Pardon me if I've missed any cumulative discussion of the best performances witnessed during this year, but before the calendar turns and the 2004 gig list becomes obsolete and delete, I thought it might be good to pull a best of ... together.

Here's my top 8:
1. Do Make Say Think
2. Animal Collective
3. Iron & Wine
4. Destroyer w/ Frog Eyes
5. Fog
6. An Albatross/Les Angles Morts
7. Jaga Jazzist
8. Six Organs of Admittance

The bottom of my list to follow too.

01 Magnetic Fields and my first time seeing Andrew Bird (who opened).
I saw some great shows this year, esp. by local bands, but the experience of seeing Bird for the first time put everything else to shame.

KPH

1) Braid @ Metro
2) Seam @ Abbey Pub

Those were the only shows I went to. The Seam show wasn't very good.

Best:
1) Lisa Loeb* / Jason Collett
2) Stars
3) Broken Social Scene / Jim Guthrie

Letdowns:
1) Lowest of The Low speeding up every song
2) Curiosa as a whole
3) Lollapalooza's cancellation
4) Morrissey's high, high ticket prices

*My favorite show of the year. It was small. It was intimate. She played her hits. She played some lesser-known songs. She played mostly old stuff, with new stuff from the album spread out through the setlist. She was cute. She had great repartee with the crowd. She took requests. She did covers.

That is pretty much anything I could ask for in a show. As opposed to the opposite end of the spectrum where the Cure were boring, didn't talk at all, played almost the entire new album, and played hardly any hits.

You can find the rest of ours here