LucasBrehm

Well I'll be damned! I should rephrase to say that he's one of the best musicians out there, then. Speaking of, Ty Segall's new album "Sleeper" might be a good one for Matt if he wants a calmed down punk thing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQZvpkNjA2o And also, this is from quite some time ago, but Graham Coxon's album "The Kiss of the Morning" kind of falls into that genre really well, and is pretty excellent. For music discovery I have to highly recommend the streaming service Rdio. It doesn't have as much music as spotify, but it's got a feature that I haven't found on any other streamers, where you can choose to follow certain people and it'll give you a mishmash of whatever they've been listening to lately as your front page. It makes finding new stuff to listen to very, very easy, and you can always see what the people you follow are listening to at any given moment. You can also click on any band and see who has listened to it, and what bands are similar, etc. I went down a huge krautrock rabbit hole this year all through this program, and it's been awesome and never would have happened if I relied on Pitchfork or AVClub or whatever. Basically, if you want to discover new music these days, you're going to have to actively search for it. It's not going to just come to you in the mail on a Rolling Stone list anymore.

The AV Club's best albums list was pretty awful, for the exact reasons that Matt stated. A whole lot of people who aren't typically music critics voting for whatever they heard on the radio just results in a lot of mediocrity flooding the list. As for what I liked this year, none of it wound up on any top 10 lists, a trend I'm finding more common as my tastes drift further and further away from the center. The Drones "I See Seaweed" was my absolute favorite album of the year. I've listened to it now probably damn near 100 times, and I'm always finding new parts to like about it. Unfortunately, the album was only released physically in Australia, so Pitchfork has deemed it unreviewable, and now it languishes in obscurity for 95% of the world. The only band I could compare it to would be Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, but it goes pretty far beyond that at times. It's really a shame it's being ignored everywhere, so I have to post about it any chance I get in the hopes someone will actually listen. Other good albums from the year that aren't being talked about: Steve Mason - Monkey Minds in the Devil's Time (ex-Beta Band solo project) Hookworms - Pearl Mystic (Spacemen 3 style psych rock) Fuzz - Fuzz (Ty Segall proving he's one of the best guitarists today) Yo La Tengo - Fade (The most consistently good band of the past 30 years continuing to put out good works) FIDLAR - FIDLAR (Dumb kids being idiots in the most fun way) Black Hearted Brother - Stars Are Our Home (Neil Halstead of Slowdive finally plugging in the distortion pedals again) The Men - New Moon (Punks getting older and in tune with Americana) Best old album I found out about this year was The Monkees "Head", thanks to this podcast and Tim Meadows.

Here's a nice upbeat plugs song. Artist: Lucas Brehm Track: Pluglife http://soundcloud.com/lucas-brehm/plug-life

Here's my first submission, titled "If You Plug Me Yours I'll Plug You Mine" http://tindeck.com/listen/cckw www.twitter.com/_MattressSale or www.youtube.com/user/MattressSale - although I don't post to them much, but a plug is a plug!