If It's Too Loud...

Another slowish week, but with one highly anticipated release and one awesome surprise. Album of the Week : Artist : Field Mouse Album : Episodic Quick Description : New album from an indie/dream-rock blog favorite. Why You Should Listen : Field Mouse's debut album was my favorite album of 2014 . Overall Thoughts : Episodic is not Hold Still Life . It's a little more raw, a little more mature, and a lot of the reverb/dreamlike status of it has been put aside. The changes are really solid, though, and the result is an album that, on first listen, I am really into. The slow trickle of songs over the course of the last few months acted as a solid preparation of what came, and the result is just a great album across the board and one that might be a favorite of this year again. If the first Field Mouse album didn't quite do it for you, definitely give this a shot as it has a little more polish. But if you're already a fan, you're going to find a lot to lik...

The good news is that the new releases were a day early this week and have a lot of fun nuggets. The bad news is that at least three of them are well over two hours long. Ah well. R.E.M. - Unplugged 1991/2001: The Complete Sessions : R.E.M. is far and away my favorite band of all time. Previously only available in bootleg form, and R.E.M.'s contribution to Record Store Day this year, the Unplugged collection is one of those completest things that will be of interest to R.E.M. fans and perhaps fans of the now-basically-useless Unplugged brand, but beyond that it's going to be filled with a lot of songs you probably don't know on the first disc, and a lot of songs you only know if you're a hardcore fan on the second. One thing I always enjoyed about the Unplugged shows were the ways they kind of exposed the songs for what they were - a reason the 10,000 Maniacs session was so solid was because their songs translated well to an acoustic landscape. While the 1991 U...