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An (extremely long!) list for now; perhaps I’ll include some thoughts next time…. It’s a long entry, so look beyond the jump.
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Things have gotten a bit hectic here at the Autumnshades HQ, and while I’ve been holding up my goal of listening to 5 albums per week that I’m not reviewing, I haven’t gotten the chance to write about ’em. Today is, unfortunately, no less pressed for time; therefore, I offer 4-word reviews of the 15 non-review albums I’ve been listening to over the past 3 weeks.

7 March – 13 March 2010
1) Nico: The End… (Island, 1974). Cale + Eno + Nico = swoon.
2) Mogwai: Young Team (Jetset, 1997). Indeed, Mogwai fear Satan.
3) Sparklehorse: Good Morning Spider (Capitol, 1999). Rest in peace, Linkous.
4) Camera Obscura: Let’s Get Out of This Country (Merge, 2006). Ready to be heartbroken.
5) Aimee Mann: @#%&*! Smilers (SuperEgo, 2008). Delightfully wry, acerbic pop.

28 February – 6 March 2010
1) Tom Waits: Small Change (Elektra, 1976). The piano’s been drinking.
2) Jay-Z: the Blueprint (Roc-A-Fella, 2001). H to the Izzo.
3) Ryan Adams & the Cardinals: Cold Roses (Lost Highway, 2005). Gets even better retrospectively.
4) Samara Lubelski: Parallel Suns (The Social Registry, 2007). Ethereal, moody, pretty, sweet.
5) Bowerbirds: Hymns for a Dark Horse (Dead Oceans, 2008). Not quite as remembered.

21 February – 27 February 2010
1) Jonatha Brooke: 10¢ Wings (MCA, 1997). Sweet, Lilith folk-pop.
2) Son Volt: Wide Swing Tremolo (Warner Brothers, 1998). Uncle Tupelo’s better half.
3) Jonatha Brooke: the Works (Bad Dog Records, 2008). Woodie Guthrie improves anything.
4) Richard Hawley: Truelove’s Gutter (Mute, 2009). He could sing Broadway.
5) Black Eyed Peas: The E.N.D. (Interscope, 2009). Make it stop. PLEASE.

This week is a “catching up on promos” edition:

1) Levon Helm: Electric Dirty (Vanguard, 2009). Not sure why I don’t listen to more Levon Helm– or why it took me so long to get around to this one– but there are some great moments here: the droney “Golden Bird” and the nice vocals on “You Can’t Lose What You Ain’t Never Had”. I feel like this album took a few songs to nestle into its groove, though.

2) Laura Veirs: July Flame (Raven Marching Band Records, 2010). Laura Veirs is an artist who, much like Nina Nastasia, doesn’t connect with me as much as she should. Of the two, Nastasia has a few records that I go back to more often than Veirs does, but it might just be a recording thing: there was much about Veirs’s live show that I quite enjoyed when I saw her a few years ago. There’s something about Veirs’s albums that just doesn’t stick with me, though, and unfortunately, July Flame didn’t have much lasting power to my ears, although a few tracks (namely, “Wide-Eyed, Legless”) were lovely.

3) Four Tet: There Is Love In You (Domino, 2010). Hey, remember how a few weeks ago, I wrote about how much I love Fridge and bemoaned that I just couldn’t connect with Four Tet in the same way? Well, I take it all back: There Is Love In You is fantastic and beautiful and haunting and powerful and resonated with me from its very first note.

4) Ali Farka Touré & Toumani Diabaté: Ali & Toumani (Nonesuch, 2010). It’s always weird listening to someone’s last recording; I felt that last week as I was writing about Jack Rose‘s excellent Luck in the Valley, and I feel it even more so on Ali & Toumani. I’m not sure why this album took so long to come out (it was recorded in 2005, and Touré passed away in 2006; Diabaté is still alive), but there’s just such a quiet intensity here, and you can feel the friendship and respect between these two Malian musicians in this album.

5) Emma Pollock: The Law of Large Numbers (Chemikal Underground, 2010). Admittedly, I was never the hugest Delgados fan, but I enjoyed Pollock‘s first solo album. This new one is pretty and sweet, and I enjoyed the nearly-a cappella intro on “The Loop”. Plus, well, I’ve gotta love an album that’s named after probability theory.

As always, in roughly chronological order:

1) Mazzy Star: She Hangs Brightly (Capitol, 1991). I always said that I’d like Mazzy Star if “Fade Into You” weren’t so freakishly annoying. I’m not sure that She Hangs Brightly has really held up over the years, but Hope Sandoval’s voice is just beautiful here.

2) R.E.M.: Out of Time (Warner Brothers, 1991). R.E.M. is a band that wasn’t super-important to me growing up the way it was for some of my contemporaries. Don’t get me wrong: I liked them well enough, but I was still stuck in the ’60s and ’70s during most of the early ’90s, so I didn’t gravitate towards this as much. Still, these albums are always a familiar place to which to return, and every time I do, a different song grabs hold of me and won’t let go. This time, it was “Country Feedback” (“It’s crazy what you could’ve had” &c.).

