Posts

Posted on

My Top Albums Of 2025

Wow! Check it out! After I published last year’s roundup in February, I swore I’d get this year’s list done ON TIME! And hey, it appears I have done so!

Part of me wonders why I still bother doing these. I used to get a few comments on the site and a few Facebook likes when I posted these things… but now I get very, very little feedback on it.

Since my heart attack, I’ve had to do a daily walk, and I often take that chance to ponder things. And I guess no one really cares about the musical choices of a random, almost 55 year-old dude on the Internet. Let’s be honest: I know I wouldn’t care about the top albums of some random 53 year-old dude from, say, Roanoke, Virginia… so why should anyone else?

But there’s more: I seem to have cornered the market on my specific music style.  I sometimes joke that “I like all kinds of music: Norwegian girls with synthesizers, Danish girls with synthesizers, French girls with synthesizers, Greek girls with synthesizers, Swedish girls with synthesizers… even German girls with synthesizers!” But holy crap is that SO TRUE for me this year. There’s not a lot of variety here. But it is what it is. The records below are my Top 10 Albums of 2025, from the extremely narrow spectrum of music I love. Please sit back and enjoy!

As always, the list comes from my Last.fm stats generally, although I often tinker with the specific order of the albums. After that are the honorable mentions, followed by the “Band of the Year”, “Song of the Year”, “Live Song of the Year” and the raw data from Last.fm.

My Top Albums of 2025

10) Wet Leg – moisturizer – I wish I could find the analogy I want for this album. Because it’s a really solid album. As a collection of music, it’s undeniably better than Wet Leg’s eponymous debut LP. But there’s just something… missing here. In a sense, Wet Leg was kind of like Duran Duran’s Rio album. Here in the US, Duran Durans’ self-titled debut was overlooked by almost everyone. It would later be reissued with an updated cover and “Is There Something I Should Know?” on it. So for many in the US, Rio was the first Duran Duran LP. It was so perfectly of its moment – so new and singular and noteworthy – that it dwarfs other Duran Duran albums, even ones that are arguably “better” than Rio. Wet Leg was a like a bolt of lightning across the pop music firmament – an “OMG what IS THIS?” moment – that any follow-up LP just can’t match. “Catch These Fists” was a MONSTER hit, but quickly grew old… to me, anyway. As the ladies themselves may agree: the second hit is never as good as the first.

9) Nation of Language – Dance Called Memory – And this album seems to have the same problem. Nation of Language’s last album, 2023’s Strange Disciple, wasn’t their first, but my goodness what an amazing LP it is! Much like Wet Leg’s new LP, this one is (arguably) the better album. The band has always been a mixture of OMD, New Order and Tears for Fears, and they’ve refined that model even more here. Much out it is flat-out beautiful: the opening track “Can’t Face Another One” reminds me SO MUCH of something you’d hear on one of my all-time favorites, OMD’s Dazzle Ships! And there’s the raw emotion Ian Devaney is known for, but I’m not sure if we’ve ever heard him bare his soul at a depth like this before. Only problem is, this album just doesn’t stick with me the way Disciple does, and “Inept Apollo” is the only thing resembling a single on the LP:

8) Mogli – Paradox – Selima Taibi is a German singer, songwriter and filmmaker who makes music under the name Mogli. She’s pretty. And that’s about all I objectively know of her. She makes (wait for it!) a dreamy, gauzy pop that’s just soooo nice to listen to. I came across the title track in a random Spotify playlist (like you do) and fell in love. Beautiful. Haunting. Downright sparse at times. Sounds like something an exclusive European luxury brand like Longchamp would use in a commercial? That’s ticking all my boxes. And you know what? The rest of the album is pretty good, too! I mean, not everything is a platinum single here, but “Cupped and Open” and “Swim” are solid. Very much worth a listen!

