Just Another Mid-Summer Music Mix.
Last week I knew I was going to need some music for a thing, and that said music should be fairly obscure, hopefully fairly good, and finally sort of have a certain mass appeal-ishness to it. I also regret having a whole ton of music that I’ve been listening to over the last 8-12 months that I’ve not at least given a mild shout out to, so that was also a motivating factor.
The thing of it is, while I try to have some sort of over-arching theme to the mixes I do, the theme for this mix has changed about five or six times since I started it. Originally I was going to call it “Two Good Songs”, in deference to my ol’ Euclid Records compatriot Steve. (Back in the day you’d ask Steve if he’d heard a new record, and inevitably, regardless of the album, you were 75% likely to get the response “Yeah…two good songs.” It became something of his trademark for a while.) That idea was to collect really terrific songs from albums made up of songs not quite to the standard of the one on the mix. Then the theme was summer. And then it wasn’t, because it’s too bloody hot as it is. Then the theme was “Excuses to put Deanne Iovan’s “Everything” into a mix.” Then it was “People you might know from other stuff doing new stuff”.
I guess for now the theme is just “This is a mix of songs that I think I have done a haphazard job of representing how good they are.” Everything in the mix is of very recent vintage, like 2008 or later. I think these songs are really, really good. I hope you enjoy this mix, and it brings you as much enjoyment as it’s brought me to both make and listen to.
Without further introduction, here we go:
Two Years Out Of My Mind
(right click and “save as”…one large mp3 file as usual.)
1. “Artificial Fanfare (Music In My Head)” Happy Chichester 2. “Pizza-Eater” The Leeds 3. “Olympic Gardens” The Mystery Numbers 4. “Queen Of Moods” Jeffrey Novak 5. “Saturday” The Music Lovers 6. “Cherry Blossom” Sad Day For Puppets 7. “Everything” Deanne Iovan 8. “Those Were The Days” Elvyn 9. “The Kids” The Bomb 10.”Chemicals” The Comfies 11.”When I’m With You” Best Coast 12.”Begging You” Graham Day & The Gaolers 13.”The Kelly Rose” The Brought Low 14.”Soul School” Cornershop 15.”Alice Marble Gray” Califone 16.”Go Jetsetter” The Postmarks 17.”So Long (Maybe)” Nushu 18.”Golden Hips” Dragoon 19.”These Are the Days” Grand Atlantic20.”Kaleidoscope Eyes” Painted Hills
First off, don’t read too much into the title I picked here–I just used a lyric from the Music Lovers song because the timeframe for these songs was right; I’ve been fairly in my mind (and certainly not with the cool, sordid tale the dude in Music Lovers has!) over the last two years. I guess this mix is sort of like me compiling some odds and ends short stories from the past two years or so.
So who are these people?
Happy Chichester might be familiar to you. He was the bassist, backing vocalist, and one of the main creative forces behind The Royal Crescent Mob back in the day. Then they broke up and he had his own band, Howlin’ Maggie. This song is from his 2008 solo disc, which is really good (see also the cool video for “A Man Needs An Airplane” on youtube.)
The Leeds are a band that seems to be a collision of Anglo (singer Pandora Burgess) and Franc0 (the rest of the excellent, Rain Parade-y sounding band). This song is just totally aces, but the entire Leeds album is fantastic. This is one expensive-sounding production, so it baffles me that this disc is impossible to find outside of France. Ah well. Here’s a taste.
The Mystery Numbers is the new act for The Weather Machines’ (who are no more) frontman Jason Ward. He’s decamped from Portland back to Rapids City, SD, and making some truly genius music. Check out this site, where he’s got demos posted from the past few months; these are all very good and worth throwing the guy a few bucks to hear.
Jeffrey Novak is the leader of Cheap Time, a band that at one time also had his then-girlfriend, Jemina Pearl of the late and lamented Be Your Own Pet on bass. No word on a new Cheap Time album, or a new solo disc; I have a feeling the death of Jay Reatard earlier this year has hit the folks in this scene pretty hard.
If I ever manage to finish the top 20 list of greatest records of 2009, rest assured that The Music Lovers’ amazing album Masculin Feminine is going to be very high in the top ten. In the meantime, this disc has felt like my little secret, and I can’t contain how great a song “Saturday” is anymore. Best song about rehab and redemption ever? Oh, and you have GOT to see the incredible video for this song!
