What I find surprising about this year is that there have been tons of great releases out throughout the year. I have not liked this many albums in one year in a very long time. Yet there seems to be nothing coming out this holiday season. There are still tons and tons of great albums out there. Thousands of great albums from years past. But just not much new out right now. So I have been trying to use this time wisely. I have been going back in time lately and discovering old albums from decades past. But I have also been spending this extra time catching up on all the great albums that came out this year. I am obsessed with that new Sally Shapiro album "Disco Romance" right now. It is the funnest album out this year since Lily Allen. Sort of like a more modern version of Stacey Q. Like a mix of all the great and fun things about 80's electro and freestyle. But still sort of relevant and exciting. I also am a bit obsessed with Pelle Carlberg. His latest album "In A Nutshell" came out about six  months ago but I just found the time to give it a proper listen. And now I can't stop. It really is brilliant. Both Sally Shapiro and Pelle Carlberg are from Sweden. I guess it is just a coincidence. But maybe not. Two of my other favorite albums of the year also come from Sweden. "Night Falls Over Kortedala" by Jens Lekman and "West Coast" by Studio both come from the land of Sweden. Jose Gonzalez is also from Sweden and I am also in love with his album this year "In Our Nature." The Shout Out Louds are from Sweden as well. What is going on this year. Sweden is taking over my life. The Knife and Love Is All are also from Sweden and they both had two of my favorite albums from last year. And I always had a special place in my heart for ABBA. But I never really thought much about Sweden until this year when I started realizing all my favorite albums were from Sweden. So don't get too depressed if you don't think there are any good albums out this month. There are plenty of albums for you to catch up on. You can just spend a couple months getting to know all the great music coming out of Sweden alone. There are also two brilliant albums out recently on Italians Do It Better. Both "Night Drive" by the Chromatics and "Beatbox" by Glass Candy are absolutely fantastic. You will not be able to stop listening to them once you stop.

Rhino has finally decided to put out a special box set just for me. If I could imagine up any box set to best describe me and capture my little world of music, it would look something like this new brilliant box set released today by Rhino. The new "Brit Box" is a 4 cd set of the british music from the 80's and 90's that made me who I am. I have many mix tapes that resemble a lot of what is included in this box. Some of them made by me and many made by friends. I can remember the exact moment that I heard some of the songs on this box for the first time. The exact moment that I went to a record store in search of the albums from these artists. There are 78 songs by 78 different artists in this box.

The box is officially called "The Brit Box: U.K. Indie, Shoegaze, and Brit Pop Gems of the Last Millennium." It really looks awesome. The box is shaped like one of those red telephone booths in England. I have never seen one up close but we all know what they look like. It even has a working light. It also comes with an 80 page book of interviews and photos. It includes essays by Alan Mcgee, Stephen Street, and Alan Moulder. It drives me a little crazy when box sets or collections have a random order to the track listing. So it made me happy to see that the tracks are all in a basic order. The box set is not perfect. But it comes really close. I own or have owned at one point almost all of the songs in this box. If I didn't own one of the albums that all these songs were on, then I definitely had a close friend that did. I might have picked a couple different songs for some of these artists and I probably would have included a couple more artists. But overall, the box is very impressive. I really can't wait to open one up and read all those interviews and stories in that fancy little booklet. And I can not wait to listen to all these songs again. I have never stopped listening to most of the bands in this box. The Smiths, Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine, The Stone Roses, Lush, Suede, Blur, & Pulp remain some of my favorite bands. It is really hard to even put into words the lasting effect that these bands have had on me and on a whole generation of music fans.

Seriously, how is it November 13th already? Christmas is just right around the corner. There have really been a lot of great albums out this year already. I think that this year has been a lot better than the last couple years. I already have over 100 albums on my top 50 already. It's gonna be hard to get that down to just 50. I might have to share my top 100 with you this year instead of just my top 50. But whatever has come out this year has pretty much already come out. There are still a couple things to look forward to after this week, but not much. The Sigur Ros DVD comes out next week. The Mary J. Blige album finally comes out the week before Christmas. I am not really sure why they are waiting so long on this one. I really love the new song and video and am very excited to hear this one. I also love that Mary J. Blige. There is also the soundtrack to Sweeney Todd featuring the singing voice of Johnny Depp. I am so excited about this movie. I love Tim Burton so much I can't even stand it. And I love Johnny Depp. This movie does look amazing. Other than that, it is mostly reissues, greatest hits, deluxe editions and live albums. The standard holiday releases. But there is also this amazing box set coming out soon as well. It comes out November 20th. It is basically my music collection crammed into a box set. All of my favorites from England from the 80's and 90's. I can' t really imagine my life without the music in this box. Before I go on to this week. I need to tell you all to go see "Lars & the Real Girl." It really is the most amazing movie. The funniest thing that I have seen in a while. But also super touching and sweet. I can't really stop thinking about and I beg you all to go see it if you have not yet.

