Dustin Hates Music

This shouldn't come as a surprise. The Menzingers are one of my favorite bands (A few years ago I was hesitant to call them a top 5 band, but it's safe to say that they're easily a top 5 band for me now), so I knew that I'd enjoy  After the Party  to some degree, even if it didn't end up being my favorite. But not only is it my favorite album of the year, it might have become my favorite Menzingers album over the last 11 months. "Lookers" was my favorite song released in 2016, and if I'm being completely honest with myself, it was also my favorite song of 2017. At the very least it was my most listened to song of 2017. Like many people around my age (or just people in general), I have a lot of inner struggles with the concept of "growing up" because... well, what does "growing up" even mean? When you're younger you look up to adults and assume that they know what they're doing, but then you hit an age where you realize t...

In terms of most plays accumulated in the shortest period of time, I'm pretty sure Katie Ellen would take the number one spot on this list. In just two weeks, I racked up 300 plays from this album, and another 100 by mid-August. I already called Sløtface's Try Not to Freak Out  the type of album that I needed in 2017, but Cowgirl Blues  *is* the album that I needed this year. As an album that is, at least on the surface level, a break-up album that was released in mid-July and as someone who broke up with a girl I'd been dating for seven years in mid-July, it was unavoidable that it would become one of my favorite albums of the year- and maybe even of all time. It's still pretty early to definitively call that one, but it really does feel like an essential part of my being after this year. I had even flirted with the idea of getting a tattoo inspired by the lyrics to "Bleeding Heart" (the tattoo never happened). I'm not much of a song-writer, but Cowgi...

In case you didn't know, there's a lot of music on Bandcamp. Probably way too much. But I appreciate the efforts that the staff there makes to highlight new(ish) acts and/or albums by putting up regular features, interviews, and album streams on their homepage. Sløtface is one such band that got a homepage story. And I'll be honest: I only clicked on the story because of their name. It's an intriguing one, to say the least (their old demos spell the band's name as "Slutface" which is also how the band pronounces their current spelling). But their name isn't why I kept listening, it turns out I really loved the music. The energy on Try Not to Freak Out  is huge, and insanely catchy. There are a million and one pop culture references (one of my favorite things), including Patti Smith, Beyonce, Queen, Nancy Drew., James Bond, and, if I'm not mistaken, Ryan Adams, and choruses that got stuck in my head for days on end. Honestly, as far as ranking m...

What do I even say about this album? I listened to it after reading about Charly Bliss for the first time on The AV Club in April. My immediate reaction was wondering how I hadn't heard of them sooner. As a rather large consumer of pop music, Guppy  was everything I didn't even know I wanted from a band in 2017. I know that this album has been near the top of plenty of publications' end of year lists and I'm pretty sure they all go into great detail about what makes this album so good. Charly Bliss have all the makings of what made 90's power-pop and garage bands so fun, and if we lived in another era, they would have certainly been a mixtape band. I can imagine it now: "Scare U" for your high school crush, "DQ" for your younger cousin who just needs a nudge in the right direction to start liking good music, "Glitter" for yourself after your high school crush inevitably turns you down (or a heartbroken friend). It's all there. ...

I didn't expect to like this album as much as I did. I saw Alex Lahey's name on some "best new artists" list, read a comparison to Courtney Barnett and thought it sounded like something I might enjoy. As it turns out, she doesn't really sound like Courtney Barnett. If anything, Lahey is kind of like the Green Day to Barnett's Nirvana- the music is peppier, the choruses are sweeter, and overall there's a very different personality going on here even if they both display a knack for slacker sensibilities. Anyway, back to I Love You Like a Brother : I've always been able to appreciate break-up albums and songs, but this year I learned a hard truth: they don't hurt as much when your heart is still intact, but they hurt way, way more when it's not. Rejection isn't fun to begin with, and it's only worse when it comes from someone you thought wouldn't ever do it. This past fall I pulled all of the classic moves of someone who had been ...

There are a few recurring themes in a lot of my favorite albums this year: trying to make sense of life, accepting or defeating inner demons, and moving on to the next challenge or fork ahead. All of these point to finding some closure for the messier things thrown at us in life. Clearly this is important to me, especially with the year I've had and how I've forced myself into positions where I needed to reflect upon myself and decide what my next steps were and which of those steps would make me either a better or happier person, or both. Iron Chic's You Can't Stay Here  is a little different. Sure, they use a lot of the same motifs: death and grief and regret, and so on, but while shouting about your problems and fears over the loud is cathartic, it doesn't necessarily mean things are going to get better. That said, even if Iron Chic's version of closure is "maybe one day it won't be so bad, let's shout it out and we'll see what happens...

The first time I listened to Stranger in the Alps , I remember thinking that I enjoyed it, but that I wouldn't end up listening to it much outside of when I was going to bed. Anything with even slightly slower tempos than what I normally listen to is calming to me, so naturally I found the music on this album soothing. Then I started listening to the lyrics, and I changed my tune. I don't really need to sing the praises of Bridgers' lyricism any more than nearly every music critic already has (there are plenty of reviews out there and it's not hard to find them), but, I will. Like all great songwriters, she has a way with words that cut deep in a very specific way that makes it almost like you're reading her diary, but that also sum up the way a complete stranger can relate and feel like the song is about them. I have no idea what actually happened to Bridgers that drove her to write "Motion Sickness" but I sure as hell feel like she could have mined t...