I'll be real irregular for the duration of the year (as I have been all year). It's coming down to crunch time for me listening to music and making my choices for my favorite 25 (30?) of the year. And yeah, all lists are detritus, but they're good rubbish, fun to read. Good news for me is that I've listened to a million albums in the last few weeks. Bad news is that I'm trying to process them all and have something intelligent to say about them all...

Anyways, some discoveries this year that won't make the list, had they been released in '07, or weren't live reissues. In alphabetical order (iTunes!):

• Alan Braxe and Friends: The Upper Cuts -- Here's an something that describes this album: holy sh*t. Had all dance music been made like this, like forever, we'd be eating ice cream in Iraq right now and have 10x the population on the globe.
• Animal Collective: Here Comes the Indian -- I've sung the praises of this guy before, but really got turned onto it again due to circumstance. I drove down a weird, empty back highway in South Jersey this year, passing farms, creepy towns with dysfunctional train stations and kids in Misfits shirts, and, no joke, Cowtown Rodeo.
  
• Beanie Sigel: The B. Coming -- Kick my own ass for not getting this one earlier. Unbelievable lyricism. Philly too.
• Boredoms: Vision Creaton Newsun -- Incredible psych -- huge and triumphant and visceral stuff that comes at you from every angle.
• Burning Airlines: Mission: Control -- Rediscovered this one, my copy was destroyed. Great not-quite-emo punk by the dude that used to front Jawbox.
• Dinosaur Jr.: Without A Sound -- Major label indie is usually watered down, but in Dinosaur's case, it kinda made sense. Their classic rock sensibility is on 11 here, while J.'s stoned drawl is never more perfect.
• Drunks With Guns -- Don't really know if the songs I downloaded are an album or not, but this is what a punk bands supposed to sound like. The St. Louis boys are detached degenerates, playing stupidly drunk and brutal hardcore, slowed down like a 45 going 33 just so you can get a quick view of the split seams and buckling supports just before it collapses.
• Grateful Dead: Fillmore West 1969 -- Really wild stuff, right around the time that it looked like the Dead were going to veer straight off into the deep end. Perfect tension between structure and chaos and 100x better than their 80's watered down pap.
• The Jesus Lizard: Goat -- Again, this is how heavy punk should sound. Disenchanted, hard and pretty damn funny ("Mouth Breather").
• The Magnetic Fields: 69 Love Songs -- Perfect. Incredible genius.
• Marah: Kids In Philly -- Who needs Bruce Springsteen when "Point Breeze" outdoes most of Born to Run? Seriously.
• Pedro the Lion: Control -- This may really be one of my favorite albums ever. Not a dull spot in this album (maybe "Priests and Paramedics", but it follows "Second Best" which is the best song ever -- right now.) David Bazan has an unfortunate stigma as a dude who loves JC, scaring off all people that are too cool or disenfranchised by the whole scene. But, hell, this is a devastating, incapacitating record that just gets better on each listen.
• Sleater-Kinney: The Woods -- Oops. Missed this one last year. Gonna miss this band -- talk about power...
  
• Todd Rundgren: A Wizard, A True Star -- For "Just One Victory" alone? Possibly. Dude's a pretty rad songwriter though.