SHOOTOUT AT THE SONG SALOON

(TOO KAY DOUBLE DOZEN EDITION)

Introduction

Me Vs. Reality (A Game Of Fisticuffs)

Another year of spins and sins, devoid of elegance and wins. Porch-locked with my pipe, I gaze across the synthetic turf landscape—a mountainous soft-serve swirl of stray cat shit and decaying leaves, filling my lawn and ceramic life-bowl to capacity. With a cherry on top, of course—all the flowers in the garden, and the songs I heard that stuck around.

Most years I try to do this—meaning, create a bizarre, self-indulgent, “post-blog” time capsule of my listening life—I either get bored, run out of jokes, or run out of time to get the whole thing written before Spotify Wrapped drops. 

“But Jake,” you might say, “Why does it matter that you finish writing before Spotify Wrapped comes out?” Especially considering I’ve obviously…y’know, failed. Again.

No real reason. It doesn’t matter, really. Maybe just a little fun, one-sided not-competition. Me punching wildly above my “digital reach” weight, racing to contribute something more fun and original to “The Discourse” (as if there’s only one discourse) than what the biggest, most obnoxiously podcast-pushing streaming behemoth in existence has to offer—yet again, like every year, albeit with a subtly shifted color scheme for the animations. I was really hoping my musical horoscope would be Taurus this year.

If I quit streaming altogether, I’d be stuck with my CDs and records and local mp3s. Debates over Spotify’s woefully inadequate artist payment structure notwithstanding (“Hi, can of worms? You can stay closed today.”), that would probably be fine—for me. But it would doubtless further alienate me from a huge portion of the listening public—and, presumably, the few people reading this. It would also make preparing this list even harder. I mean, let’s face it: streaming is a breeze. An almost insultingly watered-down bastard child of crate digging, guided by the heavy hand of a computer who allegedly knows what you like before you know it yourself. And anyway, who says we ever had a choice in our own spins to begin with? Shit, way back when dinosaurs and Doug MacArthur roamed the Earth, you’d probably be socially fine just listening to “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” or something on the radio. Even today (if my local laundromat’s on-repeat FM soundtrack is to be believed), you’d probably be socially fine just keeping your dial untouched at WILD 94.9, or Alice 97.3, or (if you’re my Dad) 98.5 KFOG in the Bay and Alt Nation on (gulp) satellite radio.

So, yeah, I’m still on Spotify. And all of the following songs are on there, too. Meaning, if you feel like delaying your inevitable exodus with me for at least one more year, you can check out a playlist featuring my top thirtysomething 2024 favorites here. It’s called Possible Battleground Sweep. And if you’re really feeling frisky, here’s the full playlist—every song that got stuck in my head over the past twelve months. That one’s called …On Second Thought, Maybe Next Year.

The write-ups follow. The rules, as always:

1. No rankings.
2. No “newness” mandate.
3. No genre requirements.

Now, let’s spin.

THE TUNES:

Pissed Jeans – Moving On

GENRE	Indie Hardcore; Punk
YEAR	2024
RIYL*	IDLES; Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs; post-breakup scrolling; starting over.

*”Recommended If You Like”

Pissed Jeans don’t get nearly enough credit. They’ve been doing the whole “demolish absentee-dad toxicity using its own implements of destruction” thing for—what, two decades? Certainly longer than a certain British band I could name. And I would argue that Pissed Jeans are a hell of a lot funnier, too. I wasn’t even allowed to say their name on the radio in college—we were instructed to call them Pressed Jeans. And it’s been a long seven years since their last album, so it was a colossal gift to get such a suckerpunch offering from them this year as Half Divorced. 

Honestly, there’s something kinda Broadway about its last song, “Moving On”—the final, howled title lyric before the runaway locomotive bridge sounds like fodder for the final, triumphant, ceiling-smashing number from an indie hardcore musical’s Act One. I don’t think it’s the grand finale for the whole show—the whole point seems to be that this guy’s got a long way to go. And even though it’s probably a stretch to say this narrator’s making any real progress on the whole self-improvement thing, it’s the attitude that counts, right? 

He’s got enough momentum, at least—this song operates like a rocket launch: unstoppable once it starts, even if the whole thing explodes. It’s also one of the most arguably straightforward rock songs Pissed Jeans has ever recorded— a not-quite-hardcore motorcycle ride built out of the bones of voyaging classic rock acts like Steppenwolf, the “hardcore-meets-The-Who” energy of early 2010s Fucked Up, and the biting, bizarro, heart-on-sleeve, upside-down sincerity of Warren Zevon lyrics.

Alejandro Escovedo – Bury Me

GENRE	Alt-Country; Blues; Rock
YEAR	2024
RIYL	Steve Earle; Johnny Cash; Grizzled music industry veterans coming to terms with their own impending mortality.

Of all the artists who I wish would get a late-career series of Rubin-produced masterpieces, Alejandro Escovedo tops the list. Just like Johnny Cash, this guy has been everywhere and done everything. He’s a songwriter’s songwriter, a warmly smiling postmodern urban outlaw with boundless punk rock cred in a landscape where renegades run scarcer every year. In the thirty years after No Depression, the flagship zine of the alt-country genre, labeled him its artist of the decade, he just kept remorselessly kicking ass. He swore off playing “Castanets,” one of his most popular songs, for close to a decade, just because George W. Bush put it on a White House mixtape once. The MC5 would be proud. 

This year he released an album called Echo Dancing, with boldly vertiginous reimaginings of classic Escovedo joints. And while it’s undeniably great to hear “John Conquest” and “Castanets” turned inside-out (the latter morphed into a sensual head-trip of dub-meets-heavy-cumbia called “Castañuelas”), it was lead single “Bury Me” that got me the most stoked. A Frankenstein-style electrified corpse of the Gravity original, Escovedo’s new, reanimated version is more of a menacing steampunk train ride through the Delta, exponentially accelerating on the long track to heaven, hell, or wherever. Escovedo’s narrator sits snarling in one of the passenger cars, endlessly busting out blues riffs on a half-destroyed dreadnought. Lyrics take the form of simple, rhyming couplets with almost Washington Irvingesque fable mystique. A lot of aging musicians make albums or songs about the inevitability of death, and the legacy one leaves—to do this by totally rearranging a host of one’s own works is audacious. It reflects an artistry that refuses to stagnate, even in reflecting on the past.

The Everly Brothers – Cathy’s Clown

GENRE	Classic Pop
YEAR	1960
RIYL	Simon & Garfunkel; early Beatles; John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.

Thank a certain loudmouthed-but-often-correct country music critic/podcaster (not naming names) for steering me toward this one. I respect, but tend to disagree with the journalist in question—for example, he famously hates the Beatles. And one day, as he embarked on another Fab Four assassination screed in tweet-long increments, he cited the Everly Brothers as a way better example of sixties artists who tried LSD and radically changed their sound. I listened a bit, and I enjoyed it—but didn’t change my mind about The Beatles. 

Then, on an all-too-routine Discogs binge, I picked up an Everlys Best Of CD, because shit, why not? And I think I get it now—I like these early Everly Brothers songs more than I like a lot of the first few Beatles records. And “Cathy’s Clown,” from 1960, is a huge standout for me. The Everlys mix the adolescent heartache you find in bubblegum girl group anthems with a certain seething resentment that feels uniquely male—wait, is this a song about a guy who’s genuinely been wronged by a girl, or is it an incel’s anthem from the late Eisenhower admin? The brothers’ close-quarters vocal harmonies are perfect (duh), and the beat lurches (in a good way, I promise) like an overweight aunt who oversauces and gets weepy at Thanksgiving every year, treating conversations with cousins like the reality show confession cam: “THUD-dumdumdum-dum-THUD-dumdumdum-dum-THUD-dumdumdum-dum-DUM-don’twantyooourloooooveaaaanymoooore…”

Drunk Horse – Strange Transgressors

GENRE	Garage-rock; Noise-rock; Punk; Alt-Country
YEAR	2005
RIYL	Comets on Fire; The MC5; Left Lane Cruiser; Going to war.

It’s probably fitting that the intro to this song sounds an awful lot like the band’s name: a cavalry charge across the Mad Max desert from a legion of Oakland headbangers, doing precarious wheelies on their various junk-punk transports. When that slip-sliding second guitar comes dancing in, the “let’s go get those fuckers, boys” energy wave crests, and the shredding begins. The song’s creepy-crawly, sinister lyrics read like Robert Plant writing campfire ghost stories—a “shadowy circle of men” that “come in the night and whisper terrible lies in the ears of our sleeping children.” These lines issue unanswered cries to a God long gone: “Is there no way to save our homes?” And appropriately, the vocals could’ve been pulled from the bottom of a well gone bad, drenched in the terror, bloodlust, and powerlessness of whoever got pushed in with a couple of cinder blocks tied to their ankles. And the way they double up for the last line of the second chorus, the howling “Why is no answer know-ow-own?” is just greaseball country-assed enough to remind us that we’re listening to a band with “Horse” in the name. It’s a song that flies full-throttle into the next-nearest sun, accelerating fast enough to punch a hole in the damn thing and shoot clean out the other side. 

