04: 10-6

10. Yuck - Yuck

Earlier this year I found myself in the same predicament most great bands will put you in. It’s the addicting act of listening to someone’s newly released album back to back to back in one sitting… and there I was at work contemplating whether or not I should give it a break or pursue my forth listen of the day. I wondered if this was going to be a one-month wonder that I would get burnt out on and forget as I formulated my end-of-year list this week. But it was too good to pass on and I pursued my fourth listen.

About two months later I realized that I was listening to it with an unhealthy obsession. Suddenly I had a strange urge to start wearing over-sized baggy jeans and a flannel t-shirt. Even my haircut had started to change, I mean for fucks sake I had a bull cut. “What the hell is happening to me?” I thought. Then it hit me, I must have traveled back to 1996.

I realized that this album brings back the nineties mentality of music that had starved and abandoned my brain in what seemed like such a short period of time. I mean come on…a chick bassist with huge bangs that looks like she doesn’t give a shit, two screaming guitar players who are not afraid of a little feedback, a couple gut wrenching slow songs, and that great balance of male/female trade-offs on vocals.

All of that set aside; almost a year later this is still finding a way to sneak back into my rotation. It’s a really cohesive first album by a young band that had grabbed my attention from the day it was released. Maybe they are over a decade late, but they are definitely worth checking out.

by thebeeb

9. Lydia Loveless - Indestructible Machine

For Hutch

THE WAY SHE TALKS TO YOU HAS GOT ME DRINKIN BACK MY YEARS BUT NOW YOU SEEM LIKE SUCH A PUSSY BABE IS THAT ALLRIGHT? THEN I CAN TAKE YOU HOME WITH ME AND PUT YOU BACK IN YOUR PLACE

What a Bad Way to Go. What a way to start a record. Car crash banjos, the family laying down some solid rhythm, screeching guitars and a voice that will melt you on the spot. No Dorothy, you're not in Kansas anymore, or Nashville for that matter. What's that you say, Columbus ? Ohio ? Hell yeah.

Lydia Loveless, all of 21 tender years, takes you on an exhausting ride for this sophomore endeavor. There is a reason most of us music lovers detest labels. Alt-country, country punk, country rock, and my least favorite Americana, you get a little of everything and the opening track is no different.

EVERYTHING SOUNDS MORE MEANINGFUL WHEN YOU SCREAM ONLY WHISKEY'S GONNA KICK MY ASS AND MAKE ME STILL COME BACK

Can't Change Me keeps up the pace. Angst, confrontation, verbal swordplay. Being good is truly killing her inside. This track could have come straight from a Lucinda Williams songbook.

IM SO FUCKING EMOTIONALLY DENSE

Broken heart. Maybe for a day. This girl can take a punch. More Like Them continues with hard driving guitars and really puts you a live rock show mood.

How Many Women, Jesus Was a Wino and Steve Earle all have more of a straight country feel to them, at least musically. Nice violin and pedal steel blended in with some fine acoustic guitar playing. No reason to get all long-winded on Steve Earle, just listen once and you'll be singing along.

CANT GO ANYWHERE WITHOUT BEING THREE SHEETS I GUESS I'LL ALWAYS BE THIS GODDAMN UNHAPPY

On Learn To Say No, the upright bass and the telecaster take center stage. I can see this song closing a show with some solid guitar tradeoffs. Todd May contributes some nice backing vocals and I believe I hear a Rickenbacker in there somewhere.

CAUSE I'VE GOT A CONSCIENCE BABY AND IT'S A MILE FUCKING WIDE BUT IT SEEMS TO DISAPPEAR EVERYTIME I STAY UP ALL NIGHT

Do Right is Lydia's attempt at solving the good girl/bad girl conundrum. Hard driving guitars, out front banjo , and a solid effort from the rhythm section leave you wanting more.

The final track, Crazy, should be a contender for song of the year.

Crazy...I'm crazy for feelin' so lonely

I'm crazy...crazy for feelin' so blue

Whoa, wrong song.

Well it's gonna be my ass if I ever have to fall, but right now it'll be love

And it's gonna push me up against the wall

There we go. The songwriting on this album closer is top notch. Superb violin and acoustic guitar work. Pure sweetness in the vocal.

I predict big things for this girl in 2012.

