Fat's best HEAVY TUNES of 2014

0. TL;DR List + Links Only

• Resonance - Solar Halos, Solar Halos
• Flower Travelin' Man / Lost In The Cold Sun - Earthless, Sonic Prayer
• Sonic Prayer - Earthless, Rhythms from a Cosmic Sky
• alpic, daydream light - Holy Mount, Alpic
• time we left - Hawkwind, Space Ritual
• we all falter - Jesu, Picture Disk
• human being lawnmower - MC5, Back in the USA
• the great barrier reefer - Bongripper, the great barrier reefer
• P-Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up) - Parliament, Mothership Connection (No link: I (shamefully) bought this on Amazon—but it was only five bucks!)
• frozen over - Captain Beyond, Captain Beyond
• one world, the 99s, in the waiting - Dead Moon, Dead Ahead
• diamonds in the rough, I won't be the one, running out of time - Dead Moon, Nervous Sooner Changes
• You Ain't Right - Bad Daddies, Head on a Rail 7"
• festering brine, we never will - Bad Daddies, split 7" with Hard Left
• dude incredible - Shellac, Dude Incredible
• leave it all up to me - Screaming Females, Live at the Hideout
• crow's nest, tell me no, leave it all up to me, doom 84 - Screaming Females, ugly
• thank you - Mark Lanegan and Duke Garwood, Black Pudding
• sad lover, dry iced - Mark Lanegan Band, No Bells on Sunday EP
• harvest home, death trip to Tulsa - Mark Lanegan Band, Phantom Radio
• Pithecanthropus Erectus - Charles Mingus, Pithecanthropus Erectus
• avant gardener - Courtney Barnett, how to carve a carrot into a rose
• Option C - No Other, Option C 7"
• Ethel - Russian Circles, Memorial
• oh my darling (don't cry) - Run the Jewels, Run the Jewels 2
• $4 Vic/Nothing But You + Me - El-P, Cancer for Cure 2 (pirated)
• lonely Lyle - Big Business, Battlefields Forever
• different days - The Men, Tomorrow's Hits

I. Meandering Introductionalizing

Looking back at the year in the light of the full list, I realize that 2014 was a musical year of...a bit of a rut, honestly. "Retrenchment" is probably the nicest word to use, but what I spent my year listening to was pretty much loud guitars and male voices and that was it.

I will have to make a point of greater variety next year.

II. The Long Version, the Real Relationships

My 2014 began much as 2013 ended—with Shooting Guns' rolling-truck rumblings, loud, heavy, and moving hard, if not fast. Almost all of what I liked best this year was what the great Erik Highter called "low-altitude space rock", the kind of music that remembers that rocket ships are just hot rods in another dimension. Which brings us to:

Solar Halos

Probably 2014's most common "just listened to this, I'll just listen to it again right now" experience. The four-song demo was outstanding, the six-song record is basically perfect, and I listened to both again and again and again. No record I listened to this year was sequenced as well as Solar Halos—the build to the final song, "Resonance", essentially eight minutes of continual pummeling explosions, or a strong crashing surf pulling you under, was unmatched and made for enormously satisfying listening.

Check out their twitter: the band was really good in January about aggregating all their reviews—numerous and rapturous—but the album now seems forgotten here at the end of the year. Which is bullshit: by a wide margin one of the best records of the year. Buy it and introduce yourself to them. Every song is great and the album as a whole is even better.

Earthless

My pal Abe the Professor recommended these guys a few times before it sunk in—but finally they popped up enough on one of my Pandora stations for me to fall completely in love with them. Very good swaggering rhythms around which spectacular guitar solos solo and solo and solo—these are side-long songs mostly with solos the entire time. Much of the year's best getting-work-done music. I like Sonic Prayer best, but Rhythms from a Cosmic Sky is, as Pete Beatty pointed out to me, also super.

Holy Mount

A late-in-the-year discovery (again from the rad-as-hell Erik Higher) this Canadian hard psych outfit scratched the hell out of my Hawkwind itch, with John Carpenter synths and long guitar odysseys that never got boring. Absolutely terrific. I listened to everything they had on Bandcamp and picked Alpic, but recent days' listenings have suggested strongly that the newer Vol might be one of 2014's finest and loveliest releases. I'll investigate further and report back.

Hawkwind!

Why so much Hawkwind? Well, three reasons. First, I've been there before. Second, they're great. Third, I saw them (or anyway a version of them) this summer with my dude Abe, and it was as good a show as I've ever seen. Old dudes trying, and succeeding, to blow the roof off the venue so that the levitating crowd can transcend. Band of my year, in that what they did was what I spent the year looking and listening for.

Jesu

Speaking of transcending, I finally discovered Jesu this year. (Thanks to David Raposa!) Very emo metallic shoegaze, or something, this Godflesh spinoff is exceptionally sensitive and powerful music for lone bodies trying for anything more. "We All Falter" is the entire album conveniently distilled into one longish track, a trek encompassing what I once saw called "tragedy ecstasy doom and so on" but with crushing guitars and beautiful textures that envelop without smothering. Sounds so loud, even when you play it quiet, that it always verges on the sublime. Always makes me a little weepy, to be honest.

MC5

This year I finally picked up a copy of Back in the USA, which is the worst-produced important album ever: you can barely hear the (nearly perfect) songs through the clock-radio-speaker production values. Basically all you can hear on this record is just snare drums, vocals, and trebly guitars, but that works well when the vocals are as piercingly wonderful as Robin Tyner's "I'm sooooooory, I'm soooooooooooooory" in "human being lawnmower". This record is hard to listen to, but easy to love. And I do love it: it's the (perfect) pop exponent of a normally noisy band's attempts to make everything okay through purely sonic means. Or, as Greil Marcus said, to:

create a young community of spirit, affection, excitement, and self-consciousness

Fuckin' A, brothers.

Comes legitimately close to working, too.

Bongripper

But you can't always be trying to create a community of spirit, affection, excitement, and self-consciousness. Sometimes you just want to get down into the king-hell bummerism that pervades: it is, after all, the 70s. That's where Bongripper comes in. Bongripper's barely relieved grim / grind / semi-sleaze works more thoroughly for me than I'm stoked about, on records like Satan Worshipping Doom, Hippie Killer, and Hate Ashbury. But the puns do suggest a tiny glimmer of humor, which lets in a little light, as do the song titles, as on Miserable, where they run "Endless", "Descent" and "Into Ruin". But nothing I've heard matches their 80-minute single-song "great barrier reefer", which matches its drug-humor title with occasional grunge chords that lighten up the proceedings a bit and keep things from just being one detuned sludge chord for an hour or so. Not that there's anything wrong with one detuned sludge chord for an hour or so: if you'd prefer that vibe, I can definitely vouch for Miserable, and it's not at all unlikely that I'll buy everything else on their Bandcamp this year.

Parliament

Oh, man, Mothership Connection. This record is so god damned good. Irrepressible. I listened to its bubbling, throbbing humanity dozens of times this year, but only ever in one circumstance: bummed the fuck out, exhausted, maybe hungover, and at my desk at work. And, every single time, it helped, at least a little. It's not hard to feel better when you're hearing unstoppable funk grooves under odes to interstellar escape. There's a lesson in there somewhere, I bet.

Captain Beyond

My pal Ian turned me onto the band, and this song-cycle album was one of the year's most versatile. From bike rides to writing to trying to crash, this one spun under it all. It was a foursquare reminder that, even sodden and miserable under an overwhelming onslaught of bummer vibes, there's still good times to be had, experiments to be made, and boundary lines to ignore the fuck out of. Whether that reminder makes you scream HANDS UP DON'T SHOOT or scatter parts of a song across an entire album side, it's a good lesson. And this is a good record!

I'm just sad that the flaccid mopes at 33 1/3 turned down his book pitch: I'd love to read what he had to say about the roiling "Raging River of Fear" and "Frozen Over", where you can hear half of the next 40 (!) years of heavy metal, or his can-actually-play-his-fucking-instrument insights into the proto-technical "Dancing Madly Backwards (on a Sea of Air") and the bullet-spraying breakdown towards the end of "I Can't Feel Nothin' (Part 1)"—to say nothing of how much I'd like to hear him come up with an explanation for the relationship between song parts, lyrics, and titles here. Why does the phrase "dancing madly backwards" appear in "Myopic Void" but not in "Dancing Madly Backwards", one wonders. Where exactly is the divide between "I Can't Feel Nothin'" and "As the Moon Speaks"? Why are there two listed two-part songs when other songs seem to share as much or more while being listed as distinct? No matter, probably: just slurp down another sugar cube and turn the fucker up and lie down and close your eyes, a person, on this planet, loved. When "Armworth" turns into "Myopic Void", going from post-Berry choked guitar chirps under pre-Priest dual lead melodies straight (in) to space, all reverb and "aaaaaaaaaah"s you smile, and you think about possibility, and you smile more. And the spoken-word pieces in "As the Moon Speaks (To the Waves of the Sea)" will work for me forever. Even if I won't listen to it in public, so nobody will catch me grooving on what could very easily be mistaken for the second-best Jethro Tull jams ever. (Note: if you ever liked that one Beta Band song in High Fidelity—I did—, you will 100% dig "Myopic Void", as it's a straight rip job.)

Side two is definitely just one long multi-part song. Fuck the haters: I know I'm right.

Dead Moon

The positive side of my year's familiarity/retrenchment is that I spent so much of my time with lifers. No lifers are purer, more committed and inspiring, or better than Fred and Toody Cole, and no band is better than Dead Moon and no songs are better than their songs.

If you can listen to "in the waiting" or "I won't be the one" and not want somebody to sing you a song that loving, or if you can listen to "diamonds in the rough" or "running out of time" and not find your entire life, hope and age and weakness and doom and resistance in there, then you can just get the fuck away from me. Probably the best American band ever.

Bad Daddies

Speaking of couples, and of lifers. One of the most important things I learned this year was that I could learn a lot from some vegan homeowners who started their band as a hobby. Because not only did Bad Daddies have a hell of a lot of interesting—even wise—things to say when I interviewed them for Negative Fun Records, they put out a couple of the year's undisputed best songs: "You Ain't Right", their Negative Fun Singles Club release will, I think, have a long life on comps, and in the bedrooms of miserable rebels: it's one of those evergreen punk songs that fits into you the first time you hear it like you've always known it but satisfies you like you've only just now stopped being incomplete. (The song is love, in other words.)

Their other big release this year, a split with Hard Left, shows a band moving—fast! "War" is a traditional Bad Daddies song: 22 seconds long, with noisy, dissonant guitar blankets over a wrestling match backbeat, Camylle's unmatched scratchy scream, and a feedback outro. It's a great song. "Festering Brine" stacks huge guitar hooks and a classic Matt solo with some of the band's most dynamic loud/soft—or maybe loud/slightly-less-loud—changes yet, and it's also a great song. And "We Never Will" is a lost New Wave hit, with Camylle's keening, poppy vocals carrying an unforgettable melody and Matt's guitar mostly cleaned up but occasionally splattering noise-magma all over the song structure: it's an absolutely thrilling song by anybody. In the context of this band's established louder/faster/shorter/noisier aesthetic, it's revolutionary. They're extending and deepening their approach farther and faster than seems possible. (The Captain Beefheart effect: there's so much noise, and it's so well-chosen and -inflicted, that everything fits.)

The core of the band is the power of no: the characteristic Bad Daddies song lyric is a negation (I don't, you ain't right, we never will). But the melodies, whether in Camylle's torn vocals or Matt's surging spatters of guitar, build something else up against that negation. The songs aren't an opposition, but a knot, made of threads of passion, negativity, beauty, the whole thing. These may seem like big claims for barely-three-minute snot-punk screeds—unless you've heard the songs, anyway.

What 2014 requires you to believe, because it's self-evidently true, is that a late-starting band of suburban teachers can make some of the year's most powerful punk records, can make vital, necessary art. That alone makes it a better year than a lot of us thought it was.

Shellac

More lifers! New Shellac! Finally I got authentic fucking information about the song titles of the songs I heard like three years ago. This record is inconsistent, but great, just like Shellac themselves, and the title song is perfect and contains one of the year's most bizarrely saddening lyrics:

some of us are tired
of where we are
in this cul-de-sac
fuck that, let's go, we can always eat along the way

Screaming Females

This New Jersey trio was by far my year's most breathtaking discovery. Guitarist / frontwoman Marissa Paternoster is probably the best guitar player on the planet—or at least the most consistently thrilling. Sylvia Juncosa's lead-like rhythm playing, Bill Carter's lunatic spasms, J. Mascis' throat-closing, heart-gripping solos. The songs are wonderful, and even the lyrics hold up. I got hooked by "leave it all up to me" off of the live record, and spent most of the year having my blood well and truly whipped by the series of tunes from "crow's nest" to "doom 84". Listen to everything Screaming Females does. Buy everything they put out. Buy them fizzy water and fruit when they come to your town and let them crash at your pad.

Mark Lanegan

I started the year listening a lot to the very-stripped-down and incredibly rad Black Pudding LP. Mostly just Lanegan's vocals with English fingerstyle acoustic guitar, this record really did it for me, especially late at night when the rains wouldn't come and the mezcaleros' work was done.

Black Pudding was particularly pleasing at the time as against the one before that, Blues Funeral, which I'd picked up in the summer of 2012. That year, I found Blues Funeral alienating and half-assed: the electronic drums seemed to be playing boring and meaningless beats, and the cold synth textures were jarring and out of place around Lanegan's unrelentingly organic vocals, lyrics, and worldview—at least that's how it felt when I bought the record. Even in February, when I made my pal a Lanegan primer, I was still even calling Blues Funeral "the only one I don't like". But after I saw his intense and excellent November set, I went back to revisit that record in the light of what I'd seen and heard.

Originally I had heard the new Phantom Radio and especially its accompanying preorder EP No Bells on Sunday as huge leaps forward for Lanegan's interest in integrating electronics. The ticking noises like devices breaking in "dry iced" worked perfectly under Lanegan's understated "I'm sorry" refrain, and the quiet little-kid-picks-out-a-melody under synth washes of "no bells on Sunday" worked like good New Order with a better singer. And my introduction to the whole thing, "sad lover", couldn't've been better fit for me: a Thin White Rope lyric over (what Mojo tells me is called) a Krautrock-style motorik beat? SIGN ME THE FUCK UP. And they did sign me up, and took my credit card number, and sent me some records. It was awesome.

Later, I revisited Blues Funeral after spending significant time with No Bells on Sunday and a little time with Phantom Radio. That time around, I found the execution great, the songs wonderful and varied, and the production immediate and engaging. I don't know what my fucking problem was: Blues Funeral, Phantom Radio and No Bells on Sunday are all great. So is Black Pudding. Lanegan rules okay.

Bonus self-promotional material: I got to interview Lanegan and he was a hell of a nice guy. Super-fun to talk to about basketball.

Charles Mingus

Every year, I make an attempt at the beginning of the year to learn about jazz. This year, I was lucky, and what I ended up with was Charles Mingus' epochal Pithecanthropus Erectus and some fantastic emails explaining it and other jazz from the great J. D. Hatings.

I didn't get much farther than this record this year, but this was one of 2014's's most revelatory and consistent pieces of work: heavy without being loud, consistent without being monotonous, and exciting without being rock. With the new year coming, I look forward to another attempt to learn about the genre.

Courtney Barnett

As 2014 slumped toward its grave, I happened to hear the song "avant gardener" on KALX and fell instantly under its spell. Apparently it's already well exposed: it's been on TV and whatnot, Pitchfork was all over it a couple years ago, etc. But it was new to me and I found it inspiring, heartening, and refreshing beyond belief, probably partly because it's so good, and partly because my year had had so much bassy guitar and howling men. After so much oppressive weight, it did me great good to hear uptempo if not upbeat bouncing songs with major lyrical variation and cool, rising melodies bubbling everywhere. Within an hour of hearing the song on the radio, I'd listened to a couple of her EPs and bought "how to carve a carrot into a rose", and it's basically been on repeat ever since. Particular favorites include "don't apply compression gently" and "history eraser". This is great shit. I really like the weird curls of Australian accent and the conversational, colloquial, witty lyrics that somehow always still fit the tune and the music. It's kind of like a likeable, charismatic, competent Craig Finn, but with a better backing band and a lot more to say.

No Other

Best song-about-work of the year, "Option C". Angry and bitterly observed, this is a song for anybody who ever had to punch a clock and keep themselves from punching a boss.

III. The Quickies

Russian Circles

Took me a while, but @jefcanuk finally wore me down and convinced me that these guys had (a lot of) (great) moments. It continually catches me off-guard that this drony, amiable outfit shares a nervous system with previous HEAVY TUNE fave-purveyors Botch. Anyway, this is instrumental metal with lots of sprinkly emo/chimey-sparkle parts, and it's extremely my shit, especially if Red Sparowes are going to continue to not exist.

Russian Circles have a ton of records. I ended up with Memorial, which is pretty good, but which passes by mostly forgettably for long stretches, until the dependably pretty/sad "Ethel" towards the end.

Run the Jewels

This one didn't do it for me quite like last year's did: the beats were slower, for one, and I didn't hear quite as many completely great long lines like El-P's "With the pull of a pin a grenade / Get a crowd to they feet and a soul to its options / I'm a fool for the win I been made" and it keeps going like that for a while. Also this record sounded like shit through my el cheapo earbuds, which is, sadly, one of my primary listening vectors. All that negativity nuance aside, the good songs here are superb, and no lyrics meant more to me in this season of Ferguson than Killer Mike's:

Where my thuggers and my cripples and my blooders and my brothers?
When you niggas gon' unite and kill the police, mothafuckas?
And take over a jail, give them COs hell
The burnin' of the sulfur, goddamn I love the smell
Now get to pillow torchin', where the fuck the warden?
And when you find him, we don't kill him, we just waterboard him
We killin' them for freedom cause they tortured us for boredom
And even if some good ones die, fuck it, the Lord'll sort 'em

El-P

In the aftermath of Abe selling me on Run the Jewels, he managed to hook me up with El-P's previous solo album, which spent a solid month on repeat in my ears. I loved almost all of it, but I couldn't possibly love anything more than the sad Metroid noises that closed the album. If I'd known one record could have both samples from Metroid and the line "fuck your droid noise, void boys / 'nnoyed ploy / oi oi! / I'll fuckin kick the shit outcha groin, boy / oy vey!" I would have bought this on release day.

Big Business

Kind of the flipside of the Parliament record, I turned to this one mostly when I was down and wanted to stay there: the songs on this record didn't get into me like so many of the earlier ones did, but "lonely Lyle" nailed me instantly, smiling-sad barbs that won't come out without ruining what they hit. A melancholy slow burn, perfect for a decade in full retreat. This record had plenty of other highlights, too, even if it wasn't a year-defining release like Here Come the Waterworks or Mind the Drift. "Chump Chance" had the year's most urgent vocal melody, and "Doomsday, Today!" was one of 2014's best pummelings. It's good shit: you should buy it.

The Men

It's been all downhill for these guys since 2011, but I did spent easily three weeks listening to this on heavy repeat. Odd that I can't now conjure up a note of it to memory. I suspect the problem is that they were, like the historians they are, trying to ape the MC5's triumph-over-bad-production move—because this is one incredibly badly produced album, with everything sounding like it was recorded in different circumstances—but the songs weren't world-defining. The best example is "Another Night" which was audibly shooting for Early Bruce Springsteen and instead ended up at Second-Tier Eddie Money, totally exhausted on the album. But the band did work these tunes beautifully when I saw them last: one of the year's best dance parties by a mile. So I'm chalking this up to a great band trying to pull off a degree-of-difficulty move and failing, slightly, and I'm looking forward to the next record and I'm really looking forward to the next time they come to town. Let's go see 'em!

IV. Past Loads of Fat's HEAVY TUNES OF THE YEAR

1. 2013
2. 2012
3. 2011

V. Disclaimers

Relationship Disclaimers

I get paid to write catalog copy and similar stuff for Negative Fun Records, and I probably wouldn't've heard any Negative Fun bands unless I did so: that said, I paid for every note of Bad Daddies I heard this year, including a couple of shows I saw, and the dough I made writing about them had nothing to do with the esteem I hold them, and their music, in. Same goes for No Other! Except I would inevitably have heard them through the great Paul Bruno's great Unblinking Ear podcast, and on his new label's indispensable Serious Rockers mixtape.

Financial Disclaimers

I bought everything on this list, with the exception of the El-P record, which Abe gave me.

Fat's best HEAVY TUNES of 2012

"An Echo From the Hosts That Profess Infinitum", Shabazz Palaces, Black Up
I spent a lot of the year writing and riding bikes to this record. This song always made me stop to pay attention to its amazing haze-sway backing track: swirling vocals, some intensely melodic percussion, and great beats. My girlfriend says I'm too hard on Sasha Frere-Jones, so let me give credit: it was him who turned me on to this excellent record. Thanks, chief.

"Australasia", Pelican, Australasia
Pelican has meant a lot to me for a long time, and they were, bizarrely, essentially the only band I'd ever really bootlegged. When I heard that Hydra Head was going the way of all flesh, I knew that it was in part my fault, so I took my credit card to the liquor store to the Internet and attempted to atone for my sins by spending quite a bit of money. This song is Pelican at their best: no band not named Iron Maiden gets more mileage out of Sweet Victor Parts (TM Al Burian); no band not named Hawkwind does more with dreamy drone parts.

"Hey Jane", Spiritualized, Sweet Heart Sweet Light
Probably the least inspired album I've bought—even Dirty Work had cocaine and Keef/Mick's desire to punch each other—but this was one song I liked whenever it came on. Spiritualized is evidently completely out of ideas, but this one song they didn't phone in, and not-phoned-in Spiritualized is something I can't not like.

"kicking", "Fat Waves", Torche, Meanderthal
I saw Torche with Big Business, and at the time, their high-gloss candy metal (alternating with deep sludge) left me cold. But "kicking" has better hooks than any guitar song since 1984, and "Fat Waves" isn't far behind. I reached for this record more times than almost any other—it's beyond perfect for getting shit done around the house—despite getting it very late in the year.

"ecce homo", Titus Andronicus, Local Business
It's all downhill after this opener, but this was my song of the year, and it wasn't a particularly close race. The rest of the album is a good Clash record, more Give 'Em Enough Rope's hit-what-you-aim-for than, say, Combat Rock's peaks and valleys or London Calling's thrilling sprawl and reach, but this one song is the kind of epic the Clash never managed, an unhurried lope across the band's previous (monumental) achievements and a sweeping gesture forward. The next album will be a California album, it will be called Manifest Destiny, and it will be epoch-defining. Book it.

"Year of the Pig", Fucked Up, Year of the Pig ep
Took me a while to warm up to this tune, but no song was better for running or for riding my bike across town. Originally, I thought "man, the drummer does the same thing for like 18 minutes, meh" but after I made it through the hypnotic drone sections a couple times and let the record overwhelm me somatically, I was more like "MAN, THE DRUMMER DOES THE SAME THING FOR LIKE 18 MINUTES, AWESOME!". It's a song that requires some effort: it's only good if you keep your attention-payer on. It's a song that rewards that effort hugely.

"In Every Dream Home a Heartache", Roxy Music, Viva!
Could really have been any song off of this record, 2012's token album that made my girlfriend ask "what the fuck is this shit" during one of the coked-up metal-disco moments with extra-theatrical vocal vibrato. But something about Roxy Music really works for me a lot of the time (SPOILER: it is Phil Manzanera) and Viva! was my default "time to go to bed, but I don't want anything fucking mellow on because that shit's for sell-out olds" record.

"tracking the dog", Screaming Blue Messiahs, Peel Sessions

"Holiday Head", Screaming Blue Messiahs, Gun-Shy

"Destroyer", Screaming Blue Messiahs, Live at the BBC
I've loved this band pretty much consistently from the time Totally Religious came out. Back then, I loved that album's weirdo echo-chamber drum sound and 10-million-stacked-guitar-noises production, really liked half of the previous record Bikini Red's weirdo everything-in-an-echo-chamber-one-loud-ass-guitar-track sound, and didn't see a whole lot in Gun-Shy's too-much-drum, zero-guitar mix. Trouser Press rated those in reverse order, and that was the only interaction I've ever had with another human about the band Screaming Blue Messiahs. All I know now is that I like all three, and probably agree now that I am old and tired that Gun-Shy is their best, though if they'd ever recorded a live-to-tape album like the Peel Session I bought from Green Noise Records in Portland all those years ago, that would be one of my favorite records of all time. Their BBC Live record is close, but not quite as great. But everything they did makes me exceptionally happy, and I can make it through terrible 80s production values if I have to...

"dethink to survive", mclusky, mclusky Does Dallas
I heard about mclusky via CopyRanter and I owe Mark Duffy a large bottle of brown liquor for the reference. It immediately became a massive favorite of the Clear the Crease crew. Smart and savage: what's not to like? Well, they did break up. So there won't be any more HEAVY TUNES from mclusky. Funnily enough, though, three (!) years ago, my friend Abe tried to sell me on Future of the Left, the band that formed from mclusky's ashes, and I didn't get it; until last night. 2013's HEAVY TUNES of the year will include Future of the Left's "Arming Eritrea" and "Land of My Formers" plus probably around a half a dozen others. Extra bonus: Falco is a really good writer, not just a really good songwriter. Try his tour diary, excellent hit piece on a shit song, and follow his swell twitter. And, for the love of fuck, spend some money on this band's brilliant music and spare them "the hollow anger of the ignored and jealous".

"hurry on sundown", Hawkwind, Some Comp a Friend of a Friend Made
I've always loved this song, and spent a couple years mostly listening to the excellent Oregon band Nudity's version, but this year was all about listening to the Hawkwind version multiple times in a row, singing along every single time.

"man the ramparts", Botch, We Are the Romans
Because sometimes you can't live your best life without spiky, off-kilter metallic hardcore. Wish it hadn't taken me 10 years to catch up to this record.

"oscillation", The Men, Open Your Heart
Untouchably great drone-groove, somewhere in between "hurry on sundown" and "year of the pig", this record pleased me every time I put it on. Less intense and transcendent than Leave Home, Open Your Heart was more varied—and maybe more easy to forget about. But the band's a keeper, and so's this record, and this song will be a staple for a long, long time.

"the nights of wine and roses", Japandroids, Celebration Rock
2012: year of Japandroids. Despite its obvious greatness, I didn't reach for this album all that often. But live, no songs meant more to me than this band's in 2012. I picked this tune pretty much at random: some nights I loved it the most, some nights I loved "younger us" the most, some nights "restless nights turn to restless years" was the lyric that hurt the most... Of course the real best song off the record is "the house that heaven built", the "anything, anything" of 2012, but like "anything, anything", I can't actually listen to the song all that often (because I don't like crying).

"rana", Pitchfork, Eucalyptus
Too much of this record sounds like hyper-caffinated early R.E.M., but (a) that's not a bad thing by any stretch and (b) some of the record sounds like this, which is as good as indie rock ever got.

It also bears mentioning that the releases from Negative Fun dominated the last couple months of my listening. Great stuff. Full disclosure: I got these records for free and was paid to write about them, but I would have been listening to them and loving them regardless. You will be hearing a lot from She Rides, Dripping Slits, and Red Hex in 2013—and so will I!

Fat's best HEAVY TUNES of 2011

Malverde, Red Fang, Murder the Mountains
Short Version, Wild Flag, Wild Flag
running on nothing, Fucked Up, David Comes to Life
TNK, 801, 801 Live
Woke up Near Chelsea, Ted Leo & the Pharmacists, the Brutalist Bricks
Black Captain, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Wolfroy Goes to Town
The Czar: Usurper/Escape/Martyr/Spiral, Mastodon, Crack the Skye
(), the Men, Leave Home
Boring Girls (live), Pissed Jeans, WFMU Comp
We Left the Apes to Rot, but Find the Fang Grows Within, Red Sparowes, Aphorisms
jigsaw puzzle, Rolling Stones, Beggars Banquet
always never know when to quit, Big Business, Quadruple Single
Miss Two Knives, Single Bullet Theory, Single Bullet Theory
Estate Sale Sign, the Mountain Goats, All Eternals Deck
Jacket (orchestral), Shallow Gravy, Jacket EP
keep pushin', Pierced Arrows, 45

All Eternals Deck

Tied with David Comes to Life as the record that meant the most to me in 2011. Only misses were "the Autopsy Garland" (a fine song, but the Steely Dan references were a turnoff), "Age of Kings" (too much whispering, too much quavery violin), "Sourdoire Valley Song" (too slow, too much falsetto, but the lyrics might be the album's best), & "for Charles Bronson" (just too on the nose).

Though there's not one song that does it for me every-note/every-word, "Beautiful Gas Mask", "Birth of Serpents", "Prowl Great Cain", are damn close, and "Damn These Vampires" is as close to absolutely perfect as any song I've ever heard; I only left it off the best-song list to try to avoid being completely trite. "Birth of Serpents" and, oddly, "Liza Forever Minelli" have two or three lines that make me misty every single time. "High Hawk Season" makes me sing along with my nothing voice every single time. "Never Quite Free" might have the album's best arrangements, and even though I have no idea what it's 'about', the way the song is put together makes me happy every time I hear it.

David Comes to Life

Almost certainly too long, and with some weak spots like dry rot, but a hell-week when I couldn't go/be home, my lady was four time zones away, all I had was this record through the sub-thumbnail-sized speakers in my netbook, and even though I was kind of crying a lot, everything seemed okay whenever I heard something like "hello my name is David" or "where the fuck is the other shoe", or the spit-shout hoarse desperation of "it's all been worth it it's all been worth it it's all been worth it it's all been worth it".

The drums are obliteratingly good, the guitars sound as good as any record you've ever owned, the bass is mixed just a hair too low for me, and the entire album sounds/feels like a heart-full teary-eyed smile-cry confession about how much you like really like somebody and just have to tell them about it all about it right now now now it hurts and goddamnit I had to do it and live/die/lose/win/walk/run/cry/laugh I'll never regret a second of this moment.

My sophomore year, I bought Quadrophenia on tape, used at the Buckingham Mall, a many-mile walk from my house, and I spent untold hours walking around Aurora listening to it again and again--David Comes to Life is less ambitious, less over-done, and slightly less successful, but it rocks a lot harder, and I'm not in my sophomore year anymore.

The stupidest thing I did at a show this year was leave during the encore.

Picked "running on nothing" more or less at random. It's great. "life in paper" would have worked about as well and I'm going to stop adding to this list, b/c if I don't, I'm going to list all but like three tunes.

Pissed Jeans

Old song, probably, but I never heard it, and this specific version is the greatest thing ever. Extra-special bonus points go to the drummer for being incredibly game.

Everything about this track is perfect.

Short Version

This record is only middling, but it makes a lot more sense after seeing them live. On the album, you just get a lot of fairly restrained pop-prog, but live you get a couple of Sleater-Kinney alums with as much raw charisma as anybody playing music, Mary Timony's virtuosity and sly hamminess and a more-than-the-sum-of-the-considerable-parts let's-fucking-go-for-it ethos that made the long, long, version of "racehorse" one of the four or five best live moments I had this year. Real players in the service of an improvisational, incantory, Patti-Smith-like tune: my brain & body were both annihilated.

But on record, "short version" was the best executed pop song with riffs and explosions and "Oh-KAY! Awl-RITE!" and bliss.

()

I don't remember why I went to this show alone; I do remember that I went to see Milk Music, who I love, and who played a very, very good set, and who were absolutely occluded in my memory by the savage brilliance of The Men. I had to leave (home) early, to catch BART, b/c living in the East Bay is a nightmare, and the last thing I heard was a phenomenal rendition of (). As untouchably brilliant as it is on record, hearing it live added a layer of repetition-build, 10 layers of dynamics, and 23 layers of intensity. The definitional HEAVY TUNE of 2011.

I just found out there's another record coming in early 2012, and that's the best culture news I've had since Chinese Democracy came out.

Malverde

Took me a long, long time to warm to this record. Two main obstacles: the first single, "Wires", sounds like (the) tepid gruel (typically) expectorated by Queens of the Stone Age; the first time I saw Red Fang was one of the greatest live moments of my life, with a couple drone-riff & groove-stomp burners they seem to have retired. Compared to "humans remain human remains" and "suicide", a lot of their material has lacked a certain luster--but this song is flawless like a mammoth-sized emerald avalanching down a steep hill, here and there bounding up and catching air, but it doesn't spare anybody, it only builds more tension before flattening whatever's in its way.

Red Sparowes

This band is a long-time favorite--I was loving their shit when I was still getting tattoos--and this EP adds substantial and nasty edge to the band's drone-flow style. Minute per minute, by far the best thing I bought this year. Takes me places every time.

Jacket

Fuck it, I can't help it: this melody really works for me. Venture Brothers is the best show on TV, partly because its creators are legit polymaths.

Woke up Near Chelsea

A toss-up: I only discovered Ted Leo this year, and I've already had a deeply weird relationship with his records. At least three times in 2011, I've been on camping trips with no music and Shake the Sheets stuck irremovably in my head--I shit you not! So for now, I'm not letting myself listen to that record, and I'm holding myself to the Brutalist Bricks.

I had a conversation with David Roth once, and he argued that the production on these records is unovercomably offputting. And there are moments of Bricks where that's almost true*: the drums all sound enh and the bass production is frankly repellent (nowhere more so than on "mourning in America" and the way-too-compressed "the mighty sparrow"), but on this number, Leo's songwriting/arranging genius takes over and rumble-tumbles big riffs over and around seizing melodies. In a way, choosing this song is a cop-out, but these two records spent a huge amount of time in my rotation this year, and will next year too, and this tune might be the easiest one to access if you're not me. (I came fucking close to picking "Tuberculoids Arrive in Hop", because I fucking love that song, but I thought it better to stick with a straight number.)

Only songs I can't seem to enjoy are "gimmie the wire", which is musically great but I can't get past the "Tipper" line, and "one Polaroid a day", with a creepily in-your-ear soul whisper-growl that I don't like from anybody. The way Leo & his band put a song together--which is songwriting far more than lyric-writing is--is one of the best things I've discovered in the past couple years. Lots of parts! And malproduced or not, the drummer is tight as fuck.

Black Captain

As good a song as Will Oldham has ever written--which inarguably means that it's as good a song as anybody has ever written.

TNK

Heard this on KALX, ran it down mere days later at a time when I was too broke to be buying records. It's by a wide margin the best tune on the record, unfortunately, but I like Eno well enough, and, per my gushing over live Wild Flag, have a lot of fondness for soloy pop-prog, which this is. (There was a BBC recording of Eno's band that turns all the still, measured perfection of Taking Tiger Mountain into slipshod boogie--no shit: avoid that one. Avoid it hard.)

jigsaw puzzle

Beggars Banquet is now my go-to Stones record. Not as scathing as Exile nor as studio-overreaching as Let it Bleed, it's just a perfectly executed collection of surprisingly varied songs--with essentially no idiot missteps (think "Brown Sugar"). I picked "jigsaw puzzle" because I think it probably has more verses than all other Stones songs I love combined.

Open question: did anyone ever take "salt of the earth" at face value?

The Czar: Usurper/Escape/Martyr/Spiral

Not a huge fan of Mastodon. They're radically overproduced, and the vocals are probably the worst of any major band in any genre. But sometimes the guy stops his atonal keening and the band goes off. They're a lot like Jane's Addiction, in other words, in that their one-trick fake virtuosity is only compelling because they spend so much time fucking around trying to pull off things they're not good at. But at 3:45 or so of this one, when the acoustics & vocals fade away and we get a couple seconds of stolen-from-High-on-Fire Sabbath-saw riffage, nothing could make more sense or be more satisfying: at least until 5:25, when it gets even better for a minute.

Bonus points for the worst lyric any heavy band ever wrote: "wasting valuable time". Hey, dude: your moron B-school ambitions are showing. If you actually want people to think you're a metal band, you follow "wasting" with "my foes" or something. You don't write paeans to efficiency (FFS).

Miss Two Knives

Far the best song on the record, but there's only so many Cheap Trick records in this worthless, degraded world, so sometimes a man just has to shove two knives into the power-pop hole in his soul.

always never know when to quit

I put this on Noodles' .mp3 player and she called me one day to say "this is funny--it makes me laugh". That's half the reason I love Big Business. The other half is that the power of their fuzz & Jared's Axl-like ability to harmonize with himself is heart-squeezingly powerful.

keep pushin'

Saw Pierced Arrows a lot this year, for some reason. Kelly's drumming has gotten better and better, and the pre-Halloween show Noodles & I caught at Thee Parkside was as good as any Dead Moon show ever was. They also opened up for Dinosaur Jr. at the Fillmore, and garnered more than a few fans from the shockingly young crowd. That's where I first heard this peppy little number, which makes me smile.

*I should note explicitly that I think the Pharmacists are sounding on record exactly like they want to: the production Roth finds so problematic is deliberate, not incompetent.