So I've been wanting to do this for a while now. I think i had the idea in 2011 or 12, actually, before we'd even crossed a full decade of PAC. Then in 2013, when i was working up Volume 10 and had already decided it was going to be a double-disc release, it seemed like that would be the time to do the retrospective. But then i realized that the second disc would, necessarily, either contain tracks that were already on the first disc, or else cover only the nine years previous. Nine years does not a decade make.
Doing it in 2014 still seemed too soon; i didn't want to repeat tracks that had just been used the year before. So here we are, 2015, year 12 of the Poor-Ass Christmas, and the time seems right to take a look back at the first ten years. Most of these are from years when i didn't write liner notes, so i'm going to have to just assume i have a fucking clue what my younger counterpart had going on in his perhaps-less-broken brain.
The idea is this: find which songs from each Poor-Ass Christmas Compilation have held up over the years. Which ones i'm still keeping in heavy rotation. Which ones i'm least embarrassed of. With one exception, i've kept it to exactly two tracks per compilation, which made me think critically about what was really necessary to this project, and forced me to make hard decisions...especially as we get closer to present day.
Initially i had not intended to keep them in chronological order, but after i had made my decisions and went to sequence the disc, i found that they actually work pretty well that way, except for putting Systematic's Glass Jaw as track 2. I ended up replacing it entirely, which may have been the better bet.
2004: Le Tigre - Deceptacon
In 2004, i was just one year out of high school, and my musical tastes still showed it. I hadn't yet discovered riot grrl, not really, so the presence of a Le Tigre song on my inaugural Christmas compilation may seem really out of place. In fact, this track, the closer that year, was the only song to feature female vocals at all. I was clearly a very different person back then.
So how did i come across this song? Well, at the time, i was heavily into perusing Newgrounds.com, a community of Flash artists who would post their cartoons and games for the world to experience. Yeah. Well, there was this short-lived animated series on the site called Bonerplex that i enjoyed. It was mostly pointless banter between a couple of characters that didn't move much, but i somehow found it hilarious. I was nineteen. Jesus. Anyway the artist had used Deceptacon for the closing credits on the first episode, which in retrospect seems incredibly off base, now that i know quite a bit more about Le Tigre and riot grrl music in general.
So it's no surprise that this song, standing alone in a sea of nu-metal and 90s alternative holdovers, is what's stuck with me most off of that comp.
2004: The White Stripes - Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground
The White Stripes are the only other band on the 2004 disc to even feature a female member. God damn, my music collection was a sausagefest back then.
This song was my introduction to The White Stripes; somehow i had entirely missed the arrival of Fell In Love With A Girl and the genre revolution that it sparked. But late one night, with MTV on as i was going to sleep, this music video came up in the rotation, because MTV did that at night back then. I was immediately taken with it; this song just felt like something special to me, and i treasured it. I downloaded it off of Napster (2004 was a fucking magical time), and held it close. No one in my school was into The White Stripes, and i had written them off as a one hit wonder band. And then Seven Nation Army happened.
2005: Cats Not Dogs - The World's Fair 1962
I was kind of an unofficial roadie for Cats Not Dogs in the mid 00s. I got kind of passed around from band to band for a while, starting with my friends Forever Virgins, who led me to Knife Party, who led me to Cats Not Dogs (then called The Shattered; they would change their name right before releasing their first EP). From, i want to say 2003, until their breakup in 2007, i filmed them, helped them move their gear, and even named their last EP. 2005 was the year they released their only full length, Rouge, and the CD release party to this day remains one of the top 10 best live shows i've ever attended. This was my favorite song on an album full of favorite songs, but maybe only because they left All Hail off. They recorded it for the album; Jason just thought his vocal performance was crap, so they left it off. My former band, damidol, would go on to cover All Hail in 2013 for the Local Love Fest compilation; it wasn't until after that event, 8 years later, that i would hear the Cats Not Dogs album version of All Hail. Once i did, i ended up agreeing with Jason.
Man, this entry became word diarrhea fast.
2005: Yasushi Ishii - The World Without Logos
Anime has never really been one of my things. I had seen and enjoyed Trigun and Spirited Away, but that was about as far into that rabbit hole as i had ever gone. In fact, sitting on the couch in her basement and watching Spirited Away was one of Amanda's & my first dates. I think we did that a week before we were official, actually. Anyway! Digression!
But in 2005, lying on Amanda's parents' bed and surfing through their 76 million satellite channels, we somehow accidentally caught three episodes of Hellsing. I was hooked, hard. I seriously cannot explain to you exactly how quickly and deeply i fell into this show. I immediately bought the DVDs, and after consuming the full series a couple of times, started picking up the manga. Then the soundtracks. The first Hellsing soundtrack, Raid, by Yasushi Ishii, is a fucking masterpiece. Listen to it with headphones on.
