Original post (from April):

In the old blog I promised a traditional, focused top 10 for J-albums, but I killed the blog. If I don’t stick to it, I’m going to just drive around listening to the new Mastodon cause that shit is great.

But I figure I will add to list list as I go, committing to buy at least ten new albums from Japan this year. (I’m really being an asshole about it and not counting the new Utada.) If I get more, stuff gets squeezed out. I’m not trying to find albums that are merely “good”, but that threaten to take over your life. It’s always been my opinion that ten of such albums never come out in any given year, but blahblah, etc.

Mono | Hymn to the Immortal Wind
Morning Musume | Platinum 9
Ha.

It’s August. Fuck it. I’m not a critic, or even a consistent opinion-giver. Nobody cares about my year-end list, not even me. I thought it would be a good challenge for me to fill in the format for once with something meaningful to me. But it’s a bad challenge, or I fail the challenge, or the format fails me. I think sticking to my new format of strictly random reviews of records I own is a better challenge, but I have to get this one out of the way.

If you didn’t notice I decided adding to the list as I went was a terrible idea. I did drive around listening to only Mastodon and Momusu for a couple months. (Mono does not work as driving music for me, or you.) Then my CD player broke. This sucked but turned out to be good as it increased my gas mileage and decreased the amount of rocks thrown at my car considerably. It also got me listening to the radio, reminding me why I got into blogging about bands I originally discovered on YouTube. Sure there’s some good stations or individual DJs still out there, but I find myself on the edge of reception most of the time at best. Even the college stations, when the shows focus on current American indie, which used to be full of bands mind-blowingly good or fascinatingly bad—-it just seems “ok” to me. Everybody else seems to only care about putting the minimum amount of imagination into stuff you can dance to or seeming “dangerous” in some way. None of it really pushes anywhere. Few exceptions, but I’m tired of rhetoric, which is only part of the problem. Here’s my stupid list:

(btw, I started buying records alphabetically and did not get far before my credit card company cut the absurd limit they gave me a couple years ago in half, to just about what I owe them. Could be worse.)

Best of Records That I Could Afford Released in Japan in the First 8 Months of 2009 by Artists that Start with “M” Somehow

1. Muramasa☆ | BEST [Limited]
2. Mono | Hymn to the Immortal Wind [Human Highway]
3. Morning Musume. | Platinum 9 [UP-FRONT WORKS/zetima]
4. Marty Friedman | Tokyo Jukebox [avex]
5. MEG | Beautiful [Universal J]
6. MASS OF THE FERMENTING DREGS | World Is Yours [Avocado]
7. mudy on the Sakuban | Kidnie [zankyo]
8. Mari Yaguchi x AIRBAND | Seishun Boku/Seishun Ore [UP-FRONT WORKS/hachama]
9. mouse on the keys | An Anxious Object [MachuPicchu INDUSTRIAS]
10. m-flo | inside -Works Best III- [Rhythm Zone]

[edit: these get actual reviews as they come up randomly, which could take several years.]

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