#^d 2018-01-02 #^h Music Week

Music: Current count 29119 [29058] rated (+61), 364 [388] unrated (-24).

Initial calculation on rated count was +41, which seemed plausible enough, but when I moved the albums list from the scratch file to the notebook I counted 44, so clearly something was amiss. I went back and searched for unrated albums and found 20 I had failed to update -- obviously going back before last week, in some cases more than a year. I don't have a lot of unrated physical 2017 CDs -- maybe a dozen, including some inconvenient but still playable vinyl -- so I've been doing a lot of streaming, especially items from interesting EOY lists, and a fair number of them have been short: the Dawn Oberg is just three songs, more are legitimately EPs, and with the refocusing on vinyl a lot of regular albums clock in close to 30 minutes. I try to work faster streaming, avoiding replays unless I really feel the need to confirm a good record, and short goes faster still.

December's Streamnotes went up on the last possible day, which has in turn pushed Weekend Roundup and this post a day later than normal -- three-day weekends and all that.

I got a last minute Pazz & Jop invite, thanks to some strings Bob Christgau pulled. I finally did a quick sort on my Best Non-Jazz list without actually resampling anything, then slipped William Parker's Meditation/Resurrection into the top ten to maintain a little jazz cred. (Also bumps Kendrick Lamar's Damn, which I have little doubt will win without me.) I have no confidence that these are the ten best (mostly non-jazz) albums of 2017, but they are good ones, interesting ones, ones worth noting:

  1. William Parker Quartets: Meditation/Resurrection (AUM Fidelity) 12
  2. Orchestra Baobab: Tribute to Ndiouga Dieng (Nonesuch/World Circuit) 10
  3. Sylvan Esso: What Now (Loma Vista) 10
  4. Pere Ubu: 20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo (Cherry Red) 10
  5. Joey Bada$$: All-Amerikkkan Bada$$ (Pro Era/Cinematic) 10
  6. Hamell on Trial: Tackle Box (New West) 10
  7. Re-TROS: Before the Applause (Modern Sky Entertainment) 10
  8. The Perceptionists: Resolution (Mello Music Group) 10
  9. Steve Earle & the Dukes: So You Wannabe an Outlaw (Warner Bros.) 9
  10. Craig Finn: We All Want the Same Things (Partisan) 9

I don't keep track of singles, so I'm hopeless there. One idea that did occur to me was to look up anti-Trump songs. I found lists from Guardian, Mic, Pitchfork, and Rolling Stone. In the end, I picked (only seven, but I expected zero):

Obviously, could have done better had I spent more time, but top four would probably have hung on. I did manage to sample another half-dozen songs, including Fiona Apple's "Tiny Hands" and YG's "FDT" (but didn't get to Brujeria's "Viva Presidente Trump!" -- on virtually all the lists -- until too late).

New records rated this week:

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