Van Halen I: The Storm Before The Calm

February Wants Some!! is The Heavy Duty's month-long celebration of the mighty Van Halen. We'll be writing a post loosely based on each VH album in sequential order. Enjoy! 

By Greg Timmons 

February, 1978. I had to go back and look at the music that was happening at that time… thank you Interwebs. As cool as it might be to say that my mind has been clouded from years of drugs and booze (very Rock and Roll), the truth is… that was just a long time ago. I’m two years out of high school, playing guitar in a country band, and half of the dynamic duo that is The Heavy Duty was nothing more than a gleam in my eye.

Ted Nugent (Cat Scratch Fever ’77), Robin Trower (Bridge of Sighs ’74), Thin Lizzy – Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson (Jailbreak ’76)… these were some of the players and bands that ruled rock guitar. Big and bluesy, they sold records and filled stadiums. Sure, we had other guitar heroes… Al Di Meola (Elegant Gypsy ’77), Yes – Steve Howe (Going for the One ’77), Rush – Alex Lifeson (2112 ’76) but they were playing brainy, progressive rock… toomuch technique and not enough girls. Not really what I wanted to hear. I admired the skills, but not the grooves.

I Can Handle The Truth

I sat down at my computer tonight with the intention of writing an old-school Heavy Duty Track by Track Duty Attack about A Different Kind of Truth. Whole lee shit. About halfway through I ran out of ways to write 'fuuuuuuck yessssss," so I spiked it. Snap takes are so easy in this Twitter/Facebook world, I want to give you something a bit more substantial. Or I want to sit on it as long as possible. Either way, look for a "One Month In" style review later on so I can dig in a bit more. 

Okay fine here's my quick first take on ADKOT: As much as this is about Roth returning to the fold, this is truly the EVH show. Roth's presence gives Ed an excuse to exhume all the old riffs and go as heavy and as fast as possible. This is some serious guitar wizardry. No Van Hagar over-chorused plodding bullshit. Just go listen to it yourself! You won't be disappointed. 

And tomorrow we'll kick off our month-long celebration "February Wants Some!!" with an ultra-secret  special guest who's contribution is at the core of all things Duty. You might even say the's the god "father" of this site. Or maybe he's the top of the "Pops" of Van Halen know-how. Who is this mystery man? Check in tomorrow to find out!

This Month In Amazon $5 Downloads: February

Rio - Duran Duran - Remember the video for "Come Undone" where these Brits were hanging around a fish-tank. Sexiest fish-tank use of all time?

Van Halen I - Van Halen - In advance of "February Wants Some," you probably should pick this one up if you haven't yet. It's pretty good.

Mezzanine - Massive Attack - Who knew The Drive Soundtrack would be the Rosa Parks of electronica music for The Duty?

Live In Santa Monica '72 - David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust comes and knocks at your door.

Dreamboat Annie - Heart - This has some serious deep album cuts potential.

Blind Melon - Blind Melon - Or what? You'll release the dogs or the bees? Or the dogs with bees in their mouths and when they bark they shoot bees at you?

New Album - Boris - Buy this before they put out another album and this title makes no sense.

Eponymous - R.E.M. - See, "eponymous" means your hair. So technically it's true. That's what makes it so funny.

American Pie - Don McLean - Does Don at least get invited to the red carpet premieres for them American Pie flicks? You got any gum?

The Month in Bedroom Covers

(Bedroom Covers is a Tumblr page where I collect videos of people playing cover songs on their webcams. Once a month I'll post a few of my favorites here on The Heavy Duty.)

Led Zeppelin - "The Ocean"
YouTube user ewallen
Love the product placement.  I like to see young guys so forward-thinking.

INXS - "Never Tear Us Apart"
YouTube user MoonwalkerPJ
The cover's great on its own, but how can you not smile at MoonwalkerPJ's Wolfman Jack/Don Cornelius-styled introduction?  So spectacular.  Dude's like a real performer, he is, and with that killer jungle cat shirt...?  You can't beat it.

Van Halen - "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love"
YouTube user aschmidtibc
I was so excited about the band's upcoming release that I decided to post a ton of Van Halen vids this month, and this kid's take on "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love" was by far my favorite.  He has that perfect amount of pretension and I really like it when he sings the guitar part at 2:28.

