Raddest Records of 2020

Plus, two recent films that deal with sobriety

One of the best things about being off Twitter? No best of lists where people who write for clicks and eyeballs make some passing reference to the latest death toll before rattling off a list of books, records, movies they haven’t read/listened to/seen. Or, they compile a list so large that it’s meaningless. Who needs that shit?

Not you. Not me. 

But every year I contribute to this nonsense with a list of Raddest Records. Every year it gets a little dumber, and every year I get a little grouchier about it. There is no best in art. There is only taste and taste is subjective, taste is relative, taste is temporary. So please interpret “raddest” to mean something that arrested my attention and made me feel something this terrible year and “record” to mean single, EP, LP, re-issue, playlist or whatever released in 2020. 

As I wrote a few weeks ago, I’m in the middle of the long research project that involves listening to lots of records that came out between 30 and 40 years ago. So the bulk of the music I listened to in 2020 wasn’t even considered for this list. Am I saying that I’m less invested in the music on this list than in years past when music saved me? Maybe. Probably. 

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Raddest Records of 2020 is that I listened to the majority of this music through my hearing aids. Because we we’re all cooped up in the condo I couldn’t blast my record player whenever I wanted so I listened to music on iTunes, Spotify, and Bandcamp through the Bluetooth connection on my hearing aids, the irony if which is not lost on me. 

Another weird thing that may interest only me: my Spotify account got hacked and I lost control of it for several months and when I got it back it was filled with all kinds of shit I would never listen to, so I listened to it (or tried to anyway), and it all sucks. Unbelievably basic beats and dance music and hip-hop. (Of course, somewhere in southeast Asia someone is telling their friends about how they hacked some stupid American’s Spotify account and it was filled with unlistenable punk and hardcore playlists.) We’re both right.

As weird as 2020 was for me, the music consumer, it was much, much weirder for the musicians many of whom were literally on tour when the pandemic shut down the large gathering industry. They had to go home and figure out how to make a living in a world turned upside down and many of those people somehow wrote and recorded new music as if their lives depended on it so middle-age assholes like me could listen to it on their hearing aids and compare it unfavorably to earlier work. There is no justice in this world. No point in looking for it either.

So, in no particular order, here are my…

10 Raddest Records of 2020 

10. Illuminati Hotties FREE I.H. This Is Not the One You’ve Been Waiting For

There was a point in the pandemic when I played board games with my family every weekend and we’d listen to music together and my favorite record to play was this one. Every song is radically different from the song that precedes it. This would probably drive a record label crazy, but I found it oddly empowering that someone was making something exactly the way they wanted. Favorite track: “Frequent Letdown.” 

9. Bob Mould Blue Hearts (Merge Records)

I touted this one a few weeks ago, but if you like Angry Bob Mould then Blue Hearts, Mould’s fourteenth solo album, is for you.

8. Coriky S/T (Dischord)

When Ian MacKaye tells you to have a cup of tea, you put the kettle on and chill the fuck out. 

7. Circle Jerks Group Sex (Trust Records)

Might as well get all the old geezer punks out of the way, and because I wrote about this one few weeks ago, I’ll tell you a Keith Morris story instead. Did you know that before Keith was in OFF!, Midget Handjob, the Circle Jerks, or Black Flag he was a roadie for the Commodores? If you’ve read My Damage or Keith’s chapter in More Fun in the New World, you know that Keith has a knack for sneaking into places and one of these was a televised showcase for the Commodores. Keith didn’t just sneak in, but he wrangled his way backstage where he helped himself to the Commodores’ beer and sandwiches, and because he acted like he belonged there, everyone assumed he did. So instead of getting kicked out, he was invited to a recording session the following day, which he parlayed into a job with the Commodores that took Keith across the country and lasted about three weeks. Just goes to show you that it’s Keith’s world and the rest of us are just taking up space in it. Here’s a previously unreleased track of the Circle Jerks rehearsing in a little pink house in Inglewood.  

6. Hurañas Brujas, Cholas E Inventadas (Iron Lung)

An intoxicating witches brew of swirling punk chaos blasting out of Chiapas, Mexico.

