It's bound to go pear shaped soon

Damage - Blues Explosion
Danny the Dog OST - Massive Attack
Dark Side of the Moon - Pink Floyd
Daydream Nation - Sonic Youth
Dear Catastrophe Waitress - Belle & Sebastian
Death to the Pixies (Double CD) - Pixies
Deftones - Deftones
Demo - Tokyo Sundown
Demo - Raddie and Weourus
Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes - TV on the Radio
Destroy Rock 'n Roll - Mylo
Different Class - Pulp
Dirty Hits - Primal Scream
Divine Hammer (CDS) - The Breeders
DJ Kicks - Daddy G

'C' was something of a traumatic letter with it's twin salvo of shite, Civilian by Boy Kill Boy and Costello Music by The Fratellis. As long as there was nothing too bad 'D' was always going to be good in comparison, but it's gone way beyond the call of duty to roll out a bunch of storming albums. Granted, the ones by Mylo and the Deftones are a bit flat-footed, but are harmless enough pieces of aural chewing gum. Different Class is an undeniable classic that manages to shoehorn anthropology, vivid prose, razor-sharp wit (of the kind that 'comedians' like Russell Brand can only dream about), scathing social critique, and cracking tunes into an album that's just a little over fifty minutes long. I haven't heard Jarvis Cocker's solo album but I intend to buy it sooner rather than later.

Dark Side of the Moon is another one of those albums that's always there or thereabouts in 'Greatest Ever' polls, but I'm still not convinced. Pink Floyd have always been a mystery to me in the same way that organised religion is. Both have millions of devout followers who don't react too kindly to criticism of any sort, both are huge money-making organisations, and both sets of believers are almost always proselytizers who think your soul/music taste is in mortal danger if you don't see the error of your ways and open your heart and mind to the true path. Dark Side of the Moon is interesting to me in the same way as evangelical TV channels are - it gives me a chance to look into the belly of the beast and see what all the fuss is about without giving myself over to it completely. Maybe I was born too late, or maybe I just didn't take the right drugs at the right time, but I still can't see what all the fuss is about. Maybe it just makes more sense when you're fifty years old and listening to it as you drive your kids to school in the Range Rover.

I'm listening to Dirty Hits as I write this. As I mentioned on Tokyo Music I finally saw Primal Scream live this year, and they were worth the horrendously inflated prices that are inevitable when you go and see foreign artists in Japan. I wasn't too sure about their Greatest Hits album though, not through any doubts about the quality of the music, or whether this was a sign of them selling out, but because it made me feel like I was getting old. Over the last couple of years there have been a spate of 'Best Of's and '10th Anniversary Special Edition's released, and for the first time I can remember buying the records when they originally came out. Is it inevitable that as someone who's never really grown out of the music geek stage, this is how I'm going to measure the progress of my life?