Honorable Mentions

Before I get to my top 20 I wanted to mention a few albums, that while they didn’t make my top 50, I did enjoy them quite a bit. With so much music hitting my ears this year, there’s always a handful of great records that I just don’t spend as much time with. Revisiting […]

Complex Distractions Presents : JHubner’s Favorite Albums of 2018 Part Two

As I revisit the music of 2018 I’m pretty amazed at the quality of the long players this year. Albums are becoming more and more of an experience. It’s not just the music(though that is a major factor.) Albums overall this year have become and all-encompassing world where we can get lost in. Solid compositions, […]

Complex Distractions Presents : JHubner’s Favorite Albums of 2018 Part One

I was never the kind of music listener that could sit down at the end of the year and compile lists of records that I loved. I could tell you I loved this record and that record, and that one I listened to a hell of a lot, but to sit down and break it […]

E.A. Pooman : 2012-2018

After over half a decade of writing about local northeast Indiana artists and general cranky indignation towards the outside world at large, I regret to inform you of the passing of music writer E.A. Poorman. He passed away yesterday at the ripe old age of 6 and some odd months old. He wrote for the […]

2018 : The Year of The Record Label

Sitting down and making lists of records may not sound like fun to some, but it is to me. I don’t follow sports, I’m not a triathlete training for my next swim across the English Channel, nor do I hunt as a hobby. I’m too fidgety for gaming as well. My thing is music. It […]

Jeff Tweedy : WARM

Jeff Tweedy comes across as the sage dude quietly sitting at a table in some nondescript cafe, reading a tattered copy of George Saunders’ CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and drinking a vitamin water. Baggy jacket, frumpy hat covering a head of wild hair, and a beard you want to tell him to please shave. Even […]

Writing and Mood Swings

For the most part I keep the writing on Complex Distractions focused on those things in art and commerce that move me. Records, books, films, art, and all those other things that fall under the category of “waste of time” in most public school systems anymore. That’s the stuff that drove me to start writing […]

Ffion : Odyssey

There’s a precise electronic pulse that runs throughout the whole of Ffion’s debut EP Odyssey. The music feels vintage, as if you pulled it from some analog time capsule buried among other ruins from 1972. The music created on Odyssey was brought to life using an ARP Odyssey analog keyboard, hence the name and the […]

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words : Favorite Album Art of 2018 Part II

Seems like only yesterday we were wishing the world a Happy New Year and hoping for a great 2018. You know, getting all excited about those New Year’s Resolutions; big plans to learn another language, lose 30 lbs, and stop spending so much money of vinyl(maybe that was mine.) Well we’re in December now and […]

Alone In The Woods

My first exposure to electronic duo Alone In The Woods was their excellent track “I Never Came Up For Air” off of Burning Witches Records’ RSD 2018 compilation Communion. From that track I knew there was something quite remarkable at play. The band, which consists of Jon Dobyns and Lon Bologna, are production wizards. They […]