Sad Day For Puppets wins the award for “Worst Band Name In This Mix”, but boy did they put out a great album a year or so ago. They’re from Sweden, and manage to occasionally out-Pain the Pains Of Being Pure At Heart. Think C86, think Lush, think Flatmates, and bliss out.
Of all the tracks on this mix, I think Deanne Iovan’s “Everything” might be the one that gets me the most. I think it’ll get you too, if you happen to have a heart. Deanne is the former singer of Detroit’s legendary garage-soul genius band The Come Ons, but this is a total departure of the music she made in that group. This will just tear your soul to pieces and put it back together again. Deanne has a really cool blog, too, where right now she’s endeavoring to cover (and upload in mp3 form) every song from The White Album, doing a new song every 9 days (and sort of learning new instruments on the fly). It’s an incredibly neat undertaking, and worth checking out.
I’ve no idea who Elvyn is, but they’ve cooked up the best rewrite of Teenage Fanclub’s “God Knows It’s True” of all time, so good in fact that, along with the lyrical sentiment that “these are actually the good ol’ days”, (and yes, these are; if your life motto isn’t being in love with these times I feel kinda sorry for you.) I can’t hardly resist it.
You might not know who The Bomb are when the song “The Kids” starts up, but as soon as the vocals come in you’re gonna start figuring it out (and if the “whoooaaaah’s” on the chorus don’t do it, you didn’t listen to enough Chicago punk growing up.) Yep, The Bomb is Jeff Pezzati–Naked Raygun, Pegboy–on vocals, and a crew of Chicago punk mainstays filling out the band. If you dig the old school postpunk punk, The Bomb is, well, the bomb.
Dunno who The Comfies are, but they’ve got a couple of EP’s out that scratch that “remember when Spoon was interesting?” itch.
Best Coast is a boy-girl duo featuring a former actress doing songs that sound like odes to 1960′s girl-pop culture. Sound familiar? Yeah, but unlike Miss Deschanel’s project, Best Coast has a great fizzy, shoegazy sound and Bethany Cosentino doesn’t rely so much on autotuning here, preferring to let her earnest vocals sit buried in an echo-chamber mix that totally works. Here’s a story from ABC News (no, not kidding) on the group that recently aired.
Graham Day is to the UK what Greg Cartwright/Oblivian is to the US: an underground icon who shouldn’t be unknown, a guy who writes ingenious songs and who can out-sing damn near anyone you’ll hear on the radio. Graham is an old school member of the Medway Sound (think Billy Childish and all his gajillion bands) that seems newly resurgent with him, The Len Price 3, and The Stabilisers carrying the flag forward. The Gaolers are a bit of a trans-atlantic partnership, with the other members of the band being legendary Georgia garage band The Woggles.
The Brought Low deserve to be household names among all those who hold hard-rocking southern FM radio from the 70′s in high esteem. Sounding like nothing so much as Molly Hatchet with a Van Zant brother on lead vocals, this Florida three-piece just totally brings it. Oh, and just to be clear, their whole album from this year, 3 is utterly excellent.
Speaking of excellent, I’m gonna guess that if you’re reading this, you know who Cornershop is. I’m also gonna guess that a lot of folks reading this know “Brimful Of Asha” and not a whole lot else. The new Cornershop album, Judy Sucks A Lemon For Breakfast is a little uneven, but when it gets it right (like on “Soul School”) it sure sounds aces.
…and probably guessing that if you know me, you’re at least familiar with my Califone obsession. It might seem like the band has been in hibernation for a while, but not true: last year they recorded a bunch of songs for a film project called All My Friends Are Funeral Singers and the album that resulted by the same title is pretty awesome; it definitely is the most “song oriented” record Califone’s done, as you can hear by this song.
I haven’t much info on the band The Postmarks, other than I believe them to be from the UK. What I do know is that their album Memoirs At The End Of The World has one or two songs that just don’t work…and then about 5 or 6 tunes that sound like Ennio Morricone or Henry Mancini wrote them for films in the 1960′s. Totally worth checking out for those songs (especially “No One Said This Would Be Easy”, which sounds like what you’d get if Morricone did a Bond theme).
Nushu is a SoCal two piece consisting of Lisa Mychols and Hillary Burton, who write and perform everything here including handling all the instrumental chores. Their new album, Hula is one of the best discs of 2010, folks, and absolutely worth seeking out. The band veer from ’90′s indie chick pop (there are a lot of songs that sound like something Veruca Salt would’ve killed for), but also a lot of nods to some very classic wall of Spector 1960′s production and songwriting.
