Manic Pop

Fun little mini photoshoot with Max today.  Originally we had planned to seek out a crazy, striped mural downtown but we were losing time for natural lighting. I like this mural we found anyway. Something crazy to go with my bright, cartoon-y, mod dress.  Lens flare is a joke and a nod to Max - haha! I had a super-small colorful water gun in my bag. It was about 84 degrees today. Shoulda filled that up and ran around the neighborhood! Sloan tote bag! I originally found out this bag existed by googling a photo of Flight of the Conchords one day. There is this photo of them running through the airport with it. No idea they were Sloan fans. They have been my favorite band for about a decade now. They're primarily considered the "Canadian Beatles" but their sound is so much more than that. The height of their career was really in the mid-to-late 90s, but as a huge Sloan fan they still have awesome albums after that and shouldn't be written of...

I haven't done a "year-end" list in a long while - mostly because I haven't been moved to in a while - but I think the time has come to list albums and songs of 2010. It's a new decade with new sounds. A music buzz word I picked up on this year was "chillwave", likely coined by hipster satire blog HipsterRunoff.com and redistributed across various blogs and websites across the world. The music is characterized by "their heavy use of effects processing, synthesizers, looping, sampling, and heavily filtered vocals with simple melodic lines" according to Wikipedia including such bands as Toro Y Moi, Memory Tapes, and Neon Indian. Wikipedia also mentions that these bands derive musical styles from the 80s "often with a laptop at their very core", but re-interpret it with a less-aggressive, soft-focus and low-fi version of 80s synthpop, with a more "chilled out" sensibility, hence "chillwave". I had the chance to see To...