You Wanted a Post, You Gotta Post

Has it really been a week since we've posted? What's with us, man? Well, sorry about the delay in fabulous content, but we promise we've got some neat stuff coming up soon that will kill at least five minutes of your workday. With two big shows in Seattle this week, The Aristocrats and Alabama Shakes, we should have reviews of both up next week.

And since it's coming up fast, it's time to announced that The Heavy Duty has dubbed next month "February Wants Some!!" All month we'll be celebrating the new Van Halen album release with a shitload of posts about the band. So much content, with the explicit goal of making you so sick you'll involuntarily hurl after hearing a single yelp from DLR. But for now, how about a quick preview of a new song that sounds like a half-assed version of "Dance the Night Away" without the killer tone? Let us know what you think in the comments.


Van Halen - "Blood and Fire" (Preview)

And You Snow It

As I'm sure you've read by now, The Heavy Duty's home base of Seattle has been blanketed with a magnificent work closing, hot chocolate hoarding, frosty face causing snowstorm that's grinding the city to a halt. And I thought we should celebrated this glorious day with all the songs with "snow" in the title that came up in my iTunes search!

GWAR - "Pure as the Arctic Snow"


Fu Manchu - "Grendel, Snowman"


Black Sabbath - "Snowblind"


AC/DC - "Snowballed"

The Year in Bedroom Covers

It was one year ago today that I started a Tumblr page called Bedroom Covers.  It was an easy bit: YouTube videos of people playing cover songs in their bedrooms.  "Song I know.  People I don't."  Since last January I've done my best to upload two videos to the site every single morning. To date there's over 720 posts, everything from cover versions of Mayhem, The James Gang, and Des'ree to performances by middle-aged men in sunglasses, teenage girls in heavy makeup, and shirtless bros from foreign shores.  There's so much great stuff on here I'll personally guarantee that every one of you will find a video you enjoy so much that you couldn't even conceive of your life without it.

So in honor of Bedroom Covers' first anniversary here's ten of my favorite videos from the past year.  Thanks for watching.  Two more videos will be uploaded tomorrow at seven.

The Smiths - "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out"
YouTube user cataclismo
Bedroom Covers' first post, and a prescient one at that.  No band is more tailor-made for closing your bedroom door and turning on your outdated webcam than The Smiths.  Fantastic, touching, and sung with accents.  Accents!

Lynyrd Skynyrd - "Tuesday's Gone"
YouTube user froggy1954
I sometimes wonder why this guy put this up, and then why he hasn't taken it down.

UFO - "Rock Bottom"
YouTube user nooneung
Matt and I used to go to this bar in downtown Seattle where we'd drink tallboys of Pabst and the DJ would play stuff like Sepultura and Thin Lizzy. Every now and again we'd hear UFO's "Rock Bottom" and I'd always think, "Goddamn, what a killer tune."  Apparently this kid did too.  I always love a Bedroom Cover where the guy not only nails the riffs and the ripping solos, but can sing the tune at the same time. nooneung gets extra points 'cause he does all of that and then pipes in those cool MIDI backing samples.  In fact, this video is so rad there's no reason it shouldn't have a million more views than it does right now, so please do this guy a huge favor and send this link to Vinnie Moore or Mike McCready or Kirk Hammett or some other guitar dude who's down with Michael Schenker so we can make that happen.

The Go-Betweens - "Rock and Roll Friend"
YouTube user volitapearl
So while I really, really, really like The Go-Betweens, I was never much a fan of this song until I found volitapearl's 4 AM version of "Rock and Roll Friend" and it changed everything. If Bedroom Covers accomplishes one thing I want that one thing to be to talk her into recording a real-deal full-length version of this.  This track is exactly the kind of cover I want when I'm plugging in the headphones: it's a little bit lonesome and a whole lot original.  I don't think I'd ever notice it was the same song.  I love the way volitapearl decided to play the octave power-chords and her voice is outstanding.  Check out volitapearl's band's Tumblr page and follow her on Twitter.  I think I'll throw her an @, and I might even download her EP off Bandcamp.

Scott Kelly Plays Neil Young. It's Pretty Cool.

Here's some video of Neurosis' Scott Kelly and Yakuza's Bruce Lamont playing Neil Young's "Cortez the Killer" at Chicago's Empty Bottle earlier this month. Since today's my day off and there's snow on the ground outside my window, this song sounds GREAT.  Enjoy.

