When I tally up my most-played artists of the last year, the vast majority of my Top 10 is basically indistinguishable from my Top 10 most-payed artists from 20 years ago. Is it my fault they insist on still putting out strong, fresh material?
If you’re a Dad Rock and ’90s Nostalgia aficionado, have I got 30 tunes for you to check out.
Diverse influences mix together to create genre-defying sounds, particularly laid-back grooves that conjure up carefree summer afternoons hanging with friends? That’s the Oakland sound in 2022.
I miiiiight have mentioned it before, but Bandcamp Fridays have been a great excuse for me to reconnect with local music over the last 22…
On the whole, I’d say these songs are a hopeful bunch, rooted in the possibility of muddling through somehow and reclaiming a semblance of fellowship, cohesion, progress, and well-being. Perhaps 2022 will deliver on that promise.
What can one say about 2020 other than, “Good riddance”? I can think of one thing: There was some damn good music released this year. Is it because 2020 was a particularly fruitful year, with talented artists who had nothing else to do but write and record new music?
On the brights side, one of the nice things about being cooped up with your household and no one else for 3/4 of the year…
Fourteen of the 30 tracks below are either by a female solo artist, a band with a frontwoman, a male-female duo, someone who doesn’t subscribe to binary gender identifiers, or a Canadian indie-supergroup prominently featuring Neko Case.
“Everything, everything, everything, everything, everything is awful!!!”
That, my friends, was 2018, in all its mortifying, capricious, senseless absurdity. I can think of no better soundtrack.
Even the shittiest of years can produce moments of musical transcendence. The tumult of 1968 gave us Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, Sweetheart of the…