7) Magic Wands – Cascades – Man, these guys… they have all the thumping drums and cold bass of Pornography-era Cure, with a touch of Cabaret Voltaire’s Red Mecca thrown in for spice. It’s really great when it works, and I was amazed at how often I threw this on when walking or working. Only thing is, as dreamy as most of the tracks from this album are, there’s a lot of “samey” here, even for me. This is one of those records where you get to track 6 (of 10) and say something like, “weeeeeelll let’s see what else Spotify has for us!” That doesn’t mean the first 6 tracks aren’t good. These guys are fun, and if you squint your eyes hard enough, it almost REALLY IS like 1982 all over again!

6) Melody’s Echo Chamber – Unclouded – So, last year’s Album of the Year was Juniore’s Trois, Deux, Un. If you haven’t listened to it yet… ONE, HOW COULD YOU? Seriously, Juniore is yé-yé (an early 60s musical fad in the Romance countries, but especially France; it was a French take on American bubblegum girl bands like The Crystals, The Shangri-Las and The Shirelles)… except Juniore is also partially surf pop and partly The Doors. Melody’s Echo Chamber – fellow Frenchwoman Melody Prochet – is kind of similar. Where Juniore only sing in French, Melody mostly sings in English these days. She’s also more in the style of the original yé-yé music than Juniore’s twisted blend of Jim Morrison and Dick Dale. If you’re old enough to remember early Saint Etienne and The Cardigans bringing back that 60s pop sound… it’s like that, but with French music.. only it’s in English? All that is to say, Procet is an AMAZING musician. If you’re every having a dinner party or are just making dinner one evening, just throw this on and see. I am a FAN, and I think this is easily her best work since her eponymous 2012 debut.

5) Maria Somerville – Luster – Ireland’s Somerville paints a picture like few others can. Her music seems to float in a dreamland… so light and airy and fragile. She’s drawn comparisons to late-era Cocteau Twins, but to me Somerville (and this album specifically) seem to inhabit a sphere more like Julee Cruise. It’s just so haunting! This album (her second) is all thriller, no filler. Every song on the album is amazing, blurring its way to next amazing song to the next. She seems to perfectly fit the dreampop niche of being singular and obscure and hard to fathom at time, yet in the end is still more relatable than fringier “art pop” like Julianna Barwick and Julia Holter.

4) Saint Etienne – International – After 35 years, Saint Etienne are finally calling it a career… or have at least announced that this album, their 13th studio LP, will be their last. It leaves me with mixed emotions. A big part of the reason I stick to newer music is that music requires fresh blood. So you could say it their time to go. Still, they’ve been a part of my world since 1998, and it’ll be hard to say goodbye. But thankfully, this last LP is good. Alas, it’s not quite what I’d hoped. It’s a collection of good songs – some of them really, really good – but nothing more. Saint Etienne’s catalog seems filled with albums of purpose. They invoke a place, like Home Counties or Tales from the Turnpike House – or a time and place, like I’ve Been Trying to Tell You and The Night. Or perhaps they’re about influences, like Words and Music by Saint Etienne or Tiger Bay. The songs here, while again quite good, still somehow seem random, as if Bob and Pete put out a call for “songs to end a career on”. I like it, but I think I’ll miss Saint Etienne more.

Continue reading “My Top Albums Of 2025”

Posted on

The Upside-Down Traffic Light!

Several early Americans – including George Washington – had the idea of a canal connecting Lake Erie to the Hudson River… and thus, the Atlantic Ocean via New York City.

But it was four-time New York governor DeWitt Clinton who made it happen in the 1820s. Clinton sent recruitment teams to England to seek out those who’d built England’s extensive canal system. As it turned out, most of those people were Irish. So the legend goes, once the canal work was done many of them settled around Syracuse, New York instead of going back to England or Ireland. And thanks to the potato famine 20 years later, Irish refugees came to New York in droves. Many had relatives in Syracuse, which meant lots of those newcomers settled in Syracuse, too.

When stoplights came to town in 1925, folks in the Irish-heavy Tipperary Hill neighborhood complained about the red light being above the green light (red typically represented the British Empire on maps, and of course green was associated with the Irish). Teens (and adults) started tossing rocks at the light on a regular basis, breaking the glass lights. The exasperated town official in charge of traffic lights gave up and hung it upside down as the neighborhood wanted. Every few years a new official would show up and try to “fix it”, only for it to be pelted with rocks until they put it back. To this very day, the light at Tompkins Street and Milton Avenue is the only known “upside down” light in the US.

