#nowplaying

Justin Timberlake

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Justin Timberlake

On Saturday, Mrs. YHT and I met up with friend of the blog Trang and made our annual pilgrimage to the Pennsylvania Farm Show, and boy howdy was it fun. And fattening. The fried cheese was nice and cheesy, the milkshakes were shakin’, and the potato donuts left nuttin’ to be desired. I even snagged a free Tractor Supply Company hat, which I sported throughout our post-feeding frenzy tour of the the best and smelliest livestock the commonwealth of Pennsylvania has to offer.

It was a good day.

So how does one switch gears and return to the 9-to-5 city life after rockin’ camo at the Farm Show? How about a brand new tune from Justin Timberlake called “Suit & Tie?” Featuring Jay-Z? Even better.

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Robert DeLong

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Robert DeLong

Apparently I wasn’t the only one who thought Gogol Bordello would make for good New Year’s tunes. Unbeknownst to those of us dancing along with Super Taranta! in Richmond, Mr. Bordello was at that very moment helping a rowdy bunch of San Franciscans ring in 2013 at an 8-hour mini festival called Sea of Dreams. How did I find out about this? Well, it has everything to do with a photo taken by Robert DeLong, the LA-based singer/songwriter/producer responsible for the fantastic track at the bottom of this post.

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Gogol Bordello

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Gogol Bordello

My wife and I had a few folks over on New Year’s Eve, and with just two hours until the party’s official start time, while she was putting the final touches on the spread of snacks she’d prepared in typical superhero fashion, I finally sat down to make a playlist.

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Alt-J

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An Awesome Wave

Before I switch into year end list mode (I have some fun stuff planned for next week), I want to sneak one last post in — one I should have written a long time ago.

All the way back in August, when I was in Duck, NC and the weather was a slightly warmer shade of unpredictable, friend of the blog Travis sent me a message about Alt-J, asking whether their debut full-length was available for purchase anywhere online. I tried (and failed) to dig up a working link — turns out it hadn’t been released in America yet — but what I didn’t do is listen to it. The album was just a few clicks away on Soundcloud, yet for whatever reason, I didn’t reach for it…

… until Tuesday.

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Johnny Cash

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Johnny Cash

Do you believe in signs? Not, like, stop signs, or that neon beer sign your college roommate had all four years but tried to pawn off on you after graduation because his girlfriend said it didn’t fit into the decorating scheme she’d devised for their first shared apartment. No, I’m talking about those fate-leaving-you-breadcrumbs-on-the-way-to-some-poignant-eventuality-type signs. I used to, but I can’t say that I do anymore. At least not wholeheartedly. I do love Fools Rush In, though. Wholeheartedly.

All the same, if something tickles the front of your consciousness long enough, you’re gonna scratch that sucker, and that’s exactly how the album pictured above ended up on my turntable last night. The acute itch started with a bandmate wearing a Sun Records t-shirt on Saturday night, and continued just a few hours later when Mrs. YHT and I were having a late-night snack at Gibson’s Grill and saw an incredibly sexy, vintage/diner-style Sun Records clock hanging on the wall nearest to the restaurant’s street-level bar. But in truth, the itching started long before that.

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Matt Ulery

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Matt Ulery

Y’all mind if I poach NPR Music’s 50 Favorite Albums Of 2012 just a little bit more? No? You guys are the best.

I had the chance to take bassist and composer Matt Ulery’s album By A Little Light for a spin yesterday and have fallen more than a little in love with it, and not just because it features eighth blackbird, the sextet that’s held an Ensemble-in-Residence position at the University of Richmond since 2003 and probably holds the record for mentions on Artsline, WCVE’s daily arts and cultural calendar.

For me, the work’s most remarkable quality, aside from its outright beauty, is the way it allows for originality and brightness to flow through one another.

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Astro

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Astro

I have yet to start this year’s top albums post. Is it because I’m a procrastinator? Yes. Well, yes and no.

I haven’t started yet, in part at least, because I’m still finding out about amazing albums that were released in 2012. In fact, I’m convinced that mid-December is the most wonderful time of the year to be a music lover. Year-end lists are worth their weight in gold when it comes to discovering new bands, and I’ve found one list to be particularly Fort Knox-ish: NPR’s Music Top 50 Albums of 2012. While so many lists simply confirm what you already knew — either about the site that posted them or about the quality of the albums that everyone knows everyone loves — NPR’s stands out by virtue of its breadth, with lots of great classical and international releases I had no idea existed. Particularly strong are the Spanish-language contributions, and Chilean group Astro is proving to be a clear favorite. Clear and distracting.

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G-Dragon

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OK, so now what?

What should America do with K-pop now that the “Gangnam Style” flood waters are starting to recede? Do we explore the rest of PSY’s catalog, or do we act like the whole horsey dance thing never happened? Should we start checking out other K-pop artists, or should we go back to ignoring the genre’s steady, world-wide march? I think we can all agree to continue complaining about dubstep, but it’s going to be really interesting to see where the American market for K-pop goes from here.

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Dave Brubeck

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Dave Brubeck

I was more than a little sad when reports of Dave Brubeck’s death started to surface yesterday afternoon. It’s weird, mourning the death of someone you never met and likely never would, but Brubeck’s music was very important to my parents when they first started dating, and it was especially important to my father, who himself died a few years ago.

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Dan Deacon

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Dan Deacon

I dunno about you, but I could use a pick-me-up.

I fell while running last night. It was dark, the sidewalk was uneven, and I ate it in spectacular fashion. My hands got pretty scraped up, but the wounds to my pride cut much deeper. If I had to use one word to describe the feeling I had when I was lying on the pavement, it would probably be “dorky.” There’s something really lame about that type of sports injury, because it brings into focus just how un-rugged modern life can be. It’s not like my hands got torn up while fending off a lion or building a log cabin. I was jogging. In the ‘burbs. Listening to my iPod. Wearing neon-colored clothes. And I fell.

So like I said, I need a pick-me-up, and I’m looking to you, Dan Deacon.

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