Best Music Blog Finds of 2008

One final Best Of music list should round out the year nicely, don'tcha think? (Or maybe Bob had plans for another...?)

While I agree in toto with Bob's commentary that music now comes at us so hard and fast and unrelentingly that it's almost impossible to savor each quarter-note morsel we ingest, I also must admit that I've been exposed to more kinds of music by more bands in the last nine months than in any 9-month stretch since I was in college. For every band whose songs I was able to sample thanks to the ten or so music blogs I regularly frequented, I'm sure there were handfuls of other bands I only wish I could have heard.

But we gotta start somewhere. And we gotta end somewhere. So, for better or worse, below are the Musical Waldos I found, my favorite musical discoveries owed exclusively to the blogging of others.



(For those dying to know, here's the order in which I've been playing them on my iPod, with song title and artists name.)

1. Push It Along - Paul Weller
2. Umbrellas (First Dance) - Sleeping At Last
3. I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance With You - Black Kids
   (Dude, y'all owe at least half your profits to Robert Smith)
   
4. If You Don't Care - Smoking Popes
5. The Night Starts Here - Stars
6. Beulah the Good - James Jackson Toth
   (I don't know where this song is going or ends up, but it's a damn chilled-out fun journey)
   
7. Everything Good is Bad - JJ Grey + Mofro
   (I hear this and wanna wear a smoking jacket and attend a key party)
   
8. Lose It - Cartel
9. I'm Not Scared - Ladytron
10. First Sight - These United States
11. Hardly Enough - WAZ
    (He played for Pete Yorn. He sounds kinda like Pete Yorn.)
    
12. All My Friends Are Crazy - 500 Miles to Memphis
    (I hadn't really heard of country/punk before, but I'm cool with it)
    
13. The Reason Why I Still Live Here - Floormodel
14. Graveyard Girl - M83
    (I hear this, I think of John Hughes, Martha Quinn, and Patrick Dempsey)
    
15. The Good Old Days - The Lodger
16. Yesterday's Lunch - Lemuria
17. You Made Me Like It - 1990s
    (Oh it's just so damn catchy...)
    
18. Is There a Ghost - Band of Horses
    (Three different people asked me what this song meant... I was utterly unhelpful)
    
19. You, Me + the Bourgeoisie - The Submarines
20. Turn the Page - The Streets
21. Lazy Eye - Silversun Pickups
    (If Kim Deal, early Billy Corgan, Dave Grohl and one of the Luscious Jackson chicks all had a single baby, the song would sound something like this)
    

None of the artists above are living the lush life of a Tina Turner, so please consider forking over a few post-holiday dollars and buying one of their albums! Most of them can be found at either Amazon.com's mp3 site or on iTunes.