“The Real Thing” is the best Dandy Warhols song ever.

Best Album: A. C. Newman — “Shut Down the Streets”

Coincidental resemblance to the title of A.C. Newman’s “The Palace at 4 AM”?

Only one other commenter mentioned the latest Dodos album?!? I don’t understand the lukewarm reaction to that album at all — the musicianship is phenomenal, and the vocal melodies are some of the best I’ve heard in years. Neko Case is great on it, too. I think that it blows Visiter away, which in comparison to No Color sounds meandering and demo-ish (except for “Ashley,” which is unbeatable).

Best of the year, and certainly the most listenable, especially when its blasting while you’re driving with the windows down on a gorgeous day.

In a sea of “Fuck you for liking the Hold Steady!” and “No, fuck YOU for disliking them!” inanity, I would like to make a few points:

1. It’s a specious argument — and a ridiculous blanket statement — to say that there’s any correlation whatsoever between one’s level of culture/education and his or her liking of THS’s music.

2. It’s entirely baffling to see how many people accuse hipsters of disliking THS based on the fact that the band has built a sizable fan base and is therefore too popular to be cool. This is completely counterintuitive, because THS totally panders to the hipster demographic in their lyrics. A significant degree of my utter revulsion for the band stems from the fact that this asshole, Finn, is 36 years old and yet somehow singing lyrics about “the scene” and 17-year-olds and all manner of related pathetic, creepy, and pedophiliac topics that he should’ve outgrown years ago. I’m five years younger than the guy, and I’ll be good god damned if I’ve given the slightest shit about scenes or hipsters for a decade. It would be fun to write THS-style songs about the Hannah Montana demographic, just to point out just how disturbing and absurd it is for these borderline-middle-aged men to be singing about college/high-school-aged kids; “She said she got a chocolate milk sugar buzz/ just because/ her mom won’t let her stay up late/she’s spastic in oversized plastic sunglasses/she said, ‘yeah, I put off my homework’/'my teacher’s a real jerk’ …”

3. Finn’s *delivery* is obnoxious as hell; the only thing more ponderous than the pseudo-profundity of his fake-catch-phrase-y one-liner lyrics is his smug, arrogant “I’m a poet of the people” nasal shout-singing. You can hear the “I’m a genius, and this is why” in every line, not unlike Anthony Hopkins’s post-Silence of the Lambs scenery-chewing, Oscar-grubbing hamminess.

4. That Finn throws together a bunch of details and dropping random scene/hipster-esque vernacular in his lyrics does not even _begin_ to warrant comparisons to Springsteen, let alone Beat writers.

5. Many seem to praise THS’s “refreshing honesty” and “belief in what they’re doing” or whatever, but their little contrived narratives and straight-faced bar rock feel juuuuuust a bit forced.

All of the above are just my opinions, of course; I just wanted to throw something out there about *why* I think the Hold Steady are terrible and insufferable, not just that they *are* terrible and insufferable.