Dragoon probably needs little introduction to a lot of my friends: this is Tripp and Stanley from The Grifters, along with Bobby Matthews (DC hardcore legend of Trusty fame) on guitars and vocals. What’s fascinating here is that Dragoon sounds a LOT like The Grifters. In fact, the Dragoon record suggests to me that it came out of some alternate dimension that took that band down a different path after the Eureka IV ep than the one they actually took.
Grand Atlantic hail from Australia, and they’re a favorite of mine; their debut made my top 20 of 2006. This is a tune from their new record, which doesn’t hit quite the highs of the debut, but which still is worth checking out.
The Painted Hills feature folks from Beechwood Sparks and The Tyde. This, one of the first albums to appear on Ric Menck’s new Bird Songs label, sounds less Gram Parsons and more Paisley Underground than the band’s roots.
Music Mixes To Barbecue To
I love having friends who do music mixes, especially when they’re friends as creative and interesting and funny and sweet as Dan Lehr and Rob Morton, two people who have never met one another or know of one another’s existence, but who share the same sense of humor enough that they could be brothers.
At any rate, Dan-O and Rob have both done, independent of one another, music mixes with a summer/4th Of July Theme, and both of them sound great and both are worthy of your time. You’ll love ‘em both, trust me.
First up, Rob’s mix:
SUN KICKER
Click the pic to download!
Then there’s Dan’s mix:
SUMMERCAST
Again with the click the pic to download!
Do yourselves a favor and give ‘em both a listen without being spoiled by a tracklist, but I’ll post them in the comments section.
Happy Independence Day (or as my old Mancunian buddy Simon Rose calls it, “Good riddance day”)!
If I Start Reading Twilight As A Result Of This, Please Shoot Me.
This is the band Panic At! The Disco (girls, did I put the exclamation point in the right spot there?):
If that picture doesn’t say “This band are awful, and in a grab-you-by-the-collar-and-yell-AWFUL-in your-face-way-awful” then I don’t know what does. Holy crap. It’s like emo exploded all over the damn place.
And so now, that hilariously crap picture burnt into your memory, I want you to hold it in mind while I mention that PATD (that’s how the kool kidz and 14-year-old girls refer to them) probably broke up last year (oh no–what’s a girl to listen to on her way to see Twilight at the cinema for the 15th time?) when leader Ryan Ross and second guitarist Jon Walker left the band to start their own group.
For this new group, they recruited some friends, including the sorry snot who produced the last PATD album, as well as poor old/young Alex Greenwald, singer of another teenage heartthrob band gone defunct, Phantom Planet. Now then, I want you to imagine how terrible, how supremely awful and beyond the limits of bad such a band might sound.
Now click this link to hear them. (Click advisory: reading the comments after clicking will likely result in geometrically high numbers of your own personal brain cells suiciding in protest).
Uh so yeah. If you would’ve given me 10 million probable reference points for a band spun off of Panic At Th!e Disco, “Early Zumpano or The Kinks or perhaps even Phil Spector” would be right around not on that list because seriously.
And sure, go ahead, dismiss this band–The Young Veins, they’re called, and yes, I seem to have buried that inadvertently by being snarky further up–as simply doing some weird homage-by-numbers. But I think you’d be incorrect to do so. Listen to the way the chorus in the first song I linked goes nowhere you’d expect it to, and carries off a rather unexpected and sort of difficult note progression very nicely. Check out the way the second song I linked “Cape Town” does the same thing and then does the AC Newman thing (yeah, AC Newman of The New Pornographers) of putting so many meters in that chorus that the thing should collapse but doesn’t.
There’s some serious craftsmanship going on here, and this debut record is–if not earth-shaking in any way, shape, or form–really, really fun and interesting and enjoyable to listen to.
Gimme gimme gimme Hindi Rokk
Ok, let’s talk Hindi Rock.
I’m sort of kidding, but that’s what Montreal multi-instrumentalist Rishi Dhir occasionally jokingly refers to his music as. Rishi first came to my attention playing sitar, guitar, bass, and keys in The High Dials, a band I’ve made no secret about being a total fanboy of.
His new band is called The Elephant Stone. They’re absolutely fan-damn-tastic. Here, let’s start off with a song that just screams sunny Sunday afternoons:
I mean, if you were going to teach guitar-pop theory, you could just use that song as exhibit A on how to do everything right.