Elvis Costello – Chewing Gum

GENRE	New Wave; Classic Rock; Punk
YEAR	1989
RIYL	Richard Hell & The Voidoids; King Krule; Dentists’ drills; Motherfucking jazz.

I read an article by Scott Bunn (aka Recliner Notes) in Aquarium Drunkard earlier this year about this song’s guitar solo, which he alleged was one of the finest ever offered up by session wizard Marc Ribot—you might know some of Ribot’s other work, including a weird, little-known album called Rain Dogs by this creep named Tom Waits. And “Chewing Gum” is definitely a slinking, strutting, spasmodically jittering jaunt through a psychotic dollhouse, guided by Costello’s best vocal squealing, his “Butler-who-knows-too-much” bravado, and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. 

The song is unsettling in a sleazy, sexy kind of way—perfect for an album as sardonic and—well, spiky as Spike, whose cover depicts a slaughtered artist on display, like a tiger shot in some recreational colonial jungle-romp (a swing at the music industry, Costello said). And even though its lead single, “Veronica,” has McCartney’s pop Midas fingerprints on it, Spike still has plenty of songs decrying whatever pieces of television news Costello was fuming over when he wrote them. And yet, the liner notes for Spike that appear on Costello’s website suggest that “Chewing Gum” “came out of [his] own travels and misadventures.” The song’s narrator spies on (or, perhaps himself is) a subject whose playtime with paper people walks the fine line between fantasy and madness. By 1989, Costello was well-practiced at writing “bitter dude” songs—simultaneously nuanced character studies and seething semi-memoirs. Before Spike, he’d already tried to put some public distance between himself as Declan MacManus, and the version of Costello who appeared on My Aim Is True. 

In that sense, “Chewing Gum” is a creative reconciliation—a return to jittery form with a bold, big-band/post-punk twist. Lightning bolts of screaming horns add an antagonistic, unrelenting TV static to Costello’s surrealist soap opera storylines—and yeah, that guitar solo really is fantastic. Like Bob Quine’s Peavey tone had a baby with Jack The Ripper. 

The Brights – Enough Of You

GENRE	Indie surf-pop
YEAR	2024
RIYL	Allah-Las; The Nude Party; Real Estate; Ripping a sunrise joint on the beach.

Australia’s national love affair (or is it a marriage?) with surf music continues to impress. But whereas bands like King Gizzard shoot for the garage-psych stratosphere and every tripped-out planet beyond, The Brights adopt a sweeter, sunshinier approach—a riff that feels classic, hypnotic vocals, ghostly harmonies, and a whole fuckload of inarticulable nostalgia. It’s a bittersweet pillowcase beckoning toward recurring surrealist dreams, where vague, cloudlike lyrical bullets like “not enough time” and “enough of you” reflect all the buried, burdensome memories that silently haunt waking life. It’s like looking at a sunset on the beach, sharing a cigarette with a since-grown-distant old friend. And for the first time in years, you manage to laugh together.

Gary Clark Jr. – JPEG RAW

GENRE	Blues; Jazz; Rock; Pop
YEAR	2024
RIYL	Smoke-filled rooms; The Roots; Alabama Shakes; El Camino by the Black Keys.

I first saw Gary Clark Jr. perform at Outside Lands in San Francisco back in 2013. He absolutely demolished his sludgy electric blues bonfire set, demonstrating a technical mastery only matched by the amount of scorn he seemingly had for his audience. He slinked and stomped all over the stage, grimacing with every riff he eviscerated, soloing like a guy with the balls to cover Jimi Hendrix at a music festival should solo. The whole blistering pyre left me awestruck. I’ve followed Clark’s career ever since, and never been disappointed. 

Obviously I was going to be stoked for JPEG RAW, his first album since before the Pandemic. That last record, This Land, was a staunchly political tone shift for Clark, but retained all of the firepower from Blak and Blu and The Story of Sonny Boy Slim. But “JPEG RAW,” the new title track, is an unbelievable new height. It’s hazy, sinister, groovy, and grim. It’s a downer-dosed hip-hop/jazz/blues/rock blender concoction, garnished with the rind-zest of an old school opium den. A lot of Clark’s fans (including me) would’ve been fine with another blues-rock album—either a return to 2012 form, or picking up exactly where This Land left off. JPEG RAW is, in a way, a sequel to This Land. It’s arguably less explicit, with themes that are at times more confessional, adding personal nuance to the more political musings. 

Sometimes, as in this song, that amounts to reflective braggadocio—Clark notes that his daughters will never need to “shake hips to make tips,” but offers an equivocation, too— “No judgment, if it makes cents it makes sense.” It’s not exactly an apology, though. Clark still seems to be thinking in imperial terms: He’ll be “on ‘em like King Rich.” But there’s a strong sense that he feels self-critical—ungrateful, undeserving somehow. At this point in the song we’ve moved from a grim cinematic portrayal of a Black boy being shot by a cashier, to “champagne brunches, go on, live it up.” So, as Clark asks (himself?) in the chorus, “If this is what you want, what you waiting for? If this ain’t what you want, what you want?”

Previous Industries – Showbiz

GENRE	Indie Rap
YEAR	2024
RIYL	Open Mike Eagle; The Alchemist; Posse Cuts; Stoner raps that actually rhyme.

If I’ve learned anything about Open Mike Eagle (a strong “my favorite rapper” contender) in the last ten years, it’s that the man loves a posse cut. STILL RIFT and Video Dave join Mike now to form Previous Industries, a (super?)group precision-engineered to expertly deploy the exact kind of sincerely sardonic, self-referential, vulnerable abstract spit that Mike’s been expectorating for decades. And whereas “Showbiz,” the lead single from their album Service Merchandise, is purportedly a boastful track, it can be pretty hard to tell sometimes. Maybe it’s all the references to “The Humpty Dance,” DJ Shadow, and Olivia Newton John. The bars are impressionistic-bordering-on-avant-garde, even cheekily opaque—take this particular STILL RIFT quip: “Right arm a Megatron/Blueprint of Babylon/Silent Tetra-Grammaton, the false alarm/Chicken Little wolf ticket bought the farm.” Leaves the discerning hip hop listener (or your average Kendrick Lamar stan) wondering, “Who actually enjoys this? It’s drowsy, swooning, goofy, and you can’t dance to it at all.” But it might be Video Dave who identifies their audience best, claiming “nostalgia like a motherfucker, you ever read The Giving Tree? By Shel Silverstein? I know you’re feeling me.” 

Liquid Mike – USPS

GENRE	Power-Pop; Pop-Punk
YEAR	2024
RIYL	DAZY; Fountains of Wayne; Mark Hoppus; Sugar; Getting fucked up with your friends on a summer night; Getting older, but acting the same.

Liquid Mike, from Michigan, was my favorite musical discovery all year. Their new album Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot is a barrage of the exact sound that warms my heart routinely: Pristine power-pop meets wink-at-the-camera slacker rock, a sound that works as well in a grime-slicked basement as it does being blasted from the beat-to-shit car stereo, or around the fire at an “Old Squad” reunion. Liquid Mike’s singer/songwriter/leader(?) Mike Maple writes perfect, under-three-minutes-as-a-rule electric guitar bangers, accented by synth riffs so kooky that they manage to be tender, and that you can actually sing along to—one million percent guaranteed to move into your brain with your other resident earworms, and throw an out-of-control house party. And on an album full of standouts, “USPS” stood out to me the most. Who cares that the riff is lifted (virtually unchanged) from Green Day’s “Geek Stink Breath?” Green Day steals plenty of songs themselves (see: “Warning” compared to the Kinks’ “Picture Book”). And “USPS” showcases Liquid Mike at their lyrical best—reimagining themes that jaded pop-punkers have been painting with for years: Apathy, stagnancy, angst, and heartache. Breakups (both romantic and with friends), academic arrogance, loneliness and hope. It’s all here. It’s a future alternative-rock cult favorite for sure. It’s the real deal. I hope this band blows up enormously. 

The B-52’s – Dance This Mess Around (Live In London)

GENRE	Classic Rock; New Wave
YEAR	2013
RIYL	DEVO; Blondie; Shaking your fucking ass off, all sixteen ways.

Another year, another Mosswood Meltdown—the weekend punk-and-whatever festival in Oakland I wander dorkily through every year, too old to be hip and too young to be cool. It’s usually a pretty good time. And when the B-52’s were announced as this year’s headliners, I caught a righteous wave of stoke that I rode all the way to July. 

