Kyle, great news abut record sales, made even more exciting by the news that it's on the backs of Lady Gaga's $0.99 special!

Hey thanks for the prompt posting of recent favourites and disappointments. That will help. I have a couple of those - Antlers, Yuck, and Low - but will check out the others - particularly the Papercuts and UNKLE, which you mentioned the other night and I tried to find unsuccessfully.

I'm also enjoying a few others which you may well know, but just to share the love: the cave singers which is a mix of pleasant chanted folk music and slightly rawer electric stuff, the mellow indy pop sounds of Iceland's Sin Fang, the hard punk sounds of the latest under-20 phenom band, Iceland's (yet again) Iceage, some atmospheric guitar-forward pop from Hello Echo, soft Cali-rock-meets-Pavement from The Donkeys, and finally, though it's early on in the listening cycle, liking the recent follow up records from Army Navy and Pete and the Pirates. Three other records that I've spun a fair bit are the 20-years-in-the-making Feelies release, the J Mascis record, and Yellow Ostrich's exercise in stimulating pop weirdness.

Somewhere in that amalgam lie my faves of the first half of 2011. (Fleet Foxes is nice too....damn, so is Matt Pond's EP, and oh yeah, the Sloan record is pretty dang good). Anyone else care to sound in?

Re disappointments, the Braids are unduly lauded to my ear as well. And I'm quite unhappy with the Bon Iver album - he's suddenly sounding like Grizzly Bear, which I thought was a great band until Veckatemist's excesses (I know many differ with my opinion). I'll give it another few listens but it lacks the immediacy and the huge angsty soulfulness of For Emma, replacing with busy, grandiose, and annoying arrangements.