2020 Artists of the Year Countdown!

 

Mountain Goats ca 2005

Well here it finally is! The Artists of the Year Countdown for 2020! It's a very good one and I love making these things, it's just that I found myself doing a lot of podcasting with other people this year and kept putting the recording of this show off. You understand. But here it is! I hope you enjoy it!

2020 Artists of the Year Countdown

***Featuring***

Alanis Morrissette
Bad Religion
Barenaked Ladies
The Beatles
Bob Dylan
Elton John
Fall Out Boy
The Mountain Goats
New Found Glory
Outkast
Talking Heads
Taylor Swift
The Wonder Years

Countdown 422 Overflow post

 

Special Countdown: 12 Years of Last.Fm (Part 3) (#30-#21)

Rise Against

It's the end of the month, so that must mean that it's time for another installment of 12 Year of Last.fm. It's a great episode with a wide range of music. Enjoy!


12 Years of Last.fm (Part 3)

***Featuring***
Alkaline Trio
Bad Religion
Dar Williams
Elliott Smith
Frightened Rabbit
Pearl Jam
Rise Against
Sublime
Sufjan Stevens
Thrice
Vampire Weekend

New Countdown: That Nostalgic Feeling of a Comatose Computer

Moon Taxi

There was a time, early on in this countdown's life, where I would constantly have computer problems and would have to figure out ways around them. That is what I dealt with, with this episode as my computer has fallen very ill. But I am hopeful that it is on the mend. This episode was entirely recorded while I waited for Nicole from Apple to call me back. Which is not a dig against Nicole. She has been awesome and I recognize that she is not only dealing with me.

ANYways. This was a good countdown. I hope that the musical differences between my vocals and the songs isn't too jarring. Enjoy!


Countdown #378

***Featuring***
AJR featuring Rivers Cuomo
AWOLNATION
Bad Relgion
Big Boi
Foster the People
Imagine Dragons
The Killers
lovelytheband
Moon Taxi
Muse
Portugal. The Man
Thirty Seconds to Mars

One Year, 100 Albums: #94 Bad Religion - Against the Grain

Bad Religion Against the Grain, 1990

This is an album of pretty unfiltered punk rock. Yeah, there's a shade of poppiness to the proceedings, but the messages and anger and loudness are there. Occasionally, even the speed is right.

Bad Religion is a band known for having "SAT words" in their songs and this album is chock full of them. I will be providing definitions for some of the ones contained in the songs below.

I picked this album because it is the most solid from start to finish. There are songs on other albums that I like far more, but this is one that I can put on and not hit the skip button once.

I couldn't find any good videos for songs from this album, so I'm just going to give you 4 songs.

Bad Religion - Turn On the Light
Bad Religion - Get Off
Bad Religion - Positive Aspect of Negative Thinking
Bad Religion - Entropy


VOCABULARY SECTION

Immolation (from "Turn On the Light") - To kill (oneself) by fire.
Rectilinear (from "Get Off") - moving in or forming a straight line
Endogenous (from "Positive Aspects of Negative Thinking") - produced or synthesized within the organism or system
Boltzmann (from "Entropy") - an Austrian physicist and philosopher whose greatest achievement was in the development of statistical mechanics, which explains and predicts how the properties of atoms (such as mass, charge, and structure) determine the physical properties of matter (such as viscosity, thermal conductivity, and diffusion).

You can purchase Against the Grain at Amazon, Amazon MP3, iTunes or the band's webstore

Three things!

1. There are still several spots left on the mix CD I'm making. Don't be shy :) It's going to be fun! I've used my random integer generator (well it's not mine, but I use it when I need random numbers) to generate my two letters. Should I tell you what they are? ;-)

2. So, apparently, Bob Dylan is going to be releasing an album on April 28th (in America) called Together Through Life. Awesome :) Modern Times was so good and I'm hoping this is just as awesome. It seems like it just randomly showed up, though. I kind of like that though, it's like a nice little surprise.

3. Warped Tour this year. I'm pretty sure my sister doesn't read this (or know about it), so I feel confident that I won't be giving anything away if I spill the beans on here. It's my sister's 15th birthday on 4/1 and I thought it would be a fun gift to give her tickets to her first Warped Tour (and really first concert). So that's the plan. So, here is a list of the bands scheduled to play that I'm excited to see (of course the list of dates that these bands are playing hasn't been posted yet, so it might be that some of the following won't be there at our venue.

*Anti-Flag
*Bad Religion
*Big D and the Kids Table (I've actually only heard a couple of songs by these guys, but I like what I hear and hey, it's a nice Boston ska band, what more can you ask for?)
*Bouncing Souls
*Escape the Fate (a buddy of mine just turned me on to these guys. The song "We Won't Back Down" is one of my current jams (and I would post it here, but I'm typing from my bedroom and the portable hard drive is in my office. If you can't find it, email me and I'll see that you get it)
*Flogging Molly
*Less than Jake (they WILL play "Scott Farcas Takes it On the Chin" this time or I swear to God, they'll regret it. No, I'm not making a threat. It's just that this will be like the 5th or 6th time seeing them and they've NEVER played it and I REALLY want them to!)
*NOFX
*Streetlight Manifesto
*The Ataris
*Thrice

The other thing is, unless they've changed the way they do it, they pick the schedule for each venue the morning of the show, so it could be that there are conflicts that will prevent me from seeing some of those. Also, my sister has bands that she wants to see that aren't listed above. So I'm hoping to get a good post out of this. And some good sibling bonding :)

Watching the Lost finale and posting to my blog...what an age we live in!!

I simply love this show. So much.

Anywho, on to some music. First, some bracket action!

Round 1d:

1. Kanye West vs The Suicide Machines

Kanye West - Champion from Graduation
The Suicide Machines - Did You Ever Get a Feeling of Dread? from A Match and Some Gasoline

2. Bad Religion vs No Use For a Name

Bad Religion - Requiem for Dissent from New Maps of Hell
No Use For a Name - Part Two from Keep Them Confused

Happy Voting! Please vote!

In other news, Weezer has released their Red album. And it's certainly an improvement from their recent efforts. Maladroit was ok. But the Red album almost makes a Blue Album/Pinkerton-esque showing. I'm going to post one track, but I'm saving my favorite track for the end of the year. The funny thing is that I've read some negative reviews of that very track...more on that later.

But here's the track.

Weezer - Troublemaker


Finally, I'm going to start a new feature on this crazy thing. I'm thinking of calling it CP B-sides!

Basically, I will use this feature to allay the anxiety of wanting to post more songs to the Contrast Podcast than I'm allowed to. For instance, this week was Babies. And I submitted this:

Alan Wilkis - Bad Mamma Jamma from Babies Dream Big

but I wanted to submit this, too!:

Barenaked Ladies - Baby Seat from Maroon

and now everyone can enjoy both of them! Hooray Internet!

OK everyone! Have a great week or so!