I prepared myself for the show with the band’s 2013 Live in London album, figuring it’d be the closest to their current sound. And it gave me a renewed appreciation of the slightly deeper cuts—in particular, the furious, heartbroken rallying cry of “Dance This Mess Around.” Cindy Wilson gets to sing an extended intro here, and her desperate back-and-forth with the lead guitar riff is kind of a dance in itself. It’s an Oscar-worthy performance already, but of course it’s all a buildup to Fred Schneider triumphantly howling the song’s title, kicking the spaceship into overdrive. This is the B-52’s song where we learn “all sixteen dances,” which change from performance to performance of this song—from the “Cheap Cologne” to the “Horny Cowboy” and the “Escalator.” This band is out there on the front lines, love shackin’ every night, inventing entirely new dances for the people. The B-52’s are national heroes. And the thing I love most about this song is that it sounds like the order it proclaims: Dance. This. Mother. Fucking. Mess. Around. You can’t help it. 

The song is fervently punk and belligerently playful. It’s that friend who pulled you into your first pit, and changed your life. What better tone to strike for shaking your ass and your worries away? Oh, and when I saw them, obviously, the band kicked ass. It might have been the most fun I had at a show all year.

Charles Moothart – Anchored and Empty

GENRE	Garage-Rock; Psychedelic Rock.
YEAR	2024
RIYL	FUZZ; Blue Cheer; King Crimson; Falling into the void.

Charles Moothart owns a tie-dye shirt that I made. 

I saw him leading his band CFM at a show in Oakland back in 2019. I knew about Moothart from his work in FUZZ and Ty Segall Band, as a prolific garage-metal guitar hero with a horseshoe moustache. He’d shaved it before the Oakland show, but the band demolished their set—unfortunate for the talented Mikal Cronin, another member of Ty Segall Band, whose more established solo material technically made him that night’s headliner. After the show I saw Moothart working his own merch booth in the corner of the venue. I was wearing a blue and magenta tie-dye button-down shirt that I made. Without going into too much detail, let’s just say that I make really good tie-dye. And without thinking it through at all, I walked up to Moothart, thanked him for a great set, and gave him the shirt off my back (I was wearing a t-shirt underneath it; I was not suddenly left topless). He admired it—“You made this?”—and thanked me (I hope) sincerely. I asked if I could buy a CFM t-shirt from him, but he said “No need.” and asked me my size. He grabbed a record and a t-shirt. He insisted, “no charge.” All of which is just to say that in my experience, Charles Moothart seems like a damned decent dude.

Moothart’s solo output is wildly underrated—especially some of the CFM records. I have no idea why In The Red doesn’t do more to promote this guy. Maybe that’s not the problem at all. I don’t know. But this new solo album, Black Holes Don’t Choke, is definitely some of his best stuff ever. The drums give more machine gun, the bigger songs feel bigger, the riffs remain abundant, and the love comes through more. “Anchored and Empty” is monolithic, a great stone idol scraping its way across the endless dunes. Prog-rock grandeur with a Deep Purple tinge, seeping menacingly out of a city sewer grate. Or maybe it’s an earthquake. The verses are burning blues explosions, adorned with a chorus of psych-steeped backing vocals and bookended by swirling, subdued soloing. Moothart cries out in anguish like a prisoner in some bad-trip version of a Looney Tunes short, overcome by the agony that goes along with arbitrarily swinging a comically oversized pickaxe at scattered boulders all day. “What’s up, Doc?” More like, “What’s up? Rock.” Thank you, thank you. Please, hold your applause.

A. Savage – I Can’t Shake the Stranger Out of You

GENRE	Indie Rock; Alt-Country
YEAR	2024
RIYL	Lavender Country; Parquet Courts; Dylan & The Band; Warren Zevon.

Not a lot to say here, honestly. It’s a fun little cover of a Lavender Country classic by a rock-solid modern rock songwriter who’s long since proven his mettle in Parquet Courts. This one conveys the warmth and acceptance of a holiday dinner with friends—real cornball Christmas movie type shit, like everyone crowded around the upright piano, singing together in inexplicably perfect harmony. Hey, why question it? It’s too hard not to smile.

Psalm One – Nasty Jazz Hands

GENRE	Indie Rap; Riot Grrrl!
YEAR	2019
RIYL	2000s-Style Lyrical Miracle Flexing; Queer-Feminist Anthems; Jean Grae.

I saw Psalm One absolutely steal the show at Bottom of the Hill this year. This song is one of her classics, and a blast live. She raps like she learned to read by treating the dictionary as times tables. Her flow is like a rollercoaster that stays deceptively low to the ground. It’s not always about the sky-high loop-de-loops in this genre—bonkers beats and A-List features. No features here. Just Psalm One. And the beat’s not a revolutionary piece of craftsmanship, although it’s wildly solid for the acrobatics it underlies. 

But songs can surprise you. And this ride’s got verbal hard turns and multisyllabic bumps aplenty to make up for the reduced vertical. Not to mention the speed—once Psalm One starts rapping, she does not stop until she’s delivered a quantity of bars comparable to the amount of kicks that Chun-Li delivers in an average round of Street Fighter. A lot. And it works to her benefit—if this song is about simply being better than the people who decry your success, then, shit—well done. Psalm One proves (and not just on this song!) that she is a potent and versatile artist who is uniquely capable of turning serious advocacy into a fucking rager. Killing a bigot never sounded so much fun. Neither did the phrase “Get out the gay.” The deft deployment of a classic burn: “All you little homophobes up in my mentions, y’all in the closet—that’s why you trippin’.” Or how about this rallying cry for the mail-in voters of America? “They try to stamp us out, we go postal.” And of course, when she goes full Bart Simpson—”Don’t have a cow in this bitch, time to get wild in this bitch”—I crack the biggest goddamn smile. Because what better way than a song like this? What better way to show that your humanity is unflinching, and that in spite of the best efforts of those who would seek to destroy you, you’re having a hell of a lot more fun than they are—authentically. “When they don’t belong, they get mad and call you ‘nasty.’” But you sure as shit don’t have to listen to ‘em.

Metz – 99

GENRE	Indie Rock; Punk
YEAR	2024
RIYL	Pissed Jeans; Protomartyr; Aging into your own noise; Getting hit in the face repeatedly with a rose-scented sledgehammer.

METZ also put out one of the best records of their career this year, which is saying something. This is a band that decorated my college radio years, providing a welcome addition to the salad bar of pummeling offerings for my late-night headbanger listeners—mostly veteran skate-punks in Oxnard. METZ songs frequently inspired request line calls asking me what the fuck I was playing and where could they hear more. It’s unrepentant guitar-drum-bass noise with confrontational industrial accents, and a lot of real songwriting proficiency—always has been. So on Up On Gravity Hill, their newest record, it’s unsurprising that turning the noise down (just a smidge!) does nothing to reduce the real songwriting proficiency. 

It might have been sort of inaccurate all along to label METZ as anything close to “hardcore punk.” They’ve always had the ferocity it takes to earn that label (at least in the indie press), and even earn the admiration of the guys in Oxnard who know what they’re talking about. But if you want to get obnoxiously genre-specific about it, that American hardcore sound’s never quite been there. Appropriately, METZ are Canadian. They’re also probably (gasp!) simply better than most hardcore bands—at the very least, more ambitious. Most! I said most hardcore bands! 

Maybe ambition’s just the natural consequence of getting older and bored as an artist, but even if that is the case, it got us Up On Gravity Hill. And there’s a perplexing beauty to this album, even though listening to it feels like watching a building collapse piece by piece with every subsequent song. It’s as if that experience could somehow, paradoxically, bring you some peace. “99” is a work of chaotic splendor. It starts all wiry and anxious, like the loner kid in the back of the class, imminently about to snap. When he does, it’s a chorus of taunting, maniacal voices repeating a number while the walls explode all at once. Hurricane guitars buzz the Code Red. Duck and cover, the drums are a polyrhythmic gatling gun. It’s pulverizing enough to distract from the fact that the structure is actually pretty pop-conventional—verse-chorus-verse etc. It’s in the song’s DNA—the sweet scent of the mainstream. But it’s a feat to make something this genetically popular, this potentially accessible, this concisely excellent, sound so goddamn mean.

St. Vincent – Broken Man

GENRE	Indie Pop; Rock
YEAR	2024
RIYL	Distortion; Sharon Van Etten; Twisting the knife; Laughing maniacally.