5. Death Hags Big Grey Sun (Self-Released)

I’ve been an admirer of Death Hags from the beginning when Lola G. split from DTCV to do her own thing. Lola G. is a French musician based in L.A. who sings and plays guitar, bass, and synth—basically everything—to create songs she’s characterized in the past as doom pop. But then suddenly Death Hags was popping up all over the place: on a doomed quarantine comp, providing the theme music for Cinematic Void, releasing new tracks on Bandcamp, all while working on an album. Death Hags was invited to do a radio show on the ultra-cool CAMP and her project morphed from one album to seven with “new tracks, demos, radio collages, covers and alternate versions.” The shows are available to stream (for a limited time) or as individual albums on Bandcamp. Arresting ear candy and a testament to Lola G’s immense talent and creativity. 

4. Gulch Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress (Closed Casket Activities)

Face-melting hardcore from San Jose, California. I know the formulation “_____ is the _____ we need right now” got retired in April but if your brainbox is in need of a good old fashioned scouring, fire up “Self-Inflicted Mental Terror.”

3. Surfbort Apocalypse Care Package (Self-Released)

Another example of the pandemic scrambling plans. Did Surfbort have another album in the hopper? Who knows, but when the COVID-19 showed no signs of letting up, Surfbort dropped these demos. Trashy, thrashy, and in your face, Surfbort rules.

2. Uzi Cadena De Odio (Adult Crash Records)

The album art says it all “10 tracks total punk” from Bogota, Colombia. Sometimes I close my eyes and imagine I’m at a show where no one knows me and I don’t know anyone and I lose myself in the swarm of bodies moving to the music. The riffs are righteous and loud and I’m exactly where I need to be. Vaccines are nice but when this pandemic is over I want someone to teleport me into the pit at an Uzi show in Bogota.

1. Casual Nun Resort for Dead Desires (Hominid Sounds)

If there’s an album I couldn’t do without this year it’s this one. It’s got an odd intro, kind of jazzy, kind of upbeat and then the album just takes off into the stratosphere. Didn’t fasten your seat belt? Oh well you belong to Casual Nun now. Casual Nun is a bunch of Greek guys and one Californian who all live in London and make noisy rock that’s so frenetic and full it completely obliterates the outside world. Epic build-ups, relentless beats, punishing guitars. The sequencing is exquisite. I don’t know what’s going in these songs. I don’t want to know. I just get lost in them. Listening to this record is like going to church and never wanting to leave: an irrational belief that the thing that destroys you will somehow save you. Yeah, wrap me up in that forever. 

Did something loud and lewd and obnoxious get its hooks in you this year? Tell me about it. 

Riz Ahmed punishes the tubs and his eardrums in Sound of Metal

Sound of Metal

I don’t talk about my sobriety all that often but I did last week and many of you wrote to tell me you appreciated that and now I’m telling you that I appreciate you telling me. A little affirmation goes a long way because being an addict is like being a bad president. You’ve got the codes to the nuclear football and can make the world an infernal hellscape in less time than it takes to get a pizza delivered. What does that mean? Being in recovery means living with the knowledge of how to destroy one’s life and every day you choose not to. Most days that feels amazing. “You mean I get to decide to have a life?” But some days it feels like a burden. That’s when the trigger finger gets itchy. Maybe I’ll nuke just one little country… Affirmation helps. It’s why we keep these corny slogans handy because on the bad days they feel like a lifeline, they glimmer with the promise of our best intentions. 

I watched a pair of movies last week and oddly enough they were both about addicts. Sound of Metal is about a musician in an indie experimental noise band (not metal) who goes deaf and is also a heroin addict. This one is right in my wheelhouse. Weird music (with a cameo by Surfbort). Hearing loss. Addiction. Kind of a triple crown of my “interests” (though maybe afflictions is a better word for it) and yet I didn’t love it. 

[Spoilers ahead! If you don’t want me to ruin the movie for you scroll down until you see the word “Wolf” in the subhead]

Riz Ahmed plays Ruben who is part of a two-piece band with his lover Lou (Olivia Cooke). She sings and plays guitar and presumably writes all the material. Homeboy is just the drummer (sorry drummers), but shit goes sideways when his hearing goes to shit. It’s a movie not a documentary so I didn’t get too hung up on how realistic it is to suddenly lose one’s hearing in the middle of a concert. Hearing loss is something many, many musicians deal with, especially those who have been at it for a while. In most cases hearing loss is gradual, which is why people are often in denial about it. The slow disintegration of one’s hearing causes us to compensate in a host of ways, often without realizing we’re doing it.

