Hey all, Happy 2026! Hope everyone has a wonderful great year ahead.
I’m going to take a few days off from blogging to relax, catch up on things, and work out what I’d like to do this year. I will be back on the 13th! See you soon!
This past year kind of felt like a transitional year for me in terms of listening to music. I managed to not obsess over discography completism as much as I had in previous years, for starters. I also dialed back the incessant need to listen to everything, which was also using up all kinds of brainspace and keeping me from actually retaining any of it.
I felt that this was a year of trying out different things instead, so that meant that not every band I liked previously stuck with me this time out. Several albums that got a ton of kudos from bloggers and music sites tended to pass me by. On the other hand, something obscure like Automatic’s Is It Now? or Coral Grief’s Air Between Us connected deeply with me. There were of course the mainstays like Doves and Grandbrothers, whose albums I listen to frequently during writing sessions, that kept me entertained.
None of it was bad, per se. It’s just that I’m in a place where I wanted to change up my tastes and listening habits, that’s all. Perhaps 2026 will be another transitional year in which I find new artists and albums to latch onto, or perhaps something will arrive that will completely blow my mind. Or maybe by chance, it’ll be a year full of stellar releases. We shall see when the time comes!
So without further ado, here’s my list of what I listened to the most, and what stayed with me over the last several months. As always, my favorite album and song of the year are in bold. I’d have created a Spotify playlist for my own best-of-year that sits in my library, but alas said website is on the outs with several friends and music listeners for not properly paying musicians, among other things. Ah well.
Albums
Andy Bell, pinball wanderer
Automatic, Is It Now?
Coral Grief, Air Between Us
Crushed, no scope
Doves, Constellations for the Lonely
GoGo Penguin, Necessary Fictions
Grandbrothers, Elsewhere
Miki Berenyi Trio, Tripla
Motion City Soundtrack, The Same Old Wasted Wonderful World
Packaging, Packaging
Peter Murphy, Silver Shade
Suzzallo, The Quiet Year
The Beatles, Anthology 4
The Hives, The Hives Forever Forever the Hives
The Verve Pipe, Reconciled
Songs
Automatic, “Is It Now?”
The Beatles, “I Am the Walrus [Take 19 – Strings, Bass, Clarinet Overdub]”
Blushing, “So Many”
Bob Moses, “Better Broken”
Bob Mould, “Here We Go Crazy”
Coral Grief, “Starboard”
Doves, “Renegade”
J Mascis, “Breathe”
Packaging, “Running Through the Airport”
Peter Murphy, “Swoon”
Pulp, “Spike Island”
Sparks, “Do Things My Own Way”
SPELLING, “Portrait of My Heart”
The Neighbourhood, “Hula Girl”
The Verve Pipe, “Tattoo”
The Singles 2025 Playlist:
1. Blushing, “So Many”
2. SPELLING, “Portrait of My Heart”
3. The Hives, “Legalize Living”
4. Steve Queralt, “Lonely Town”
5. Doves, “Renegade”
6. Motion City Soundtrack, “She Is Afraid”
7. HighSchool, “Sony Ericsson”
8. Ashes and Diamonds, “On a Rocka”
9. Peroccupations, “Ill at Ease”
10. Automatic, “Is It Now?”
11. Hannah Jadagu, “Doing Now”
12. Lucy Dacus, “Ankles”
13. Flock of Dimes, “Keep Me In the Dark”
14. The Chameleons UK, “Feels Like the End of the World”
15. Snapped Ankles, “Smart World”
16. SPRINTS, “Descartes”
17. Throwing Muses, “Drugstore Drastic”
18. The Charlatans UK, “We Are Love”
19. Hatchie, “Lose It Again”
20. Heartworms, “Extraordinary Wings”
21. Suzzallo, “River”
22. Bob Moses, “Better Broken”
23. JR Richards, “Alive”
24. Peter Murphy, “Swoon”
25. The Beatles, “Free As a Bird [2025 Mix]”
26. Bob Mould, “Here We Go Crazy”
27. Air, “Cemetary Party”
28. Doves, “Cold Dreaming”
29. Nine Inch Nails, “As Alive As You Need Me to Be”
30. J Mascis, “Breathe”
31. Tortoise, “A Title Comes”
32. Pulp, “Spike Island”
33. Florence + the Machine, “Everybody Scream”
34. Packaging, “Running Through the Airport”
35. Sea Lemon, “Stay”
36. The Neighbourhood, “Hula Girl”
37. Cut Copy, “Belong to You”
38. GoGo Penguin, “Fallowfield Loops”
39. Unbelievable Truth, “You’ve Got It”
40. Brandi Carlile, “Returning to Myself”
41. Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke, “Back in the Game”