Tipperary Hill Light

Posted on

International Elvis

Elvis Presley was one of the most popular artists ever. Yet aside from a handful of concerts in Canada, and a couple organized by the Army when he was stationed in Germany, Elvis didn’t play any international concerts at all. No London, no Paris, no Tokyo, no Rio de Janeiro.

Frank Sinatra, in contrast, hosted concerts in every Western European country – even the tiny ones you can barely call a “country”, like Monaco. He also did over 50 shows in Australia, 15 in Japan, four in Hong Kong, two shows Tehran and even did one in front of the Great Pyramids in Egypt.

Why didn’t Elvis do any of that? Because his manager was an illegal immigrant.

Colonel Tom Parker

History calls him “Thomas Andrew Parker” – the honorary “colonel” title came from Louisiana governor Jimmie Davis, who he helped elect in 1944. But Parker was actually born Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk in Breda, Netherlands on June 26, 1909.

One of 11 kids, his father died when he was 16. He was a bit of a ne’er do well as a teen, so was sent to live with an aunt and uncle in the port city of Rotterdam. The idea of running away to the United States was just too great. He tried in 1926 but was caught in New York and returned to Rotterdam. He sneaked in for good in 1929. Working as a carny and grifter for many years, Parker stumbled into talent management and had the good fortune to meet Elvis – who Parker thought was black, by the way – early in his career.

But Parker watched Elvis like a hawk, hence the problem: Parker didn’t feel safe leaving the country, and if he couldn’t leave the country, then Elvis wouldn’t, either. Hence the near total lack of international concerts for Elvis.

Posted on

The First Telecom Scam

I took a lot of history classes in college, and back then one thing history professors liked to say (often!) was that “from the time of the earliest pharaohs to George Washington, information could not travel faster than a horse or sailboat”.

I get the point they’re trying to make… it’s just the assumption is wrong. We know that lighthouses were a thing in antiquity, and they convey information at, well, the speed of light. Smoke signals have been used by armies probably as long as armies have been a thing. Signal flags, too.

By the 1700s, some European powers were building semaphore systems, also known as optical telegraphs. You’d build a series of towers, hopefully on mountains or hills. At the top of each tower was a wooden signaling device (see photo) that could be manipulated into 96 unique positions (characters), depending on the country. Through a series of control characters, they could send messages like “prepare for message”, which would be sent down the line of towers. Much like an electrical telegraph… just, visually.

Telegraph Tower

The British had such a system between the Royal Navy’s base at Portsmouth and the Admiralty in London. The Russians had one between St. Petersburg and Moscow. But the French had an extensive system of 500+ stations spanning thousands of miles; this allowed the French government to send complex messages across the country in as little as 15 minutes. France’s system was so vast that lots of operators were needed, so inventors came up with a set of controls for each signaling system that a single person could easily learn without knowing anything about what he was sending – he’s just copying the symbol shown on the other tower, after all.

Enter François and Joseph Blanc. They were brothers and bankers in Bordeaux. In normal circumstances, it would take around 4 days for stock market information to get from the Paris exchange to Bordeaux. If the Blanc brothers could get the information before anyone else, they’d be able to make millions.

Problem was, the semaphore system was strictly limited to government use only. So they started bribing people. They had a confederate in Paris who, when certain market conditions were met, would send a package via the fastest coach to the telegraph office in Tours. Why Tours? Because it was just south of an “auditing station” outside Paris where all communications were logged and verified.

Inside the package were certain carefully chosen items: maybe a blue dress and black trousers, or a wool cap and a jacket. Perhaps a comb and a towel. The items in the box were the signal to the crooked semaphore operator, who would send a carefully-constructed message to Bourdeaux, but then use the “Oops! Please disregard the previous message” symbol to cancel the message without it being logged into the system. Critically, it wasn’t the content of the message itself, but a particular sequence of specific errors, that made up the secret message.

Lastly, the Blancs paid someone who lived within eyesight of one of the last towers near Bordeaux to spy on it and bring them such messages before they were discarded at the destination.