“Broken Man” has been called a classic rock pastiche—but if so, it’s kind of like how Hot Fuzz was a loving parody of buddy cop movies that doubled as a rock-solid buddy cop flick in itself. And the ferocity of “Broken Man” doesn’t quite scream “goofy gag” to me. It’s unsettlingly seductive—unlike a great deal of classic rock, this song practically tiptoes its way in, with a creepy looping instrumental harkening back to the days when Annie Clark made Marry Me in GarageBand. St. Vincent waits a good long time before dropping the venomous guitar tone she so famously, ferociously wields—like some kind of legendary demon-possessed blade. Every chord struck is like a hulking, pugnacious monstrosity taking one step closer—again, closer. A lot of fun percussion happening here—a cacophony of rhythmic clattering, an assembly-line churning out cyborg stepford dude-bros. It’s a fearsome sound. And the energy is crazy all of a sudden. All the little pieces come together into a cyclone of wailing vocals, dance-pop, and metal. 

Armand Hammer – Trauma Mic (feat. Pink Siifu)

GENRE	“Alternative” Rap? “Industrial” Rap? “Indie” Rap? Fuck if I know, man.
YEAR	2023
RIYL	Backwoodz Records; Quelle Chris; Cryptic riddle-rhymes; Smog-choked city streets; The encroaching darkness.

Once again, I’m over a year late to writing about an Armand Hammer album. 

Whenever I want the gnarly shit, I pretty consistently come back to this project—Billy Woods and E L U C I D’s take on the rap power duo thing. There are times when I don’t give a fuck about dancing—sometimes I just want to hear lip-curling snarl-bars, like E L U C I D claiming the title of “the mud, waiting for the flood they said would never come.” Armand Hammer songs are routinely thoughtful, aggressively mechanical, and often lyrically inscrutable. We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, which dropped in September 2023, elevated that sound to beautiful. It made sense—both Woods and E L U C I D had been sharpening their weaponry for years, getting more ambitious with every respective solo project. And even though “Doves” (featuring the always excellent Benjamin Booker) was probably the “prettiest,” (man, that feels weird to write) most epic song on the record, I was busier bobbing my head like a psycho to the fang-masticating gnash of “Trauma Mic.” It kicks off with a cymbal crash—over, and over, and over, and over—until an earthquake splits the land beneath the song in two, and the drums blasting from beneath are as cavernous as the resulting cavern. Pink Siifu’s introductory guest verse is a madman’s soliloquy with a thunder-and-lighting-storm backdrop—King fucking Lear. And Lord, does Billy Woods know how to start a verse—your favorite rapper would never quote Thomas Hobbes.

Me First and the Gimme Gimmes – Dancing Queen (Live)

GENRE	Punk
YEAR	2024
RIYL	Fat Wreck Chords; Mexican American culture; Cover songs.

As a Bay Area kid born a little closer to the millennium than I would’ve liked, a lot of the punk available to me was 90s pop-punk and skate-punk. All it takes is one mix CD—and I had a Gimme Gimmes compilation. So when I wasn’t getting into weirdo rock like Elvis Costello or They Might Be Giants, I was embedded in the Fat Wreck Chords label roster. And I learned a ton of classic pop songs just by torrenting Gimme Gimmes albums. That included 2004’s Ruin Johnny’s Bar Mitzvah. Great album, great joke: Corny punk cover band plays an actual cover band-style event, where nobody in attendance knows or gives a shit about them. It made for some laughs—and not just because Johnny’s voice cracks on the intro track. 20 years later, they did it again—at a Quinceañera. And to tell you the truth, I think it’s better than Bar Mitzvah. The challenge is greater, but the band rises triumphantly to the bizarre occasion, which the birthday girl’s family apparently won in a radio contest giveaway (what year is it?) 

Coming from a band who’s already done entire albums of diva classics and showtunes, it shouldn’t be a surprise that The Gimme Gimmes nail it. Backed by some genuine brass (musicians Keith Douglas and Jason Crane) and a setlist of armor-piercing girl-power ammunition, they leap from Selena to Juice Newton and Vincente Fernández, delivering far more firepower than anybody bargained for. And their take on “Dancing Queen” dominates the album. This band is known for artfully riffing classic punk songs’ way into pop gemstones—here they use The Clash’s “Janie Jones” as a trick intro, to wild success. I am never not impressed with how well Spike Slawson sings, while still unfailingly capturing the spirit of a drunk uncle. His voice shines here—and this is not an easy song to sing well, no matter what Shannon from Accounting who loves karaoke apparently believes. Pinch (of English Dogs and The Damned) and CJ Ramone (yes, those Ramones) make for a dream rhythm section, and gosh darnit, I’m just glad to hear that Joey Cape (of Lagwagon) seems to be doing OK. 

Let’s be honest—ABBA is a safe choice for any ritualized pubescent coming-of-age event. Everyone on Earth likes “Dancing Queen.” It would be so easy to phone this one in. But this is an early highlight on the album, where they begin to win the otherwise-ambivalent crowd over. By the end, the girls are screaming for more. And it’s somehow still more fun than hearing them cover Olivia Rodrigo with a Buzzcocks intro.

Big Black – Racer-X

GENRE	Classic Industrial; Punk
YEAR	1985
RIYL	Shellac; Nine Inch Nails; Broken drum machines; Snarling; Dirty speed.

It would be easy to simply write this one as “Steve Albini. ‘Nuff sed.” But it would be rude, and the truth is, it wouldn’t actually say enough. After Albini died in May, I knew it was inevitable that his music—including titanic albums by Big Black and Shellac—would soon be available on streaming platforms. It made me a little sad. For a long time, it seemed like the stalwartly iconoclastic Albini was withholding some of his best work from the masses on anti-industry principle alone. This made it harder to hear his music, but he made a point. He was both praised and decried for this. He was both praised and decried for a lot of things, very little of which was truly bad enough that he actually needed to apologize. And you can do your homework reading about his work as a studio mentor, a sidequest poker star, and his annual gig as Chicago’s municipal Santa Claus. I’m still a little uneasy streaming these songs, but whoever’s getting what little money it brings in could probably use it.

None of that discussion touches on Big Black, Shellac, Albini’s engineer-brain inventiveness, or his commitment to making music sound exactly how the artists he produced wanted it to sound—especially music that’s loud, grating, menacing, ferocious, and on-fire. 

“Racer-X,” from a 1985 Big Black EP, is one of my favorite examples of Albini creating a mood. It’s not one of their more celebrated tracks—even at the time of its original release, the band was already working on their debut full-length Atomizer—widely regarded as a masterpiece of industrial and noise-rock. But I think there’s something intensely badass about “Racer-X.” Sure, it’s primitive compared to later, more strategically constructed Big Black. The lyrics are straightforward and there’s not much to the song’s driving (get it?) concept. The riff’s punkishly simple, and it doesn’t remotely reach the heights of “Kerosene.” Shit, some bands would call this a throwaway. Big Black essentially said as much in the EP’s liner notes, hinting at Atomizer—“[N]ext one’s gonna make you shit your pants.” But it’s still got that insane, heavy-machinery-having-sex guitar tone (Albini’s signature surgical implement), and the interplay between the bass and the drum machine does an excellent fucking job encouraging violent dancing. It’s not artsy or presuming in the slightest. It’s a slam-pit classic, a techno-biker line dance, a cyberpunk Nascar video game soundtrack, and a great way to instigate a fistfight—all about a cartoon character who’s hooked on amphetamines. 

Rapsody, Erykah Badu – 3:AM

GENRE	Rap
YEAR	2024
RIYL	The Roots; Common; Slam poetry; Getting touchy-feely in a judgment-free zone.

I really wish my meds and/or therapy worked as quickly as Rapsody’s on Please Don’t Cry, a brutally confessional bevy of bars that she dropped in mid-May. It only takes us an hour (approximately two sessions, ranging anywhere from $100 to $600, depending on your “insurance”) to circumnavigate Rapsody’s identity, learn a few lessons about love along the way, and—of course—cry. And I cried a lot. 

Man, how could I not like this record? It’s got too much of what I love in hip hop: prolific, substantive, impossibly multisyllabic writing, a flow that bleeds the soul out through the voice, tender sincerity, features by Lil Wayne and Erykah Badu, and even a Hit-Boy appearance. It’s about as close as you’ll get this year to reading a rapper’s diary through your ears (Sorry, Kendrick), and it covers everything from family to romance to queer feminism and faith. At times it’s a heartbreaking message of insecurity and fear, even in the face of success—a stark reminder that even when objectively, everything should be going great, it doesn’t always feel that way—especially if you have a few suitcases that need unpacking. And how dare you be unhappy if everything’s fine? So, y’know, it’s a casual listen. Good for killing the vibe at parties.

But on “3:AM,” it’s a message of healing and finding strength in others—allowing them to teach you more about yourself than you thought it possible to know. Learning to believe in yourself simply because someone else believed in you. Growing. The song’s intro is all jazz, with a sorrowful sax accented by a phone ringing—either unanswered, or it’s Rapsody on the line. This beat could’ve been a D’Angelo song in 1995—it settles comfortably somewhere between nostalgic boom bap and Grover Washington, Jr. On the chorus, Badu brings the heat as always—as if her voice even needs commenting on. Surprise: still incredible.

