Day Nine (A Sad Man in a Song Part II)

Look what finally got a proper release!



Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse Present Dark Night of the Soul can be downloaded from Amazon.com for like $3.99 or something ridiculously affordable. Me being the out of control music collector that I am, I had to fork up the scratch for the lovely deluxe vinyl box version.





The box includes the album on heavy double vinyl, 2 CDs: The album and the instrumentals, 3 lobby cards, a poster, a photo, and a book. The book is a record-sized version of the original hardbound book of photos that was DNOTS's first format. Lobby cards? What the hell year is it, anyway?

I'm glad the record finally got an official release. It sounds great. It's a far cry from the low-quality source I used to have. It's just sad that two of the people involved had to die before getting to see this beautiful work see the light of day.

So now Dark Night enters the running to be my record of the year two years in a row. It's got some stiff competition though, what with Janelle Monáe and Arcade Fire and Tame Impala all putting out stellar releases this year. Guess we'll just have to see...

Day Four (A Sad Man in a Song)

I absorb records. I tend to consume so much music that record release dates all blur together. **SNOB ALERT** I spent much of this year consuming psychedelic world music from Turkey and Latin America to be bothered keeping up with whether Vampire Weekend put a new record out. I only loosely follow musical trends and I have completely turned my back on the pathetic joke known as American Radio.

Because of all that I rarely take the time at year's end to figure out what my favorite record was for the last 365 days. But this morning, in the shower, it dawned on me what my favorite record of '09 was: Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse Present Dark Night of the Soul.







Dig if you will a record produced and performed by Danger Mouse and Mark Linkous and featuring 11 various guests ranging from the Flaming Lips to Nina Persson of the Cardigans to the late Vic Chesnutt and even David Lynch himself on two tracks and hovering over the entire production as its chief influence. Now, house that record in a lavish book of Lynch photographs and then, to top it all off, have EMI step in and prevent the music from ever being publicly released. Thankfully, it streamed on a blog a few days before the injunction, and someone was nice enough to rip it. It wasn't too hard to find.

Why is it my favorite record of 2009? Because it plays like a really dark compilation of the best songs you've heard by a bunch of bands you really, really like.

And because it didn't really come out.

Score!