My choice for Counting Crows’ best album is a close contest between their 1993 debut August and Everything After and their fourth release, 2002’s Hard Candy. Forced to choose, I would likely side with Hard Candy.
Today’s random SOTD, ‘Carriage,’ is a big reason why. This is a beautiful and poignant song that plays to Adam Duritz’s strengths as a lyricist and vocalist and gives the band plenty of space to fill a rather sparse song with moments of musical grace.
Of all the Bob Dylan Bootleg Series releases, volume 11 (The Basement Tapes Complete) is definitely the most impressive.
Spanning six discs and 138 tracks, this volume contains all of the unreleased tracks recorded by Dylan and The Band in the basement of a house called Big Pink between May and October of 1967.
I’m most excited by the Decades series when I’m served up albums like this one. One of 2000’s most acclaimed releases is by a band called Godspeed You! Black Emperor with the glorious title Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven.
As I write this I haven’t heard a single note, but whether it’s a disaster or a new favorite, I’m excited to live for a little while in the bubble of uncertainty before I dive in and figure out what this thing is. Here goes!
In contrast to my last three selections, Outkast is a band I’ve featured on the blog several times already. And today’s 2000 album, Stankonia, is at least somewhat familiar to me.
Stankonia is the Atlanta rap duo’s fourth studio album. They would follow it up with 2003’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below (essentially two solo albums packaged as a double album under the band’s name) and 2006’s Idlewild (a soundtrack album to a film Big Boi and Andre 3000 starred in). Then they split up.
I’m three for three this week on bands I’ve surprisingly never featured before. I would have sworn that I’d at least blogged about Modest Mouse’s 2004 hit ‘Float On,’ but alas, I have not.
Like Sleater-Kinney, Modest Mouse hails from Washington state. I guess something about those Pacific Northwest bands really struck a nerve in the year 2000.
Meet Me In Montauk 