Their scam went on for TWO YEARS, and the brothers made MILLIONS of francs this way. They only got caught when the corrupt Tours operator fell ill and tried to get a friend to keep the scam going for him. The friend squealed to the authorities, who shut down the ring.

A funny thing, though: by this point, the Blancs could afford better lawyers than the government could, and at trial their lawyers brought up that actually, there were no laws that specifically banned insider trading, nor were there any laws that banned manipulating the official government optical telegraph network. In fact, the only crime the government could pin on them was bribing the operator in Tours. They paid a small fine for this and went on their merry way, only slightly less wealthy than before.

The Blanc brothers died rich, and as a result of their court case, France not only explicitly made hijacking the telegraph system a crime, they also made it illegal for anyone else to set up their own system… which seems a bit much to me.

Posted on

The WORST Windows Networking Feature

In Windows Vista, Microsoft added the concept of “Network Profiles” to Windows. On paper, this is cool: Windows determines what type of network you’re on – your work domain, your home network, or a public network like coffee shop or airport Wi-Fi – and adjusts your security settings appropriately.

Except… it doesn’t always work.

Windows Server had a notorious bug where it would reset to a Public Network on every boot, thus disabling Active Directory, file & print sharing, DNS, DHCP, and everything else companies buy servers for. Angry IT guys eventually figured out a fix, all the while cursing Microsoft for adding the feature to Windows Server in the first place… after all, servers are likely to sit on the same rack or shelf their entire existence. No one’s taking the rack-mounted domain controller to Starbucks for a leisurely afternoon coffee.

My point is, if you’ve got a network share on your Windows 1x PC at home and it’s worked fine for years… but suddenly stops working even though everything else on your PC seems fine…. go to Settings > Network & internet and click on your network connection. Check that you’re on a “Private Network”.

Chances are, some Windows Update changed it to “Public Network” without you knowing. Change it back and your network share should start working again. If not, THEN begin the traditional troubleshooting. I can’t imagine how much time I’ve wasted in the past troubleshooting “network weirdness” only for the issue to be THIS damn thing! Now I always check this first!

Windows Network Profile

Posted on

The Tax That Changed London’s Architecture

One subtle feature of London’s architecture you might not notice until your third or fourth visit to the city is… the sheer number of bricked up windows. Once you know to look for them, they’re EVERYWHERE. But why?

Bricked Up Window #1

Because King William III enacted a tax on windows in 1696. Windows were expensive back then, so the theory was the tax would get most its revenue from the wealthy, since they had the most windows.

Bricked Up Window #2

Except EVERYONE started gaming the system immediately. In some places, the tax was tiered, so you paid x tax on 1-6 windows, more on 7-12 windows, etc. A homeowner with 7 windows thus only needed to brick up 1 window to drop into the lower bracket.

And of course the poor inadvertently felt the brunt of the law. Many “apartment buildings” were houses converted into apartments. For tax purposes, they were considered one dwelling. So landlords would brick up all the windows on the first floor, where the cheapest rents were, or would brick up windows of tenants they just didn’t like.

The TRULY wealthy steered into the skid. Although Derbyshire’s Hardwick Hall predates the window tax by 100 years, its striking use of windows flips a finger at the taxman and shows the world who could REALLY afford to live large:

Hardwick Hall

Posted on

Windows Sandbox

If you’re using one of the “Pro” versions of Windows 10/11, you should really use Windows Sandbox. It’s a virtual machine built in to Windows. It uses Hyper-V to run its kernel in isolation, and it cannot save any changes, so it’s pristine on every boot.

I recently needed to click on a link in an email I didn’t really trust. Rather than cross my fingers and pray uBlock Origin would save me, I fired up Sandbox and pasted the link into a virtual instance of Edge. Turns out, the link was legit, but had it not been, I coulda just closed the Sandbox window and that woulda been the end of that.

It’s a great feature I think people don’t use enough. It’s kind of hidden in the “Windows Features” applet, but it’s worth digging around for.

It’s only available in Pro and Enterprise versions of Windows.