The song’s subject relationship is modern-romantic—it’s digging through a shoebox of polaroids, pulled from the top shelf of the storage closet, each one a stream-of-consciousness story in a single bar: “Netflix asking if we still watching TV—no.” And “staycations in St. Regis,” and “shopping sprees on Fifth Avenue,” and “the plans we made, the looks across the room we trade, holding hands on the long car rides we take[.]”  It’s a breakup story, ultimately—but Rapsody is the farthest possible thing from bitter. She’s closer to gratitude: “I learned so much, you were like my second adolescence…whenever, wherever, you were always there for me, and for that, I’ll always love you.” And just…Jesus. Jesus Christ. I’m ruined. Pass the tissues.

Chris Cohen – Sunever

GENRE	Indie Rock/Folk; Psychedelic
YEAR	2024
RIYL	Deerhoof; The Kinks; Whimsical fairy-tales with strong undertones of drug use.

Chris Cohen’s long been unafraid to tap into the strange while music-making—at times far stranger than this, frankly—and it’s always a pleasure to go for a sonic swim in one of his compelling, fantasy-cottage-quaint compositions. There’s something kinda Magical Mystery Tour about his new record, Paint A Room. It’s the kind of album you’d expect from a guy who famously shredded for Deerhoof and produced for Weyes Blood: a pensive, dreamy, accessible, psychedelic post-impressionist painting. “Sunever,” the third track, is peak Cohen. Sort of a lullaby for a growing plant, a promise of a brighter future— “You’re gonna find a way.” It’s a song that wants you to think it’s simple—nursery rhyme lyrics and a tender melody, with distant guitars echoing across a verdant field of vibrating magnetic wildflowers. But in the most perfect way, it’s difficult to differentiate between guitar parts, or identify accurately where any one of them is coming from. The result is a gentle cyclone carrying the listener skyward into the kaleidoscope lens. And when that Camper Van Beethoven violin kicks in, “Sunever” recalls “Pictures of Matchstick Men,” albeit robbed of its explosive, drunk-trip college radio bravado. This is a different kind of psychedelic music, of course. It’s softer. It’s sweeter. And that’s OK.

Loretta Lynn, Conway Twitty – You’re The Reason Our Kids Are Ugly

GENRE	Country
YEAR	1978
RIYL	John Prine and Iris DeMent; Home Improvement (starring Patricia Richardson); Loving imperfection; Shit-talking.

This is just a cute little country duet. Less tender than Prine and DeMent’s “In Spite Of Ourselves,” but it captures a similar spirit of “We’re not perfect, and in fact sometimes we kinda hate each other’s guts, but we’re all we’ve got, and we’re happy.” Boomer humor for sure (Take my wife—please, take my wife!”) but it’s not so bad. It’s a very solid meat-and-potatoes country arrangement. And, turns out it’s fun as shit to listen to these two go back and forth, trading snide condescension and shit-talking each other into the dirt. Not that I’d ever try it.

Anybody else think this song could be a corny sitcom theme? Someone must have done that already, right? Some forgotten deep-cable hellspawn of a show that probably got canceled after a season or two? Something starring Tim Allen, perhaps? Look—much like the great American family sitcom, it’s not a complicated song. It’s all charm and cheek, with a wry take on tenderness that nears universal. Much like the great American family sitcom, it’s a tight entertainment package—over in under three minutes—and much like the great American family sitcom, it’s great for a not-too-challenging chuckle. Honestly, our collective national entertainment diet has been lacking in trifling, cute, funny bullshit recently. Not every show we watch has to be a hyper-realistic crime drama with a brooding antihero of ambiguous morality. Shit, even the Housewives franchise has sprawling criminal investigation subplots these days. We are severely lacking in cheap, optimistic trash television that everyone can enjoy. Give me more country songs like this. And no, most Bro Country doesn’t count, because most of it’s not wholesome. It just ain’t Christian. I say—I say—I say—boy, it just ain’t Christian!

Falcon Jane – Dirty Dog

GENRE	Country/Folk
YEAR	2024
RIYL	Jessica Pratt; Quitting Town; Chain-smoking your ex-girlfriend regret away.

Gotta love a good ol’ fashioned “fuck that no-good lousy motherfucker, I’m glad his ass is gone” song. Except that’s not what this is—Falcon Jane’s “Dirty Dog” is a sweet, swooning little country-folk-rocker about the no-good lousy motherfucker who left. But it’s actually his song, and he’s not the titular dirty dog. It’s about what happens to him after he leaves. And it shows us that maybe there was more to the story all along: “My mama didn’t raise her son to be blown off and cheated on, heartbroken, stuck in the mud—oh honey, what have you done to me?” He’s hurt so bad that he leaves town and gets a new job, for Christ’s sake. And his only prayer is that she doesn’t find him. That sounds awful.

But in terms of sound, it’s dreamy and cozy, even tender. Suitable for a sunny day, subject matter notwithstanding. Interlocking guitars add some sentimental heft and some necessary extra seconds to the presentation, but it’s mostly about the way Falcon Jane emotes when she sings. Comparing yourself to John Prine means it’s not enough to write the character—you gotta play the character. And she does. 

Love Fiend – Hard Feelings

GENRE	New Wave/Punk
YEAR	2024
RIYL	DEVO; “Making Plans for Nigel”; the B-52’s Wild Planet album; Battlebots at L.A. warehouse parties.

“Hard Feelings” sounds like the backing track for an exercise video series hosted by a neon-glowing, amphetamine-fueled Phantom Menace C-3PO, stray frayed wires sticking out at concerning angles all over its jittery frame. Love Fiend serves up a massively catchy chorus—who doesn’t love a song that spells out its own title? Who doesn’t love a wailing sax? Handclap sound effects? Key punch after ass-kicking key punch of accelerated-heart-rate vintage synth line vines, interlocking and ascending into an unassailable hedge-wall of 80s movie jogging sequences? Goddammit, it’s the whole shebang. It’s early B-52’s, the best of DEVO, Colin Moulding’s XTC, whatever. But it somehow manages to double down on the B-movie angle—self-awarely shlocky and reference-drenched, it’s afforded the luxury of getting right to the point—and ripping. There’s something special about music that doesn’t feel the need to invent a new genre or grasp at continent-shifting artistic inventiveness. And this track’s sundae cherry—the kooky, serious-shticky “Hard Feeling/Hard Feeling” vocal call-and-response post-chorus—adds a cartoonish exclamation mark to the already kooky laser-show arrangement, seemingly assembled the same way Mia Thermopolis’ Bay Area mom made paintings with water balloons, darts, and a whole lotta heart in The Princess Diaries. 

Steve Earle – Yer So Bad

GENRE	Country-Rock; Classic Rock
YEAR	2024
RIYL	Tom Petty; Knowing how enviable your happiness is.

Readers of previous years’ Tune Wrap© columns know that I love Tom Petty. And they know that I love Steve Earle. And this is Steve Earle deftly covering one of my top five Petty songs: “Yer So Bad.” Written with Jeff Lynne’s help for Full Moon Fever, it’s not quite as exospheric in its altitude as “Free Fallin’” or as hot-rod rapid as “Runnin’ Down A Dream,”  but it’s still my favorite song from the impeccable record.

I’ve always thought of this as one of Petty’s best in-character love letters: Dreary, judgmental, and condescendingly voyeuristic. For a song allegedly about how much its narrator loves someone, it does an awful lot of looking outward, beyond the boundaries of the relationship. It spends more time pitying or condemning its side characters—sadistic gold-diggers, yuppies playing Sylvia Plath, and swinging singers—than dissecting its own happiness. In a way, the lovers are the true side characters of this love song.

But it’s got that heartstring-escalator-to-heaven sound in the pre-chorus parts, the “not me, Baby—I got you to save me,” that sells the feeling. The chorus is just a cheesy ironic reversal—his sister was cruel—dare I say, “bad”—to her ex-husband; the narrator’s girl is good to him—therefore, she is “so Bad.” The romance is in the contrast: Between the narrator’s sister, who “got lucky, married a yuppie, took him for all he was worth,” and the narrator—who’s looking at that trainwreck and thinking, “God, I hope that doesn’t happen to me.” And to make things more fun, his girl’s in on the joke. It’s arguably a great romantic tradition to trade that knowing glance with your partner—the one that says, “I’m so glad we’re not them.”

I’ve often said that I don’t like straightforwardly happy love songs. There are exceptions to that rule—coincidentally, one of them is Petty’s “You Wreck Me,” from Wildflowers. But for the most part, I only find love songs interesting when there’s an element of conflict—something for the love to overcome. Don’t just tell me you’re in love; tell me a fucking story. Whether you’re separated by distance, by circumstance, whatever. Give me something to fucking root for, and something to root against. And the villain in “Yer So Bad,” to me, is the narrator’s insecurity. Perhaps the surest sign of a relationship in distress is one that needs to tear other couples down in order to feel secure. Will this kind of shit-talking really stop with his man-eating sister’s divorce? Sure, the narrator’s got his girl to “save him.” But is that really her responsibility? Should it be? Maybe if he wants to keep his head out of the oven long-term, he needs to examine what he thinks a relationship is supposed to be.