This is also the opening theme song to the series, by the way. Hellsing was the first, and probably still only, series that Amanda and i binge watched and never skipped the credits, beginning or end, just because we loved the music so much.
2006: Agent Sparks - Camouflage
Jason, of Cats Not Dogs fame, above, introduced me to both Veruca Salt and Jeri Casper around the same time, in 2005. So in 2006, when what was left of the former was coming to town with a new album, the latter and i picked up some tickets and headed up to The Majestic to sit in their weird-ass couches and revel in the Louise Post. After the show, i got to talk to her for a few minutes, and hug her, and turn into an embarrassing mess of a fanboy. Yeah...it wasn't good.
But what's important here is the opening act, Agent Sparks. Their performance was breathtaking. I can't say as i remember it very well at this point, but i was impressed as hell, particularly at this song. After their set, i caught them out in the lobby hawking their wares, and picked up a tour-exclusive EP with a bonus DVD in it. When i listened to it later, i was ecstatic to find that this song was on it.
And i had that conflicting emotion of being pissed off and excessively excited when, months later, i found out that two of the members of Agent Sparks used to be in Audiovent, who were one of those bands that i put up on the highest pedestal i had available to me years before and never let down. Fucking Audiovent. I met two of the guys from Audiovent and didn't even fucking know it!
2006: Human Waste Project - Dog
Human Waste Project had collaborated with Korn on a track called This Town at some point. In the heyday of the original Napster, i had been scouring the exchange (see what i did there, old people?) to find as much rare Korn material as possible, attempting to assemble a box set of every single recording they had ever made. God damn, it was painful to type that sentence. Shit, 21 year old Trevor, GET IT TOGETHER.
Invariably, This Town landed on my hard drive. Another hobby i had at the time, or "problem addiction" as it might be referred to now, almost 10 years later, was picking through Half Price Books' dollar bin and purchasing anything i was even remotely familiar with, which is how i built up the Mobyfort. Back in those days, i was not picky, not AT ALL. So, knowing the name "Human Waste Project" only from an unverified Korn collaboration i had downloaded from a sketchy data trading portal and listened to maybe a couple times, i dropped the dollar on their album e-lux. And unlike much of the actual waste that i acquired during those dark days, this one i have never regretted.
2007: The Knife - We Share Our Mothers' Health
This is where my musical tastes really started changing. I started working at Newborn Screening in 2006, just a lad of 21, head full of nu-metal, but a real thirst for learning as much rock and roll as i could. I already had the aforementioned Jason Loeffler dropping much better material on me from time to time, but suddenly spending 8 hours a day with the twin influences of Mike Cogley and Robert Johnson really started expanding my horizons exponentially. They made me feel ashamed of listening to so much Korn. And i feel like that was the right thing to do. Because separating me from my whiny teenager thrash was the only way to get me into music with substance.
The Knife's Silent Shout was one of the first albums that Mike got into me, and got me into. I don't know if i first took it because i wanted to impress him, or if it was some kind of acceptance ritual, but i think this album was was made me realize i could never again take Linkin Park seriously. Also, i'm not gonna say this was the first electronic music that i ever liked, that honor probably belongs to Everything But The Girl, but this album definitely made me realize exactly how much i appreciated the artistry of music without guitars.
2007: Black Light Burns - Kill the Queen
The only good thing that came out of being a hardcore fan of Limp Bizkit in my teen years is that i was in exactly the right position to intercept Black Light Burns when Wes Borland finally stopped fucking around and did something that tapped his full potential. Big Dumb Face was ok and all, but it was just a logical progression from Limp Bizkit; Black Light Burns was the departure that Wes really needed to make his mark on serious music.
When i got this album, i don't think it came out of my CD player for weeks, other than to move to another CD player. Weirdly, i remember listening to it as we helped Alyssa move up to Mauston; knowing the release date of Cruel Melody is the only reason i can remember what the timeframe of when our third wheel lived two hours away from us was.
Regrettably, this song is not actually on the disc; it was a bonus track that you had to have a Best Buy-exclusive download code to get off of their web site, which i had, because in 2007 i was still buying most of my new music at the big box store. Unfortunately, the hard drive i had downloaded these tracks to crashed a couple of years ago, and aside from the 2007 PAC, i had no access to this song for years before i finally, to complete the retrospective here, found a torrent of all of the Best Buy bonus tracks.
This song is so good, you guys.
As a side note, i would like to take a moment to recognize that all of the members of Limp Bizkit are actually, weirdly, insanely talented. All of them except for the one that everybody knows, Fred fucking Durst. Seriously, Limp Bizkit is like assembling the greatest football team that has ever lived and then hiring Gary Busey as the quarterback.
