LWA Blog

Happy new year and welcome to the New Year's Day edition of ROTW. This week, the Randomizer serves up Chelsea Wolfe's Live at Roadburn. This set was recorded in 2012, and the album was released in 2018. This gorgeous violet disc is the copy I'll be playing. Roadburn is a festival started up in 1999, in Tilburg, Netherlands. I've never been but I've read about it here and there. I think they mainly focus on metal/doom/heavy rock. Chelsea Wolfe is a perfect fit. Opening up the album with Halfsleeper pretty much sets the tone for this set. Haunting and heavy. The...

Welcome back to ROTW, hope your holidays were cool. This week, the Randomizer serves up Asobi Seksu's 2006 gem, Citrus. This is the copy I'll be playing today. I love this album so much, it checks all the boxes for me. I remember hearing the lead single, Strawberries, and just instantly fell for it. I think the album came out a month later, around the start of June. I swear I listened to the album every day for the rest of the year (and probably into a good chunk of 2007). What a blast of an album. Pop hooks for...

My faves of 2025, I've been working on this one for a while. When the year began, I thought I wasn't gonna do another one of these, but here I am. Listening to it. Thinking about it. Writing about it. Listening to it again. There was a ton of good stuff this year and I know I missed a lot. As usual, I made an mp3 mix. There's something therapeutic about putting the songs in an order that has some semblance of flow, and then attempting to get the transitions to feel natural. I tried to keep it on the...

Record of the Week is back! Did a little traveling for Thanksgiving and the week after, and we're still here. This week, the Randomizer brings us Wilco's Speak into the Rose, which is a companion EP to 2011's The Whole Love. This RSD copy from 2011 is what I'll be spinning today. Side 1 of the 4-track 10" EP serves up a 7-minute alternate version of Art of Almost and a demo of I Might. At first listen, one might think this is not Wilco. Very electronic, very experimental and very cool. Side 2 lines up a couple of b-sides,...

Welcome to the Thanksgiving Day edition of Record of the Week. This week, the Randomizer is serving up The National's Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers. This "Vinyl Me Please" reissue from 2017 is the copy I'll be listening to today. Released in 2003, their second album is kinda The National forming their Sad Dads schtick that is very much their brand today. Very indie, a little bit rock and slightly veering into alt-country territory at points. This album, I think, is kinda underrated in The National canon, which is now 10 albums deep (not counting live albums). It just doesn't seem...