Dusty’s ExplodingNow! is my current must-read, particularly his ongoing top 500 albums project. Knowing something about assigning numerical values to massive amounts of music (and even more about not finishing such endeavors), I’m a bit surprised that he’s starting at the top of the list, but he’s still going strong and not looking back. I’ve always thought that we have fairly similar tastes in music, stemming not just from our formative years on the Hum mailing list and a slew of tangential alignments, but this project underscores some of our primary rifts. Naturally, I’m playing along at home to some extent, trying to merely come up with a list of my top 500 albums (in no particular order, although guessing the top spot would be a rather easy task). If I ever reach that number, maybe I’ll come up with a competing project, but at this point, sitting at 145 albums and having other projects in the queue (no, I haven’t forgotten about 1000 Songs), odds are against it, so perhaps you should enjoy ExplodingNow’s.

Of course, that won’t prevent me from discussing that hypothetical list. One of the most difficult artists to place on the list would be Silkworm, as I’m a fan of nearly their entire catalog and my preferences have shifted from year to year. Firewater, for instance, never clicked until this past year, when “Drag the River” opened up the album for me in a way that the first half never could. Since that point, Firewater has been my decided favorite of theirs, with Andy Cohen’s solos having a profound effect upon how I view the rest of their catalog. It’ll Be Cool remains in the upper echelon of their albums alongside Libertine and Lifestyle, but the a-side of Developer ranks among their finest moments as well. What about Italian Platinum, Blueblood, and In the West? I’m not sure if they’d make it as albums, but within a sampler of Silkworm, they could easily be heartily represented. Unlike Pavement (a early comparison made primarily because of the nod to “In the Mouth a Desert” in “Raised by Tigers”), whose catalog has settled in terms of my preferences (Crooked Rain a definite first, then Slanted followed closely by Wowee Zowee and the Watery, Domestic EP), I’m not sure how I’ll feel about the current second-tier Silkworm albums in a year or two. But this situation makes me appreciate them even more as a band, not less. (Silkworm’s final release, Chokes, is closer to an EP in execution and obviously not what the band intended to issue, but I await it nevertheless. Bottomless Pit, however, is Andy Cohen and Tim Midgett’s new band, and I hope I’ll be able to catch them in September.)

In non–obsessive list making news, I sense another redesign afoot, since the current layout utilizes approximately 40% of my new laptop’s screen resolution. I should also have far more time to actually use my site now that I won’t have to hover over the screen reset button anticipating my backlight flickering off.