2008: A Place to Bury Strangers - I Know I'll See You
Here's another one we can thank Mike Cogley for. A Place to Bury Strangers have been called "the loudest band in New York," possibly because their guitarist, Oliver Ackermann, plays through seven amplifiers. At the time of this release, at least, their bass player was using four; that might not be true anymore. Their particular brand of loud, heavy shoegaze really hit me just the right way. This song in particular just means so much to me, so many things i can't put in words. I've seen APTBS twice now, and after the second, i actually got to shoot the shit with a heavily, heavily inebriated Oliver Ackermann afterward. He's a fun guy.
2008: Loudermilk - Blue Lucky Lucy
Loudermilk was a band that was way ahead of their time. They were unfairly lumped in with nu-metal when they hit the scene in 2002, but perhaps they'd have been better suited to The White Stripes' crowd, i don't know. Their major label debut, The Red Record, was something i picked up in much the same fashion as Human Waste Project, above. I knew their single Rock 'N Roll and the Teenage Desperation from some radio play and a series of compilations i did in high school called Music For Dumb White Guys, pre-PAC. It was another one that made a great case for my policy of continuing to pick up albums in that fashion, and i became obsessed with Loudermilk.
I'd end up spending years, half a decade, searching for a copy of their first album, Man With Gun Kills Three!, which had been a limited pressing of only 1,000. It's almost impossible to find. Early in 2008, very shortly before the New Zealand trip, i located one on eBay and plopped ten bucks on it. What came of this was a bidding war between me and somebody else, as unlikely as that seemed, and a lot of hemming and hawing on my part over whether it was worth continuing. In the end, after airing my trepidation on MySpace and receiving encouragement from friends to press on, i won the auction at $35. It's the most i've ever spend on a single CD, by far...i'm not even sure if i've bought boxed sets for more. But to this day i consider it the jewel of the Mobyfort.
This song, Blue Lucky Lucy, is used in my vacation movie Kiwiland, Ho! to represent our van, which we had named Lucy for unrelated reasons, and who happened to be blue, and had beaten impossible odds in many circumstances.
2008: Sleater-Kinney - O2
I have no idea why the 2007 Poor-Ass Christmas contains no Sleater-Kinney, as that was when i discovered them, a woeful six months after their breakup. Jason had burned me copies of The Woods and One Beat probably a couple years prior, but if i'd listened to them at the time, i don't remember. So in early '07, i was digging through a wallet of CD-Rs from various sources, and these came up again. Their impact on me was instantaneous. I acquired proper copies of their discography in short order, and would go on to spend the rest of 2007 and, indeed, the rest of the decade amassing as complete a collection of Sleater-Kinney bootlegs as i could; i had found my new favorite band scant weeks after S-K Torrents, a website devoted to that exact collection, had shut down.
So in 2008, i made up for the oversight of the previous year by including three Sleater-Kinney songs: O2, Banned from the End of the World (my favorite), and Turn It On. This is the only instance of a single artist having three songs on a single PAC (although a few years later i very nearly did it with PJ Harvey).
2009: Sneaker Pimps - Wasted Early Sunday Morning
Sneaker Pimps and i have the same story as Loudermilk and Human Waste Project, above. Becoming X is such a great album, it's so perfectly in line with everything i desire from music nowadays, defining "nowadays" as the post-The Knife's Silent Shout era (again, see above). More recently, i discovered that they had gone on to make more albums with a different vocalist after Becoming X; none of those did anything for me. Becoming X marks the spot.
2009: Biffy Clyro - A Whole Child Ago
In a similar story to Sleater-Kinney just two tracks ahead of this one, A Whole Child Ago has no business being left off of the 2008 Poor-Ass Christmas. The theme song to Kiwiland, Ho! and the lead-in to our years-long obsession with this band, this song came to us on the Kerrang! Best of 2007! compilation. I'm sure i've told this story many times before, in this blog and in others, but when we went to New Zealand in early 2008, i had loaded up my iPod with 30 gigs of music, intending to use a cassette adapter to run mp3s through the tape deck in the sedan we had rented. When we got to that pacific island, however, the rental company had given us a free upgrade to a van, blue lucky Lucy, who had a CD player rather than a tape deck. Which is great, generally, because fuck tapes, right? But we had no CDs with which to utilize this newfangled technology. We stopped at a grocery store for supplies, where i picked up a Kerrang! magazine, which just happened to contain that compilation disc. As we ventured outside of our journey's Point A, Christchurch, we found that once you leave New Zealand's larger cities, there is nothing for radio. We listened to that CD on repeat for A WEEK.
So really, 2008's Poor-Ass Christmas should have just been a copy of Kerrang!'s Best of 2007 compilation. But by the time i was assembling the PAC, i was so sick of everything on it that i just couldn't bear to immortalize any of those tracks in that way.
By 2009, i had come around. Another Biffy song, Living Is A Problem Because Everything Dies, had come my way via another compilation, and i finally broke down and purchased the album Puzzle. From there, it was a short trip into obsessively collecting all of their albums, most of which had not been released in the United States. This song remains the gateway to the geekery, as the AV Club would say, and it has absolutely all of the business being on the first ten-year retrospective.