That’s where Steve Earle comes in—the absolute perfect choice to perform this song for the Petty Country tribute compilation that dropped this year. Steve Earle has been married seven times. It is extremely likely that he has made the same exact romantic mistakes as every character in “Yer So Bad,” possibly more than once. Appropriately, what perfects this cover is the soul—Steve Earle sings like his head’s in the oven because goddammit, he’s had his head in the oven a time or two. It’s a lot like method acting, actually—even comes with the same prescription drug abuse. But hey, maybe I’m not the problem—maybe this girl’s different. 

Doechii – NISSAN ALTIMA

GENRE	Rap
YEAR	2024
RIYL	Da Brat; Aceyalone; Missy Elliot; Little Simz; Doja Cat; Ownership of exotic animals as a display of hedonistic wealth.

Oh, cool—made it to the song I’m least demographically qualified to write about. Look, Doechii’s already received far more eloquent praise for her new record, Alligator Bites Never Heal, than I could possibly cornball-fry up in a few hundred words for a seasonal snack. Every song is great. It’s one of those albums you throw violently in the faces of people who use “rappers don’t rap anymore” as an excuse not to listen to new rap music. Doechii raps prolifically. Her style is like Freestyle Fellowship mixed with Da Brat, at times as cartoonish as Gift of Gab and at times barking mad, like something that you wouldn’t want to poke too hard with a stick, foaming at the fanged mouth. The whole thing reeks of Tampa, with classic Southern samples arranged in various mechanized battle-suit configurations from song to song. Doechii switches between these weapons of mass destruction, each passed through the ages, using each suit’s unique weaponry to devastatingly prove—again, and again, and again—that she’s the genre’s heaviest-hitting so-called “rookie” this side of the 2020s. And whether that ultimately proves to be true or not, Doechii still deserves a monument for giving us the singular “NISSAN ALTIMA,” one of the catchiest rap songs I’ve heard in years.

The song is short—just over two minutes. But it’s exactly as long as it needs to be, offering Doechii plenty of opportunities to pummel her listeners with palabra pugilistics. I get a strong Myka 9 (the rapper with the largest vocabulary in all of hip-hop—look it up. Over 9,000 unique words) vibe from her “warming-lubricated Tommy gun” approach to syllable dispersion. Listening feels like skidding uncontrollably across a frozen lake at exponentially increasing speed, snipers firing from the distant shadows of the woods. You flail your arms wildly, trying to gain some semblance of balance—then the chorus hits, the ice shatters beneath you, and you’re sinking into the frigid abyss at terminal velocity—all you can hear is “Wake up, A-cup, get your tits sucked, In my makeup, face-fuck, get your bake up.” Childish Major’s production—this beat—is playfully taunting, with individual MIDI key-presses doing most of the work—which, deceptively, almost insultingly (if you’re a beat-smith, or whatever they call themselves these days), seems like not much work at all. It’s enough to make your average prog-rap fan (Again, sorry, Kendrick stans) start screaming about “digital laziness,” or “TikTok rap,” or some other nonsense.

That’s fine, though. The beat does everything it needs to. Besides—lead single or not, this song’s less about dancing than it’s about Doechii proving her prowess. Well, shit—done. Absolutely fucking done. “The motherfucking princess,” in-fucking-deed.

Ginger Root – No Problems

GENRE	Indie Pop; City Pop
YEAR	2024
RIYL	Mariya Takeuchi; Funk; Soul; Disco; Movies about heartbreak; Soulful, sassy vocal affectation; 80s local television aesthetics.

I didn’t want to write this one. I put it off for a long time, because the truth is, I don’t know diddly fucking piss about Japanese city pop—a genre that frequently gets name-dropped in descriptions of Ginger Root, aka musician/director Cameron Lew. I didn’t know anything at the start of this year, and frankly, I still don’t—even though I really like this new Ginger Root record SHINBANGUMI, which nods heavily in city pop’s general direction. 

But it presents me with—gonna say it—a problem (har-har) as I try to write about “No Problems,” (get it?) the first real song on the album’s tracklist. I can’t rely on my usual grab-bag of “similar artist” references or historical anecdotes. At best, I’ve got genre identifiers and lyrical content. And since I don’t know enough music theory to adequately explain anything that’s happening in this sweet, funky, anguished piece of dance-floor fodder from a technical standpoint, I’m just going to have to do the best I can with adjectives and charisma. Should be embarrassing for me and a lot of fun.

Fortunately for me, this isn’t exclusively a city pop album. I do recognize bits and pieces lifted from adjacent genres. Lew brings an almost glam-rock bravado to the vocals here, with stunning strings that summon Donna Summer’s wrathful spirit to smite the unbelievers. The lead guitar is neon-glowing, and the wedding-bell accents with the gospel choir of backing “aah’s” are endearingly schlocky—almost like a Vegas-fluorescent network television Christmas special. It’s a guy pouring his double-shot-of-depresso guts out in the goofiest way possible, wondering how on Earth everyone else can seem so happy: “I can’t be fake while you’re up and elated—how can you say that you’ve got no problems?” All while shaking his ass unrepentantly. 

Hey, I think I did OK! Phew.

Soul Coughing – Collapse

GENRE	Deep Slacker Jazz; Alternative Rock
YEAR	1996
RIYL	Early Beck; Cake; Primus; Weird shit in general.

After 25 years of swearing they’d never do it, Soul Coughing’s impossible-to-overhype reunion tour this year was every bit as enthralling and fun as I could’ve hoped—crazy, considering how much these dudes all hated each other by the time the band’s original run wrapped up in ‘99. But it must have been a success, because they recently announced a slew of additional 2025 shows across the country. 

I was five years old in ‘99. I couldn’t even spell “coughing.” It took me a few extra decades to finally get into this band for real—a couple decades and, of course, college radio. Appropriate, because when the reunion tour was announced, nobody cared except the 90s college radio jocks, the tips of whose ears unanimously shot skyward—and me, who probably still just wishes he was born four or five years earlier.

In early September, at the Fillmore in San Francisco, The Cough™ (aka SoCo—just kidding) busted out all their classics: “Super Bon Bon,” “True Dreams of Wichita,” “Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago,” and “Screenwriter’s Blues.” Plus some welcome, slightly more niche selections from their initial hat trick of bizarro albums. One of those was “Collapse,” a breakneck-pace pummeling of static-electric “Secret Agent Man” guitar stabs, upright bass bombast that flows like a slip-n-slide, esoteric samples galore, and a drum propulsion engine that spins the track like a cursed merry-go-round, where all the dilapidated rideable animals burn white-hot when your ass touches the molded plastic seat. 

As usual, Mike Doughty’s vignette lyrics touch on some of the more twisted aspects of humanity: “Mid-level manager said he heard about some mulatto girl, shot him in the mouth and left him in a hotel near the mid-south offices. He worked in distribution—regional vice-president.” Performing this song in 2024 was perhaps weirdly prescient, given recent “kill corporate” news events. There’s a strong anti-capitalist theme to this song, spun from the perspective of an office drone crunching numbers, knowing it won’t make a difference. No one’s getting richer here but the fat fucker in charge: “too cash-heavy, bloated, sitting there all puckered up[.]” Not like it’s our narrator’s place to question: “Index of numbers is scrolling upscreen, scrolling up […] Smash it down to digits. Gut it out and break it down. Liquid assets are seeping down, seeping down now[.]” But hey, who knows? After all, blood is a liquid asset, too. Depending on whose.

Dave Alvin – Fourth of July (Live)

GENRE	Country Rock; Americana
YEAR	1999 (2007 CD Issue)
RIYL	X; Alejandro Escovedo; James McMurtry; The Blasters; Barn jammin’.

