As in years past (2013, 2012, 2011), I present for you the 10 Raddest Records of the Year. It’s not a best of list by any means but a record of the new music that rattled around my brainpan in 2014 for a variety of reasons, most of them deeply personal. For this reason I indicate how I experienced the music (LP, digital, etc.) For the first time ever, this list features a song I commissioned and two bands with singers with ridiculous dreadlocks. That will never happen again…
10. The Bots “Pink Palms” Video/LP
Two super talented kids from L.A. What’s not to love about this incredible video?
9. La Luz “It’s Alive” CD
This record came out in the fall of 2013 but when your tour gets cancelled because your van got hit by a semi-truck, exceptions are allowed. Anyway, I didn’t start listening to the record until 2014. Sweet, slow, surf rock. Atmosphere for days. Check out this super tight in-studio performance.
8. Shenxian “II” Digital
Shenxian is Sean Doyle, my punk rock sailor blood brother in Brooklyn. People had been trying to introduce us for months before we finally met last spring and we clicked. He makes these jams and puts them out on bandcamp and they’re excellent. No vocals, just icy guitar riffs over jumping bass lines. They’re like what Tones on Tail might have sounded like if they’d gone in a funkier direction. My favorite on this track is “The Second Law of Thermodynamics.” The music is great for driving, writing, thinking, moving forward.
7. Soulside “Trigger + Bass/103” Digital
No, Soulside didn’t release new material this year, but the alternative rock band from D.C. put out a remastered reissue of “Trigger” and “Bass/103,” the EP and single the band originally released with Dischord in 1988 and 1989. The reissue preceded some reunion shows in New York and Washington D.C and triggered all kinds of intense nostalgia for Hot Bodi Gram, the 1989 album the band recorded in Holland while touring. (That alone makes it worthy of a 33 1/3-style monograph.) Soulside was one of those bands a few years ahead of the curve, somewhere between Minor Threat and Fugazi. The late ‘80s are something of a musical wasteland, but they didn’t have to be. Soulside was there to show us the way. A bit slower and more melodic than its hardcore forebears but every bit as impassioned in their creation of sonic sculptures, Soulside could hold it down. Here’s the complete audio from two reunion shows.
6. Meatbodies “S/T” Digital
I was turned on to this band when my friend Jason saw them open up for Ty Segall and they promptly blew the doors off the place. They’re psychedelic, but rock way harder than most garage bands. The Meatbodies describe their sound as “heavy groovy” and it’s a perfect description. Fast, massive and hypnotically melodic.
5. Total Control “Typical System” Digital
Joy Division dance mix with four guitars. That’s all I’ve got, but it rules pretty hard. Check out this live video for “Systematic Fuck.”
4. OFF! “Wasted Years” LP
Another 20-minute blast of SoCal hardcore from Keith Morris, Dmitri Coates, Steven McDonald and Mario Rubalcaba. I’m not going to belabor this because as most of you know I’m working on a book with Keith, but I think that song-for-song OFF! is better than Circle Jerks and every bit as good as Black Flag. Go ahead and disagree, just about everyone does. As this hilarious video with Jack Black proves, we can all agree that they don’t take themselves too seriously.
3. Mind Spiders “The Haunted Casino” Video
You won’t find “The Haunted Casino” on any Mind Spiders full length or 7”. It’s not tucked away on a High Tension Wires or Radioactivity record. When I asked Mark Ryan if he’d write a song that I could use for the book trailer of Forest of Fortune, I thought it was a long shot. But when I heard what he came up with, I was beyond stoked. I must have listened to it a hundred times through iTunes, but the first time I played the song for some friends through a PA system, I got chills. It sounds exactly like what it is: a haunted casino. It starts off spooky and slow, gets a little frenetic with the sounds of the slot machines crashing through the background, and then takes a hard right turn into the deeply weird with a bone-chilling howl from another time and place. It took me 300 pages to do what the song achieves in 90 seconds. Fun fact: “The Haunted Casino” was my book’s working title.
2. Babymetal S/T Video/Digital/Live
If you read my Razorcake column, or The Rumpus Letters in the Mail that I did, you know I love this album. (If you haven’t heard about Babymetal, you’ll have 90% of what you need to know after watching the first minute of their video for “Gimme Chocolate,” which has more than 20 million views. Try tearing your eyes away. It’s impossible.) What you are hearing is the perfect synthesis of pop and metal. But I didn’t start to really love this band until I bought the record on iTunes and listened to it on my drives between San Diego and Los Angeles. I won’t get into the songs, the choreography, the costumes, the cosmology. It’s all out there waiting for you to discover. Just picture me, driving 80 miles per hour while singing along to songs like “Suki Suki Midnight” in terrible Japanese while banging my head. I dragged Nuvia out to Hollywood go see them for my birthday, which you can read all about at The Weeklings. This was gearing up to be the year of Babymetal until….
1. Neighborhood Brats “Recovery” Digital/LP
Fucking whoa. My teen years were in the 1980s, which means I grew up on ‘80s movies, ‘80s videos, ‘80s punk. My values have been shaped by theatrical responses to questions like, “When are you going to grow up?” Kicks over table. “Never!” Cue scorching guitar licks… At 46, well into my fifth decade on this ball of confusion, my response is slightly more nuanced: if I can’t get my motor running to records like “Recovery,” it’s time to put a down payment on a headstone that reads, “He used to rip shit up but then he got tired and he died.” “Recovery” is the closest thing I’ve found to the way my brains feels that exists outside my body. It might as well have, “Jim’s Fuck You Mix” stamped on the wax. The confrontational lyrics, the ridiculously rad guitar, the manic rhythm section. This record makes me wanna run through walls. This record brings me to tears. This record is everything. It’s available here. Go put it in your earhole now.