The Best Thing I Heard This Week-Feist

I picked up the new Feist record with some trepidation. While I'd always enjoyed a few singles ("Mushaboom", for sure), she'd never been able to hold my attention for a full album. Worse, her new record, Metals, was being given the dreaded "pretty ok, but not great" review by pretty much every outlet, ensuring a decent but sleepy record by a respected artist. So I was happily surprised when I found Metals to be not only engaging, but my favorite Feist record yet.

The Best Thing I Heard this Week-Gillian Welch

Eight years. Eight years! It was eight years between albums by Gillian Welch, a time period so long that a whole generation of music has come and gone in the time between. Of course, with music as soulful and reverent as The Harrow and the Harvest, eight years is but the strum of a chord. While Welch told the Onion A/V Club that most of the time was spent being unable to craft songs that she and collaborator/virtuoso David Rawlings felt were up to snuff, each track here sounds like it was painstakingly developed over eight years. Created and refined to the point of perfection, The Harrow and the Harvest is likely the closest thing to a flawless album that we will see in 2011.