The Duty's Live Evil: Scott Kelly // Jay Munly // Bob Wayne!

(Hey everyone, here's a thing I wrote about the Scott Kelly // Jay Munly // Bob Wayne show I saw last November.  I wrote it fairly soon after the show, goofed around not finishing it, and then decided I wasn't going to publish the thing after all. After recycling nearly all the bits into my 2011 Year in Re-Brew I went back and re-read this draft and liked it anyway.  So here it is. Apologies for the redundancies.  Enjoy.)
 

Scott Kelly // Jay Munly // Bob Wayne
Tractor Tavern, Seattle
November 29, 2011

I'd never heard of Jay Munly until he walked onstage and started playing.

In the week that passed I think I listened to his 2002 record Jimmy Carter Syndrome somewhere around thirty-five times. It's now somewhere around one month later and I've already listened to it three times today. It's even playing right now, right as I type this. Within the first thirty seconds of seeing Munly sit down on a folding chair and plug in his guitar I knew he was great and I knew I was about to be a big, big, BIG fan.

And so far I was right.  The guy is great. I am a big fan.

Jay Munly looks like he's six-and-a-half feet tall and weighs just under a hundred pounds. When he strolled onstage the other night he carried with him a neckerchief and a bottle of Budweiser, and he wore so much black that I thought I could see clear through him. He sang his forty minutes of songs with a voice that was half Nick Cave baritone and half wailing Appalachian falsetto, and either way the sound broke my heart. Like I said, I'd never heard any of these songs, but from what I could tell from first listen they were half about Old Testament and prizefighters, and half about dogs and frontier abortions. Every so often Munly would pull back and from the mic and speak a few lyrics to himself, in an aside that we could barely hear. Between songs the guy didn't say a single word. Not one. He just stared straight ahead, past the crowd and back toward the soundboard, and maybe he tuned his guitar. Halfway through his set he fished an alligator clip out of his pocket and clipped it to a string, punctuating the following song with blasts of what sounded like the kick from a distorted TR-808.

Opeth Your Heart To Me

How did it take me so long to come around to Opeth? I'm supposed to be a professional music writer, Tebowing  preaching to all the Duty faithful about that good rock and or roll. And I've failed all of you. Somehow I've taken a big Pete Incaviglia-sized whiff on this band up until now and it's embarrassing me even to admit it. I've been cranking their latest album Heritage on Spotify for the last week and I think it's awesome. Fantastic guitar tones, great arrangements, tasty keyboards, and not too prog-tastic. And I for one enjoy all the clean vocals because that's how I like my metal now. Intelligible.

What a great obscure find, eh? Only one of the most celebrated metal bands of the past 15 years, and one I even saw live already! Pulitzer coming my way. Yeesh. I finally decided Stockholm's Loudest Band was worth my time because I've been obsessing over getting a new PRS guitar and both guitarists have their own signature models. So I got interested in checking out their guitar tone and decided to give Heritage a spin. I'm as confused as you are that I waited this long, even when back in September  I wrote about this album getting released and didn't think to check out a measly YouTube clip! What an asshole. Oh well. Let's make up for lost time:

Opeth - Slither

The Sunday Cool Down Shuffle: That Interview's a Pretty Good Idea Edition

This is a feature post for the Duty, known as The Sunday Cool Down Shuffle. We load up the iTunes, hit shuffle, and write about the first 10 songs that come up no matter what. Got it?

10. "Jazz Passenger" - Bottle  Oh man, when I was in eighth grade Bottle was a band of college guys and I was their number one fan.  I sent fan mail to their PO Box and everything, and they were all very nice to me. I should Facebook some of those guys and interview them for the Duty.

9. "New Mind" - SWANS  I like their bunny rabbit goth stuff more than their pummeling noise stuff.

8. "Song 25" - The Austerity Program  I wrote about this band once.  They play with a drum machine so when I put their EP on my Top 10 for the Lounge Act podcast I used a line from the sticker that was on the first pressing's of Big Black's Headache EP ("Not as good as Atomizer, so don't get your hopes up, cheese!"). I was happy with myself for being clever, but also for being honest.  The Austerity Program's Backsliders isn't nearly as good as Black Madonna.  