That song is on the new Elephant Stone EP, called “Glass Box” and along with “Yesterday’s Gurl” (which has an amazingly sneaky hook in the chorus) is totally worth investigating.
And if you dig that, you oughta check out The Elephant Stone’s 2009 album, The Seven Seas, which goes from straight-ahead Mancunian-sounding guitar jangle through a steady progression of adding more and more interesting ideas as each song goes by. Here’s the cliff’s notes on that progression:
“Bombs Bomb Away” (What a glorious, awesome, shimmery cool song, especially when they do the key change the last time through the chorus)
After “Bombs”, the album gets more layered….and here’s the title track, the fourth song in:
“Seven Seas” (Ok, sure, it nicks “Across The Universe”, but still, here comes the sitar baby!)
And here’s the album closer. Go grab a bong, we’ll wait. Ready?
“Don’t You Know”. That right there is seven and one-half minutes of pure unadulterated awesomeness.
Best of all, you can listen to both the full lp from last year and this year’s new ep right here:
Hey There! We’re BACK.
Take that, Google Evil Empire!
In a process that was completely painless once I actually decided to try to figure out what I needed to do, I think popnarcotic is back in business.
One tiny, tiny change that hopefully trips no one up: the “www” is gone from the front of the URL. If you’re using a browser from sometime after 1997, the URL line in it should self-correct anyway, so if you’re addicted to typing “www”, don’t let us stop you.
Also, obviously switching from Blogger to WordPress, the formats aren’t exactly the same. You may see a few oddly formatted pictures or something. Best advice there: deal. Or let me know and I’ll see if I can fix it. All fairly recent links should work just fine, and the blog proper is as it ever was, albeit with a slightly newer look to it. Dare I say it: WordPress and the variety of options, UI, and sheer excellence of what it gives you blows Blogger/Blogspot/Google out of the ocean.
Back in a while with blatherings on why you should be listening to Hindi Rock, pimping of Teenage Fanclub, Dragoon, and Sweet Apple, and most importantly–me getting all serious and telling you that if you’re not a raving fan of a Seattle band called The Cute Lepers, you may hate rock and roll. Only slightly kidding with that last bit.
So here’s the deal…
For the last three months or so, Google/Blogspot (which is what I use to write this here blog thingy) has been stringing me along with “In two weeks, we’re going to eliminate FTP service to non-blogspot URL’s.” This blog would be one of those apparently few affected entities. So…I’ve been loathe to update here, because I’m trying to figure out how to proceed.
I’d hate to lose the content here…and hate to have to blog under a new URL. I’ve made a lot of contacts with worthy musicians here and there and they’ve come to know this blog under this name, and starting from scratch seems like too high a mountain to climb. The other side of the coin is that I’ve no idea how to migrate the data or format (which is actually on my own server) to something else (like WordPress? I have to confess to being totally out of my element here.)
Anyhow, as I understand it, I won’t be able to update the blog in the manner I’m used to after Saturday. If anyone reading this knows how I can move the content of the blog without losing things, I’m all ears. Drop me a line at chris11201 (followed by the @) (followed by gmail dot com).
Thanks!
The (Finally) Popnarcotic Top 20 Of 2009 (Cont.)
I’ll come clean here: Ghost, She Said, the third DWG album was the first record of theirs I’d ever heard, and I was sort of amazed to discover that fact and then also discover that I’d sort of wandered into a film in the middle act. Deleted Waveform Gatherings is the music brainchild of a Norwegian rock and pop maestro named Øyvind Holm. Holm’ band used to be called The Dipsomaniacs and they recorded a few albums…but wouldn’t you know, there was a Jersey band going by that same name. Holm picked a new name (chosen, seemingly, to ensure that it was an original) and here we are, third album from Deleted Waveform Gatherings.
Let me try to take you through what listening to this record was like for me the first time out. The album opens with an almost desperate acoustic-fueled song called “Doorway” that drops an amazing middle 8 out of nowhere to take a decent song and make it a very good one…but on the heels of that fine tune we get “Shaman’s Tambourine”, an Allman/Black Oak Arkansas-esque stab at arena boogie that just seems out of place and which quickly made me a lot less interested in Ghost, She Said.
