Casey Kolderup

this is my pledge to make it out to the Debbie 20th Anniversary Tour in 2036 🫡

probably the funniest thing that's happened to me this year is when a coworker queued this up at karaoke and I said to him "wow, nice, I like this song" and he said "yeah, everyone does"

(listens to a pretty heavy album while having a hard day and doesn't know what to think about any of it) ...
(gets to "Balloon") ooh this is fun! I'd better add it to my playlist

I’m not much for screaming in music; just never acquired the taste for it. This is a good first step maybe? I already trusted Ben Quad from their excellent back catalog, there’s still a great melodic sense to a lot of it, and also in 2024 it’s like… yeah man, I get it

someone did this at karaoke last night and I hadn’t thought about it in a while but now it’s all I can think about. In hindsight I’m a bit surprised that Confessions on a Dance Floor didn’t get a revival in the wake of Future Nostalgia but I guess it’ll have a chance at some attention next year for the 20th anniversary?

Thanks to @cass for posting about this on blood.church! I really like it and I can obviously hear the Porter influence but some of the detailed layering on this also reminds me of CFCF’s Memoryland which is easily one of my most-spun albums of the 2020s. I have a feeling this one’s gonna get a lot of play this fall as well.

when Joey Valence said "let the numbers speak / never once put a number on a spreadsheet" I realized where my life went wrong

a weird thing about memory is that I can very clearly remember hearing "Do The Strand" as a kid from when my brother first discovered Roxy Music, meaning I would have been... 9? 10? But I remember basically no other moments from this album. It's good! I love the organ & sax on "Editions of You".

"Owner of a Lonely Heart" interpolation with a problematic fave feature? let's gooooooo

the So I remix 😭

70 minutes of live studio recordings of Fiery Furnaces songs in 2024? Be still my heart 😍

I teared up a little bit at “Benton Harbor Blues”. I’m an elder millennial!!!

UPDATE AFTER SECOND LISTEN: wait no I'm realizing that I really miss hearing Matthew's voice in the "right places" in these songs! Augh! The ones that didn't have him already are fine, but the lines that were his don't hit right without a change in vocalist.

Thank you to the 30-year-olds in Cliffdiver for extending the olive branch to 40-year-olds in the final chorus of "thirty, flirty and thriving!". truly I still do not know shit

the end of "Jump on Stage" when he does the "Lust for Life" riff with Beasties' "Hey Ladies" and "LoveGame" on top!

In 2011 I was working in New York City and living in the suburbs. I had my first job doing web programming, though it was all on the backend, a projection of my insecurities after a half-decade of writing C++ programs that ran on OpenVMS. My team was responsible for figuring out how to unify the Java service-based architecture that had begun to spiral out from the original Rails monolith. An API, a "source of truth". My team was made up of slightly more experienced engineers all based out of our Dublin office (a recently-discovered tax haven for US startups), a manager from America who had moved there some years ago ahead of the curve, and me, the dummy at… More

I’m still ~ pondering ~ the album but this song keeps getting stuck in my head. The sample here is maddening (complimentary)

If I were James I would simply have released this album before I created my magnum opus

I'm not ready for the 20-year anniversary discourse for this album

Apple Music has apparently never given this band's artist profile an editorial pass, so when you navigate to their page it's up to you to figure out what this band's whole deal is across 25 years and (checks notes) 9 listed albums, only 6 of which are actually the canonical original album discography, and that's more manageable, if you know that, right?

But the best clue that Apple Music offers to its editorial subcontractors is also its most obvious, the "Essential Albums" section that blows up the selected album covers tolike 3 times their normal size.

"Essential Albums" for Polyphonic Spree, were Apple Music to wake the fuck up (lol jk) and pay for someone spending the five goddamn minutes… More

I was really prepared to love this, to make it the release this year that I would be most annoying about to everyone I know– Toxe's two Boiler Room sessions are among my favorites of all time, and early single Som En Sol was extremely my jam; followups "Pillow Fight" and "Souvenir" slightly less so but I was still looking forward to hearing it all in context.

