rumpled.

Joanna Newsom's ''Have One On Me'' is fucked-up good. It's like a banquet where the wine & sweetmeats just don't run dry. Songcraft! Yeah! Songcraft!

Seconding Zs' ''New Slaves''. I like my noise bands unafraid of rhythm.

Also... if anyone feels like being re-convinced by a straight-up guitar+voice album: The Tallest Man On Earth's new one, ''The Wild Hunt'', is pretty fucking great. I was unimpressed with his first album (''Why not just listen to Dylan?'', I thought, not a little gruffly), but he really snared some magic with this one, imo. Metaphors about electricity and swift-flowing rivers occur, even to the tiredest mind.

(Lastly: everyone else seems to loathe it for some reason, but I can't get enough of Rafter's ''Animal Feelings''. Great sex + wild introspection. A deranged ad-man doing home-made Timberlake. AWESOME, if deeply flawed in most ways.) (Seriously -- the song ''No Fucking Around'' has me hooked so bad it's not funny. Every time it ends my finger twitches to play it again. It's the rhythms. Or maybe the Daft-Punk-with-a-pot-belly chorus. Either way, I'm scared to look at my last.fm stats for it.)

I support this protest as much as anybody, but there is no way that there were 20,000 people there.

Not to imply that there weren't a lot of people there -- heck, at the height, it probably did reach around 10,000 -- but there's no need for such blatant exaggeration.

It happens with pretty much all protests, I find, and it never ceases to bug me.

By day 3, the amount of teenage New Zealanders wearing Ouch My Face t-shirts was pretty awesome.

DAMN this is a good song.

I've been thinking about this one for a while... rather than any ''THESE ARE THE GREATEST''-style nonsense, I humbly submit these only as the albums of the past 10 years that have meant the most to me.

The Microphones - It was Hot, We Stayed in the Water [2000]

The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots [2003]

Animal Collective - Sung Tongs [2004]

Okkervil River - Black Sheep Boy [2005]

Christine Fellows - *Paper Anniversary *[2005]

Lucky Dragons - Widows [2006]

The Most Serene Republic - Underwater Cinematographer [2005]

Dirty Projectors - The Glad Fact [2003]

Sufjan Stevens - Come On! Feel The Illinoise [2005]

Joanna Newsom - *Ys *[2006]

(It tends to take a few years before I feel like I can accurately judge whether or not an album has really 'lasted' with me; which I guess is why there's nothing post-2006 stuff on this list. Ask me this question in 2015 ~ then I'll have your answer proper.)

Oh MAN is that poster cool~!