More laurels to rest (your head) on

Perhaps you know Stylus Magazine – they were a great online music (& movies) site that unfortunately stopped publishing new content a couple years back, (although you can still peruse the archive of articles here).

Decennially, they reconvened this past month to put up a series of decade wrap-up lists & articles and super flatteringly, they put the Meadowlands as their #76 album ‘o the aughts. We’re pretty sure they’re about 75 slots off (meadowlands feels like a #151 at best) but there it is.

Decennially means every 10 years, which isn’t accurate, I just wanted to type it.

You can see the rest of the Stylus Decade here.

Thanks very much, Stylus, sincerely.

Addendum to the addendum

Again, we don't have a press page and have always been iffy about putting up a whole page of flattering press (also too lazy to go ahead and write that press ourselves). But we were so knocked out that some people had put the Meadowlands on their lists of favorite albums of the decade that that we went ahead and broke our own little convention here and then again here when someone pointed out that we'd hilariously missed Pitchfork.

So now we're kind of stuck on this train (and it ain't a bad ride) and adding two more as an addendum to the addendum:

First, Steve Holtje put us in his Top Albums of the 2000s on CultureCatch, which like the other ones, is just bonkers. It means a lot to us because (1) Steve works at Sound Fix Records in Brooklyn so (1a) he hears a LOT of music and (1b) Charles actually shops there because (1c) everyone there is really nice and there's pretty much zero snob-factor...and (2) because Steve is a wonderful musician & composer in his own right.

And for those of you of the Facebook persuasion, James Bradley also put us in his Top 100 Albums of the Decade. James owns Sound Fix (notice a theme here?). So maybe consider this not only a self-administered back-pat but a plug for one of our favorite record stores anywhere.

Thanks, Steve & James, sincerely,

the wrens

...well at least 1% of the way into it

See what happens? With a nod to Kenneth Koch, one brag may hide another.

Last week, after a lot of moral wrestling, we put up a self-congratulatory list of folks that had the Meadowlands on their own respective 'best of decade' lists. And from that, over the weekend, a few people hit up our Facebook page with a couple others we didn’t know about:

First, Pitchfork put the Meadowlands in their Top 200 Albums of the 2000s too. We hadn’t actually heard of this website until now. Pitchfork, is it? I understand it’s fairly popular with the under-50 agricultural set. Well, thank you, “pitchfork”, and hopefully the link above will drive a little traffic your way - we’re always trying to help out newcomers on the alternative and college rock scenes.

Ok really, a great deal of thanks to Pitchfork, for a great deal of stuff. They've been very kind to us over the years - running a lot of news items that barely qualified a such, having us play their first Pitchfork Fest (which was a hoot), stuff like that. And the write-up that accompanies our entry in the list is pretty funny and very nice. So once again, thanks, ‘fork.

Secondly, Chris Campbell at the Huffington Post put the Meadowlands on his own Favorite Records of the Decade list at number…well, it’s ridiculously high. He may have been also.

Seriously, this one’s maybe the biggest honor – I mean it’s the Huffington Post. Finally, all those left-leaning benefits & causes we’ve been a part of have paid off in spades. We’re also now officially sanctioned as both Progressive and more hilariously, as news. Or at least that’s how we like to see it. Hope Arianna accepts our Facebook request now.

Again, all jackassery aside, our sincere thanks. All this has made our week. Honestly.

the wrens

Hey, saw the light on thought I'd drop by

One of the stranger (but occasionally cooler) aspects about being a long-lived but less-than-prolific band that makes it to near-2010 (and with a slow-but-working internet connection) is that online, your older albums never die, they just continue to pop up here & there like that person from accounts payable you made out with at last year’s office holiday party. Or say, the undead. Not necessarily out to do harm or even embarrass, but making things kinda weird just by being there.

And people send you links to see it happen.

With our last album having come out in ‘03, we’re not exactly generating a hipster’s-weight-in-gold’s-worth of press lately. So it’s a really nice surprise - and a super flattering one as well – to find out some folks had put the Meadowlands on their Best-of-Decade lists of varying sizes (theoretically I guess, if the lists were long enough, we’d be on all of them. Like say, Top 110,343 Albums of the Decade).

Now, we should preface all this by adding that we’re kind-of of a mixed mind about posting this type of thing - notice we don’t have a press/reviews page. But making this dumb album almost killed me/us and the work that went into it & the depression that came out of it, dwarfed the small-beans industry setbacks that have become something of our ‘story’ (but more on that some other time). 
So this means more to us than you might think and figure if you’re here reading this, we're counting you in on whatever modest successes we have and so wanna share our good luck & news and say thank you.

And lest you still think we take all this (or ourselves) a tad too serious, probably worth a quick revisit to what we wrote about one of our own early heinous band photos (as opposed to our more recent heinous band photos).

That said...

behold this, our self-tooted horn

...behold this, our self-tooted horn.

We just squeaked in on Stereogum’s Gummy Awards list of top 50 albums of the decade at, well, #50. But this one means the most to us because it’s a readers’ poll and sort of boggles our micro-sized brains that there are enough readers that would vote our album up there esp. given how many great albums there have been in the last 10 years (a point driven home by looking at lists like these). But so, dear readers, thanks very much.

John Richards & DJ Shannon at KEXP also put the Meadowlands in their respective top 10’s . You’d think being dj’s they’d have better record collections. Seriously, KEXP have been awfully kind to us and are super nice folks, so thank you, John & Shannon. Our “pledge checks” are in the mail.

The following three were nice ‘cause we found them ourselves since they’re on blogs I/we actually already subscribe to via the moderny miracle time-suck of RSS. Both Oceans Never Listen and Heeb magazine put the meadowlands in their ten-year top-10s and as the friend who forwarded the Heeb link said, “it’s almost as good as being Jewish”. But actually, as a band we’re ¼ Jewish, ‘Bissell’ is a Yiddish word meaning ‘bit or piece’ and our label is Absolutely Kosher.
At this point we’re considering a run for the Knesset.

And in lieu of long lists, An Aquarium Drunkard has been doing sort of re-reviews of albums of the last 10 years, and were very kind on our sole aughts output.

Lastly, a couple blogs who gave us album of the decade. Just even typing that sentence seems crazy but hey, it’s your list. So truly, our sincere thanks to Thus Spake Drake and Babystew.

Again, hopefully this didn’t come off as braggy, it’s more that to not acknowledge these and say thanks would seem rude. And for us, it’s a wonderful way to finish out 2009 and as our master plans come to final fruition, we should have something new in 2010 to hopefully get all listy about.

Until then, as always, our humble & sincere thanks,
The wrens