42. Just Mustard, “We Were Just Here”
43. Dead Pioneers, “My Spirit Animal Ate Your Spirit Animal”
44. Steven Wilson, “Perspective”
45. Dropkick Murphys, “Who’ll Stand with Us?”
46. Mogwai, “God Gets You Back”
47. Andy Bell, “I’m in love…”
48. Paul Meany, “Scenic Route”
49. Garbage, “Chinese Fire Horse”
50. above me, “out of body out of mind”
51. David Byrne & Ghost Train Orchestra, “Everybody Laughs”
52. The The, “Unrequited”
53. The Verve Pipe, “Tattoo”
54. Celeste, “Woman of Faces”
55. The London Suede, “Disintegrate”
56. White Lies, “Nothing On Me”
57. Coral Grief, “Starboard”
58. PLOSIVS, “Death Kicks In”
59. The Reds, Pinks & Purples, “The World Doesn’t Need Another Band”
60. Crushed, “starburn”
61. The Hives, “OCDOD”
62. Grandbrothers, “We Collide”
63. The Beatles, “I Am the Walrus [Take 19 – Strings, Bass, Clarinet Overdub]”
64. HAIM, “Down to Be Wrong”
65. Motion City Soundtrack, “Your Days Are Numbered”
66. OK Go, “Love”
67. Too Much Joy, “Song for a Girl Who Has One”
68. Anna von Hausswolff, “The Iconoclast”
69. Nation of Language, “Inept Apollo”
70. Miki Berenyi Trio, “8th Deadly Sin”
71. Automatic, “Mercury”
72. Depeche Mode, “In the End”
73. Massage, “Daffy Duck”
74. Inhaler, “Open Wide”
75. Franz Ferdinand, “Audacious”
76. Bob Moses, “Waiting on the World”
77. Sparks, “Do Things My Own Way”
**
See you next year!
I am of course working today (our store only closes on Christmas Day), but thankfully it will be a morning shift, and will most likely entail a few regulars coming in having forgotten cranberries or extra cream or something. Then there’s Black Friday tomorrow, which usually isn’t too bad.
In the meantime, I’m going to take it easy and enjoy the day and the food. See you next week!
Alas, I did not have the time, nor the inclination, to make any mixtapes this year. I’m pretty sure I’ll still do my year-end playlist/mix, but other than that, I just never got around to it. But that’s okay! This isn’t the first time I’ve gone through a musical dry spell. Between 2006 and 2011, I only made eight mixes in total — two of them were for someone else, and the last was when I’d decided to resurrect the year-end mix.
The main reason for not making one? Well, I’d hinted at it late last year when I’d wanted to spend more time listening the albums I downloaded rather than focusing on the discography completism spiral I’d fallen into over the last couple of years. I felt too disconnected from the music in my own library and wanted to change that. So over the course of 2025, I gave my favorites some more repeat listens. Got to know them a bit better. Found a few singles and deep cuts that caught my attention. Not to mention revisited a lot of my favorite albums from recent years, with the occasional deep dive into an oldie but goodie. And I replayed a lot of albums during my writing sessions!
The other reason for not making one is because I just hadn’t had time or the ability to listen to them other than at my desk. There’s also the fact that we’d recently moved and
So, will I be making more of said mixtapes in 2026? We shall see. I’m not going to confirm or deny at this point. If I’m in the mood for it, I’ll do it. If I do, I might try revisiting the style of my oldest mixes by allowing older songs, something I haven’t done in ages. [A lot of my most recent non-writing-soundtrack mixes usually stick to newish releases from the last few months.]
Either way, the point isn’t just to make the mixes, but to enjoy the tunes I put on them. And I think I’m finally on the way back to that point.
The above was the first Christmas song of the season to be heard at work the other day. Yes, I know Thanksgiving is still a week away, but this is actually right about on time for my store. The holiday music pops up sometime in mid-November, just a few songs here and there mixed in with the regular playlist we have, and will only go full-on 24/7 on Black Friday.
And for the record, the first Christmas song I actually noticed being played in-store somewhere was this past weekend at World Market, and they were playing Cocteau Twins’ version of “Frosty the Snowman”. Not a bad choice!
Anyhoo…it’s that time of the year, and I’m down. I actually quite enjoy holiday music, even at work!
I was introduced to Too Much Joy by my friend Chris back in 1990 when the major label reissue of their second album Son of Sam I Am dropped, and I was immediately hooked. At that point in time I was still listening to far more doom and gloom music than I really should have been listening to, and TMJ was refreshing, noisy and funny but without being too absurdist or corny. I put this cassette in my Walkman quite a lot near the start of my sophomore year when I needed a pick-me-up. Later on in the summer of ’91 I would see them live at the Hatch Shell, where I very nearly got hit by flying glass. Whee!
