Okay so I almost completed the assignment. Put on the RHCP album. As someone who's only familiar with their radio songs, some of it was surprisingly funky and antiracist. That said, I eventually had to turn it off and put on some Brian Eno to cleanse my ears.

MGMT occupies a club in my head with Foster The People; Peter Bjorn and John; and Portugal. The Man, although the latter came later IIRC. I actually always liked PBJ and P.TM better than MGMT and FTP, considering the latter to be mostly fluffy, shiny music that you might randomly hear on the radio or while shopping at Old Navy. It's not bad music; just vacuously catchy without much substance. That said, I really enjoyed listening to Oracular Spectacular in its entirety. I won't become an MGMT superfan anytime soon, but they are really talented and I will probably listen to this album again at some point.

I was always lukewarm on The White Stripes. Jack White is a fantastic guitarist and decent songwriter, but a lot of their stuff sounds pretty similar, with vocal lines and chord progressions that are sometimes indistinguishable from one song to the next. My favorite Jack White project is actually the indie supergroup The Raconteurs, which (as you might expect) are more sonically diverse and draw more on classic rock than the blues (Rich Kid's Blues from Consolers Of The Lonely is their magnum opus, IMO). That said, this was a solid release. There's some of that Jack White sonic repetitiveness, but there are also some diversions from this, most notably on the gospel-soaked closing track, I'm Lonely (But I Ain't That Lonely Yet).

I love this album. It's filled with covers of standards, and although Willie has never had an impressive voice, he still manages to infuse each song with poignancy and emotion. His version of Unchained Melody may be my favorite.