts at finding some additional places to run my work, but this year I'd like to get a little more serious about pitching stories and such. (You can find links to almost everything I did write here, and a little bit more here). Per the latter, the good news is that 2013 is already looking up: I've got a major project happening at One Week One Band in March, and we're hard at work behind the scenes at PoZ on expanding our non-news offerings (in particular, I have a few plans for long form pieces that I'm set on venturing into in 2013). I even have a kinda-sorta book idea that I'm probably way over my head venturing into (and which probably lacks any sort of readership appeal outside of, oh, me). In general, I'm making little steps, and little steps are good and important, but this year I want to push myself to take bigger ones.

The other quasi-resolution I made last year was to listen to fewer podcasts, and in that plan I failed miserably. If the podcast market felt waterlogged in 2011, 2012 brought a level of saturation I didn't even know was possible, especially when it came to music podcasts. Programs like Going Off Track, Washed Up Emo, Nothing To Write Home About, and 100 Words Or Less all became essential listening. Add to that a proliferation of tech and baseball podcasts, and for much of the year it felt like that was all I was listening to -- something that's borne out in my listening numbers. The number of new* albums/tracks I listened to was barely half what I did in 2011, and the number of listens I gave to those tracks was down even further. I enjoy writing about music, but this year it felt like the music I was listening to explicitly for the purpose of writing about it dominated listening for pleasure.

*It's probably worth noting that none of the below numbers include time spent listening to pre-2012 releases. While that's certainly a significant amount of my listening time, I'd guess that, proportionally, it was about as far down as my new-music-listening time.

Which is not to imply I didn't enjoy much of that listening; many of those albums I wrote about wound up as my favorites for the year, and would have gotten the plays regardless. And I saw as much music live as I did last year, which was almost exclusively for my own enjoyment's sake. But running through my most-played songs and albums of 2012 on last.fm, it's a muddled mess of stuff I loved and stuff I didn't care for, and while I suppose spending time on stuff I don't much care for is just one small, necessary downside to choosing to write about music in a serious sort of way, not spending more time with music I did love doesn't have to be a side effect of that effort. So, in 2013, I'm doubling down on that whole fewer-podcasts-thing, and making a conscious effort to prioritize listening to music over chatter.

Now with all that out of the way, on to the numbers!

So how did I spend my listening time this year? As of December 29, 2012:

By my count, over the course of the year I listened to 121 LPs, EPs, 7"s, Splits or Comps released in 2012.

There were 1,155 songs added to my iTunes this year that received at least one play (unlike last year, this only includes tracks from 2012 releases).

In total, songs from 2012 added to my iTunes library this year received 3,074 plays.

My albums with the most track plays were**:

Dave Melillo - Eskimo Kisses (143)

The Forecast - Everybody Left (110)

Foxy Shazam - Church Of Rock And Roll (109)

Sharks - No Gods (108)

John K. Samson - Provincial (97) **This year's numbers are almost entirely skewed toward albums I listened to (at least in part) for review. The album with the most track plays that I listened to merely for pleasure this year: Our Lady Peace - Curve (69)

My most played songs were***:

The Maine - Good Love (16)

The Forecast - Clear Eyes, Full Hearts (15)

Eisley - Laugh It Off (14)

The Forecast - Skyline (14)

Sharks - Matthew's Baby (14) *** The same skew applies here. The song with the most plays that I listened to merely for pleasure this year: Our Lady Peace - Find Our Way (11)

I attended 93 shows this year, in addition to a week of SXSW and the first three days of CMJ.

At these shows/festivals, I saw (by my inexact count) 352 different sets played.

I wrote 42 album reviews, along with eight lighthearted Christmas song reviews this year. In general I try to ensure that every album I review gets at least ten full listens over the span of at least a week, though I apparently fell short of that a bit this year. I also wrote one live performance review (of four different performances), and conducted fifteen interviews which were all published in Q&A form.

The full list of albums and EPs from 2012**** that I’ve listened to this year, alphabetical by artist, is after the cut.