Reddit mentions of Aocana

> There is no intrinsic quality to modern American music to me anymore

There's an extremely obvious rebuttal to this. Can you guess what it is? ;)

Clue: I'm not sure I can pick just 1, but of my top 3 albums discovered/bought this year, one is from Senegal. Not eligible for this list anyway, being from 2007, but the point is I can't fathom limiting musical exploration to a given nation state. Another is from still more years back... but it was still brand new to me. So basically, why stick to modern and/or American music, considering it's not like you're already thoroughly familiar with all music made in times past and/or the rest of the world, right?

Btw I guess I may be preaching to the choir here, and that was your whole point, I don't know. I'm not aiming that at you personally. I just thought I'd chime in at this juncture, being as your comment struck a chord in a few ways.

> Musically, it's gotten almost too simple.

This for example... gah... I just commented elsewhere, "I am now forcing myself to youtube stuff from this list ... in the hope of destroying my preconceptions". Hit the first result for Phoenix and had my worst preconceptions confirmed and then some. Piano bashing away on a straight quarter note rhythm, on a chord sequence that sounds vaguely reminiscent of every other pop/rock song of the last 40 years ever, while the bass plucks roots notes on beat one every couple of bars, and I can't even bring myself to care what lyrics the singer is coming out with because he sounds like such a giant watery bedwetter, the drums and overall mood are somewhat jangly and bright but with a seemingly calculated edge of being too cool to try very hard or seem too happy, so no true sense of uncontrolled joie de vivre... it's basically a perfect archetype of everything which powerfully turns me off indie bands... (braces for downvotes)... anyway I let myself rant rather off course, but the point being, yes, it's pretty musically simple and formulaic, with harmony, rhythm and instrumentation alike about as safely familiar as they could possibly be.

However

> I don't think there was a single new album that came out this year that I really enjoyed

I can't really agree with this. Truth be told I'm not the best person to challenge it, because I don't really care about buying new stuff or not, so I've only bought a dozen or so 2009 releases, in between doing tons of fleshing out of past decades' output. Even so, this simply blew me away, this was a delight, this struck me as dubstep's musically richest lp yet, this and this were solid if not exactly vast progression from previous releases, while this and this were only disappointing to me because their respective predecessors were too jawdropping to realistically repeat, not because they were at all unenjoyable.

Of course standard disclaimers apply and I don't pretend to claim anybody else's taste is poor, or any business but their own, or that my taste is awesome, or at all likely to be shared by you or anybody else.