Brendan's Favourite Songs of 2013

Whilst my other two top 10s will be a bit more definitive, here are TWENTY songs that stuck in my head a lot this year - whether they are the BEST twenty is of contention, even with me. Ah well, let's have at it then...

20. Mogwai - Remurdered

As if a list of songs from me wouldn't feature Mogwai. This song has taken a lot of people by surprise - but this is Mogwai now. And I can deal with it. Very much. This track is just as dark as their transcendent white pulse nightmares of Young Team, just from a different sonic universe.

19. FIDLAR - Cocaine

This isn't the best song from these guys, but they were excellent fun at the dire Splendour In The Grass this year, and Ron Swanson pisses on people. Fin.

18. Crying - Bodega Run

Chiptune guitar pop whimsy? That mosquito buzz at the beginning is painful...but give it a few seconds, and for the live instrumentation to crash on in, and everything makes sense. I'm stuck in a 90s 8bit skateboarding RPG!

17. Violent Soho - Covered In Chrome

I am so proud of these boys and their new album Hungry Ghost. I would have this at the top of every list if I was ten years younger - effervescent, virile grunge rock played at maximum velocity. The fact I still think it's a great album even when I rarely visit these realms anymore is a testament to its success. I've seen them play live four times this year alone and I felt the years melt away every time. And they are the best dudes on the planet. Keep killing it guys!

16. Porches. - Headsgiving

Porches.'s album Slow Dance In The Cosmos makes me wish that the Wolf Parades of the world hadn't gone so quietly into the dark dark night. This isn't slacker territory; just classic cracked intellect guitar rock. I love it.

15. Pale Earth - Coral Skulls


This foray for Benjamin Thompson to step way from the introspections of The Rational Academy continues to sprout myriad legs, and this track of the decidedly left-field Coral Corral release is the culmination of his propensity to push himself to the outer limits of his abilities, and then some. A track that may not be brilliant, but to me is a true testament to a work in progress; a stepping stone into the stratosphere.

14. Batpiss - Loose Screws

Not my favourite track from the trio's debut album Nuclear Winter, but it's a live staple, and this insane clip that accompanies it elevates it to cult status. If you don't feel a rush of blood to the head when listening to Batpiss, you are probably dead. Or at least about to be.

13. Dead - Scratching My Arts

A split with No Anchor is never an easy ask to stand out on, such is their brutal brilliance, but the underdogs of the Australian noise rock scene easily usurp their brethren here. Why isn't everyone championing these guys? With the amount of dark and twisted rock coming out of the bowels of our country, surely it's about time that people sat up and took notice?

12. Girls Names - The New Life

The longest track on the Irish band's new album, and for me the best by far. I really enjoyed the album, but it didn't stick with me as much as this song did.

11. Plant Parenthood - Transit Town

A small band from Knoxville who delivered what was the most listened to song on my playlists this year. Bizarre but true. See if you can ignored the sleepy, deceptive hooks. I can't. Shit, I'm listening to it on repeat again...

10. TEEN - Ambient



A cut from the Brooklyn band's In Limbo recordings. That was a great album of 2012, yet it baffles me how this didn't make the cut, even as a longwinded outro. All cyclical psych, all killer.

9. Per Purpose - Eureka


Probably not the best song Per Purpose put out this year - 'Warburton' was amazing, as is most off their new (and missed out of my year review yesterday) LP Circle The Stains - but every incarnation of the band is present and accounted for in this nine-minute dirge. Caustic brilliance.

8. Double Dagger - Heretic Hymn



The excellent Baltimore punks called it a day last year, then surprised us with a posthumous album, 333, in time for Record Store Day. This is a fitting farewell if I've ever heard one - Nolen's vocals say it all.

7. Pissed Jeans - You're Different In Person

The irascible howlers slayed it once more with new album Honeys, and this is the track that buried its sordid hooks furthest into my soul this year. It's typically dirty, raucous, serrated and blackly funny. You just can't fuck with this.

6. Ides - Prisms

Alanna McArdle might be more recognisable as part of Joanna Gruesome, who brought out a great LP this year. But it's her solo endeavour Ides that moved me most this year, and 'Prisms' really slays me. Every time. I cannot listen to this without getting whispers of the maudlin shakes and the longing that love and the loss of it can bury within you. Hauntingly beautiful.

5. Totem - See Saw Girl

I'm sure most of you won't agree with this one, but this track was played ad nauseum for weeks on Planet Masala. It's like a voodoo mantra, maniacal in its bubblegum hooks disguised as dark motorik. I'm not sure if Totem will ever match the heady heights of this one song, and I'm not sure if I care. This is enough.

4. Lake Mary & Nathan Wheeler - Agrimony (Porch Music)


A lot of great experimental and drone music crossed my desk this year, and there are so many tracks that I return to in my dark den of iniquity that its unfair to focus on one. Yet 'Agrimony (Porch Music)' is one that took me completely by surprise, and I find new pieces of beauty in it with each listen. A great improvisational track, and one I never want to end.

3. Gooch Palms - We Get By

I could have this here for the video alone. I interviewed Leroy from the band earlier in the year for a national magazine and it was a lot of fun. The fact that their LP NOVOs isn't a complete shambles but a combustible ball of playful energy and soulful intent is a further surprise. This track, though - quintessential party music. Well, a party in a grimed-out Queenslander with holes in the shirts and bottomless cans of beer. So, my kind of party then.

2. Pontiak - Innocence



This is a fresh one, but the Carney brothers are in my opinion one of the greatest psych rock bands going round. Why? Because the emphasis is on rock. Every album they have put together is strong, and 'Innocence' intimates that the next one will be a killer as well. All together now...'WAAAAAAAAASTED!'

1. Courtney Barnett - Avant Gardener

This is the only song that is solidly in place as numero uno. I have loved this song ever since I first heard it. A woozy guitar track that feels country and slacker at the same time; Barnett's hilarious lyrics about a panic attack are prescient, acerbic and, whilst delivered in a flippant way, are defiant in the way they shape who Barnett is. No pretentions here, just a meteoric talent on the rise.

Tomorrow - my top 7"/10"/EPs...

VIDEO VACUUM - Liars, Wild Wild Wets, Peals, Plant Parenthood

Going crosseyed is the spice of 21st century life. Here are four rectangular boxes with stuff moving in them to expedite that blissful process, hmmm?

Sonic Masala faves Liars have a couple new tracks floating around for those who haven't already joined their mailing list. Because they are good aliens. Strangers with candy and all that. If it tastes this good though, what's the harm in some lost innocence? None, I say. NONE.



San Diego's self-confessed psych party band Wild Wild Wets have just released a 7", Criminal Blue, through Grizzly Records. Its pretty good, keeping things loud, loose, limber and louche. Acid coco pops? Bacardi barbiturates? Helium hallucinogens? Whatever the poison of choice, guaranteed that after a hedonistic night with these guys, you'll wake up in the middle of a deciduous rainforest, naked, cut and bruised, tongue tied, wild eyed, and ready for round two.


Wild Wild Wets - Realized Into Redwood from Celeste Byers on Vimeo.

What is a peal of laughter anyway? A sudden, abrupt, high-pitched outpouring of mirth. Usually over the top, often inappropriate, always noticed. Put a peal in a plural, and you have a conversation stopper. Baltimore duo William Cashion (Future Islands) and Bruce Willen (Double Dagger)'s collaboration, Peals, also stops the chatter, only because the air in the room has been sucked out by its inordinate beauty. Intrinsic to such elegance is the undercurrent of flippancy. Its a weird mix, likely to cause eyes to close and a grin to crease the lips. And maybe - maybe - a peal of grateful, unfettered joy to bubble through.



I've already proclaimed my love of 'Transit Town', the lo-fi racket Knoxville's Plant Parenthood smashed out earlier this year (check that out here). Here is a suitably lo-fi racket smashed out on celluloid. MTV-of-the-80s worthy - riptastic. Just try to get this serrated hook out of your head.


NOW GET BACK TO WORK!

Hits From The Box #60 - Rewriting History, One Phantasm At A Time

 

I watched Don Coscarelli's 1979 horror Phantasm for the first time today. I can't believe it's taken me so long. Sure, it doesn't make all that much sense, and the acting from the guy who plays Jody is one of the worst I've ever seen, but that kind of Italian-style horror, with a fair bit of humour thrown in, is right up my alley. And all for chips! There are lots of cool moments, created by a guy who loves having fun with his craft. I also watched Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained for the first time. Worlds apart in many respects, but also the similarities (violence and gore, lashings of humour, abject love of the artform) really struck me as I left the cinema. And I have come home to write tonight's Hits From The Box, and whilst I really liked both films, it's that sense of adventure, of creativity, of taking a chance, that has really stuck with me. And I enjoy that when I see that in bands too. And tonight, here are six acts that have impressed me for their craft this week...

    

Plant Parenthood is a band from Knoxville Tennessee that delves into the rougher, lower end of riff-heavy guitar rock that duos like JEFF The Brotherhood and Japandroids revel in. Their latest cassette, Sick Summer Vol. 2, is filled with that laconic, flailing, silly rock that makes you want to scull a beer, throw the dregs up in the air, let it hit you like fat drops of rain and not even notice how sticky that shit is, that's how blissfully happy and young (feeling) you are. Then there is 'Transit Town', another track they have put out - and it shits all over what is on this cassette. That warbling racket over the phone-recorded guitar strum - the drawled/shouted vocals - the innate warmth and potential singalong lyrics - it's rife with teenage touchstones. That said, no one around here is still in adolescence, so to tap into those notions without being manipulative or - well, shit - is a rare achievement. I like this, and hope they continue to rise. Get the cassette here, and listen (incessantly) to 'Transit Town' below.

   

 

I received an email about NY duo Trabajo waaaaaay back (like in July last year), yet I let it slip through my fingers - until I stumbled across their self-titled EP last week. Accidents happen, and like the four tracks on offer, they can reap unexpected rewards. Heavy on the experimental sampling and electronics, with vocals that straddle New Age stargazing and noise nonsense, the artificial Eastern beats inherent in tracks like 'Monk' are hypnotic and with a heady pinch of fun added. These tracks are made for headphones too - not like ANYTHING is made for laptop speakers, but Trabajo really grabbed me when I could differentiate all the different elements at play. NB - as I was researching the band I discovered they had released a new EP this month called Gamelan To The Love God - and it's infinitely better. This duo are doing some really creative, immersive and fun experiments with their format - I really wish they were a Brisbane band actually, that's how much I want to see them play this stuff live...

 

Let's head to Fort Wayne, Indiana now, where sonic travellers Heaven's Gateway Drugs call their spiritual plateau. They have released a pretty decent cassette in CPF, five tracks of mostly short slices of scorched, melodic psych meanderings, hovering between 60s bohemia and 70s blacktop swagger. So far, so Black Angels then (especially on something like 'Psychic Firearm'). Well, there's nothing wrong with that in my opinion - especially if it's done well. The selling point? The rabble chorus that hovers in the background of some of the tracks, most notably on 'Highway Hypnosis'. And that their press release claims there are six members of the band - the five musicians, "and you". I'm with you on this one fair wayfarers.

 

 

Now you think July last year was a long time coming? Try May, which is when NZ band Teen Fortress sent me their record Tepid Vapid Callow. The home project of Zach Doney (he of Bang Bang Eche infamy), the Christchurch native has a cross-pollination of emotive Bright Eyes vocals (well, sounds a bit like Conor Oberst) with the grittier, industrial town of angry, angular pop that the UK have always pumped out at regular intervals, all swimming in a petri dish of malaise, anguish, and awkward emotion that teeters on a knife's edge between hilarity and morbidity. I'm a massive fan of the music that is bubbling and boiling on the Island of the Long White Cloud - this is just another example (although Doney is moving to Melbourne soon - so like everything else from NZ that "makes it", Aussies can claim him soon too). Grab the record here.

Teen Fortress - Ace Harlow 

Teen Fortress - Say

 

Brooklyn duo Steel Phantoms actually got in contact with me a while ago too about their Forer EP, but I only officially cottoned on with their current release Curtain Call/Friend To Friend. I can't tell you why - maybe its that guitar sound, and Aaron Harris (of Islands' fame) nasally vocals - but I can't get early Walkmen out of my head when I hear 'Curtain Call', albeit with more urgency when the crunching chorus comes to a head. There are a few tempo changes here, but it all develops into a soaring track that easily beats everything on what stands on their previous release (which is a little slower and "mature" - not a bad thing, but the paring down to a two-piece seems to have made the world of difference). If you want to find out yourself, head over here to get Forer AND the single, make your own assumptions. I'm sure we'll end up on the same page. 

Steel Phantoms - Curtain Call

 

Let's end with (a) Wedding Favor then, shall we? Wedding Favor is Philly artist Robert Perkins, who was planning to have his eleven-track LP Solitaries/Tanglements out by the end of January on Magic Death Records. I'm not sure if this has actually happened or not - I haven't been able to get back to him, nor have I found in available at the label - but if these two tracks are anything to go by, this is quintessential bedroom meanderings that echo the warbled scratchings of early Beach Fossils, but with a heavier focus on country and clear reverbed vocals (almost unheard of in this day and age, amirite?) These two tracks are cold but without being distant; the sonorous guitar echoing like a steel guitar on the side of a deserted highway on dusk, played by a youthful King Dude with Dean Wareham in support. These two tracks alone have me actually very excited to hear the entire album. And when I do, you will be the first to know. Until then - get the Wedding Favor itch... 

Wedding Favor - It'll Be Much Time 

Wedding Favor - What Have You 

Happy Sunday...boooooooooooooy!