Listening Post (11/22/11)

Every year when Thanksgiving rolls around I start compiling my list of favorite albums from the last eleven months.  That means the last month of the year around these parts will feature a lot of music.  I don’t have any specific criteria for this list.  I love stuff that hits me on an emotional level, but I also have a soft spot for music that doesn’t do any more than just set my feet tapping.  I do ask, though, that the albums work as a cohesive collection of songs.  It can’t just be one or two hits and then ten tracks of filler.

What that means, of course, is that every year there’s always a handful of songs I love, but whose parent albums don’t quite make the cut.

Say hi, then, to The Wombats.  Their first album, 2007’s A Guide to Love, Loss & Desperation, was a punchy, scrappy set of danceable rock.  They had a goofy sense of humor and played high-octane songs about dancing to Joy Division and partying in a forest.  Their second album, this year’s This Modern Glitch, is kind of a drag.  It’s not a musical abomination – not at all – but it’s missing a lot of the stuff that made their first album so much fun.  It’s a little too polished, a little too calculated.  Where their debut had a sense of youthful abandon, This Modern Glitch too often feels like the work of cynical pros.

But there’s at least one redeeming point.  I’m kicking off my year-end music celebration with one of the year’s best songs from one of the year’s most disappointing albums.  Here’s This Modern Glitch‘s lead single, “Jump Into the Fog.”

*****

Last movie seen:

Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011; Sean Durkin, dir.)