And then along comes the stunner. There’s nothing in Øyvind Holm’s history to suggest he had a tune like “Miss Missing You” in him, but damned if he doesn’t grab you by the ears and then sock you in the guts from almost the very beginning of the song. I think what this number (and really what the rest of the record) has going for it is that Deleted Waveform Gatherings is revealed to be not so much just one of those bands with a pop wunderkind with a band unable to do them justice. No, if the nimble bass and absolutely wonderful drums on “Miss Missing You” don’t immediately convey the true group-nature of Deleted Waveform Gatherings, then the inspired electric banjo that goes wending through the second verse absolutely does.
Not that “Miss Missing You” is the only wonderful slice of instantly-memorable guitar pop here. “The Doc” sounds as if all it’s missing is the “Rocks Off” horn section. “Hate Waiting In Line” starts off sounding like Brian Jonestown Massacre before throwing down a descending note chorus that’d make Noel Gallagher green with envy. “Don’t Wanna Know” either sounds like The Who covering late-period Replacements, or vice-versa.
What inevitably hurts a band like Deleted Waveform Gatherings in the commercial marketplace is that there are so many bands attempting the guitar-pop with a Lennon-ish hue thing that do such a mediocre job of executing that vision that when a group comes along possessing the songwriting moxie of an Øyvind Holm and the stiff rocking backbone of the DWG rhythm section, it’s easy to think “I’ve heard this before” without fully realizing that actually no, we haven’t. How good is Ghost, She Said? This good: since they’re sort of working the same territory as Brendan Benson, I decided this list was only big enough for an either/or between them…and Deleted Waveform Gatherings took the prize.
The (Finally) PopNarcotic Top 20 Of 2009 (Cont.)
And then some co-workers at the restaurant I’m working at are talking music to me, and introducing me to friends, and finding out how much I’m loving this Scottish band called The Pastels and then I’m up in Robb and Matt and Stephanie’s apartment house and they’re spinning records by The Flatmates and the Shop Assistants and the first My Bloody Valentine singles comp and I’m literally feeling an almost amphetamine rush from discovering an entire group of people with whom I share a music taste and who seem to have Plenty More Where That Came From, as it were. Those heady, wonderful, wonderful days at university were where I started to get it sorted, life-wise. I may not have marked a clear path on the map, but from that time forward I knew I wanted to keep hearing music that made me feel the way that music did, and life suddenly had some purpose and got a whole lot more interesting and enjoyable.
And so here we are in 2009 and I’m hearing a New York band called The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart for the first time and I’m thinking “This is the band I’ve been hearing since back then at school.” I mean, I don’t have the foggiest idea how a group of NYC youngsters can hook into a sound as obscure as the C86 indie pop movement that came and went with alarming quickness in the middle 1980′s, but there you go.
The description of TPOBPAH’s music isn’t gonna do it justice, but I’ll try anyway–you take ridiculously fuzzed-out guitars, strum them earnestly, and sing in mostly on-key vocals (thick with British, or in this case faux-Brit accents) and then write one doe-eyed love song dripping with teen angst after another. What that description of the music fails to capture is the exuberance and innocence and naivete required to get this right (and it is perhaps the neatest trick that The Pains turn that they manage to sound incredibly unprepossessing while basically aping a music style that may pre-date the births of the members of the band).
Emo as a movement never really worked because anyone who’s ever felt all wrung-out with angst knows that you can’t really get to those deepest-valleys without also hitting a lot of amazing, glorious peaks of discovery and joy in life. What makes the twee fuzz indiepop of The Pains work so much better than that genre is that they aren’t afraid to express the joys and wide-eyed true belief of young-adulthood (and sadness is just another interesting and unique discovery here). Their ability to transmit that simple feeling of exuberant wonder at all things boy/girl/relationship casts a spell that will make your heart feel 20 again. Hopefully you’ll be transported to airy college apartments, sitting on dusty hardwood floors drinking cheap beer and listening to records with friends…and wanting nothing more than that in life.
“This Love Is Fucking Right”
“Everything With You”
“Stay Alive”
14. The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, S/T
15. The Broadfield Marchers, Displayed In Reflections
16. Police Teeth, Real Size Monster Series
17. The Faraway Places, Out Of The Rain, The Thunder, & The Lightning
18. Crocodiles, Summer of Hate
19. The Idle Hands, The Hearts We Broke On The Way To The Show
20. The Pretty Things With Phillippe DeBarge, S/T
The (Finally) PopNarcotic Top 20 Of 2009 (Cont.)
