From a purely musical standpoint, I find The Fame to be pretty scattershot in quality - a couple great songs in places, but a lot of it being either just average-to-mediocre songs or great choruses with lesser verses attached to them (typical pop songs, eh?). If I then listed all of my favorite tracks and some examples of those great choruses, that could arguably be my entire synopsis of Lady Gaga's first.

However, The Fame is actually more interesting to discuss farther. A lot of it has satirical and subversive undertones, which makes some songs pretty damn funny, some deceptively…

I've never cared much for The Killers save for a few songs, to the point of at times being somewhat hostile to the thought of them. Even though I didn't hear much from them.

nibchan has been a fan, however, which motivated me to dig deeper into them to get more proper exposure to their music. Wise decision on my part, which I realized when the synths to Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine kicked in, because this album is actually damn good. It's sonically dense; even the singles, which are in my opinion among the weaker tracks here, benefit…

Light Grenades has a particular distinction: it's the first of the albums borrowed from nibchan that I've listened to. And I'm very happy with it! Quicksand is an awesomely trippy, Kid A-like way to kick it off, and the entirety of the remaining tracks is consistently high-quality, especially the first-half-album run of A Kiss To Send Us Off, the three singles Anna Molly, Dig, and Love Hurts, the title track Light Grenades, and Earth To Bella, Pt. 1 (I especially note this one for its MASSIVE chorus).

I've got only three real complaints: Quicksand…

I already loved Walk Away, and the rest of the album mostly hangs in good company with it. Everything about the overall sound - loud drums, aggressive but largely undistorted guitars, Alex's voice - works to the songs' advantage in my opinion. They put this sound to work in working across a diverse range of song styles, and greatly to their credit, absolutely all of the ones they tackle are done well - dance-rock (The Fallen, Do You Want To, What You Meant, Outsiders), upper-tempo alternative rock (This Boy, You're The Reason…

Having played Everlong so many times on Rock Band 2, I kind of got sick of that song, haha. Even then, however, it's still great, and combining that with the fact that Dave Grohl is possibly made of pure awesome (going past the obvious distinction of being Nirvana's drummer, he's also down with Tenacious D and drummed on QOTSA's Songs For The Deaf, which I absolutely adore) was enough reason to delve into some Foo.

And this album's pretty damn good; certainly helps that all its singles hit the mark, and the album tracks - like Wind Up…

This started off as a Facebook note, but it's just occurred to me that my journal here would be an excellent forum for displaying it. Therefore, this is an adaptation of that note, tooled specially for the tools of lastfm.

So, the underlying concept of this journal: there's a pretty big mountain of music that I inherited over the Spring 2010 semester, whether through my own album purchases or borrowing music from my friends, and one of my biggest goals over this summer is to get through most - if not all - of it before the next school year…