Ewww, why did I buy this?

[Davey]

I've been really lucky lately, as well, but that latest Magnetic Fields release, i, hasn't much done it for me, for reasons already posted somewhere down below.

Ya know, I still feel that I haven't fully absorbed 69 Love Songs, 4 or 5 years down the road. Can't help feeling that I need to condense it into a 1-disc streamlined collection, but it seems like such a daunting task. One of the reviewers at Stylus wrote an article about his attempt at doing exactly that, and while interesting, it still left out some of my favorites. Maybe we should have a thread about it sometime. I wonder how many people around here have that 3-disc collection?

As kind of a converse to my original post, I've had The Decemberists Castaways and Cutouts playing for what seems like days now. Do you ever get in a mood where it seems like there's only one album you really need, and so you just listen to it over and over? I've always really liked this one since my good buddy Slosh turned me on to it almost exactly 1 year ago (http://archive.audioreview.com/10/0EF9B40E.php), but I think it wasn''t until this past week that it officially became love. Totally, completely and without reservations. Sounds nearly perfect to me now, whereas I initially thought it meandered toward the end. If I was to do a top 5 of the Double Ought, this just might be one of them. Along with Neon Golden and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and The Moon & Antarctica and maybe Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons. Or something like that. Oops, maybe some Black Heart Procession or Califone instead of Blonde Redhead, I don't know, there's always a few that could fill that 5th spot and YHF will likely fall to A Ghost Is Born based on what I've heard so far. Guess it depends on the phase of the moon. Anyway, really interesting to see how some albums go from initially good to an all time fave, while others only go down after a short initial infatuation. Hard to pinpoint the exact qualities that give an album that growth potential. Certainly varies from person to person, but sure would save a lot of money if we could pick only those albums we knew would be favorites a year or two in the future