7. "Valentine" - Adrian Borland  This is the first time I've heard this song. It's good!

6. "Now Is Better Than Before" - Jonathan Richman  Jonathan played this on some TV show in the early '90s.  It's a great clip.

5. "The Blood Runs Red" - Discharge  One time Heavy Duty contributor Mike Foley checked out this CD from the Seattle Public Library.

4. "Right Brigade" - Bad Brains  I don't think anything on this list has ever been on Matt's iTunes.

3. "We Are Never Talking" - Roky Erickson  I almost bought a poster when I saw Roky Erickson in 2008. Show wasn't very good, but that poster was neat.  Seemed like a hassle to carry it home.

2. "Lame" - Burn the Priest  I should really just delete 85% of my iTunes collection.

1. "High Price on Our Heads" - Circle Jerks   My mom bought me this album at the Wherehouse.

Don't Ya Trust Me?

With all the excitement around the mammoth Van Halen juggernaut returning to conquer BeiberFever and steal your girlfriend mother, much is being made about this being the first Van Halen album with David Lee Roth since 1984. This is technically true, but let's not all go crazy and forget about two excellent songs that the full original lineup recorded for Best of Van Halen Vol. 1 back in 1996 (Also featuring the underrated Van Haggar track Humans Being.) Audio evidence:

"You Can't Get This Stuff No More"


"Me Wise Magic"


I probably only like these two songs because of their super-fan deep band cuts potential, along with the romantic notion that a full album during this time with this lineup would have killed. Is there any chance a song off  A Different Kind of Truth can be as awesome as those two? Probably not, and because of one man's absence: Michael Fucking Anthony.

We are a broken record around here about how much we adore him, but Mikey is our guy. It's that simple. So I sincerely hope that the new VH album is as remotely as cool as those two songs. But I'm damn sure they'll be lacking in the high-harmonies dept and the sweet alcoholic beverage-shaped bass dept. But I'll try keep and open mind. 

People Who Released Albums in 2011, And Cassie Chatelain's Self-Indulgent Memories Tied To Each

For The Heavy Duty's "Breast of 2011," Matt and Dev are inviting a few friends to share their thoughts on the year's best music.

By Cassie Chatelain 

Just like the title says. People who released albums in 2011, and my self-indulgent memories tied to each:


Coldplay:
In High School, I went to the Oregon coast with my best friends family. On the beach a stylish couple in their early thirties asked me to take their picture. I desperately wanted to somehow portray how cool I also was. I wanted them to walk away going "Wow, that high-schooler is super funny and charming without even trying, don't you think?" I took the picture, and gave them their camera back. They were all "Thanks!" and I said "No Welcome!" because I was nervous, and fucked everything up.

On the drive home, everybody stopped at Safeway to go to the bathroom, I was all "Naw, I'm cool." and waited in the car. Less than an hour later I had to pee worse than ever before. It seriously felt like monsters were tap-dancing on my bladder. I weirdly didn't say anything because I felt stupid for not going at the Safeway like everybody else. So I held it while fantasizing about the nightmare this could become (Will I just pee on the upholstery? Could I secretly go in a Taco Bell cup without them noticing? Form a cup with my hands and hoist the pee out the window in sessions like I'm in a sinking raft?) Eventually, we pulled over and I went on the side of the road. When I got home, my sister told me "You JUST missed Coldplay on Letterman." She knew how much I loved them, and she said it as a jab, to rub it in. What a bitch ya know? So I cried in my room with Monday around the corner. Fuck you, High School.

Don't Let it Be Over: Matthew's Best of 2011

We love lists here at The Heavy Duty, and none more than a top ten album list. We also like italicized headers than no one reads. Shit balls cock. 


By Matthew Timmons

We've already published two pieces disagreeing with me about as much as you possibly can without wanting to slap me in public, but 2011 was my favorite year for new music in a long, long time. But that claim in itself tells you everything you need to know about enjoying music. Besides sense of humor, nothing is as personal as one's taste in music. I got into these 10 albums in my own personal way, and I could tell you how great they are and you might hate them anyway. Don't worry, we'll still be friends. You'll tell me I'm full of shit and I'll get over it. Too busy dancing to these hot tracks in my kitchen as I sing into a wooden spoon. Hit up these records on Spotify/YouTube/Amazon or whatever and see if they make you swing too.

