Unyielding Commissioning Is Way Behind and Short On Time

...so you're going to get a massive link dump with scant little commentary. Some of these go back over a week. Sorry to keep the good info from you for so long.

Jim Derogatis' Best Albums of the Year So Far -- Proving myself further out of touch by not owning any of these. What can I say, I'm a bad blogger right now. Interesting that he has Weezer at #2 even though it generally didn't seem to be very well received by critics. He's also just convinced me to buy that Nick Cave record. Everyone agrees it's amazing. So far I've heard only one song which didn't do much for me.

JD's Top Ten Movie Soundtracks -- I know I keep linking these guys every week. I promise only to link when their lists are good. But they're always good.

The Ten Best Selling Albums of all time -- Kinda interesting to look at. I had no idea AC/DC's Back In Black did this well. Did you? Also surprising to yours truly: Dark Side of the Moon and Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell. Wow.

Bird on Bird is Back in Action -- A while back, we reported on Andrew Bird's opinion piece in the New York Times. Apparently he has a running deal with them because his second such column showed up yesterday. More interesting personal insight from Bird here, but the real kicker is a 47 second sample of "Oh No," one of his new tunes. It's smooth and friendly. Check it out.

Hideout Block Party Tickets On Sale -- Band playing include: Neko Case, The New Pornographers, Black Mountain, Robbie Fulks, and many more. It's the last show of the summer, so go get you some.

Lastly for today, in case you haven't heard. Stevie Wonder is playing Taste of Chicago for free. If you can deal with the crowds, you get to see Stevie Wonder for free. A small price to pay for this kind of thing:
I could have picked a more upbeat, well-known tune, but my goodness. There's just no comparison to Stevie.

Oh, there's so much more to talk about. Will we ever get to it all? Coming up this week. Lollapalooza released the detailed schedule. We'll have plenty of comments, but the initial, gut reaction - thumbs up! Also, those final AFI genre lists were released. We talked earlier about how they botched the balloting, but the initial, gut reaction of the results - thumbs up! We'll go into detail as there are some interesting finer points.