But the way Ruben loses his hearing is completely devastating. The kind of thing that would make you freak out. And he does, but to be honest, not as much as one might thing. He’s a DIY guy. He wants to fix it and get on with his life, which is an attitude that many people take at the beginning of recovery. Like they’re taking a car to the shop. “I know the brakes are shit and the transmission is shot and I’m leaking fluids all over the place but just make the engine light go off so I can get back on the road, okay?” Well, it doesn’t work that way in life or in movies, sobriety or hearing loss.

Lou realizes that Ruben needs help and checks him into a sober living facility for deaf people, which Ruben navigates with mixed results. Here Sound of Metal gives us a glimpse of a world I never realized existed and it’s fascinating to watch—for a little while.

Losing one’s hearing is traumatic, but so is having it “restored.” Hearing loss is permanent. Once you lose it, you don’t get it back, which is why you should treat it early; but there are things you can do to trick the brain into “hearing” again like hearing aids. A hearing aid is much more than an amplifier. A good audiologist can customize a device so it boosts the exact frequencies that one’s ear can no longer access. The hearing isn’t improved. The device is transmitting an enhanced signal that the brain interprets as hearing. The first few days of this are hell until the brain adjusts, which it does, because brains are amazing. What Ruben experiences, a cochlear implant, is even more intense, but you’d never know it from Sound of Metal. 

Ahmed is an astonishingly good actor, and his performance is mesmerizing. He makes the movie work as well as it does, but as harrowing as the first half of the movie is, the second half is kind of a snooze. It hinges on a bunch of unrealistic stuff. A stretch of time flashes by in an instant. He goes to France. It’s a bit of a jumble that fails to pay off the intensity of the opening scenes, which is kind of a shame. 

Sound of Metal does an excellent job of showing how you can only really deal with a problem by accepting it. There’s a reason why that’s the first step in drug and alcohol recovery, and it was really interesting to see that play out in the context of hearing loss.

Wolf of Snow Hollow

One of these people is not in control of their emotions

Writers have been using horror as a metaphor for addiction and/or mental illness for centuries. A man that turns into a beast by the light of the moon is a standard werewolf narrative, but the same scenario is played out at the local bar every night of the week. Wolf of Snow Hollow puts a fresh twist on this storyline. 

Officer John Marshall is in a bad situation. A tourist is brutally murdered in the ski town he is sworn to protect and serve. The Sheriff is suffering from undiagnosed health issues but refuses to step down, hamstringing Marshall’s ability to solve the crime. It also doesn’t help that the Sheriff is Marshall’s father.

Marshall is extremely hot-headed and has extreme anger management issues. He’s also a recovering alcoholic. As the body count goes up and all signs point to the culprit being a very large and very ferocious animal, i.e. a werewolf, Marshall becomes increasingly volatile. As he inches closer and closer to relapsing, the viewer begins to wonder: could Marshall be the werewolf of Snow Hollow? 

Jim Cummings, wrote, directed, and starred in this extremely hard to classify movie that uneasily sits at the juncture of horror and comedy. I imagine some people will find this movie very unfunny, while others will think it’s hilarious. Marshall goes so far out of his way to be a prick and is so willing to walk the boundary of his emotions that a part of me can’t help but admire him even while recognizing that he needs help.

I love the way the movie steamrolls the viewer with information that makes the movie work as a horror, comedy, and drama as we get to know Marshall’s family and understand the ways that people are depending on him. Marshall is acutely aware of this and the genius of this movie is that Marshall tries not to disappoint them but also resents the pressure they put on him, which ensures his downfall. This is the heart of the movie and not some throwaway back story. It also makes Marshall a very unsympathetic character, but a very real one. His biting humor and unwillingness to face the darkness inside him makes us complicit in his bad decisions. 

This is extremely refreshing in a genre that thrives on neatly defined good guys and bad guys. Marshall is capable of anything. He is the best of us, and the worst of us, and right up until the final scene there’s no telling which will win the day. 

Hat tip to Ryan Bradford for recommending Wolf of Snow Hollow. Thanks, Ryan! You were right (for once).

Thank you for reading. I’ll be back next week with my annual Year in Books. Keep your eyes open on Xmas, because I just might send something down your chimney and it won’t be a package nosiree…

All kidding aside, if you want to talk to someone about addiction or hearing loss, I’m happy to listen or share my experience with you.