For the last couple of years, I’ve been on a kick of increasing appreciation for country, blues, western, and folk styles. It’s the stereotypical middle-aged punk route of learning about alt-country and having the barn doors blown off their hinges. And Dave Alvin is one of those worshipped-in-certain-circles American songwriters who it took me way too long to appreciate properly. The first time I learned Alvin’s name, it was in the context of his band The Blasters, one of the greatest “American Music” groups of the early 80s. It’s way too easy to reductively refer to The Blasters as one of any number of genres—rockabilly, rock’n’roll, punk, bluegrass, r&b or country. Each is inadequate on its own. I heard “Dark Night” and was struck by the dude’s storytelling abilities, wrapped tightly around a riff whose style I couldn’t place—surf? Blues? Is this a fucking spy movie? Didn’t matter—was incredible.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that I’d already heard Alvin’s work. During his stint as the guitarist in Los Angeles punk heroes X (not too shabby for a kid from Lubbock), Alvin wrote one of my favorite songs of all time: “Fourth Of July.” A devastating pre-breakup story, it’s an ambiguously powerless, paradoxically empowering plea to “walk outside” and see the fireworks, even in light of a relationship that it might be too late to salvage. This live version, from an Austin City Limits performance in 1999, turns up the heartbreak with a pedal steel and plenty of gentle acoustic strumming, but it’s the steam-whistle organ that really sells the emotional heights of the performance. Not to mention that guitar solo—a runaway horse on bootleg amphetamines, strapped with a jetpack and approaching the sound barrier. You know why this was such a great punk rock song? Because it’s just a great fucking song. Nothing guts me like the way Alvin sings the words “hey baby” in the chorus, as though they were whispered through a crack in the bedroom doorway, into the cold darkness where the curtains are drawn. “She gives me her cheek, but I want her lips and I don’t have the strength to go…we gave up trying so long ago.” Desperation and hopelessness never sounded so beautiful. 

NOFX – Hot Dog In A Hallway

GENRE	Punk
YEAR	1996
RIYL	The Vandals; Screeching Weasel; Descendents; Fat chicks.

I saw one of NOFX’s 30th Anniversary of Punk in Drublic-slash-farewell shows at the Cow Palace in September 2023. Based on fifteen years of NOFX fandom, and Fat Mike’s love of drug money, I knew the band would probably still be tying up all their loose ends and wrapping up their 40-year career—in other words, still farewellin’—for a long time.

This October, the band at long last wrapped up their “real” final show in San Pedro— playing 33 songs from seemingly every one of their albums, plus classic punk and hardcore covers, plus a new self-aggrandizing anti-tribute to Sinatra called “Our Way,” and the entirety of “The Decline,” I almost couldn’t believe it. Then the memory deluge commenced.

I was thirteen years old when my cousin introduced me to NOFX alongside Swingin Utters and the Beastie Boys. He was mainly listening to the 90s stuff: Punk In Drublic, White Trash…, and So Long And Thanks For All The Shoes, with the most recent album on his iPod being 2000’s Pump Up The Valuum. That’s where I first heard the song “My Vagina,” which—years later, as the walking embodiment of male adolescent antisocial edge—I would play over my built-in cell phone speaker for a high school crush, thinking she’d find it funny—and subsequently get ghosted instead of laid.

I remember learning about politics through NOFX songs—The War on Errorism (which even Robert Christgau loved) and the venomous Wolves In Wolves’ Clothing—starting in 2007 when the Great Recession receded greatly. I was listening to Bernie Sanders on the news, and his trademark rant-rambling resonated. Undeniably, that’s because I listened to NOFX singing shit like “[t]he idiots are taking over,” decrying head-in-sand burying on “Franco Un-American,” and getting (frankly? extremely) bitchy and nasty on “Leaving Jesusland”: “We call the heartland not-very-smart-land; IQ’s are very low, but threat levels are high.” And while “You Will Lose Faith,” from Wolves, isn’t exactly unfounded in its attacks on blind religious adherence, it’s also some of the more vicious, explicitly antagonistic writing I’ve heard in an almost-mainstream 2000s punk song. It’s condescending and confrontational, and it insists on kicking ex-Christians while they’re down: “Where is your God now?” And the more I reflect on all of this, having doubled my age since I first heard these songs, the more it makes me wonder—did listening to this band ultimately just make me into more of an asshole?

The SPIN oral history of NOFX, released around the time of their final San Pedro show, depicts a band that was on their way out—on “The Decline”—for close to a decade, sticking it out largely because none of them really knew what else to do. Melvin, Hefe, and Smelly couldn’t imagine not being in NOFX. And in light of the SPIN piece, the prevailing consensus narrative (at least in certain digital town squares) seems to be that Fat Mike is a self-centered addict who had some very good musical and business ideas over the last 40 years. But his ability to achieve success in the industry while still retaining some amount of “punk” cred keeps his life too good to change. Dude doesn’t need to better himself, so he doesn’t. As he proclaimed on “The Agony of Victory,” from 2009’s Coaster, “I define success as not working, and I live like a king.” Written in character for a punk-rock-opera about street urchins or not, it’s not exactly an attitude I want to glorify—much less emulate—anymore.

Instead, I choose to look back on the good times and laugh. Like at this song, “Hot Dog In A Hallway,” about Mike’s unrequited love for heavyset women. Which manages to be exactly as backhandedly upside-down romantic as a heart-shaped branding iron—appropriate for a songwriter with a self-expressed bondage kink. It’s got a corny Melvinsy riff, a workhorse loud-quiet-loud arrangement, and enough crass, wince-inducing lyrical illustrations to leave you feeling icky by the end. It’s no surprise this guy beefed with Riot Queen Kathleen Hanna in ardent denial of his own sexism—anyone who’s ever read even a scrap of NOFX lyrics knows how depraved and objectifying Mike could be. Here, “it’s like feeding a tic tac to a whale—that’s why I love her.” He refers to this woman as a “human sleeping bag,” for God’s sake. Lovely. 

In retrospect, I’m not sure why I ever thought this band’s music would make my crush think I was funny. It’s pretty gross. But shit, I think it’s funny. And I’m pretty gross. And in a twisted kinda way, that’s comforting. Saying goodbye to NOFX doesn’t mean I have to stop enjoying gross shit. As with a lot of artists I love, the idea is to listen to Fat Mike—not behave like Fat Mike. As long as I don’t blow my Tony Hawk royalties on coke, I should be OK.

Shutups – Almost Won the Lotto

GENRE	Alternative Rock
YEAR	2019
RIYL	Parquet Courts; Calvin Johnson; The Jesus & Mary Chain.

KEXP, the Seattle-based “alternative” music radio station known for its sizable digital presence, started broadcasting to the San Francisco Bay Area this year. In the sense that they’re providing some vital competition for Live 105.3 (now a desiccated indie-pop skeleton of its former self, despite best efforts), KEXP is a welcome addition to our local options. Of course, that depends on who you ask—and if I had to guess, maybe don’t ask KALX. 

It does raise the question, though: Why target the Bay for expansion? San Francisco’s not exactly famous for its “alternative” music at this specific moment, unless you’ve been misguidedly munching enough molly at the Midway to feel like that must be true when the first opening DJ of four whispers it sleazily in your ear. Maybe the powers that be at KEXP are just really nostalgic for 2008, when Ty Segall dropped his first full-length on Castle Face. But my guess is, the hipster board room at KEXP (or, more likely, the regular board room at whatever company owns it) would’ve gone for the L.A. market first, if KCRW didn’t already exist.

But I’m glad KEXP crossed the Golden Gate, because someone at that station is paying attention to East Bay rock. Take this band, Shutups, for example: Oakland-based, been around for almost ten years. A perfect example of the droll-to-dramatic, deceptively slacker-not-slacker attitude toward post-punk that I fucking adore. And I had never even heard of them until some KEXP evening drive-time DJ threw on this song—“Almost Won The Lotto,” from 2019’s Every Day I’m Less Zen—to score my crawl down University Ave in Berkeley on a weeknight in October. It’s yet another Charlie Brown trudge-to-the-brick-wall soundtrack, altogether too typical of my rock listening, complete with the lyric “every day is the same[.]” But they do that thing on the second chorus where the vocals get all grit-shredded and jump an octave, and the guitar becomes more of a fuzz-wave than a discernible riff, and yup—it’s that explosive rock catharsis again. I should’ve fucking known.

East Bay alternative is fucking thriving, by the way. Oakland’s Fake Fruit just put out one of the year’s weird-best art-punk records in Mucho Mistrust (another that easily could’ve made this list). Oakland’s Diesel Dudes are amazing and horrifying. That dude who does Teddy Bear Orchestra lives in El Cerrito. Seems like something’s always happening at Thee Stork Club or the Ivy Room, and don’t even get me started on Punk Rock Karaoke at The Little Hill Lounge. Green Day is playing the legacy set at Coachella 2025, for fuck’s sake. Look—all I’m saying is, for those of you sick of a certain bpm, try crossing the bridge. You can see for yourself what Seattle’s been buzzing about. 

The Gun Club – Death Party (Live)

GENRE	Post-Punk; Americana
YEAR	1983 (2004 CD Reissue)
RIYL	Dead Moon; The Gories; Scaring the Europeans with Americanisms.

My greatest musical embarrassment is that it took me this long to finally get into The Gun Club. Arguably, only a city like Los Angeles, and only a scene like its menagerie of 70s punk rockers, could have produced Jeffrey Lee Pierce—a rock’n’roll soul as prone to glorify Debbie Harry as Western flick tropes. And as The Gun Club’s 1983-84 sound showcased, when necessary, he and Kid Congo Powers could combine their dueling six-string firepower to create a profoundly massive electric-blues racket.