So get ready

Cause I know you're scared of me

Maybe you should be baby

Cause I'm Crazy

by Vincent

8. Drive-By Truckers - Go-Go Boots

2011 started out with me hanging out with this girl I met last December (technically it started with me swilling champagne from a bottle the dude from Japandroids handed me, but that’s not important to the story). She seemed pretty swell when we met. Not really the type of gal I’d normally waste my time on, but way more like what I should probably be spending my time on at this point. She wasn’t really wild, she didn’t encourage me to get drunk. She tried to get me to think about shit. She could tell a helluva story.

For the sake of this story, let’s call her Go-Go Boots .

This past winter was a real bitch. Epic blizzards, awful cold. The kind of shit that makes you reevaluate your choice of living environment. So this blizzard hits and GGB is stuck down on the south side at some care facility for kids who like bring guns into schools or had to be removed from their homes because mom’s a crackhead. Real heavy kinda place, totally sad, shit of the earth type of stuff. Meanwhile, I’m holed up in my apartment wondering if my ceiling’s going to cave in due to the weight of the snow on the roof. I’m getting drunk on Kessler and Sun Drop. I ate an entire grocery store rotisserie chicken and I’m watching the short-lived CW cheerleading drama Hellcats. Life’s pretty good.

GGB calls me and I’m obviously drunk, because there’s nothing else I can be doing and it’s 9 pm on a Tuesday. She’s trying to tell me some long elaborate story about some kid she’s stuck with killing his dad for having his mom killed or something. When I bring up the fact the kid should probably be in jail and not with her during a blizzard, shit got weird and GGB hung up on me.

The blizzard comes and goes and GGB is still sort of around. For some reason, that talk was some huge sticking point. Anyway, we kinda hung out for a few more months. Then spring started to turn into summer and I’m out with a friend at some bar that was in this neighborhood that I knew mostly because of a Chinese restaurant I used to frequent. Anyway, I’m hanging at the jukebox and out of nowhere I hear the most beautifully fucked up sentence ever uttered to me...

“For me, it’s Jimmy Eat World and then every other band...”

Well goddamn, what do we have here?

From that point, I was all in on this gal. Let’s call her BLEED AMERICAN.

BA was a little older than GGB and GGB had basically run her course by then, so we mutually parted ways. That kind of stuff just happens, right? Well BA stepped up to the plate. She was everything you wanted in a summer. She was earnest and reckless and vulnerable. She made you want to apologize for being a drunken mess but she made no promises that it wasn’t going to happen again because at her core she was way more wounded and fucked up than you could imagine. We walked around the city for hours on end, day and night. Her in my ear and eventually in my head. The most infectious earworm, a call to staying out late and making mistakes and not giving a shit about it at my desk the next day at work. It was a pretty awesome summer.

Like any moment of profoundly obscene genius, BA’s hold on me was short but intense. By the end of summer, things had passed. And now it’s winter and I find out that Go-Go Boots has made this top twenty five list and I’ve been asked to write something about it. But I can’t really. Just like GGB, the album is perfectly fine and I’m sure someday it’ll make someone really happy. It made my list of things that happened this year, but I don’t know if I can get all melodramatically effusive about it. It came and went. And they’ll be other Go-Go Boots next year.

But Bleed American is the kind of record that will stick with me forever. I’l remember waking up on my hardwood floor at 4 in the afternoon on a Sunday after I came in at 8 that morning from BA’s place. I’ll remember texting “I’M SORRY THAT I’M SUCH A MESS I DRANK ALL MY MONEY COULD GET” to friends so many times I can’t keep count. Because every year we do this and every year we make some questionable choices we won’t remember in the coming years. And every year we make choices that we only consider great because they’re being measured against everything else that happened in that moment. But every so often, we rediscover something from the past and it consumes us, even if for a moment. And that’s the kind of shit we should list. That’s the kind of stuff that sticks with us. That's the shit we remember.

by Spilled Milk

7. Ryan Adams - Ashes & Fire

RawkBlog or Ryan Adams: A 2011 Quiz

All comments taken from the twitter accounts of @TheRyanAdams or @DaveRawkBlog from October 2011 to date – but which ones come from each account? Or are they really the same person. Scroll down for answers.