HONORABLE MENTION: Beyond Magnetic EP, Alabama Shakes EP, David Grissom's Way Down Deep. All these albums are EP's and by my arbitrary rules don't count. Also Watch the Throne was pretty great, but I didn't buy it so it doesn't make the list.

10. The Aristocrats - The Aristocrats 

Major instrument gymnastics from three monster players. I've never been much into instrumental wankery, but since I've been player much more guitar this year, I've been searching beyond standard blooze licks for inspiration. And I've found it in Guthrie Govan. But this isn't some solo masturbatory biggest-guitar-dickest-fest, all three players shine in tandem and I much prever this approach over the windblown hair guitar-god Satch/Vai stuff. I did a lot of writing for my science class this quarter, and I needed some good instrumental music to blast while I copied and pasted from Wikipieda. Thanks guys!

9. Smoke Ring for My Halo - Kurt Vile 

If Kurt Vile was playing his beat-up Martin outside Pike's Market, mumbling about ghosts or small Pennsylvania towns I doubt I'd stop to listen. But that's the magic of a little touch of reverb, some finger style guitar overdubs, and a great name. Turns a nice kid with nice melodies into an Pitchfork-beloved international superstar.

The Year in Re-Brew: Devon's Top 10 of 2011

It's the end of the year!  Here's what I (Devon) listened to during 2011.

By Devon Booth

10. Various Artists -- Drive (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Lakeshore Records, 2011

Movie of the Year! The songs with singing make you want to make out with slender girls who taste like beer, and by "you" I mean "me," and by "me" I mean "all the time."

Standout Track: Desire's "Under Your Spell." "I don't eat / I don't sleep / I do nothing but think of yoouuuuuuu...." Unrequited love.  Ugh.

9. Feist -- Metals
Interscope, 2011

One night while Matt and I were up late talking about reviving The Heavy Duty and instant messaging each other YouTube links of St. Vincent and Karen O I thought, "You know what, I'm totally gonna buy that new Feist album."  I enjoyed the holy heck of out of at least half of Leslie Feist's 2007 album The Reminder and I'd been a big fan of Metals lead-off "single" for a week or two, but that night I was so full of giddy excitement about being a music fan that a new Feist album seemed like it'd be not only a really great record but one that'd be even more fun to buy. Even if I'd only listen to it twice.  And I was right!  Metals is really great, and true to my prediction I've listened to it maybe thrice since I brought it home from the CD store.  And, you know, I'm totally okay with that.  It's really such a cool record, one that sounded great when I swept my floor and stared out the window, and one that sounded even more fantastic when I wore a scarf in my apartment and poured myself a drink.  The last time I listened to it I sat on the couch and wrote pages and pages of notes in a legal pad about how much I enjoyed the songs and even more about how much I enjoyed the experience.  Looking over those notes right now I see that they're half about great voices and cute bangs, and half about Bob Dylan and Depression-era hats. Hmmm.  Maybe that's really all you need to know right there.  Metals: neat songs and heavy thought fodder.

Actually, maybe the thing I like most about Metals is how every time I listen to it I think about how these songs might have evolved, where the writing process started, and where it finally stopped.  See, The Reminder was mostly a singing and guitar album, but Metals has so many different stringy and clinky instruments that weave in and out, and songs that are sometime subdued and sometimes orchestrated, that I can't help but stop and wonder who brought what arrangement to the table or what the original scratch demos sounded like or why the whole thing is so beautiful and contemplative and interesting.
Then I go back to thinking about great voices, cute bangs, and Bob Dylan.

Standout Track: "Caught a Long Wind"  Hey, why not?  It's real pretty.  Makes me want to pour a drink and rest your head on my shoulder.

The Duty's Live Evil -- Dinosaur Jr!

Dinosaur Jr // Pierced Arrows
Showbox, Seattle
December 17, 2011

Growing a beard is probably the greatest thing J Mascis has ever done.  I seriously love it, and not just because I've been growing a beard my own damn self, but because it lets everyone know that J Mascis means BUSINESS.  It's easy to underestimate the guy, and for longer than I've been listening to Dinosaur Jr I feel like everyone has sold J short.  With the way he speaks and the way he sings he's inadvertently fooled the world into thinking he's lazy and high, and that his records are tossed-off excuses to play guitar solos.  But this couldn't be further from the truth.  Mascis is not only a fantastic lyricist and a great singer, but he's always recording and he's always on tour.  Always.  During those years before the Dinosaur Jr reunion, J crossed the country, like, four times, and then he went to Europe, Japan, New Zealand, and back all the way back to Europe.  He got Mike Watt back on his feet after the guy almost died from a scrotum infection and he instigated The Stooges reunion. He also bought a ton of vintage gear.  How awesome.

The Month in Bedroom Covers

(Bedroom Covers is a Tumblr page where I collect videos of people playing cover songs on their webcams. Once a month I'll post a few of my favorites here on The Heavy Duty.)

Van Halen - "Panama"
YouTube user googxmsr

Sometimes I post a video just because I like the guy's house.

You're Doing It Wrong: Michael Foley on The Year in Music

For The Heavy Duty's "Breast of 2011," Matt and Dev are inviting a few friends to share their thoughts on the year's best music.

By Michael Foley

Upon getting the kind request to contribute some thoughts on The Year In Music 2011 to The Duty (Heavy being so implied amongst those in the know as to be rendered almost redundant, but everyone has to start somewhere right?), it was cause for me to contemplate how the method(s) we consume our music and our entry points to the bands we like/love/loathe can influence us well after the initial blush of audio adoration.

Then I thought that is awfully damn pretentious.

Look, we like what we like. We can over-think it as much as we want, believe me. Does it matter if it's because that solo "rocked" or if the singer is pretty or if they didn't sign with a major? Maybe, depends on what we bring to the table when we turn the player up or down, on or off (only old farts still turn the station and no one turns the channel). Here's some of what I found at the table this year.

I Got The Shakes: My Song of The Year

I'm still banging away at my year's top ten album list, elevating (in my mind) its importance to Magna Carta or even the original screenplay for Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure levels. A historic document indeed! So how about my song of the year while you wait!



Stumbling upon Alabama Shakes on an early Saturday morning was my favorite musical moment of the year. Something just clicked instantly, like I've been a fan of this band forever. With its clean guitar tones, rolling 60's-esque bass lines, and of course singer Brittany Howard's soulful pleading croon, "I Found You" just knocked me out. I love when music becomes this sort of unexplainable magical mystical emotional gut punch, which only happens when you least expect it. That is a nice recipe for a song of the year.

Happy Holidays from The Duty!

List 'O Top Six: My Favorite Tangentially Music Related Things of 2011

I'll be posting my top albums of 2011 sometime next week, but I had a few extra things I loved that were sort of related to my voracious music consumption that weren't "albums," thus disqualified. So here's a List 'o Top Six that helped put 2011 over the top and made it my favorite "music" year since 2006, which was my first year in Seattle and the saw the genesis of this very website:

6. Late Night with Jimmy Fallon - Fallon owns the late night music scene, no questions asked. The Roots, the impressions, the theme weeks and more. Just plain fun. And all the clips are online the next morning, so I don't have to stay up until 1:25am to watch! My favorite clip of the year:

The Thing That Should Not B-Sides

One of the worst things about being a huge Metallica fan (besides the unrelenting hate from former fans) is the lack of awesome original b-sides to show off our superior fandom. We never had any deep band cuts like "Crazy Mary," "Soul to Squeeze," or "The Fun Machine Took a Shit and Died." to hail as the band's best and try and out-obscure causal fans. The only thing Metallica has ever released that was an original song and not on a proper album was "I Disappear," for the Mission Impossible II Soundtrack, and that was specifically written for the movie.

For a band that is so popular with regular dudes, not having a go-to argument winner to show off my extreme fandom has always been a bummer. Sure, I could have gone with one of their many sweet cover songs or maybe even go beyond pretentious and picked a live version of a "Creeping Death," but somehow I think everybody would see through all that. Until Metallica finally decided to put out the four Death Magnetic leftovers this week as the EP Beyond Magnetic, I was on the same playing field as everyone else despite my unrelenting devotion to El Cerrito's loudest band.

Aaron Shipp Tells The Year in Music to "Fuck Off"

For The Heavy Duty's "Breast of 2011," Matt and Dev are inviting a few friends to share their thoughts on the year's best music.


