It takes me a while to get into a new album, especially one with as much hype as the new Radiohead album.  Now that the dust is settling, I have to say, I absolutely love this album! 

There is not a dull track on this album.  It strikes me as a balance between the band’s rock roots and their newer electronic direction (though who are we kidding, its not so new anymore).  Thom Yorke’s soaring voice is more prominent than in previous albums. 

Radiohead has been adamant about selling their music as albums only, no singles.  In Rainbows is a perfect defense of this.  The quick opening of 15 Step and Bodysnatchers stands in sharp contrast to the gloom of the closing Videotape.  And I doubt any other ordering of the tracks in between would leave me as emotionally moved.

Its hard to play favorites with albums from Radiohead, but I’m glad that seven albums later, they continue to evolve.

I spotted The Hold Steady‘s Tad Kubler and Hamilton Leithauser from The Walkmen hanging out at Hi-Fi tonight.  I had it in my head that if they were still around when we were leaving, I’d go up and talk to them.  Sadly they weren’t.  But to capture the moment in time, here’s what I’d like to have said to them:

I’m in love with this video.  The scenery and music work beautifully in tandem.  Sigur Ros’ lead singer puts it in context:

The video is a preview for Sigur Ros new film Heima.  Its screening in NYC on Saturday as part of the New Yorker Festival, along with an acoustic performance from the band (of course, its sold out).

The song from the video is “Hoppipolla”, and I’ve had it on repeat all day.

And Iceland looks breathtaking; I’d like to visit someday!

I’m a big fan of social bookmarking sites.  After playing around with a few, I finally settled on Delicious; its simple interface and tagging options make it easy to use but powerful.

But what surprises me is how effective Delicious is for capturing other types of lists beyond bookmarks.  Here are a few examples:

1. Storing articles to read later using Readeroo – This simple Firefox plugin I wrote helps manage the flow of articles using the “toread” tag in Delicious.
2. Storing books I’d like to read – I’ll save the Amazon link to a book and tag it with “booktoread”.  I can then add other tags to partition the books by subject or genre.
3. Storing music I’d like to listen to – Same concept as the list above, except for music, tagged with “musictoget”.  I also add the “rhapsody” tag to indicate whether I can listen to the album on Rhapsody.

The same method can be expanded to all sorts of lists, such as movies you want to see or a wishlist for Christmas.  Any bit of info that’s tied to a url open to be managed by Delicious, just pick a consistent tag and stick with it. 

Personally, this is a revelation, since it allows me to centralize all those random lists scattered in text files and Access (yes, Access!).  This is a crucial piece of moving my life online.

I realize that tagging is nothing new, and none of this is revolutionary.  But I find it interesting that such a simple concept can be “overloaded” to represent different types of data within the same system.  In this case the tags go beyond mere categorization to build a personal “Database of Intentions“.