1. “Getting a flu shot makes me never want to take intravenous drugs”

2. “"Trapped in the Closet" is one of the foremost cultural achievements of our time”

3. “Fans of american-guitar-dream-rock...The Reivers are working on a new album ( !!! ) and I can tell you what I've heard is amazing!!!!!!”

4. “I didn't make these to say "these are the best things." They're more about "I love this, you probably will, too."”

5. “Sweet article on the mastermind of one of the coolest metal bands ever, "DEATH"“

6. “Sometimes I think there's a whole generation of kids who think "D.I.Y." means "Scanning photos from Dad's old National Geographic issues"”

7. “dracula has mad kitchen skills!”

8. “eggsclamation point!!!”

9. “I like that Sade breaks up her sexy-sex songs with tracks about being unemployed.”

10. “Had a pretty weird dream last night about most of the cast of "Mean Girls." Lindsay still had red hair.”

11. “Anybody have deets on any classic arcade situations in Toronto tonite?”

12. “Whatever, I saw tons of babies at Coachella!”

13. “the new tunes thus far are as great if not greater than the classic stuff. It moves me how inspired you cats have stayed”

14. “Being a cat would be terrific”

15. “On another note: the least realistic thing about this season of Gossip Girl is that none of them have Twitter. Is the show set in 2003?”

16. “Radical Islam could be the funniest surf film ever”

17. “Both my cats are part of Occupy Blanket right now. Blanket is on legs so i will have to let it play out”

18. “Cat just saw another cat through the window, panicked and peed on my @hipsterpuppes book”

19. “@juddapatow That's what I'm doing homecheese”

20. “Not going to lie, the Bieber fair isle baseball jacket is super-awesome”

21. “This actually sounds like an amazing story: traveling America's cat hotels. We should actually make a documentary. Pitch it to whatever channel Bourdain is on.”

22. “Mariah Carey's "Dreamlover": A perfect song.”

23. “i ammmm a ghooosssttt booooo oooooohhh Ohhhhhhhhh hissssssss”

24. “Wonder what Ozzy Osbourne thinks of this Justice album”

25. “I feel like even for haterz it would be hard to go away from seein coldplay love not pretty rocked. Will Champion slays his kit”

26. “Listening to the first Coldplay album. It still rules.”

DaveRawkBlog: 1, 2, 4, 6, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 18, 20, 21, 22, 24

TheRyanAdams: 3, 5, 7, 8, 11, 13, 16, 17, 19, 23, 25

by AlaskaFox

6. Real Estate - Days

One of the more vivid memories of my teenage years that doesn’t involve Dave Matthews is milling around the parking lot of a suburban Target after dark with friends, taking turns climbing into a shopping cart and being pushed into a nearby row of bushes. That mimicking third-string Jackass gags was the best thing we could think to do with our Friday nights speaks to how trivial and dull our existence was at that point, but as white, middle class kids living in the suburbs we didn’t have a whole lot of other options. We’d had drugs and alcohol DARE’d out of us, we were too awkward to make passes at each other and going to the movies gets old quick. So we’d all pile into a couple beat-up little Hondas or Toyotas our parents had recently bestowed us and drive around without much in the way of ambition or direction, content to let the night live itself, provided we got home by curfew.

It didn’t seem too romantic at the time, but it’s funny what ten years, a couple broken hearts, a hefty student loan payment and a dead-end job will do.

If The National is the soundtrack of middle-class white people staring down 30, Real Estate is the same people thumbing through a high school year book and driving the roads of their youth. Days, the group’s sophomore effort, builds on the languid melancholia of the group’s equally superb self-titled debut. Taken together, the band’s catalog is a hazy recollection of the dull comfort of teenage suburban life before college taught you to feel guilty for growing up that way.

Days doesn’t do much to expand the band’s thematic formula, but it’s a significant step forward sonically. “It’s Real” is an immediate stand-out, with drumming that would sound at home on an IRS-era R.E.M. record and a melody that bounces whereas the band’s earlier work rolls. The whole thing sounds remarkably effortless, like the songs were perfectly formed from inception and the band rolled into the studio, plugged in the reverb pedals and went to it. By the time the hypnotic “All the Same” winds down to its seventh minute, it’s hard to fathom how quickly the album ended. Sorta like growing up, huh?

by Hutch