It’s not a brilliant album by any means, and they’re firmly entrenched in the ‘punk band that definitely doesn’t take itself seriously at all’ genre, but instead of going the meathead drunk-and-partying route, they took the intellectual Gen-X ennui-and-irony route, which caught the attention of several kids my own age. While it never got enough major airplay, they were a firm favorite on alternative radio and retained a loyal fanbase. Years later in 2020/2021 they reunited and have released two new albums since then.
The album ran the gamut between the ‘bad karma thing to do’ action of making fun of bums, to being traumatized by clowns…
…to singing about reincarnation (a song I still know all the words to!)…
…and not just a cover of an LL Cool J song….
…but a cover of the weird-yet-catchy classic by Terry Jacks.
So why a major reissue of an album from 1988 and reissued in 1990? Simple: after thirty-five years, the rights to their breakthrough album finally reverted back to them. They’d gotten the quite-aged masters back and got them cleaned up, and they sound fresh and vibrant once more.
Pure silliness, but I highly recommend this album because it’s just that much fun.
I do have a soft spot (heh) for industrial music. I don’t listen to it all that often, but I’ve loved it since I first heard those dance beats, clanky percussion and crunchy guitars in the late 80s with bands like DAF and Front 242 and Skinny Puppy and Ministry. Which means I was into it well before all those sci-fi action films of the 90s used this genre for all those martial arts fight scenes! [Looking at you, Mortal Kombat and Matrix movies!]
I used to see KMFDM at the indie record stores all the time, which is a surprise considering Wax Trax! releases (the label they’d been on for years) weren’t always easy to find. They’ve been around since the early 80s themselves, starting out in Germany and eventually emigrating to the States. I’m pretty sure I’d heard one or two of their songs on WAMH back in 1988-89, as there was an industrial/techno/EBM show that would play stuff like this.
I owned only a few of their CDs back in the day, but I’d throw them on now and again when I needed the boost for something that would fit the Mendaihu Universe’s more tense moments that I was writing at the time. [Interestingly enough, this is the kind of music Alec Poe would listen to, which goes quite against the laid back aura he puts out through most of the trilogy. It’s all under the skin and hidden away with him.]
They’re still around these days, having dropped an original album (Let Go) early last year and a revisit of an older album this year (Hau Ruck 2025). They may not get a lot of airplay, but they’re definitely an interesting band to check out.
I’ll freely admit that I’m firmly on the Gen-Xer side of ‘remembering MTV back when it played music videos’. We’re talking the early 80s here, back when my family signed up for cable TV via Warner Amex. I’d heard about the channel via its mention in music magazines like Rolling Stone and its occasional “I want my MTV” commercial showing up here and there. The first videos I remember seeing on the channel was .38 Special’s “Hold On Loosely” and The Police’s “Spirits in the Material World”. It was sometime in 1982, and I was already well entrenched in rock radio and American Top 40, even at eleven years old. I was completely hooked.
I think what appealed to me, even as a preteen, was the fact that the channel tried so hard to be at the forefront of music culture, yet also felt like one of those low-budget community access channels where the production teams and the on-air hosts really didn’t know what the hell they were doing half the time. That was part of its charm! They knew enough to replay all the music videos that got a positive reaction from its viewers, but they weren’t afraid to insert weird things like Blotto’s “I Wanna Be a Lifeguard” or Yello’s “The Evening’s Young” to keep us on our toes. Hell, I even loved those one or two minute bumper fillers that were basically public domain films set to nameless instrumentals.
I bring this up following the recent news that the channel has chosen to shut down all of its UK channels by the end of the year, with the possibility of more channels in other countries going the way of the buffalo as well. Not that anyone is surprised these days, considering that the original channel plays reality shows and the tertiary smaller channels are mostly available via cable TV packages.
Most music videos show up on YouTube and TikTok these days, and that might be a good thing when you want to watch the new Taylor Swift video now instead of waiting for it to show up at some point in the next hour or so. But what we miss, just like streaming versus terrestrial radio, is two-fold: we miss out on the slow anticipation that our favorite band or singer will show up like some kind of mini-event, and we miss out on the potential discovery of music we might otherwise not have noticed on the way there.
I don’t necessarily miss those MTV days of yore. I’ve got a lot of great memories, and I’m glad I was there to witness the world premieres and the unscripted moments and the holiday countdowns. I’m thrilled that I was part of the era that got to see all those amazing bands and singers grow and evolve into world-dominating celebrities. I’m especially thankful that it played an extremely influential part in my life when I discovered 120 Minutes.
