YEAR-END THOUGHTS:
If you think Fleet Foxes is better than Year of the Gentleman, you're out of your cotton-pickin' mind. "Oliver James" is the most embarrassingly mawkish thing I heard all year, the kind of song that's twice as painful for its obvious sincerity. I wrote songs that Tried To Say Something Important About, Um, You Know, Something, Man once too, and I quit because they sucked, for which the world thanks me even if it isn't aware it does. Encouraging it is bad form.

Pacific Ocean Blue is badly sung, dimly produced MOR. whose "importance" is entirely due to its maker's death. If he'd stuck around to double-drum with John Stamos the reissue probably wouldn't have gotten anywhere near The Wire's pages, though given that mag's commitment to mistaking shitty production with the avant-garde, maybe not.

The Girl Talk album still sounds pretty good, is neither a masterwork (Night Ripper was my No. 2 of '06 in part because '06 sucked so hard) nor anything to huff and puff and blow the Internet down about, much less make like a bobblehead about when someone does, especially when the Big Revelation is that, wow, everything's a mash-up. Dude, what if the inmates ran the asylum?! What if they gave a war and nobody came?! THINK OF THE POSSIBILITIES!