I always tend to procrastinate and fine tune my year-end albums list til the very end, and one of the reasons/benefits is that there are always perfectly good albums released in December that get lost in the shuffle, and it's fun to be at least one of the few that notices them without just throwing them on the next year's lists. The last big one of this year that I was looking forward to was the new Fall Out Boy last week, but I was also compelled to pick up Anthony Hamilton's The Point Of It All based on Cibula raving about it. And while he's exaggerating how good it is by quite a bit, it's still pretty good. I've always mainly just adored "Charlene" without feeling really compelled to dig deeper into the guy's music, but really he makes some pretty dope shit. For all the old-school soul Al Green-type signifiers thrown at him, he really has a voice that's completely his own and keeps the production aesthetic way more modern than you'd expect, although thank god this record has a better drum sound than the awful snare on Comin' From Where I'm From, which always bugged the shit out of me. Right now the last song on the record, "Fine Again," is my favorite, but I'm still getting into it.
I was also being an online jerk, something I have promised myself not to do in 2009. My apologies.