Leftovers from 2011, part 2 of 1 (or maybe 3)

in 2011, there were songs. Oh yes. and there were bands. and there were songs by bands and bands banning songs they used to play and I didn't so much make a list of "the best of" because I am still hearing songs that came out in 2011, and probably will be, well into 2017, because that is how music works. Rarely does anyone simply immerse themselves in "the now" in a way that doesn't also make them look a little bit silly. Here are some songs that I heard a lot of times in 2011, most of them on purpose. I'll bet you could get a good buzz on if you made a drinking game out of the ones that I'd already posted at some point, and forgot about. Most of these are just sound, but there's a couple videos.



Mogwai's album from January is still good 90% of the way through (that opener is a snooooze) and should not be relegated to any sort of bins. This song sparked my interest in actually checking out Mogwai for real, since people had been assuming that I already liked them for years.



The Obits are one of those bands that deserve a bigger following, but most of their fans listen to no new bands except the Obits. They will never write a hit, but they have a lot of cred, and sometimes they write things that sound like hits from a weird alternate-universe mashup of 91-93, 1980, and 2001, just after "fell in love with a girl" came out. "Moody, Standard, and Poor" is a good record.



I assumed Blue Sky Black Death were from Bristol, or France, or Latvia because of their gorgeous instrumental beats/melodies. Guess they're from Seattle. Huh.



. . . of course, everyone and everyone and everyone's mom who knows that Shabazz Palaces are from Seattle because HOLY SHIT SHABAZZ PALACES EVERYONE! EVERYONE! SEATTLE HAS RAPPY TYPES! EVERYONE!



"lana del ray" "odd future" "___________"



Brielle moved to Chicago this year. Go, Brielle, go!



I was gonna do a whole double-entendre thing about this band being called The Men, but realized it would be labored and hackneyed. If they were just called "Men," though, that'd be awesome.

(see also, a few posts down, the Thee Oh Sees clip for the continued up-bubbling of punk/psych/garage from various bits of the nation)



Chuck Klosterman pissed this band's fans off. I won't post a link, I'll just say that Klosterman's gotten fuckin' lazy in recent years, and tuneyards fans are touchy folk. Less people need to write about how a Feminist Woman Artist writing about rough fucking is a Statement, and more people need to write about how it is awesome.



Stay weird, Annie.



One night, after working 13 hours combined jobs, a little drunk off beers from work, I wanted to listen to something funny and aggro and weird and didn't feel like FOTL (I know, RIGHT?!) and so I loaded this video up to play this awesome song by these awesome rappers and the internet in Rainier Beach is so slow that it never played and I was angry at 3 a.m. and put on an episode of "Its Always Sunny In Philadelphia" but it woke up my housemate, who had to work at 8 a.m. so I had to turn that off as well. Marty has since gotten the internet fixed.



Momma's gonna buy you a mockingbird.



This song can play from start to finish three times in a row, starting at Westlake Station and ending at Northgate Transit Center. The sheer fucking amount of times this has soundtracked the sunset over Lake Union, or the roll out at rush hour by exit 173, or the absolute lack of any view at all.

Petty Pains of Modern Life and Why White Zombie are the Best Band Ever

Recent life in Bullet-List Form

>>> Brielle, youngest of the bio-sisters, is somewhere in the midwest (not colorado, har har) right now, highwaying her way closer to Chicago,



where she'll study art and writing at the Art Institute of Chicago. The absence there is palpable, rather than symbolic, as I've been living in the same house as her the last year and a half.

******> Soon that will change. Investigating (limited) housing options now. They include beacon hill, chinatown (ostensibly), capitol district (what I'm calling that space between Pine and Jefferson and 12th and 20th that is literally Central District but increasingly co-opted by 'hillsters) or probably places in suburbs that are affordable but far away from everyone i know and everything I want to do.

>work. have had little luck/fucked up my interviews for full-time jobs. stop that, brain. >still, some digging and pestering have yielded some freelance tutoring opps, some freelance blurb-writing opps that are still in-process.

in.
process.
this is the frustrating part; waiting for writing samples to be cleared, etc, before I can go full-bore. Things I would have been more confident in before a summer of job-hunting. Confidence is key. Irony.<<<<<<<<

(Not much to do but keep at it. Dig in. Make it part of you until it doesn't have to be. All sorts of mantras to make the demoralizing slog of Craigslist and numbing rigor of cover letters into some sort of arch-masculine chest-pound.)



!!!!Tonight, however, Jake Tucker and I will drown our respective (and very different "sorrows" in beer at various town-based places and then I do a gig with Cristina Bautista's new band and Police Teeth, whom have been mentioned here before as fine individuals and purveyors of good-time, rootsy folk music, which is the best type of music for humans to make. Here is them covering White Zombie and then playing their own song about trashing living rooms and jumping fences:



and the original:



so good.

also: anyone notice how the ads for Colombiana are basically "check out this hot chick killing shit?" or perhaps more specifically, "check out this hot south american chick killing shit?"