3) Cowboy Junkies: Pale Sun Crescent Moon (RCA, 1993). I loved this album when it first came out, but it’s only with time that I’ve realized how utterly cheese-tastic some of these songs are. There are just so many swoony love songs on the first side of this album (“First Recollection”, “Ring on the Sill”, “Anniversary Song”, “White Sail”, etc.). But then things take a darker turn, with songs of abandonment (“Seven Years”), stalking (“Hunted”), and just general sorrow (“Pale Sun”, “Hard To Explain”). It’s a bizarre mood-shift, but strangely, it works: just when you’re lulled into thinking that all is happy and sweet in the world, the Timmons siblings and their band change gears into something more troubled and sinister. Plus, this album contains one of my all-time favorite Cowboy Junkies lyrics: “Memories are just dead men making trouble.”

4) Tortoise: Millions Now Living Will Never Die (Thrill Jockey, 1996). I’m not sure I can even put into words how important this album was to me as a music fan or how hard the song “Along the Banks of Rivers” still hits me, to this day, with its sighing swells and lyricless perfection.

5) Gillian Welch: Revival (Almo Sounds, 1996). Love.

the SnowtoriousB.I.G. edition of 5 albums for this week; in roughly chronological order:

1) Silkworm: Italian Platinum (Touch & Go, 2002). This album really hit me hard, both at the time and in retrospect. At the time: I was a longtime Silkworm fan, and I remember getting this right when it came out– and listening to it over and over and over again. I don’t think it left my car stereo for weeks. There are some epic, fantastic songs on here (“A Cockfight of Feelings”, “(I Hope U) Don’t Survive”, “The Ram”, etc), and I just could not get enough of it. In retrospect: this is probably the last album I remember just throwing myself into and listening to almost nothing else for days/weeks on end. Writing about music has changed the way I listen to music, and this album somewhat symbolizes that for me. And then, of course, there’s the sad end to the Silkworm story; the Chicago model named Jeanette Sliwinski who got in a fight with her mom and tried to commit suicide by driving 90 mph, running three red lights, and ramming into the back of a car carrying SKWM drummer Michael Dahlquist, the Returnables’ John Glick, and the Dials’/EXO’s Douglas Meis. Such a crappy end to such a great band.

2) Benji Hughes: A Love Extreme (New West, 2008). This album was recommended to me by a friend who compared it to the Magnetic Fields. That was enough to pique my interest, so I picked it up this week. To my ears, it’s a little more Beck than S.Merritt, but that’s hardly a complaint; this album has more than enough of Beck’s genre-jumping and weirdness to make this listener happy. The other great thing about it: I couldn’t make it through from start to finish in one listen; I kept rewinding to listen to a few songs over and over (“Neighbor Down the Hall”, “Waiting For an Invitation”, “Vibe So Hot”, “So Well”, etc). I’m betting that most reviews of this album talked about how “ambitious” it is to release a 2-disc album as a debut– and it certainly is, and he probably would’ve also been fine with a little editing to make this into one disc– but I’m also pretty stoked to hear what he does next.

3) Robyn: Robyn (Konichiwa/Cherrytree, 2005/r:2008). Man, am I ever glad that Robyn crossed paths with The Knife. It took me until now to shake the sound of “Show Me Love” from my head whenever I hear the name ‘Robyn’, and this album is just delightful pop.

4) Glasvegas: Glasvegas (Sony, 2009). Disappointingly average UK indie-rock.

5) The Horse’s Ha: Of the Cathmawr Yards (Hidden Agenda, 2009). I love Janet Beveridge Bean and all her various bands (currently Freakwater and Eleventh Dream Day), and so i expected to love this. Instead, I merely like it.

1) and 2) Massive Attack: Protection (Virgin, 1995) and Mezzanine (Virgin, 1998). So much of my mid-90s was soundtracked by the Bristol trip-hop scene. As much as I loved these records at the time, they don’t resonate with me as a whole the way they did at the time (and the way Portishead’s Dummy still does), although several songs are still immensely mood-inducing.

3) Thalia Zedek: Been Here and Gone (Matador, 2001). Zedek has one of the awesomest voices in indie-rock, and I do miss Come.

4) the Decemberists: Her Majesty (Kill Rock Stars, 2003). My favorite Decemberists album overall is probably Picaresque, but Her Majesty certainly has a few of my all-time favorite Decemberists songs on it.

5) Josh Ritter: the Animal Years (V2, 2006). Ritter is such an under-rated songwriter, and this is probably my favorite of his releases. I always get a chuckle out of the fact that my mentioning his song “Girl In the War” in my “Best of 2006” round-up for the Washington Post‘s Weekend section got me mentioned on newsbusters.org, a blog dedicated to “exposing and combating liberal media bias”, for my (and I quote) “liberal/radical picks”. Ha! Sure, my political views are probably apparent in some of my writing, but c’mon, people– I’m just a music critic!