Windows Sandbox

Posted on

Yes, VHS Movies Once Cost $100

Have you ever seen a random thing show up out of nowhere on the Internet, stay around for a while, then leave? Yeah, in the past couple weeks I’ve seen several message board posts, tweets and Threads questioning (or outright denying) the fact that VHS movies once cost $100.

As someone who was alive and had an interest in videos back then, let me assure you: yes, VHS movies once cost $100. That’s almost $325 in 2025 dollars!

In the late 70s and early 80s, the concept of owning a pre-recorded movie on videocassette just didn’t exist yet. This was a bit odd, given that plenty of people shared movies taped at home off HBO or Showtime (or copied from rental copies), that bootleg VHS movies were already a thing at flea markets, that there were plenty of movies available on various “disc” formats like LaserDisc and SelectaVision (CED), and that audio cassettes of just about everything – music, books, lectures, foreign language classes, training materials, etc. – were everywhere.

No, the first VHS and Beta movies were sold to video rental shops, and studios charged around $100 for each copy. Popular movies like Stripes or Chariots of Fire could easily rent a profit for the rental shop. Of course, not every single movie cost $100. Movies that didn’t do so well at the box office, or “catalog titles” (older films, like Casablanca) may only have cost $60-$75. And of course, huge chains like Blockbuster Video got volume discounts for ordering 20,000 copies for their corporate-owned shops.

In 1983, Paramount did an experiment. They released the first “consumer” VHS – called “sell-through” in the industry – of a popular, recent film: Flashdance. Flashdance was the first movie priced for Average Joes to buy, at “only” $39.99… which is way less than the $100 they charged your local rental place, but was still around $130 in 2025 dollars. Regardless, people lined up to buy it, and other studios slowly started releasing movies with similar prices.

For the rest of this post, any time a dollar amount is given and followed immediately by a higher number in parenthesis – for example, “$30 ($90)” – the first amount is the original 1980s price and the inflation-adjusted 2025 price is in parenthesis. Note that in most cases I rounded up or down to the closest whole dollar amount.

By the mid 80s, the studios settled into a pattern: new VHS movies would be released to video stores for $70-$100, and they’d enjoy a few weeks of exclusivity before the sell-through version would be released for $19.95 to $59.99 ($60 – $180). This way Hollywood could maximize profit to both video stores and consumers.

And if you really just couldn’t wait for the sell-through version of the film, most local video stores would order you one of the $100 copies if you prepaid or left a deposit. People would sometimes do this because there were rumors in the 80s that rental copies were “much higher quality” than the consumer versions. Which makes sense: Blockbuster may rent out a movie dozens or hundreds of times, so maybe they’d use heavy-duty videotape?

Well, this was sometimes, kinda sorta, technically true – rental versions sometimes used slightly better tape stock and slower duplication speeds, which resulted in marginally better video and audio quality than sell-through versions. But since VHS tapes degrade with each play, the quality benefit didn’t last long. And this wasn’t a “policy” of the movie studios, it was just the reality of having multiple plants do differing production runs, just as some companies make better vinyl records than others today.

I’m mostly talking movies here. Exercise and cooking videos were often cheaper, as were concert videos or music video compilations. The Making of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” video was famously sold for the then dirt-cheap price of only $9.95 ($31)! It was for charity:

The Making of "Do They Know It's Christmas" VHS

Meanwhile Sony had “Video 45s”, VHS and Betamax tapes with 2-4 music videos on them. Their MSRP was $19.95 ($60), but they were often on sale for $12.99-$14.99 ($39 – $45). Here’s David Bowie’s Video 45 of his Let’s Dance era videos:

David Bowie Video 45

Here’s Duran Duran, with their Seven & the Ragged Tiger-era videos gathered into a Video 45 collection called Dancing on the Valentine. This tape was especially popular with fans because it had the extended version of the “New Moon on Monday” video, which was rarely played on MTV or Friday Night Videos:

"Dancing on the Valentine" VHS

Speaking of music, Japanese VHS music videos had a cult following in 80s America… but not because of Japanese artists. You see, European videotapes were encoded in either SECAM (France) or PAL (literally every other European country). They won’t work on US players, which used yet another standard, NTSC. If you put a PAL VHS tape in an NTSC VHS player, it looks something like the old scrambled channels in 80s cable:

But Japan used America’s NTSC system, so Japanese videotapes DID work in the US. The only option most Americans had for music videos from bands “too obscure” or “too alternative” for a US release was to hope there was a Japanese release. Japanese tapes always cost $75-$100 and rarely went on sale. Here’s Japan (the British New Wave band’s) Instant Pictures, a Japanese VHS music video compilation I paid $80 for in 1987… that’s an eye-watering $230 today:

Japan "Instant Pictures" VHS

Anyway, all this went away when DVDs came around. DVDs had a single MSRP for rental stores and consumers. Of course, giants like Blockbuster Video still got volume discounts. And video distributors HATED it, because lots of mom & pop rental stores started buying them online for $12.99 or even at Walmart for $14.99 release week instead of paying $19.99 from the distributor.

Posted on

Great Southeast Music Hall

The Great Southeast Music Hall was a legendary Atlanta music venue at least a decade before my time. The list of acts to play that stage is almost unbelievable. The most famous has to be the Sex Pistols’ show on January 5, 1978… but the venue is really known for hosting acts that would one day become huge. In the 1970s, you could go to Great Southeast Music Hall and see “nobodies” like Billy Joel, Jimmy Buffett or Lynyrd Skynyrd for 3 or 4 bucks. Even if they were known – like Jim Croce, Muddy Waters or Linda Ronstadt – chances were good that there wouldn’t be much of a crowd (the official maximum capacity was only 500).

One night in the mid 1970s, Steve Martin and Martin Mull were supposed to do a double-bill as “The Steve Martin Mull Show”. Local legend Darryl Rhoades describes it:

“Steve had a college date on a Thursday night so they brought in Tom Waits for that show and Martin asked if I wanted to set in so I played drums with Jonny Hibbert on sax and Keith Christopher on bass with Martin on guitar and Tom on piano. That was one of my more pleasant memories at the Music Hall.”

The best part is, only around 14 people bought tickets, so the two Martins cut the show short and invited everyone – the crowd and venue employees – to the nearby Express Lanes bowling alley, where Martin and Mull bought several pitchers of beer and rented a couple lanes for the rest of the evening.

Can you imagine how cool that would have been? How much geek cred would you have with your “I saw Martin Mull open for a pickup band with Steve Martin and Tom Waits and only 13 other people showed up, so they took us bowling and bought pitchers of beer!” story?

NEAT FACT: Jonny Hibbert played sax, but is mostly known for starting Atlanta-based label Hib-Tone Records. The label only ever released four singles. Three of them were pretty forgettable… but the other one was R.E.M.’s first version of “Radio Free Europe”.

HIbtone Records

NEAT FACT 2: Keith Christopher was a founding member (and namesake) of a short-lived Atlanta band called “Keith and the Satellites”. After several personnel changes (including Keith’s departure) they renamed themselves “The Georgia Satellites”.

Posted on

“The Joy Of Knowing Jesus”

This is a gospel record called “The Joy Of Knowing Jesus” by The Revelaires. Normally, old gospel records sell for anywhere from 25¢ to $5, max. However, this particular record usually sells for $450-$1,100.

"The Joy Of Knowing Jesus" cover

Why? Because one day in late 1983 or early 1984, at the now-demolished Reflection Sound studios here in lovely Charlotte, North Carolina, frustrated music producer Don Dixon happened to hand this record to R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe. The rest of the band was working on a song, but Stipe didn’t have lyrics yet. In fact, he had a raging case of writer’s block. Dixon asked him to just sing the liner notes off the back of the LP over a recording of the new song, in hopes that it would get his creative juices going.

"The Joy Of Knowing Jesus" back cover

The song eventually became “7 Chinese Bros.”, the lead track from R.E.M.’s second LP, Reckoning. Dixon kept the version with Stipe singing the liner notes; it’s called “Voice of Harold” and it’s available on R.E.M.’s 1987 B-sides collection, Dead Letter Office: