Sunday, January 27, 2008

WHOA!!!! Five Months Have Gone By & Car Tunes Year End List

No apologies or excuses from this dude. I'm just lame when it comes to keepin up on this. So here's the year-end 2007 breakdown on the Car Tunes. This is the music I listened to this past year, not necessarily released in 2007.

Top 20 (no particular order)
Buffalo Tom - Three Easy Pieces
Robert Pollard - Coast to Coast Carpet of Love
Jesse Malin - Glitter in the Gutter
Josh Ritter - The Animal Years
Portastatic - Be Still Please
Peter Case - Let Us Now Praise Sleepy John
Ryan Adams - Easy Tiger
Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga
Tommy Womack - There, I Said It
Wilco - Sky Blue Sky
Grinderman - Grinderman
John Doe - A Year in the Wilderness
Will Kimbrough - Americanitis
Half Japanese - Charmed Life
Bobby Bare Jr - The Longest Meow
Sonic Youth - Rather Ripped
Tim Armstrong - A Poet's Life
Circus Devils - Sgt. Disco
Nick Lowe - At My Age
Born Again Floozies - 7 Deadly Sins
Gore Gore Girls - Get the Gore

As I look back at this list, must've been a bad year for chicks. I listened to the Gore Gore Girls quite a bit , so I changed it to 21!

Here's a bunch more that I listened to and really enjoyed. Many of these probably made other folks top 20:

Robert Pollard - Standard Gargoyle Decisions
Beirut - The Flying Club Cup
Gogol Bordello - Super Taranta!
Black Lips - Good Bad Not Evil
Dwight Yoakam - Dwight Sings Buck
Rilo Kiley - Under the Black Light
Robbie Fulks - Revenge
Robyn Hitchcock - Ole Tarantala
Steve Earle - Washington Square Serenade
Thurston Moore - Trees Outside the Academy
Solomon Burke - Nashville
Elizabeth Cook - Balls
Lemonheads - Lemonheads
The Glands - The Glands
The Clean - Anthology
Dinosaur Jr - Beyond
Geraldine Fibbers - Butch

I hope if you see this that you'll take my cue and pick some of these up if you haven't already.

I must also mention that 2007 was a year where I fell in love with the music of Half Japanese. I'd heard Calling All Girls somewhere a long time ago but had never pursued them. By chance I watched the Half Jap documentary, The Band That Would be King on the Documentary Channel. I instantly bought into the idea of Jad and David had been the epicenter of punk rock without really knowing it. Releasing a 3 lp box set as their debut kinda makes you smile and watching them go for $300 on ebay makes you curse and smile. Of course that led me on endless ebay searches trying to find their records (cds & lps). I had some success and my life is better for it. Pick up Greatest Hits or even better, Charmed Life if you can find it. Its a masterpiece.

It was also the year of the Ramones for me as well. Mostly due to watching End of the Century, the Story of the Ramones. Of course I had listened to them for a long time, but this film helped me understand their true impact on music history. I pulled out a couple of the lp's I had and bought a couple or more and listened to them on vinyl all summer. I fell in love with some of the lesser known songs and re-connected with the hits. Worth doing if you haven't listened to them lately.