2010: Them Crooked Vultures - Gunman
Them Crooked Vultures, for those who don't know or have somehow forgotten, was (is?) a supergroup consisting of Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age, Kyuss, Eagles of Death Metal), Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters, Nirvana), and John Paul God Damn Mother Fucking Jones (Led Zeppelin)...and sometimes Alain Johannes. Sorry, Alain. You've got some pretty big shadows to stand in. Their only album (so far?) was released just a teensy bit too late to make the cut for 2009, so i had begun my 2010 playlist before i'd even distributed the 2009 comp, with this as its lead track.
Them Crooked Vultures is another contribution to my life from Mike Cogley. I remember when they first hit the scene, Cogley was camping a web site anxiously at work, waiting for tickets to go on sale for a mystery show in Chicago. The only thing anyone knew about this show was that it was being advertised using three symbols: Jones's rune from Led Zeppelin IV, the "FF" logo from the Foo Fighters' Colour and the Shape, and the tuning fork from the cover of QOTSA's Songs for the Deaf. I think. Might be wrong about one or two of those. Anyway. The rumors were flying that these three had started a band together, but nobody knew for sure and they damn sure hadn't heard any of the music, but it had to be just bonkers, right?
Cogley didn't end up scoring those tickets, but once we heard New Fang, we knew we were both picking that album up on release day. And we did, and it was good.
2010: Metric - Gold Guns Girls
It certainly took me longer than it should have to find Metric, i'll tell you that for sure. But once i did...well, i've gone on public record saying that Gold Guns Girls is the greatest song in the history of recorded music, and i'll still stand by that today. This album, Fantasies, and its followup, Synthetica, are pretty much the bible of the type of angry girl-fronted heavy pop music that exemplifies most of my library anymore. I wish i had more to say, but as far as Metric goes, just listen. Let the music do the talking.
2011: The Adults - Nothing to Lose
Here's a New Zealand band that i was introduced to by a different coworker, Tammy Armbrust. Tammy and i have aligned on music better than i do with most people; she's also introduced me to other bands that have made prominent PAC appearances. This is such a cool song though, and a compelling video. I mean, it's such a simple video, but for some reason it's just kind of mesmerizing to watch.
In the four years since i came to know The Adults, though, i've been unable to obtain their album. You can't even order it online to be delivered outside of New Zealand.
2011: The Type - Same Sex Attraction
Just as Forever Virgins led me to Knife Party led me to Cats Not Dogs, Cats Not Dogs inevitably led me to The Type. In 2005 i had roadied with CND out to Waukesha, where they were playing a show with The Type, a band of friends of Jason's. It was The Type's first show, and the first time i met Jeri Casper, who i would end up playing with in another feline-themed band, Cats On Leashes, nine years later. In the intervening years, The Type would change names, break up, reform, and then rotate out the entire lineup other than Jeri, but once the album Sirens and Storms was released in 2011, they were in a prime position for that album to leave an indelible mark on Madison's rock scene. They won a MAMA (Madison Area Music Award; our own version of the Grammys, basically) for Best Alternative Album. Even before the album was released, this song had made a mark on me through live performances. In all seriousness, my favorite lyric ever comes from this song.
"Lost my shoes in a battle with God."
damidol ended up covering this one also, for Local Love Fest 2014. We recorded two songs that year, this one and Mighty Myrtle, and the latter ended up being used for the comp; our recording of Same Sex Attraction has never been released. It is the last song damidol ever recorded.
2012: Screaming Females - Buried in the Nude
Screaming Females are the only band since Sleater-Kinney to leave such an immediate, unmistakable impression on me. I downloaded No Idea Records' two free compilations, Pretend Record 1 and 2, which don't appear to be available on their site anymore. The first one featured this track, as well as Geometric Park by Pink Razors, and both of them were obvious additions to the 2012 PAC. But what really sold me on this band was when i had the opportunity to see them at the Rathskeller that summer, and, well, i already wrote pretty extensively about that.
2012: Beta Male - Are You Holden?
Christina and i share a brain. It's been proven over and over again. So she introduced me to her friends Beta Male, pretty much knowing exactly how their music was going to hook me. They were already broken up by that point, but coincidentally, they ended up doing a reunion/final farewell show just a few months later. My first Beta Male show was their last show. But i was grateful for the opportunity to actually see them.
2013: Baristacide - I've Been Waiting for All You Fuckers
I first met Baristacide at the Wisco during an incident involving an entire bottle of Mrs. Butterworth's. We quickly became awkward acquaintances, and i started making myself present at more and more of their shows. As this song started to enter their rotation, i began to look forward to it. Honestly it might be all the F words, or it might be the beautiful absurdity of the line "We made a god and we named him Greg," but i think it's just the overall character and energy of this song that really attracts me to it.
I like to think we're slightly less awkward these days.
2013: Ellie Goulding - Lights
Don't think about it. Just listen, immerse yourself, and feel. It's all i can do every time i hear this song - every time i hear Ellie Goulding at all, really.
Doing it in 2014 still seemed too soon; i didn't want to repeat tracks that had just been used the year before. So here we are, 2015, year 12 of the Poor-Ass Christmas, and the time seems right to take a look back at the first ten years. Most of these are from years when i didn't write liner notes, so i'm going to have to just assume i have a fucking clue what my younger counterpart had going on in his perhaps-less-broken brain.
The idea is this: find which songs from each Poor-Ass Christmas Compilation have held up over the years. Which ones i'm still keeping in heavy rotation. Which ones i'm least embarrassed of. With one exception, i've kept it to exactly two tracks per compilation, which made me think critically about what was really necessary to this project, and forced me to make hard decisions...especially as we get closer to present day.
Initially i had not intended to keep them in chronological order, but after i had made my decisions and went to sequence the disc, i found that they actually work pretty well that way, except for putting Systematic's Glass Jaw as track 2. I ended up replacing it entirely, which may have been the better bet.
2004: Le Tigre - Deceptacon
In 2004, i was just one year out of high school, and my musical tastes still showed it. I hadn't yet discovered riot grrl, not really, so the presence of a Le Tigre song on my inaugural Christmas compilation may seem really out of place. In fact, this track, the closer that year, was the only song to feature female vocals at all. I was clearly a very different person back then.
So how did i come across this song? Well, at the time, i was heavily into perusing Newgrounds.com, a community of Flash artists who would post their cartoons and games for the world to experience. Yeah. Well, there was this short-lived animated series on the site called Bonerplex that i enjoyed. It was mostly pointless banter between a couple of characters that didn't move much, but i somehow found it hilarious. I was nineteen. Jesus. Anyway the artist had used Deceptacon for the closing credits on the first episode, which in retrospect seems incredibly off base, now that i know quite a bit more about Le Tigre and riot grrl music in general.
So it's no surprise that this song, standing alone in a sea of nu-metal and 90s alternative holdovers, is what's stuck with me most off of that comp.
2004: The White Stripes - Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground
The White Stripes are the only other band on the 2004 disc to even feature a female member. God damn, my music collection was a sausagefest back then.
This song was my introduction to The White Stripes; somehow i had entirely missed the arrival of Fell In Love With A Girl and the genre revolution that it sparked. But late one night, with MTV on as i was going to sleep, this music video came up in the rotation, because MTV did that at night back then. I was immediately taken with it; this song just felt like something special to me, and i treasured it. I downloaded it off of Napster (2004 was a fucking magical time), and held it close. No one in my school was into The White Stripes, and i had written them off as a one hit wonder band. And then Seven Nation Army happened.
2005: Cats Not Dogs - The World's Fair 1962
I was kind of an unofficial roadie for Cats Not Dogs in the mid 00s. I got kind of passed around from band to band for a while, starting with my friends Forever Virgins, who led me to Knife Party, who led me to Cats Not Dogs (then called The Shattered; they would change their name right before releasing their first EP). From, i want to say 2003, until their breakup in 2007, i filmed them, helped them move their gear, and even named their last EP. 2005 was the year they released their only full length, Rouge, and the CD release party to this day remains one of the top 10 best live shows i've ever attended. This was my favorite song on an album full of favorite songs, but maybe only because they left All Hail off. They recorded it for the album; Jason just thought his vocal performance was crap, so they left it off. My former band, damidol, would go on to cover All Hail in 2013 for the Local Love Fest compilation; it wasn't until after that event, 8 years later, that i would hear the Cats Not Dogs album version of All Hail. Once i did, i ended up agreeing with Jason.
Man, this entry became word diarrhea fast.
2005: Yasushi Ishii - The World Without Logos
Anime has never really been one of my things. I had seen and enjoyed Trigun and Spirited Away, but that was about as far into that rabbit hole as i had ever gone. In fact, sitting on the couch in her basement and watching Spirited Away was one of Amanda's & my first dates. I think we did that a week before we were official, actually. Anyway! Digression!
But in 2005, lying on Amanda's parents' bed and surfing through their 76 million satellite channels, we somehow accidentally caught three episodes of Hellsing. I was hooked, hard. I seriously cannot explain to you exactly how quickly and deeply i fell into this show. I immediately bought the DVDs, and after consuming the full series a couple of times, started picking up the manga. Then the soundtracks. The first Hellsing soundtrack, Raid, by Yasushi Ishii, is a fucking masterpiece. Listen to it with headphones on.
This is also the opening theme song to the series, by the way. Hellsing was the first, and probably still only, series that Amanda and i binge watched and never skipped the credits, beginning or end, just because we loved the music so much.
2006: Agent Sparks - Camouflage
Jason, of Cats Not Dogs fame, above, introduced me to both Veruca Salt and Jeri Casper around the same time, in 2005. So in 2006, when what was left of the former was coming to town with a new album, the latter and i picked up some tickets and headed up to The Majestic to sit in their weird-ass couches and revel in the Louise Post. After the show, i got to talk to her for a few minutes, and hug her, and turn into an embarrassing mess of a fanboy. Yeah...it wasn't good.
But what's important here is the opening act, Agent Sparks. Their performance was breathtaking. I can't say as i remember it very well at this point, but i was impressed as hell, particularly at this song. After their set, i caught them out in the lobby hawking their wares, and picked up a tour-exclusive EP with a bonus DVD in it. When i listened to it later, i was ecstatic to find that this song was on it.
And i had that conflicting emotion of being pissed off and excessively excited when, months later, i found out that two of the members of Agent Sparks used to be in Audiovent, who were one of those bands that i put up on the highest pedestal i had available to me years before and never let down. Fucking Audiovent. I met two of the guys from Audiovent and didn't even fucking know it!
2006: Human Waste Project - Dog
Human Waste Project had collaborated with Korn on a track called This Town at some point. In the heyday of the original Napster, i had been scouring the exchange (see what i did there, old people?) to find as much rare Korn material as possible, attempting to assemble a box set of every single recording they had ever made. God damn, it was painful to type that sentence. Shit, 21 year old Trevor, GET IT TOGETHER.
Invariably, This Town landed on my hard drive. Another hobby i had at the time, or "problem addiction" as it might be referred to now, almost 10 years later, was picking through Half Price Books' dollar bin and purchasing anything i was even remotely familiar with, which is how i built up the Mobyfort. Back in those days, i was not picky, not AT ALL. So, knowing the name "Human Waste Project" only from an unverified Korn collaboration i had downloaded from a sketchy data trading portal and listened to maybe a couple times, i dropped the dollar on their album e-lux. And unlike much of the actual waste that i acquired during those dark days, this one i have never regretted.
2007: The Knife - We Share Our Mothers' Health
This is where my musical tastes really started changing. I started working at Newborn Screening in 2006, just a lad of 21, head full of nu-metal, but a real thirst for learning as much rock and roll as i could. I already had the aforementioned Jason Loeffler dropping much better material on me from time to time, but suddenly spending 8 hours a day with the twin influences of Mike Cogley and Robert Johnson really started expanding my horizons exponentially. They made me feel ashamed of listening to so much Korn. And i feel like that was the right thing to do. Because separating me from my whiny teenager thrash was the only way to get me into music with substance.
The Knife's Silent Shout was one of the first albums that Mike got into me, and got me into. I don't know if i first took it because i wanted to impress him, or if it was some kind of acceptance ritual, but i think this album was was made me realize i could never again take Linkin Park seriously. Also, i'm not gonna say this was the first electronic music that i ever liked, that honor probably belongs to Everything But The Girl, but this album definitely made me realize exactly how much i appreciated the artistry of music without guitars.
2007: Black Light Burns - Kill the Queen
The only good thing that came out of being a hardcore fan of Limp Bizkit in my teen years is that i was in exactly the right position to intercept Black Light Burns when Wes Borland finally stopped fucking around and did something that tapped his full potential. Big Dumb Face was ok and all, but it was just a logical progression from Limp Bizkit; Black Light Burns was the departure that Wes really needed to make his mark on serious music.
When i got this album, i don't think it came out of my CD player for weeks, other than to move to another CD player. Weirdly, i remember listening to it as we helped Alyssa move up to Mauston; knowing the release date of Cruel Melody is the only reason i can remember what the timeframe of when our third wheel lived two hours away from us was.
Regrettably, this song is not actually on the disc; it was a bonus track that you had to have a Best Buy-exclusive download code to get off of their web site, which i had, because in 2007 i was still buying most of my new music at the big box store. Unfortunately, the hard drive i had downloaded these tracks to crashed a couple of years ago, and aside from the 2007 PAC, i had no access to this song for years before i finally, to complete the retrospective here, found a torrent of all of the Best Buy bonus tracks.
This song is so good, you guys.
As a side note, i would like to take a moment to recognize that all of the members of Limp Bizkit are actually, weirdly, insanely talented. All of them except for the one that everybody knows, Fred fucking Durst. Seriously, Limp Bizkit is like assembling the greatest football team that has ever lived and then hiring Gary Busey as the quarterback.
2008: A Place to Bury Strangers - I Know I'll See You
Here's another one we can thank Mike Cogley for. A Place to Bury Strangers have been called "the loudest band in New York," possibly because their guitarist, Oliver Ackermann, plays through seven amplifiers. At the time of this release, at least, their bass player was using four; that might not be true anymore. Their particular brand of loud, heavy shoegaze really hit me just the right way. This song in particular just means so much to me, so many things i can't put in words. I've seen APTBS twice now, and after the second, i actually got to shoot the shit with a heavily, heavily inebriated Oliver Ackermann afterward. He's a fun guy.
2008: Loudermilk - Blue Lucky Lucy
Loudermilk was a band that was way ahead of their time. They were unfairly lumped in with nu-metal when they hit the scene in 2002, but perhaps they'd have been better suited to The White Stripes' crowd, i don't know. Their major label debut, The Red Record, was something i picked up in much the same fashion as Human Waste Project, above. I knew their single Rock 'N Roll and the Teenage Desperation from some radio play and a series of compilations i did in high school called Music For Dumb White Guys, pre-PAC. It was another one that made a great case for my policy of continuing to pick up albums in that fashion, and i became obsessed with Loudermilk.
I'd end up spending years, half a decade, searching for a copy of their first album, Man With Gun Kills Three!, which had been a limited pressing of only 1,000. It's almost impossible to find. Early in 2008, very shortly before the New Zealand trip, i located one on eBay and plopped ten bucks on it. What came of this was a bidding war between me and somebody else, as unlikely as that seemed, and a lot of hemming and hawing on my part over whether it was worth continuing. In the end, after airing my trepidation on MySpace and receiving encouragement from friends to press on, i won the auction at $35. It's the most i've ever spend on a single CD, by far...i'm not even sure if i've bought boxed sets for more. But to this day i consider it the jewel of the Mobyfort.
This song, Blue Lucky Lucy, is used in my vacation movie Kiwiland, Ho! to represent our van, which we had named Lucy for unrelated reasons, and who happened to be blue, and had beaten impossible odds in many circumstances.
2008: Sleater-Kinney - O2
I have no idea why the 2007 Poor-Ass Christmas contains no Sleater-Kinney, as that was when i discovered them, a woeful six months after their breakup. Jason had burned me copies of The Woods and One Beat probably a couple years prior, but if i'd listened to them at the time, i don't remember. So in early '07, i was digging through a wallet of CD-Rs from various sources, and these came up again. Their impact on me was instantaneous. I acquired proper copies of their discography in short order, and would go on to spend the rest of 2007 and, indeed, the rest of the decade amassing as complete a collection of Sleater-Kinney bootlegs as i could; i had found my new favorite band scant weeks after S-K Torrents, a website devoted to that exact collection, had shut down.
So in 2008, i made up for the oversight of the previous year by including three Sleater-Kinney songs: O2, Banned from the End of the World (my favorite), and Turn It On. This is the only instance of a single artist having three songs on a single PAC (although a few years later i very nearly did it with PJ Harvey).
2009: Sneaker Pimps - Wasted Early Sunday Morning
Sneaker Pimps and i have the same story as Loudermilk and Human Waste Project, above. Becoming X is such a great album, it's so perfectly in line with everything i desire from music nowadays, defining "nowadays" as the post-The Knife's Silent Shout era (again, see above). More recently, i discovered that they had gone on to make more albums with a different vocalist after Becoming X; none of those did anything for me. Becoming X marks the spot.
2009: Biffy Clyro - A Whole Child Ago
In a similar story to Sleater-Kinney just two tracks ahead of this one, A Whole Child Ago has no business being left off of the 2008 Poor-Ass Christmas. The theme song to Kiwiland, Ho! and the lead-in to our years-long obsession with this band, this song came to us on the Kerrang! Best of 2007! compilation. I'm sure i've told this story many times before, in this blog and in others, but when we went to New Zealand in early 2008, i had loaded up my iPod with 30 gigs of music, intending to use a cassette adapter to run mp3s through the tape deck in the sedan we had rented. When we got to that pacific island, however, the rental company had given us a free upgrade to a van, blue lucky Lucy, who had a CD player rather than a tape deck. Which is great, generally, because fuck tapes, right? But we had no CDs with which to utilize this newfangled technology. We stopped at a grocery store for supplies, where i picked up a Kerrang! magazine, which just happened to contain that compilation disc. As we ventured outside of our journey's Point A, Christchurch, we found that once you leave New Zealand's larger cities, there is nothing for radio. We listened to that CD on repeat for A WEEK.
So really, 2008's Poor-Ass Christmas should have just been a copy of Kerrang!'s Best of 2007 compilation. But by the time i was assembling the PAC, i was so sick of everything on it that i just couldn't bear to immortalize any of those tracks in that way.
By 2009, i had come around. Another Biffy song, Living Is A Problem Because Everything Dies, had come my way via another compilation, and i finally broke down and purchased the album Puzzle. From there, it was a short trip into obsessively collecting all of their albums, most of which had not been released in the United States. This song remains the gateway to the geekery, as the AV Club would say, and it has absolutely all of the business being on the first ten-year retrospective.