It was a specific point in time, just slightly ahead of the curve and unafraid to take chances. It was an era of two completely different iterations of pop music — the US and the UK — crashing into each other, influencing each side of the Atlantic and reaching out into the cosmos with something new and fascinating. It influenced the sound of rock and pop for decades to come, allowing it to evolve in unexpected directions.
Now that we have instant gratification at our internet fingertips, having that kind of cable channel doesn’t quite have the power and the reach that it once did. Sure, had they the budget and the creativity and less of the stakeholder influence, MTV itself could have evolved into something unique. Instead, it slowly faded away into yet another benchwarmer channel playing innocuous reality shows and viral videos of people doing stupid things.
That’s the one thing I wish had been different about the channel as it got older and less influential: it could have gone out on a high note rather than limping along well past its lifespan.
It’s funny that I remember this song quite well by the time 1995 rolled around. I’d hoped, back in 1991, that I would be better off and in better emotional shape by then, but alas…
It’s been thirty years since I’d moved out of Boston, and I still think about that from time to time. It was one of the rare moments in my life where I’d said “fuck it, I give up” so utterly completely. But even then I knew that it was the best decision in order to fix a terrible situation. Thankfully I’d been able to transfer my job to a different theater, even though I knew I probably wouldn’t be there for long. I just needed some kind of anchor so I wasn’t completely unmoored. I allowed myself the entirety of September to get all the anger and defeat out of my system before I started fixing my situation.
But in a way, being unmoored to that extent wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. I knew I had to change a lot of things in my life. Grow up some. Deal with some personal shit that I’d been avoiding for years. Think about who I was, who I hung out with, and what I wanted and needed to change. Living with the family from ’95 onwards certainly had its own ups and downs, but it remained that steady platform I could build something new on. It gave me time and breathing room in order to do better.
Fast forward thirty years, and here I am, twenty years married and owning our own home. I’m still a writer — one who’s self-released seven books, with another one on the way and hopefully many more in the future. I still have a stupidly large music collection that is still expanding (though thankfully taking up much less space these days). Life still has its ups and downs, but for the most part I’m doing okay.
Was it worth staying there for a full decade? Definitely. I probably could have moved on earlier if I’d planned better and saved more. Sure, I still made a few dumbass decisions here and there, but doesn’t everyone?
Shocking revelation: I haven’t made a mixtape since the year-end collection back in December.
To be honest, part of it was due to prepping and packing and moving and unpacking and banking and settling in and everything else that goes along with buying a home while still juggling the Day Job. I put my mixtapes (and in effect, this blog) aside for a little bit while I got my life back in order once more.
I’d been tempted multiple times, but I just didn’t have the time or the inclination. Similar to my putting aside the journaling and the word counting and the whiteboard schedule, I felt it was time to properly step away for a bit to recharge. Aside from the book-centric mixes I’d been creating for my writing, I hadn’t been listening to the ones I’d made over the last couple of years, and that started to annoy me. They’re good mixes, they’re just not getting played, and that’s because I needed the brainspace.
We’ve been living here for at least three months now, and that itch to make mixtapes is returning. Sometimes I think about where and when I’d actually listen to them, considering I can’t really do that at my Day Job, and my commute is a seven-minute, sixteen-block drive. Days off and during writing sessions, then. And it occurs to me — that kind of thinking is exactly what’s turning me away from it instead of towards it. Mixtape listening isn’t about setting aside a specific time to put in that latest volume of Walk in Silence or Untitled or Re:Defined. One of the main reasons I chose to disconnect from mixtape-making was the same reason I’d stopped the whiteboard schedule: I was making myself too regimented, and that was taking all the fun and the spontaneity out of it.
As expected, the time away has given me time to connect (or reconnect) a bit closer to my music library, especially now that I’ve managed to back away from the mad frenzy of discography completism and obsessive listening to KEXP (which I still do, just to a lesser degree). I’m relearning how to just enjoy the music I hear, and I’m glad about that. I’m feeling a lot more connected in the right ways once again.
Interestingly, the outcome of this is that making any mixtapes now feels a bit like when I started making them in earnest back in May-June of 1988. I’d made a ton of mixes before that of course — what I refer to as my ‘radio tapes’ era for obvious reasons — but I hadn’t made any personal sourced-from-records/tapes mixes before, at least none made with any seriousness, up until that point. Those original first mixtapes were not about making seasonal mixes at all — they were about collecting my favorite songs at the time, songs I didn’t have in my collection that I could borrow from others, and most of all, they were mixes I could enjoy at any time.
And I think I’m finally getting to that point once again, for the first time in years.
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