#^d 2014-11-03 #^h Music Week

Music: Current count 23966 [23933] rated (+33), 540 [543] unrated (-3).

Week didn't start until Wednesday, when I posted last Music Week, so the rate count rate was exceptionally high -- 30 is a very solid 7-day week, ridiculous for a 5-day week. Played a lot of new stuff on Rhapsody, including a couple records I had acquainted myself with on the road. While the top-rated records all got multiple spins, I didn't dawdle on the clear misses (other than Dan Weiss favorite Ex Hex).

I've especially been missing the recommendations of Jason Gubbels, so was glad to see his Third Quarter 2014 Wrap-Up -- really just a cribsheet. He tabs five records as "pretty great": Run the Jewels, Angaleena Presley, Leonard Cohen, Spider Bags, and Aphex Twin. I had three of those, but "ran the jewels" way too fast a week back to get any real feel for the record, not that I didn't like what I heard [**]. I gave Spider Bags another play: I probably have it too low [*], but not so much so that I felt compelled to regrade it. I only know about half of the "pretty goods" (including Elio Villafranca and Changari below), but only have Orlando Julius' Jaiyede Afro at A-. No major disagreements below that, although the "pretty meh" Bill Frisell was well received by my friends on the Cape (I wound up at [***]), and I dislike Jason Moran's All Rise more than my grade [*] suggests.

Thought I noticed a blip in B+(**) grades this week, so I went to the year-in-progress file to check. I assumed B+ grades would be evenly distributed, but there is a small bell curve in the middle: 168-185-162. Actually, that bump was much more pronounced last year: 222-318-262. And now that I think about it last year's distribution makes more sense: there should be fewer higher-rated records than lower, but my actual lower-rated counts are progressively attenuated as we get ever deeper into records I don't consider prospects. Consider this sequence, comparing this year's count-per-grade to last year's: [A-] 68.7%, [***] 75.6%, [**] 58.1%, [*] 61.8%, [B] 52.9%, [B-] 76.9%. The way I read this, I'm listening to less crap this year -- probably because I don't have the metacritic file to make me conscious of lousy records other people like.

By the way, adding up all these numbers shows I only have 64.2% as many records in the 2014 (738) file as in 2013 (1149 and still growing until I freeze it end of December). It seems unlikely I'll ever make that deficit up (although 1000 is probably a 50-50 proposition).

Get out and vote tomorrow. It's the only day of the year when you get to act like you live in a democracy, even though your choices aren't likely to amount to much and the powers-that-be have done all they could to rig the results. Also the day you can blame your fellow citizens for their foolish choices, as opposed to every other day when the problem is more likely to be the corruption of the system.

New records rated this week:

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week: