1.
The Bamboo Kids - Safe City Blues
Four years after their last transmission (and seven since their last full-length), the Bamboo Kids show up with their very own London Calling. 30 songs chockful of everything these guys can think of, which amounts to a glorious sprawl of punk rock, Stones licks, pianos, horns, hooks and gutter wisdom. Songs like "Dumb for Life" power through on sheer adrenaline, while "Batshit Crazy" chews on an Exploding Hearts bubblegum melody and "Privacy" jumps on top of a 50s rock & roll strut. Singer/guitarist Dwight Weeks wields his guitar as if he's spent equal amounts of time listening to Keith Richards and Johnny Thunders (and moments like the muscular lead that explodes out of "The Most Important Rule" suggest a Mick Ronson influence as well). The various keyboards, from pounding 88s to droning roller rink organ, coupled with the wise-ass strain in Weeks' vocals conjure up the days when Mott the Hoople was attempting to draw a line between Dylan and Jerry Lee Lewis. This is seriously on that level.
Safe City Blues presents a band with all the right influences wearing those influences on their collective sleeve, playing their hearts out, all while being fully aware of the futility of taking a stance like this in 2013. I tell ya, it ain't nothing but heroic.
2.
J. Roddy Walston & The Business - Essential Tremors
Their last album had me a little worried they were about to get lost in the indie rock wastelands, but
Essential Tremors puts the band back on track. J. Roddy follows early rock & roll's migration from Memphis to London, takes drugs, puts on platform boots and eyeliner, pops the dream with a safety pin, and then brings it all back home on this southern rock glam stomper of an album. That's what it sounds like anyway, regardless of the fact Baltimore's a long way from both the South and London.
3.
The Computers - Love Triangles Hate Squares
The dollar bin cover art certainly didn't lead me to expect much, but this album snaked its way into my consciousness and never left. The band's screamo past has almost entirely been eliminated, as somewhere along the line the boys must've realized they had actual talent. The result takes their soul/R&B/rock&roll impulses and polishes it to a sheen that illuminates the hooks in the songs as well as the innate melodicism in Alex Kershaw's vocals. Often sounding like what Elvis Costello aimed at on
Get Happy!, but incorporating a stronger hardcore edge (as well as nabbing quotes from Little Richard), this album introduces a band that seems ready for the spotlight.
4.
Zachary James & the All-Seeing Eyes - Space Case
Exactly 40 years after Ziggy Stardust's rock & roll suicide, Zachary James and the All Seeing Eyes have reanimated that alien critter's spangly corpse and dragged it mule-kicking and screaming into the new millennium. Which isn't to say
Space Case sounds like Bowie - it doesn't: it sounds like the album the character Ziggy might make, with lyrics of sci-fi romance and more nods to T.Rex than Bowie (and more to the Stones than either). Subsequently, it also embraces the glam dichotomy, the inherent contradiction of an androgynous future utopianism juxtaposed with the music's desire to search and destroy (to wit: just check the distance traveled between "Soul Love" and "Suffragette City" on the original artifact). With
Space Case, James makes those two opposing poles obvious and distinct.
5.
Pat Todd & the Rankoutsiders - 14th & Nowhere...
With the Rankoutsiders Pat Todd has continued the artistic trajectory started way back in the 80s with the Lazy Cowgirls. That band kicked off the journey by hammering out a punk/Americana hybrid at a million miles an hour, and since then Todd has stayed true to the original vision while broadening his scope to include folk and country, which has now culminated in this 15 track beast of an album. He still rocks hard enough to frighten away most Americana fans, but he's also capable of simmering it all down to a quiet fury, which seems to quest after transcendence with equal parts pessimism and romance like a secular, faithless Van Morrison - meaning that he's old enough and smart enough to expect nothing, but can't entirely extinguish the hope for all.
6.
James Younger - Feelin' American
The guitarist for Vancouver band Sun Wizard, UK-born James Younger's solo joint completely eclipses his main gig. This is expansive guitar pop, pulling a major influence from the Strokes debut even while summoning comparisons to artists like Tom Petty, Elvis Costello, and Paul Simon. And if that description suggests an unchallenging adherence to tradition, just know that every song comes armed with its own handful of hooks that would require nothing less than a black hole joyless cynicism in order to resist.
7.
The Connection - Let It Rock
Well, fuck, I didn't expect this one to climb so high on my year-end list. It's pretty easy to scoff at a band like this, wearing skinny ties, pointy boots, and bowl haircuts on the album cover and sounding pretty much
exactly how that image suggests. But the thing is these guys have that X factor, so while they plow the same field the Ramones already dug (albeit with an even stronger influence from the 50s rock & roll source) they miraculously have that same Joey Ramone gift for melody that prevents them from falling into mere revivalism. On top of that, they keep expanding the template: "Wrong Side of 25" injects some New York Dolls carelessness and "Girls in This Town" ascends into full-on
Exile On Main Street levels of horn-led mongerosity.
8.
Black Joe Lewis - Electric Slave
I'm not sure what happened, but somewhere along the line Black Joe Lewis dropped the "& the Honeybears" from his moniker and then dropped this raging monster of a record. It takes in so many genres that it's almost impossible to describe. Opener "Skulldiggin," for example, steamrollers out of the gate like some unholy mutant cross between ACDC and James Brown, and the album just picks up intensity from there. Throughout Lewis screams, howls, croons, and pleads, and that now-anonymous Honeybear horn section is fully integrated into the proceedings. It's a violent maelstrom of sound that might just reclaim 50 years of music to its rightful originators.
9.
Chris Wilson - It's Flamin' Groovy!
The album title and cover suggest a cheap nostalgia strikeout - and on some counts that might have even been enough - but Chris Wilson enlists help from the mainmen of both eras of the Flamin' Groovies (the Mersey-crazed power pop of Cyril Jordan vs. the rock & roll purism of Roy Loney) and hits it outta the park with an album that actually combines
Shake Some Action with
Teenage Head. It also helps that Procol Harum's Matthew Fisher is also on board, lending that majestic organ tone to "Heart In Her Hand." Apparently there's plans for an official Groovies reunion in 2014, but I have my doubts they'll be able to capture the magic on display here.
10.
Various Artists - Rockin' Here Tonight; Songs for Slim
No showboating going on here, just honest covers of Slim Dunlap songs by artists who sincerely seem to care about helping. There's enough of a guest list to interest something close to the mainstream (Lucinda Williams, Wilco, Steve Earle, Jakob Dylan, and Soul Asylum), but it's the 2nd tier indie royalty that really pushes this over the top. Lucero, Craig Finn, Tommy Keene, John Doe, Joe Henry, Deer Tick, Frank Black, Patterson Hood, You Am I, and the Young Fresh Fellows are all on hand, not to mention the mo'fuggin' REUNION of the Replacements. If you've never heard a Slim Dunlap song and may suspect that Slim is the weak link here, you've got a surprise coming. Dunlap took his lessons well from Westerberg, and the two solo albums most of these songs are pulled from are valued items in my collection. This one's worth a few of your dollars.
11.
The Grapes of Wrath - High Road
12.
The Yum Yums - Play Good Music
13.
Barrence Whitfield & the Savages - Dig Thy Savage Soul
14.
Glitz - It'z Glitz
15.
Greg Pope - Pop Motion Animation
16.
Attic Lights - Super De Luxe
17.
The Cliks - Black Tie Elevator
18.
The Suburbs - Si Sauvage
19.
Red Jacket Mine - Someone Else's Cake
20.
Modern Kicks - Rock 'n' Roll's Anti Hero
21.
Missing Monuments - Missing Monuments
22.
Bad Sports - Bras
23.
Deer Tick - Negativity
24.
Beach Day Trip Trap Attack
25.
The Charlie Watts Riots A Break In The Weather
26.
Wyatt Blair - Banana Cream Dream
27.
Neko Case - The Worse Things Get...
28.
Dirty Fences - Too High To Kross
29.
The Crunch - Busy Making Noise
30.
Night Marchers - Allez! Allez!
Also really liked:
Warm Soda - Someone For You
Ulysses - Kill You Again
Rich Hands - Dreamers
Primitive Hearts - High & Tight
Foxygen - We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic
Jungle - Pacific Oblivion
Wild Belle - Isles
The Virgins - Strike Gently
The Bamboos - Fever in the Road
Nick Piunti - 13 In My Head
Oblivians - Desperation
Willis Earl Beal - Nobody Knows
No Tomorrow Boys - Bad Luck Baby Put The Jinx On Me
Grimm Generation - The Big Fame
Vegas With Randolph - Rings Around The Sun
King Khan & the Shrines - Idle No More
Silver Seas - Alaska
The Dirtbombs - Ooey Gooey Chewy Ka-blooey!
Great EPs from:
Biters - Last of a Dying Breed
Sharks - Cocaine Radio, Blow, South of the River
Van Buren Boys - Hit It Quick
Indian Rebound - Los Flamingos
