01: 25-21

25. Thee Oh Sees - Floating Coffin

The first attempt at this blurb started off as an obit for this prolific and energetic garage rock band from San Francisco. During their last show of the year last week, John Dwyer, TOS mastermind, announced to a sold out San Fran crowd that the band were going on extended hiatus and that band members were moving away from the town that nurtured and supported them. Laziness caused me to delay writing the rest, but in that time, a breakup was denied and news of another album was revealed. In a matter of days Floating Coffin went from being the bands brilliant swan song to another tremendous album in their discography filled with tremendous albums.

While probably the least known band and album on this list, Thee Oh Sees have been at this for 7(ish) years, and have put out 9 albums as many EPs. You can make the case that pretty much any of their albums could be their best. Floating Coffin is no different. Its 10 tracks run the gamut of what this band can do. From garage pop tracks, to big rock psychedelia, this album has something for every Oh Sees fan all while being accessible to a potential wider fanbase. If you got 40 min, its well worth your time.

Highlights: Toe Cutter, No Spell, Minotaur.

by MattP

24. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Push the Sky Away

A perennial favourite with the UFCK crowd it should be no surprise to see this make the list.

by The Editor

23. Queens of the Stone Age - ...Like Clockwork

Much has been made of the QOTSA’s connection to the desert. Their famous generator parties out in the Sonoran desert hold a mythical status in rock origin story lore – like the Beatles’ first shows at the Cavern Club or the Talking Heads’ early run at CBGB’s.

I grew up in Palm Desert around the same time as Josh Homme and crew would have been blasting those crunching riffs out to the sand dunes and creosote bushes. They are a bit older than me so while that scene was at its peak I was traversing that same desert to dig holes. I’m not talking some little pock marks for planting flowers. We dug trenches. Six feet deep, Ten, twelve feet long. And we weren’t the only ones. One year we heard about a kid at school who was digging a similar hole that collapsed and suffocated him.

If you would have asked me at the time I couldn’t have told you why we did it. Looking back I think every kid from that area was just try to get some relief from the oppressive fucking environment. Palm Desert is a resort town for grey-haired snowbirds. It’s a town for immigrants from nearby Mexico. It sure as shit ain’t a town for young people with rock and roll in their soul. Digging holes was my outlet. Josh Homme played rock shows for scorpions.

All this to say that …Like Clockwork is not of the desert. I could feel the desert in their earlier albums. The sand in your teeth, the suffocating dry heat, the bleary sight lines. This album is both bigger in framing and more insular in direction. It fucking rocks in the arena setting – standing up against any of their older songs in terms of face melting. It also might contain Homme’s most personal writing to-date. The guy has been through some shit recently and while not exactly an open book, you can feel the sincerity in these songs. For an album recorded in Burbank, CA (headquarters of The Walt Disney Company) …Like Clockwork manages a great degree of integrity in ambition and scope.

So while Queens of the Stone Age might be born of the desert, with …Like Clockwork, Homme’s phoenix-like assent from the charred valley of Riverside County seems complete. It was either that or stay and be suffocated.

by Leaf

22. The Avett Brothers - Magpie and the Dandelion

by ????

21. Waxahatchee - Cerulean Salt

I want to say Cerulean Salt is the album that you only heard about because your older sister was dating some guy who was already in college who used her laptop while she was in the shower and of course you rifled through his web history (overlooking his pit stop in your big sis's Gmail because you totally do the same), and obviously you end up finding a site with a URL that just seems like a bunch of random letters thrown together and you're lucky he's still logged into it because you end up reading about how some strangers on a message board who use really long words to rip apart albums you like totally know you will love forever (Oh, hey, what's up, Give Up? Where are you now, A Beautiful Lie?) are in their very next post name checking albums like In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and All Hail West Texas or even stuff you kinda remember your parents mentioning, like Blue and After the Gold Rush, as if everyone who ever mattered knows they are the sonic f*cking gospels. It took you like three months to get over the initial ugliness of them (like for reals the "they don't SOUND good" factor took me a long while to get over), but then you finally realize that they are:

Sparse. Raw. Perfect.

And the thing is I think this album is inspired by and deserves to be discovered in the same manner as every other indie folk classic, but Cerulean Salt might just sound way too good to hold its place among its big brothers and sisters.

Yeah, sure, it features instrumentation no more complicated than you'd find at a college coffee shop open mic. And yeah, sure, it's not like Katie Crutchfield (formerly of P.S. Eliot kinda/sorta/indie fame) is ever trying to imitate Taylor Swift's Wal-Mart-clean vocals.

But it's not an album that you love in spite of its "I can't afford to shop at The Salvation Army because I can't afford the gas to get across town" production values.

Cerulean Salt sounds as good as what indie bands used to sound like when they started to sound like they were selling out. Every instrument is perfectly panned. Every vocal is subtly doubled (and only when necessary!). Every guitar effect adds to the album's overall atmospheric weight, and every vocal rings out at the same volume no matter if it's whispered or screamed.

The attention to detail on Cerulean Salt reminds me of this past October when I went on a run through Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Five years ago (this is a bit of an overstatement, but the timeline is right), I wouldn't have been able to move there, much less go on a "jog" there, because it was just too desolate and dangerous. But there I was barely two months ago, finishing up my run by waiting in line to pay for a (-insert however much money you think is too much-) soy latte when I noticed their cute, rustic autumn-themed window display that had a dozen or so wooden replicas of baby mushrooms decorating it, which when you picked them up to admire them, you realized that each little fake mushroom had a little bit of fake dirt on it that made you think "more yuppie bs" but which made you FEEL super-f*cking cozy and sentimental.

So yeah, even though Cerulean Salt makes you want to protest because it isn't as raw and sparse as the albums which inspired it (and to which it deserves to be compared), every second of it still hits you like a pubescent pile of bricks.

by Blaha 41