This live take of “Death Party,” from a Swiss radio broadcast, is an unholy clusterfuck of an awful din. It’s chaotic, explosive, spasmodic, and completely overlong. It’s overwhelming how much goddamn sound is happening here. The rhythm section’s military march is relentless, and the guitars swirling around each other in ascending spirals come crashing back down to the Earth in thunderous meteor shower sheets. Pierce yelps and yowls like someone stepped on his tail, or like he’s table dancing in cowhide-print spandex atop the saloon piano in the midst of a bar fight. It’s like the world is ending, and the plink-plink-plink of the piano keys are an almost comical afterthought in light of the nuclear devastation all around—but they still kick ass. It’s fun because it’s the exact type of performance you’d expect to end with some station Program Director whispering to the DJ, “We are never having these California pretend cowboys back—they are absolutely unhinged.” 

XTC – Earn Enough For Us

GENRE	New Wave; Pop
YEAR	1986
RIYL	King of America by Elvis Costello; The Psychedelic Furs; Todd Rundgren.

I didn’t know much about XTC—apart from “Making Plans For Nigel”—until this year, when I watched an excellent Trash Theory video essay about the band’s mostly-fruitless quest for chart success. I’d never realized that their label brought in Glitter Sage Todd Rundgren to produce Skylarking, their ninth album, in a somewhat misguided, somewhat successful grasp at American airplay. As Trash Theory points out, the recording sessions were tumultuous—with Rundgren tempering singer/guitarist Andy Partridge’s more dictatorial tendencies when possible, including by exercising final say on the tracklist and sequencing. This resulted in more songs written by Colin Moulding than on previous XTC records. But Rundgren’s “independent arbiter” influence still couldn’t stop Moulding from temporarily quitting the band—over an argument about the bass line for this song, the excellent “Earn Enough For Us.”

It’s a fun, trope-filled, working class love story—an honest, uncertain, resolute promise to keep gunning down those paychecks, put those pennies away, fix the gutters on the weekend, and never waste a drop of water. The boss man’s a bastard, but coming home to see her face at the end of the day makes it all worthwhile. Wholesome. Helps that the melody is perfect—shining and triumphant like a big ol’ parade, with Partridge bellowing the high notes like it’s his last shot at relevance (at the time, it kind of was). Dave Gregory crushes the riff, channeling some kind of folk-rock Iron Butterfly wavelength into an iridescent, beaming headbang-catalyst. The stench of Rundgren is all around, even if it’s mostly just a vibe thing. There’s always a mystical quality to his production work, whether here or on the New York Dolls’ studio debut. It differs depending on the flavor of the artist it’s filtered through, but he helps to make silly little love songs about picking up trash and the mundanity of the working week burn supernova-hot. The product is pure, uncut, one-hundred-percent dynamite British Isles-origin Power-Pop bliss.

Winged Wheel – Sleeptraining

GENRE	Post-Rock; Noise-Rock; Shoegaze
YEAR	2024
RIYL	Explosions In The Sky; Sonic Youth; Radiohead.

This was the year of the “new dad” art-rock supergroup or something, wasn’t it? Whether it was The Hard Quartet or Messthetics, it seemed like everywhere I looked, some group of guys from a bunch of amazing 90s bands was doing enough sit-ups to get road-ready for a brief regional tour of a new studio dream-come-true for their legions of geeky fans (like me). And sure enough, when I heard that Winged Wheel had picked up Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth to play drums for their new album Big Hotel, I bit. Most of the Winged Wheel band members’ respective CVs are deep—names that only the most qualified of “cool” music aficionados could possibly conjure from listening memory. But I am not totally out of my league with Winged Wheel anymore, because I know what Sonic Youth is. I call that progress.

“Sleeptraining” is a very well-controlled catastrophe. Its immediate, brawny bass-and-drums intro feels a little like falling down one of the pipes in Super Mario World, entering into a discolored, subterranean universe where weird magic flowers and reality-altering mushrooms grow. The waves of ferocious-but-delicate guitar noise increase as you go deeper, with individually looped threads multiplying and overlapping like a garden spider web kissed with morning dew and stray leaf shards. I’m not going to pretend I’ve tried to decipher these crooning phantom lyrics, but I’m sure they do their siren soliloquy influences proud. And for all its velocity, the song seems almost fragile until the guitar soloing starts—then it’s an undeniable billion pieces of stained glass shooting outward in every direction, bouncing off the walls and the floor and the ceiling, creating magnificent multicolored patterns while the cataclysm overhead blows in through the shattered cathedral windows. The end is here, but it sounds fucking great.

The Intelligence – Always Be Kidding

GENRE	Post-Punk; Post-Everything
YEAR	2024
RIYL	Damaged Bug; Yo Gabba Gabba!; Peaking on acid in the Space Needle elevator.

I’ve been listening to The Intelligence, the “main” musical manifestation of the errant garage-smith Lars Finberg, since college. Finberg’s done time in Thee Oh Sees, but his albums as The Intelligence typically skew less toward the grimy-psychedelic end of the alternative rock spectrum, and more toward the provocatively awkward, combatively witty, snot-nosed and jarring, but super fucking catchy. Songs like “Reading And Writing About Partying,” “Whip My Valet,” and “Like Like Like Like Like Like Like” are garage-freak seizure-starters, laced with spiky guitars and lyrical snipes that smart like spit in the face. Finberg mastered this approach a long time ago—arguably on 2015’s Vintage Future, and captured its sneering energy on The Intelligence’s 2018 addition to Castle Face’s Live In San Francisco series. Finberg even expanded his (arguably) artsier no-wave and jazz-punk frontiers on 2018’s Un-Psychedelic In Peavey City and 2022’s Lil’ Peril. But mastery breeds familiarity, which breeds contempt—which might explain why Finberg set fire to the old sheet music on this year’s Intelligence album, Now, Squirm!

“Always Be Kidding,” my favorite from the new record, is weird. I mean, it’s The Intelligence—it’s always going to be a little weird. But this whole album grabs the concept of “weird” by the throat and violently shakes it ‘til something listenable falls out. And in the most pleasant, fucking weird way, “Always Be Kidding” sounds like being blissfully stoned in the clinic waiting room, watching whatever DVD is playing on the closed-circuit monitor in the corner of the ceiling, losing track of whether they’ve called your name for detox yet. Like you’ve got nothing going on afterward, so the waiting’s not so bad—might as well enjoy the movie. Every so often, the song dissolves into a frothy electronic body wash, and your tongue turns to TV static while the minor chords do their dirty deeds. This music is uncategorizable—genre names don’t begin to do the job. Ambient garage-jazz-punk? Fuck, who cares? It’s incredibly audacious. It’s basically formless. The song doesn’t strike hard and hellstorm it up for attention—it creeps in and settles down, creating space for calculated patterns of comforting motifs to subvert in time. Room to warp the song like a funhouse mirror.

Sleeping Bag – Troll 3

GENRE	Alternative Rock; Slacker Pop
YEAR	2024
RIYL	Beat Happening; Built To Spill; Rozwell Kid; Pining for the 90s.

After 12 years of fandom, I still maintain that Sleeping Bag is the most underrated rock band in America. When I heard their Joyful Noise self-titled in 2012, I was struck not only by Dave Segedy’s drum-and-drone command, but by just how goddamn tender the whole thing somehow sounded—in spite of, or perhaps because of Dave’s droll delivery and the band’s goofy falsetto harmonies. But there’s an undeniable magic in the way this band finds profundity in mundane moments, seizing the banner of dorkdom with niche pop culture references from decades past, self-awarely, geekily served up. This song is a double-helping of Sleeping Bag, because not only is its title is a loose pop culture nod (Troll 2 was a mythically “so-bad-it’s-genius” flick from 1990, which I watched and re-watched many times—stoned—in college. The idea of a sequel to that movie is funny on its own), but it also appears on an album whose title (Beam Me Up) is an obvious Star Trek reference. “Troll 3” is sonically true-to-form for a band that’s long since mastered minute-and-a-half-long garage-pop mope sessions. A stuttering bass introduces us to Segedy as Charlie Brown, fuming through the snowy trudge home. Sounds like he “found out who his real friends are” and he’s “through with [his] life,” so it’s back to living under the bed for a while. But despite the narrator’s best attempts at misanthropy, against his better judgment, still feels some hope for the future—“I hope this is the last time.” Incredible drum fills, too—they grease the song-slide for listeners’ plummet into the last chorus crescendo, and they catalyze the sailing outro guitar solo, which then drops everyone gently down onto a power-pop pillow—Fountains of Wayne on Utopia Parkway. Segedy tucks us into bed, and as we drift off, we think, “Shit. Maybe it will all be OK, somehow. Maybe tomorrow will be better.” And what a note to end the year on.