:) I like music.

Where I'm at: Editor-in-chief of the University of Calgary's Gauntlet. Enjoying it, I suppose. Listening to ambient as I edit copy.

The big albums for me lately: Grouper's "Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill," Carly Rae Jepson's "E-MO-TION," SSLYBY's "Broom," The Mountain Goats's "The Sunset Tree," Okkervil River's "Sleep and Wake-Up Songs," Julia Holter's "Loud City Song," Talking Heads's "Fear of Music," Julianna Barwick's "Nepenthe," The Microphones's "It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water," any new LCD Soundsystem I can get my hands on. Any common thread? Sad boys frantically strumming guitars, sad girls singing quietly in the background.


Explaining my lofty rating system: There's a lot of music out there and I knowing for the most part what I'll like. As a result, I have a positive opinion about most albums I rate, pushing the centre of my rating curve up to a 3.75 area on this site. Every album I've rated 5.0 is perfect. I reserve 0.5 for special cases, of which I've only found one. I don't think any 1.0 albums have any redeeming qualities to them all the way through. Sometimes I think the music is good but it's so derivative of either the artist's previous work, or the work of others, that I have to rate it low.

Current 5.0 releases:

The Beach Boys - Pet Sounds (1966)
My Bloody Valentine - You Made Me Realize (1988)
The Field Mice - Sensitive (1989)
A Tribe Called Quest - The Low End Theory (1991)
Slint - Spiderland (1991)
Guided by Voices - Bee Thousand (1994)
Belle and Sebastian - If You're Feeling Sinister (1996)
Built to Spill - Perfect From Now On (1997)
The Promise Ring - Nothing Feels Good (1997)
Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (1998)
The Dismemberment Plan - Emergency & I (1999)
The Magnetic Fields - 69 Love Songs (1999)
The Avalanches - Since I Left You (2000)
Yo La Tengo - And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out (2000)
Arcade Fire - Funeral (2004)
Jens Lekman - Rocky Dennis in Heaven (2004)
Radiohead - In Rainbows (2007)
Grouper - Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill (2008)
Sufjan Stevens - The Age of Adz (2010)
Destroyer - Kaputt (2011)
Tame Impala - Lonerism (2012)
Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires of the City (2013)
The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die - Whenever, If Ever (2013)
Sufjan Stevens - Carrie & Lowell (2015)