Pitchfork thinks that the new Thermals record is their best yet. I'll admit, it's growing on me a bit as I become more familiar with the songs, but I still can't imagine ever enjoying it as much as I've enjoyed More Parts Per Million, which most definitely sits on my top 10 favorite records of all time list*.

Whilist fishing around for an official link about the newish Futureheads album, I found this link, giving us a 9/26 release date for the new Lemonheads album. 2006 has been a far better year musically than 2005 was, in my opinion. It kicked off with the Lawrence Arms Oh Calcutta! and has pretty much been great release after great release from some of my favorite bands ever since. With new Lemonheads, Ergs, and Les Savy Fav all in the pipeline, I'd say the year will continue accordingly.

But back to the Futureheads. I heard the single Skip to the End from News & Tributes for the first time in a hotel room in Venice, of all places. Marissa and I had to wake up at about 4am to catch our flight home... and Venice all but shuts down around midnight, so we took to plopping our exahusted bodies in front of the TV during the interim. We found an MTV owned channel that played all indie rock and experimental videos in between short films and animation clips that reminded me of the irrevrant type stuff MTV used to do in the early 90s. Much of it was in Italian, of course, so I wasn't exactly sure what was going on.. but I couldn't help but think that maybe I'd actually watch TV if we had something like it in the states. It was all commercial free, which certainly helped, and it was actually playing good videos by (mostly) good bands! I was transported back to being 14 and watching Nine Inch Nails' video for Wish on 120 minutes. The Skip to the End video was pretty neat, and I really dug the song a lot. I just finally got myself a copy of the album last night and I think I'm going to end up enjoying it a lot more than the first one, which started to annoy me after only a few listens. The sound is bigger.. the songs are sparser.. and it makes for an overall better listening experience, in my opinion.

Paul likes to rag on me for my incessant music links and generally over-enthusiastic recommendations, which I'm sure is mostly warranted. So instead of ranting further about the new pAper chAse album, I'll ask him what he thinks about it, if anything. --

* This list contains approximately 40 records.