Unfortunately this doesn't really come together, and plenty of cuts on the full length of the thing just don't really hit for me. "Pillow Fight" ended up being my second-favorite track, if mostly for the piano part that sounds like some kind of "what if Michael Nyman did the soundtrack for Microsoft Encarta"… More

perfect album, perfect autumn vibes, bless Sadurn 🙏 “Icepick” is one of the best final tracks there is and proves you don’t have to build to an epic conclusion to go out on top. (My mind is the fishnet btw; my partner’s is the icepick)

make some time for an old friend

The nature of "novelty music" is an interesting phenomenon related to the way in which we participate as audience to people making music. I tend to be a bit defensive about people dismissing music like the work of They Might Be Giants as "novelty", so what does it mean that I've observed much of the lifespan of The Mountain Goats' discography and wrestled with what I like and don't about the music he's made since the release of Beat the Champ in 2015?

Almost all of these albums have been marketed as having a "gimmick" of some kind, and I think the temptation has been to treat them as concept albums, but I think in general it's still just... John… More

As a midwesterner and a Jason Molina obsessive I think the comparisons are maybe a little much (I'm sure he's an influence! They're just very different writers) but I like the record and I'm glad to finally check him out after enjoying his contributions on that latest Waxahatchee album. Favorite track on my first listen: Wristwatch

I love Fred's club-ready stuff, almost everything that gets added to USB is fun, and some of the advance singles from this were encouraging... "adore u" is a little Gap-coded for me but hits in the right mood and obviously "places to be" is a banger. Everything else here sounds like Fred spinning his wheels.

Complete waste of that Emmylou track but if it gets anyone to listen to Wrecking Ball I could consider that a win? Listen to Wrecking Ball!

I was never as "into" Grizzly Bear as some of my contemporaries but if you weren't around the "indie rock scene" in 2009 you should understand that their first two albums were massive; this one got a 9.0 and a "Best New Music" designation from Pitchfork, undoubtedly the American tastemaker of the moment

Anyway at some point after I got my first iPhone I was putting some work into setting up custom ringtones which you did by creating m4a files, renaming them to 'm4r', importing them into iTunes, then (via a USB-to-30-pin-adapter cable) sending them to the phone. I chose the opening 30 seconds of "Two Weeks" as one of those and it became my morning alarm sound. It… More

This album hasn't really demanded a ton of repeat listens for me but on listening today it did hit me that the opening two tracks really do kick things off very nicely. Good but vague 90s vibes, would put on when some fellow millennials came over or something... just a little too slick to actually catch my attention most of the time.

in my second hour of being on hold with my local Department of Revenue and was just reminded how much this song whips. My city should license it for its hold music. What an improvement for everyone

I just saw this band live for the first time ever last night after listening to them from the moment they broke basically 20 years ago and I'm still thinking about how if there actually is a cult I can join maybe I'm on board.

How often, realistically, have I listened to the songs on this album in the past 10 years? Very rarely, but every note from this album was as familiar as a song from a Boys and Girls in America or OK Computer, albums I've listened to so many times, and it all felt so joyous. Gretchen and I both had a great time.

We got to meet Tim and a couple of the band members after… More

hey sorry I’ll just get out of the way up front that this song is boring dreck. I try to keep an open mind but this lacks the earworm quality of their one big hit and presents nothing of interest instead. okay now:

what the hell is going on in this music video. there’s gratuitous nudity, mediocre special effects, random violence, and a giant living CGI teddy bear. how did this get made

This band has been a great reminder for me recently of how truly subjective music (and art in general, I suppose) is and how there's so much out there that I can just not connect with independent of whether it's "good" or not, but keeping an open mind and revisiting a work or an artist at a different point in their career when I am at a different point in my life can be rewarding, fulfilling, joyous, and/or important. And the glory of this particular occasion is that now I have a 5-album discography, and hopefully many more to come, waiting for me. Music... I Recommend It.