Cam Recommends

Here’s where I usually drop a fairly long preamble in which I try to sum up my year in music to some degree or another, whether it’s trying to find disparate themes or some other common touchstone. But this year? 

I've teased this topic before, but in lieu of publishing my 2025 "best of" lists before the year is actually over (I'm going to be disciplined to my format here, by the way, in that I plan to still do a quarter four notable releases list and then the year-end wrap up--hopefully by mid January at the latest), I'd like to highlight some of the best cover art that I saw this year. I truly love good album art and it is a shame that you generally have to kind of go out of your way to find it at a large enough scale to appreciate: whether in "real life" by finding said records on vinyl, or digitally where most streaming services de-prioritize album art to the point of making smaller and smaller thumbnails. But even if it's just a few more clicks into an artists Bandcamp profile, it's always worth the effort to take a closer look at any record art that catches the eye. I'm not someone who necessarily "sees" anything when listening to music, so it's not that album art represents some kind of jumping off point I need to complete my listening experience (though no shade towards anyone who does process music vis a vis visuals that way), but rather I find it a useful element in interpreting what the artists themselves may wish to communicate with the music contained within that literal artistic wrapper. It’s not all-encompassing of course, different artists place different levels of importance on the physical trappings of the medium. Regardless, ever since I spent hours pouring over the liner notes of that first CD pressing of Radiohead’s Kid A back when I was 16 years old in 2000, I’ve been fascinated and enchanted by album art. Presented in no particular order, and clicking on each cover should take you to an appropriate site to listen :)

It’s already April?! Well, three months into this whirlwind of a year and there has already been a staggering amount of good music released into the world. I wanted to do a general round-up of the albums that have caught my attention so far this year. While the whole point of this blog is to point out things I like, this space is also going to serve as a general clearing house for albums I’ve been wanting to write about but haven’t quite gotten to it–the sheer forward momentum of my life coupled with the near-relentless drops of awesome new music has made it very slippery for me to keep my footing so lots of stuff has fallen through the cracks (both on this blog and in my personal life but that’s for another time and place to tell). So, below, in roughly release order, is a list and some thoughts about music I think is worth your time that’s come out since January. Generally, if I’ve already written about something, I’ll just post a link and move on, but I’ll reserve the right to delve into more detail about some of these later on :)