By Aaron Shipp

I'm going to get two things out of the way, right off the bat. (1) I had a shit year and (2) because I had a shit year, most of what I listened to in 2011 reflects a mood that one who is experiencing such a time might carry. I'll spare you all the elaborate elucidation in regard to why my year can best be defined by a common term for feces. Its commonality, its overall lack of exception, is partly why it was so shitty. So there's no need for me to try and spruce up, for your entertainment, a disinterestingly shitty year. I'll focus instead on my favorite albums of the year and why they, not necessarily bested anything else out there but, served an integral purpose in my surviving 2011.

The Sunday Cool Down Shuffle: Golden Bears Edition

This is a feature post for the Duty, known as The Sunday Cool Down Shuffle. We load up the iTunes, hit shuffle, and write about the first 10 songs that come up no matter what. Got it?

10. "Blaise Bailey Finnegan III" - Godspeed You Black Emperor  I'd probably still listen to this if it didn't have that crazy-man rant running the whole time.

9. "Molting" - Cephalic Carnage  FUCK!  Hey iTunes, gimme some warning next time you're gonna transition into screaming blast beats like that.

8. "Rolodex Propaganda" - At the Drive-In  Relationship of Command is such a great album, but when I hear these songs I can't think of anything but sitting in my dorm room at UC Berkeley.  Kind of a bummer that I'll never listen to this record again.

7. "Out of This World" - Black Flag  Black Flag is the incredible. Truly one of my favorite bands, but I've never ever been able to get into Damaged. At all. I actually think I prefer Family Man.  Weird.

6. "Little Dolls" - Ozzy Osbourne  And speaking of Berkeley, I bought a used copy of Ozzy's Diary of a Madman the second day I moved to campus.  That and the first Van Halen album.  Wasn't until day four that I bought a bargain copy of Anthrax's Spreading the Disease.

5. "The Park" - Feist  I really ought to write a Two Months In on Feist's Metals.

4. "Pieces" - Dinosaur Jr  Matt and I are going to see Dinosaur Jr next Saturday.  Sometimes I hear myself playing guitar and I wonder if it's obvious to others how much and how long I've listened to this band.

3. "10" - Rikk Agnew  My friend Sam loved that blue Adolescents album when we were teenagers.  He gave me a copy along with some Rikk Agnew stuff, and I guess I've listened to it a lot more than I think I have 'cause I know this song inside and out.  Agnew's band called Poop they put out a really awesome EP a few years back.  They play at a punk club here in town every few months it seems and I sometimes regret it a little when I don't go.

2. "Chaplin's Radiotelephone" - Joel RL Phelps the Downer Trio  A number of years ago I saw the Downer Trio's Robert Mercer play guitar and it changed my life.  I've been talking about that tone ever since.

1. "Without Wings" - Corrosion of Conformity  Always nice to end a Cool Down with an acoustic interlude.

Waaaay Too Much Duty For One Day

I knew going in today would be a great day in DutyLand, with The Black Keys' El Camino and The Roots' Undun dropping at the same at your local independent music store. I was all set to pick them up after class, head home, and dive right into two albums that are locks for my top ten. That alone would be a fantastic music day. But then I awoke to the internet aflutter with two old heavy metal favorites trying to win back my garage rocked soul and a Ryan Adams live stream on Letterman! Holy overload, Batman! Let's hit it.

This Month in Amazon $5 Downloads: December

To The Sea - Jack Johnson  Some people like vanilla ice cream. Jack Johnson is cardboard ice cream.

The Shepard's Dog - Iron and Wine  When I was typing this out, I automatically added an extra "g" on dog.

The Queen is Dead - The Smiths  A good place to get started if for some reason you've ignored Moz till this point in your life.

How I Got Over - The Roots  I'll never understand why there aren't a million other bands ripping these guys off.  Should be its own genre.

Kid A - Radiohead  BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP.

Holy Diver - Dio  I like this album more than any Black Sabbath record.

Oslo: Burning the Bridge to Nowhere - Doug Stanhope  Buy this just because Doug was awesome on Louie.

Songs and Stories - Guy Clark  $5 for 23 songs! Folksy stories! Grandpa haunts!

The Downward Spiral - Nine In Nails  What are you waiting for! Get yourself a free sampler of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Soundtrack here!