
Despite the unfortunate title, Diaper Island is an amazing, heady mix of reverbed mood woven with a voice that at times seems barely strong enough to sustain the weight of the sometimes sad words sung. I had somehow missed the boat on finding him through any of his previous three releases, but I'm more than happy with what I've found. The album is a tender mix of beautifully paranoid and touching songwriting, all articulated with a delicacy that few can match. Though off of 20082s Soft Airplane , the tremendous 'Rabid [...]

If you find something you like on this list, download the complimentary MP3 and click the album art, which will take you to the Amazon MP3 page so you can purchase it (some of these albums are $5 or less). 25 // Glassjaw – Coloring Book EP/Our Color Green EP Eight years in the making and completely worth the wait, both the Coloring Book EP and the Our Color Green EP expose the bands reason for generating a dedicated fan base of true post hardcore and [...]
![Best of 2011: Singles/Music Videos [TOP 10]](http://cdn.elbo.ws/posts/3959149_lg.jpg)
The time has come and posting this before 2011 ends (Ottawa time). Here is the Top 10 Singles/Music videos of 2011. Most of the singles are compiled from the Singles Chart on my site. There will be some songs that wasn't on the chart but are worthy to be noticed. Check it out and be surprised. 10. Lana Del Rey - Videogames / Blue Jean I prefer Blue Jeans and my pick for music video. [...]

Here is part four of the Best of 2011 Canadian albums. We are almost getting to the Top 10. These albums that are still worthy to check out. Here is the ranking from #20-11. 20. Sound of Lions - 11.44 Listen to Blue , Counting Eights , One and Passive Attack . 19. Mother Mother - Eureka [...]
Vandaveer – Dig Deep DownDownload "Concerning Past & Future Conquests" Chad VanGaalen – Diaper IslandDownload "Sara" Vetiver – The Errant CharmDownload "Can't You Tell" and "Wonder Why" Kurt Vile – Smoke Ring for My HaloDownload " Jesus Fever" and "In...
![[Best of 2011] Adam's List](http://cdn.elbo.ws/posts/3945872_lg.jpg)
Tweet vaso link It's hard to tell whether this was a really great year for music or if I was just paying attention more than last year. That sums up my feelings at the end of every year. I don't want to do too much of an introduction because I have quite a bit to say. I'm not putting these releases in any particular order, they are just my favorites. Some I listened to more than others, but putting them [...]
![[Best of 2011] Andy's List](http://cdn.elbo.ws/posts/3941236_lg.jpg)
Tweet vaso link This has been an odd year for me musically. While most people have professed to an easy time picking out what their favorite albums were over the past year, I've had some difficulty with it. For the past couple of years I've had an album that was a clear-cut favorite: not so in 2011. This year, in honor of that difficulty, I'm presenting my favorites as an unranked, randomized list. The list's order does not [...]
BEST OF 2011 : Songs | Albums (soon) | EPs/Singles | Discoveries/Heavy Rotation | Photos A really good year! The first 40 or so are mega-jams and the latter 38 (Rawkblog loves you, baby) are still jams. I purposefully left out songs by Destroyer because I couldn't decide, so consider Kaputt represented. You can play the entire page with the handy Ex.fm player in the bottom right corner, stream the playlist on Spotify and Rdio , and download everything after the jump. [...]

EMJ Top 20 Readers voted and here's the result... welcome to EMJ's Top 20 Releases of 2011. 3 High Places- Original Colors High Places' most introspective and mature album yet is characterised by foreboding melodies, with Mary Pearson's vocals utilised in an eerie, haunted way and Rob Barber's ever-clever programming taking a dancier route. With isolated riffs and creepy [...]
As 2011 comes to an end, we are taking a look back at some of our favorite posts of the year by our guest editors. White Wilderness (Dead Oceans) is the latest album from the San Francisco-based John Vanderslice, and he's joined on it by the classically trained Magik*Magik Orchestra. MMO artistic director Minna Choi [...]

10. Bonnie Prince Billy - Wolfroy Goes To Town Bonnie Prince Billy - We Are Unhappy.mp3 9. Chad VanGaalen - Diaper Island Chad VanGaalen - Peace On The Rise.mp3 8. St. Vincent - Strange Mercy St. Vincent - Strange Mercy.mp3 7. Cass McCombs - Wit's End [...]

This one's a Freudian turning point in every child's life... and for the rest of that day at 'Paul's House' not a single fuck was given MP3: Chad VanGaalen- Sara Chad VanGaalen's album from which the gorgeous song above is taken is called Diaper Island. I remember hearing the word diaper for the first time when I was [...]
120 Megabytes – Episode 13 brought to you in association with @markbrown and our friends over at Network Awesome
Good God. This little tour ought to make any tinkering musician salivate: H/T: Matt Stangel [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]
I'm not sure if it's possible to overstate the dumbfounding work ethic and determination of one man tour-de-force Chad VanGaalen has. Between writing, performing, producing, and touring his own material, producing the artists who make their way through his at-home Yoko Eno studio, whipping up a bunch of visual works (including the album artwork on his most recent Diaper Island record), and still finding time to raise a family, he consistently seems to operate an order of magnitude higher than most of his peers. And yet, here he is, preparing to completely outdo himself with the [...]

Frank Yang Much of Dan Mangan's appeal comes from his everyman-ness - and his beard, if you ask certain friends of mine - so when he was playing the back rooms of bars, as at The Rivoli in October 2009 or The Horseshoe in April 2010 , it felt perfectly natural. Those shows also felt utterly jam-packed - because they were - making it unlikely that the club circuit would be able to serve his ever-growing audience for very long. And so when he played Trinity-St. Paul's in his last proper [...]

Aaron Miller There's no shortage of variants on the sentiment that good things come to those who wait, but in the case of Toronto's Darcys , keeping the faith would have been trying for the most steadfast optimists. The specifics of their long, four-year gap between their debut Endless Water and their self-titled follow-up - out today - are still best documented in this Toronto Star feature from back in March, which is also approximately when I got a finished copy of the record to preview. To [...]

As I wrote about for Exclaim! , Chad VanGaalen is releasing a whole whack of unheard albums on cassette. They will be available in limited quantities from the merch booth during shows. Unfortunately, he only just played in Vancouver earlier this month, so who knows if I'll be able to pick them up. D'oh! Below you can hear "Never Cut My Hair," which appears on a collection of Diaper Island outtakes called Garbage Island #2 (yes, there's also a Garbage Island #1 ). This is [...]
GUYS, WE'RE NOT GOING TO MAKE IT! HPX 2011 is next week, and I'm afraid we've fallen short in our attempt to post a song from every aoutfit playing the fest this year, but we've made a pretty sizeable dent in the list (sorry to those we didn't get posted, our bad, we tried!). So here's one last kick at the can, another jumbo list of jams from bands playing in Halifax next week, so if you like something you hear below, check the schedule and go see them play! [...]