good god men! it's friday afternoon and no one has offered at least two of their five discs of the year for others to contemplate/congratulate/annihilate?

fine. then i'll offer up two of my choices:

'Cast of Thousands' by Elbow, an album that doesn't really push any boundaries, channelling, from track to track, everyone from Coldplay to Catherine Wheel to Primal Scream to Spiritualized. But hey, since I dig all those influences and since this is one solid album I can listen to and enjoy all the way through, and since, even after I've played it over 20 times I'm still not tired of it, into the top 5 it goes.

My other choice, 'Funeral' by Arcade Fire, is probably up there at the top of the top five, for the sheer energy and intensity of the music and the vocals and for the fact that it conjures up good feelings about the music I liked in the 80s.

as promised, here is one of my top 5 songs of the year:

'What are you afraid of?' by West Indian Girl. If you don't recall it from the cd club (we were probably 5 or 6 drinks in at that point), you can preview a copy at the new Itunes store, the Canadian version of which opened yesterday (meaning for a mere 99 cents, you can also purchase it, all legally.

Itunes is a free software program that you can download from apple's website and I use it to burn all my cds and organize my music. Recommended if you like to listen to music on your computer and necessary if you wish to purchase music from the itunes music store. Enough promo for apple!! (I've got my own software to sell!)

But one quick other note, in regards to the reviews topic last week, there is a site called Metacritic that compiles, among other things, reviews of cds from various sources. There was a reference to this site in an article I read today at Salon.com that echoed statements made by those of you who own the Brian Wilson disc. The writer can't understand why it's the highest rated disc of the year. (Note: to read articles at Salon, you have to watch a brief commercial).

Okay, back to selling career exploration and planning software...