2010: Them Crooked Vultures - Gunman
Them Crooked Vultures, for those who don't know or have somehow forgotten, was (is?) a supergroup consisting of Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age, Kyuss, Eagles of Death Metal), Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters, Nirvana), and John Paul God Damn Mother Fucking Jones (Led Zeppelin)...and sometimes Alain Johannes. Sorry, Alain. You've got some pretty big shadows to stand in. Their only album (so far?) was released just a teensy bit too late to make the cut for 2009, so i had begun my 2010 playlist before i'd even distributed the 2009 comp, with this as its lead track.
Them Crooked Vultures is another contribution to my life from Mike Cogley. I remember when they first hit the scene, Cogley was camping a web site anxiously at work, waiting for tickets to go on sale for a mystery show in Chicago. The only thing anyone knew about this show was that it was being advertised using three symbols: Jones's rune from Led Zeppelin IV, the "FF" logo from the Foo Fighters' Colour and the Shape, and the tuning fork from the cover of QOTSA's Songs for the Deaf. I think. Might be wrong about one or two of those. Anyway. The rumors were flying that these three had started a band together, but nobody knew for sure and they damn sure hadn't heard any of the music, but it had to be just bonkers, right?
Cogley didn't end up scoring those tickets, but once we heard New Fang, we knew we were both picking that album up on release day. And we did, and it was good.
2010: Metric - Gold Guns Girls
It certainly took me longer than it should have to find Metric, i'll tell you that for sure. But once i did...well, i've gone on public record saying that Gold Guns Girls is the greatest song in the history of recorded music, and i'll still stand by that today. This album, Fantasies, and its followup, Synthetica, are pretty much the bible of the type of angry girl-fronted heavy pop music that exemplifies most of my library anymore. I wish i had more to say, but as far as Metric goes, just listen. Let the music do the talking.
2011: The Adults - Nothing to Lose
Here's a New Zealand band that i was introduced to by a different coworker, Tammy Armbrust. Tammy and i have aligned on music better than i do with most people; she's also introduced me to other bands that have made prominent PAC appearances. This is such a cool song though, and a compelling video. I mean, it's such a simple video, but for some reason it's just kind of mesmerizing to watch.
In the four years since i came to know The Adults, though, i've been unable to obtain their album. You can't even order it online to be delivered outside of New Zealand.
2011: The Type - Same Sex Attraction
Just as Forever Virgins led me to Knife Party led me to Cats Not Dogs, Cats Not Dogs inevitably led me to The Type. In 2005 i had roadied with CND out to Waukesha, where they were playing a show with The Type, a band of friends of Jason's. It was The Type's first show, and the first time i met Jeri Casper, who i would end up playing with in another feline-themed band, Cats On Leashes, nine years later. In the intervening years, The Type would change names, break up, reform, and then rotate out the entire lineup other than Jeri, but once the album Sirens and Storms was released in 2011, they were in a prime position for that album to leave an indelible mark on Madison's rock scene. They won a MAMA (Madison Area Music Award; our own version of the Grammys, basically) for Best Alternative Album. Even before the album was released, this song had made a mark on me through live performances. In all seriousness, my favorite lyric ever comes from this song.
"Lost my shoes in a battle with God."
damidol ended up covering this one also, for Local Love Fest 2014. We recorded two songs that year, this one and Mighty Myrtle, and the latter ended up being used for the comp; our recording of Same Sex Attraction has never been released. It is the last song damidol ever recorded.
2012: Screaming Females - Buried in the Nude
Screaming Females are the only band since Sleater-Kinney to leave such an immediate, unmistakable impression on me. I downloaded No Idea Records' two free compilations, Pretend Record 1 and 2, which don't appear to be available on their site anymore. The first one featured this track, as well as Geometric Park by Pink Razors, and both of them were obvious additions to the 2012 PAC. But what really sold me on this band was when i had the opportunity to see them at the Rathskeller that summer, and, well, i already wrote pretty extensively about that.
2012: Beta Male - Are You Holden?
Christina and i share a brain. It's been proven over and over again. So she introduced me to her friends Beta Male, pretty much knowing exactly how their music was going to hook me. They were already broken up by that point, but coincidentally, they ended up doing a reunion/final farewell show just a few months later. My first Beta Male show was their last show. But i was grateful for the opportunity to actually see them.
2013: Baristacide - I've Been Waiting for All You Fuckers
I first met Baristacide at the Wisco during an incident involving an entire bottle of Mrs. Butterworth's. We quickly became awkward acquaintances, and i started making myself present at more and more of their shows. As this song started to enter their rotation, i began to look forward to it. Honestly it might be all the F words, or it might be the beautiful absurdity of the line "We made a god and we named him Greg," but i think it's just the overall character and energy of this song that really attracts me to it.
I like to think we're slightly less awkward these days.
2013: Ellie Goulding - Lights
Don't think about it. Just listen, immerse yourself, and feel. It's all i can do every time i hear this song - every time i hear Ellie Goulding at all, really.
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