Animal Collective has a new album just out, Merriweather Post Pavilion. After listening to it a few times, my thoughts are that it’s very good, but not their best for me. I really liked the frenetic energy of 2007’s Strawberry Jam and the gorgeously complex sound of their older albums. Merriweather Post Pavilion is a bit more easy and domesticated, and the lyrics are much more understandable than in previous albums, which for me is actually a bit of a drawback. It doesn’t leave so much up to the imagination, if that makes sense.

But MPP seems like Animal Collective’s most accessible album to date, so it’s probably a great introduction to their music if you’re not already a fan.

If you are already a fan, here is some other music from 2008 that you might have missed and may like:

Visiter by The Dodos
I love the way they combine simple acoustic sound with fun complex rhythms.

Ice Cream Spiritual by Ponytail
It took me a while to be ready for the heavy guitars and high-pitched growling, but at one point I just got it, and really liked it. (The son of the president of the company I work for plays in the band, in the interest of full disclosure.)

The Evening Descends by Evangelicals
A little psychedelic, and different enough to hold my attention. Also, they’re from my home state of Oklahoma!

I was browsing through iTunes the other day and came across a mention of Matthew Sweet’s 1995 album 100% Fun, which happened to be one of the first CDs I bought as a teenager. To my frustration, I no longer seemed to have the album anywhere, but I really wanted to hear it again, so I broke down and bought the digital copy after a few days of vacillating. It’s so great!

The “power pop” sound of this album didn’t really fit in with the alterna-grunge vibe of the mid-’90s, and that might be one reason that I didn’t give it the credit it deserved at the time, and it didn’t make the cut of CDs to take with me when I went to college a few years later. But the classic, super-catchy tunes of 100% Fun are even better than I remember as I listen to them 13 years later, even though I’m finding again that this album doesn’t really fit in with the music that fills most of my life (this time, indies, experimental rock, folk, and other oddities). The first track, “Sick of Myself,” has quickly become a rediscovered favorite, for its bittersweet lyrics over a memorable melody.

It makes me a little sad to think about how Matthew Sweet has never became a huge name, even though his sound is perfectly suited for mainstream mega-hits. At the same time, there’s no way that he’ll ever go away. (And I hear that “Girlfriend,” from his earlier breakout album, is on Guitar Hero II, so there’s that.)

I found out yesterday that my unhappy hard drive, which was being tinkered with by the second set of professionals, is not recoverable after all, and I’ve lost about a year’s worth of data. Fun!

It’s fine really—when I finally accessed what I actually lost, there’s little that cannot be replaced or forgotten about. I now have my computer back with a new hard drive, and one of the first things did was go back through my old CDs so that I could have something to listen to after three music-less weeks.

Going through my college-era albums, I realized that I hadn’t had Neutral Milk Hotel on my computer in a long time. Remember them? If you kind of do, it’s a good time for a re-listen. And if you don’t remember them, you should get the CD (or download from iTunes and back it up for goodness’ sake). In The Aeroplane Over the Sea is a beautiful listen, with trumpets, lo-fi noise, and references to The Diary of Anne Frank. Hearing it now makes me think of it as a precursor to some of The Decemberists’ better songs—it’s thoroughly situated in the late 1990s (Neutral Milk Hotel was part of the Elephant Six collective), but the sad and touching images it evokes are from an earlier era.

I’m not the first person to revisit In the Aeroplane Over the Sea this year—Taylor Clark wrote about Jeff Magnum in a Slate article on the 10th anniversary of the album back in February. Clark wrote about how Magnum bowed out of the music scene after releasing Aeroplane, with no signs of returning. All the more reason to appreciate this album.

I usually seem to catch up with new music about 1-2 years after it’s released, so I’m happy to have found a great album a mere two months after its debut.

Listening to Cut Copy’s new album In Ghost Colours feels kind of like cheating, it’s so listenable. It makes me think of a tree somewhere that grows songs, and Cut Copy just went and picked their favorites before anyone else got to them.

If you, like so many of us, are a sucker for the retro 80s vibe, you should pick this one up. That is, if you haven’t already in the past two months.