Here’s an album that’s been all over and out of my list pretty constantly. I’ve thought at times “this is one of the best 5 records of the year”, while at others I’ve thought “dude, no.” Like so much music, you can wear yourself out playing “spot the influence” with the Broadfield Marchers: singer/guitarist finds that vocal sweet spot between Daltrey and Pollard, the songs clock in at a Dayton-esque average of 2 minutes and feature loopy titles like “Dr. Invincible & The Champions Of Love” or “Where Baxter Meets Willow”. When Magnet described a previous Marchers effort as “sounding like Alex Chilton fronting Guided By Voices” they weren’t far off.
Which, it goes without saying, sets off my “not another band that sounds as if it was trying to pre-fulfill the wishes of some hipster focus group” alarms. Those alarms are nearly shut down by bouncy Bee Thousand tributes like “The Revenge Of Jimbo Bell”…and then go into full retreat when a song as drop-dead gorgeous as “Falling Asleep To Disappear” (which song, in a little over two and a half minutes, manages to achieve pretty much everything The Clientele have been trying to achieve with lesser results for nearly a decade.) (No, no…I love the Clientele….but “Falling Asleep” sounds like them, but just better.)
There’s enough same-ishness here at times to induce listener fatigue, but the brevity of the 2-minute songs helps that quite a bit, and then anthems like “Everyone From Everywhere” or “Incredible Jumpsuit Shaking” step in to yank you fully back into the Broadfield Marchers’ weird little psych-pop world.
“Falling Asleep To Disappear”
“Everyone From Everywhere”
“Incredible Jumpsuit Shaking”
15. The Broadfield Marchers, Displayed In Reflections
16. Police Teeth, Real Size Monster Series
17. The Faraway Places, Out Of The Rain, The Thunder, & The Lightning
18. Crocodiles, Summer of Hate
19. The Idle Hands, The Hearts We Broke On The Way To The Show
20. The Pretty Things With Phillippe DeBarge, S/T
The (Finally) PopNarcotic Top 20 Of 2009 (Cont.)
Back in the day, bands like Bitch Magnet, Bastro, or Helmet roamed the land, creating deafening slabs of guitar roar. Over the years, these groups eventually left the scene for various reasons, changed their sound, “developed”, in other words. The little secret of the ’80′s midwest postpunk sound was that a lot of bands got the loud guitars part right, but screwed up by leaving the energy and lyrical “young, loud, and snottiness” of punk behind.
So when I say that a lot of the sound of Bellingham, WA band Police Teeth reminds me of that musical movement, I can already see you thinking “oh right; big chunky lurching guitar riffs with the occasional mathrock start-stop thing going on and not much else.” Well, what if we went back a little further. What if we invoke the name of the holy duo of that movement, of the two bands who got it exactly right? What if we mention the two bands who did the postpunk roar with all the energy and piss of the punks intact? What if I told you Police Teeth has a chance to be this generation’s Big Black? What if I said they might end up some day being as relevant as Fugazi? Now how much would you pay?
On Real Size Monster Series, there are some songs that just don’t work as well as they might. Let’s state that right away. But then let’s also say that a song like “Who Wants To Fuck A Millionaire” is worth seeking this album out all by itself. Let’s also say that “Bob Stinson Will Have His Revenge On Ferndale” sounds like Big Black covering a Finn’s Motel pissy rant on career-ism vs. a rock career (“Pee in the cup, No raise!” goes the chorus, followed by an epic bridge: “Do you remember the spreadsheet that you wrote up way back in 1993?/Nobody ever said ‘That changed my life’/Nobody ever said ‘That inspired me.’”)
Heed some advice, yo. Get on this bandwagon right now. Police Teeth’s irreverent, pissy, angry, hilarious guitar fury deserves to be huge and they might just get there. Thousands of people oughta be singing along to the chorus to “Northern California” at concerts. You know how you once felt like maybe The Hold Steady were writing this epic poetry about disaffection in suburbia? Well, this here is the real folk blues, y’know? The Police Teeth album might not be the very best record I heard this year, but it damn straight is the most exciting. In two years I’m going to look at this list and think “Shit, Police Teeth should’ve been in the top five.”
The PopNarcotic Top 20 of 2009:
16. Police Teeth, Real Size Monster Series
17. The Faraway Places, Out Of The Rain, The Thunder, & The Lightning
18. Crocodiles, Summer of Hate
19. The Idle Hands, The Hearts We Broke On The Way To The Show
20. The Pretty Things With Phillippe DeBarge, S/T