Out this week is a new album by Alicia Keys. I really do love this lady. It is just one of those things that happened and I can't really explain it. She just sort of makes me happy and I think she might be sort of magical. I really liked that "Songs In A Minor" way back in 2001. And she got me hooked. One of my old favorites, Duran Duran, also has a new album out. This one is produced by Justin Timberlake and Timbaland. Seriously, it really is. I have not had the chance to hear it yet. But I am very curious. My cousin is still the biggest Duran Duran fan. But it really makes me happy. I love when anyone is devoted to their favorites. I know a couple of those Duran Duran fans. You don't really want to mess with them. They are serious about their Duran Duran. Please do not joke about Duran Duran with them. You might get hurt. It does make me happy that Duran Duran is still putting out albums. I really did love those early albums. They still give me lots of good memories. You really should get that Duran Duran DVD that came out a couple of years ago. It is the greatest hits DVD and it is sort of amazing. Those videos were just fantastic. The design of the DVD and the features are really awesome as well. Lots of little secret things inside the DVD. The Hives also have a new album out today. I do also really love the Hives. I do fear that my love for them has been slowly dying since the last album. But I am willing to give this new one a big chance. I was really swept up in the Hives frenzy when I was last living in Hollywood. I love myself some swedish garage music. That Veni Vidi Vicious and Barely Legal album are still really great. I saw them live in Hollywood and it is still one of my favorite shows that I have ever been to.

I don't know what it is that gets me about cover songs. But I really do like them. It is always fun to hear one of your favorite bands cover some horrible song that was not really good before they covered it. Or to hear  some band do a sort of tribute to some awesome song you loved in your youth. As I listen to more and  more music I also find out that some of the songs that I loved forever and thought were originals were actually covers of much older songs. I didn't grown in the girl group 60's or the Motown 70's. So many of the songs that I originally heard in the 80's and 90's that I thought were originals, were actually just covers. When I bought the  Siouxsie & The Banshees "Through the Looking Glass" cassette and listened to it for the first time, I had no idea it was all covers. It only took me a couple years to figure it out. I had not heard Television and Iggy Pop yet. I also heard most of the covers on the This Mortal Coil albums for the first time as "This Mortal Coil" songs.  It is weird to grow up hearing one version of a song only to learn later that there is some older original version that actually inspired the version I grew up loving. How would I know that the Soft Cell song "Tainted Love" was actually performed 10 years before I was born by the great Gloria Jones. The song was then covered by Ruth Swan in 1975. After the Soft Cell version that I grew up with in the early 80's, the song has of course been covered countless more times. The song has been performed by Blue Oyster Cult, Coil, Marilyn Manson, and the Pussycat Dolls. Rihanna even sampled the Soft Cell version a couple of years ago for her song "S.O.S."

I still remember the first time that I heard about  Sigur Ros. I had read an article about them in NME and was immediately intrigued by this new Icelandic band that looked sort of like Radiohead. I decided then that they would be one of my new favorite bands. I put a picture of them on my wall at work before I had even ever heard them.  I had no idea what an affect they would actually end up having on my life. They were described as a little bit experimental and a little bit classical. They were maybe a mix of a band like Radiohead and a band like Slowdive. Ethereal and dreamy and shoegazey. Exactly the kind of band that I could easily fall in love with. The first thing I picked up from them was the single for Svefn-g-englar in 1999. I couldn't really pronounce the name of the band or the single. But Sigur Ros easily and quickly became my new favorite band. They are even to this day sort of hard to explain. I often try and explain them to people and find it easier to just make them listen to it. Much like an artist like Bjork, you quickly will discover if you hate them or love them. There is really no in between. Jonsi Birgisson really has a  magical voice. There is really nothing that I have ever heard before that sounds anything like it. Sort of like Elizabeth Frasier from the Cocteau Twins. You just hear it and can't help but be impacted by the power of the voice. The music of Sigur Ros is also really fantastic. With the combination of the music and that magical voice, these Sigur Ros albums are easily some of my favorites.

Agaetis Byrjun came out right after the single and was really hard to find in stores for a while. The album went through a couple labels and distributors but I think anyone who found it also soon fell in love. I later found their real first album "Von" which was also reissued years later. "()" came out in 2002 followed by "Takk" in 2005. Both these albums are fantastic. The band can really do no wrong. I have seen them about 4 times. Each of these show I hold up as some of my favorite shows. I might sound like I am giving them a bit too much praise. But I really do love this band and just can't stop saying it. I saw them at the Fillmore in San Francisco. Gillian Anderson from the X-Files was up in the private balcony reserved for celebrities and friends of the Fillmore. I sort of remember yelling out "Scully" in the middle of the show. I was of course much younger back then. I then saw them at some fancy auditorium on Wilshire in L.A. after I had just moved down there. Both these shows were amazing. But for the Takk tour I saw them in Oakland at the Paramount Theater. I can't really think of a more beautiful place to see them. I had heard wonderful things about the Paramount but had never been there until a week or so before the Sigur Ros show. I had actually just seen an amazing Dead Can Dance show there. Which is sort of weird since a "best of" Lisa Gerrard CD is finally coming out domestically today as well. But this show was the best of the Sigur Ros shows that I had seen. They played some of the songs behind a screen and had amazing visuals during the whole show.