HORRAY! IT’S SAMMIES WEEK! As you may recall from year past, to help satiate your craven craving curiosity in the lead-up to the announcement of this year’s Sammy Awards winners we offer up a little something called the Skyline 50. That is, 50 songs that caught our ear this year for one reason or another. Now, it would be wrong to call this our 50 favorite or the 50 best because, let’s face it, we would just list the five tracks from Powerhouse‘s Yeah! ep and call it a day as we would rather listen to that ten times in a row than anything else. So maybe it’s more like our 50 favorite songs if we limited ourself to just a few Powerhouse! tracks.  Oh, and once again, all these bands lucked out by there not being a Golden Axe release. Rules are same as last year, where the song must have been on a physical release of some sort and have come out since the last time we did this. Songs are listen in alphabetical order.

PS: Don’t forget to vote in the Sammies! Especially if you are into bands that are not from Pasadena, because those are the only people winning right now. Seriously.

Acrylic Tomb – Wicked Poseur
Wicked Poseur/Little Trooper 7″ (Shdwply Records)
More than their self-titled 2007 7″ debut, this split with Norfolk’s Little Trooper captures the primacy of guitars in Wicked Poseur’s live performance, a welcome evolution. Though still lock-stepped to the regular beat of a drum machine, by having the human touch of the six string at the forefront, the anything can happen element of frontman Arthur Bates’ personality gets a big bottom boost (along with the overall fullness of the composition). Simple China Girl  keyboard sprigs counterpoint vocals that rarely take a breather and punch up a surprisingly punchy dance track that manages to avoid the pitfalls of both New Wave worship and too-little too-late electroclashism.

Adventure Renor – Giant Princess
Grey Ghost #61 (Grey Ghost)
Spunky throwback to the uncollapsed heyday of early 90′s college radio. Makes us think of park bench polariods of little consequence that ecstatic fanboys will spend their afternoons fashioning into heady zines while the Pepsi goes flat and the doorbell stays broken. Certainly the best organized of GP’s tracks, and a peek into how rawness can be done right with a little bit of heart behind it. Sorry Mario, your princess is potentially moving on to bigger castles.

Aku Benci Kamu – The Secret Prostitutes
The Secret Prostitutes 7″ (Psycho Wolf/ArseGestapo1982/Death Exlamations/Cutthroat Records)
Almost Devoesque in the application of angular speed to concerted tightness. Simple riffs spit out over a matter of fact lyrical slate that could be about working in a cola mine for all we know (The Secret Prostitutes’ songs are sung in a language said to be indigenous to Indonesia). A minute and a quarter of deadly serious sounding goof that we hope isn’t meant to be taken seriously, because it’s some serious fun. Seriously.

Death Ride – The Monocles
The Monocles/News on the March Halloween Party Split (Self Released)
Putting the brakes on their usual Camaro tempo, “Death Ride” is the menace of a black and tint Coupe de Ville, jilted lover behind the wheel with tear streaks on his face that could be from sadness, anger or madness (and why not all three). Whitewalls slowly turning, the worse half of ourselves ascribe motive to why this man is on this particular street at this particular time of the night. With the methodical, tom-dominated drums and increasingly well honed dark guitar tone of The Monocles best recording to date as the soundtrack, don’t expect that it’s going to end well for somebody, if anybody.

Big Big Jokes Jokes – BLACKIE
Wilderness of North America (Self Released)
The most interesting (and shortest) track of BLACKIE’s Pasadenaization of Grime may lack such wiley features as a 2-step beat, it does convey the off-kilterism commonly thrown about when describing the genre. With a healthy ooze of refinery slime and a taste for massively clipping volume that somehow preserves a plink plink subtelty, Big Big Jokes Jokes shows, with its chiding battery of the stereotypes of taste and self image, that there is substance behind the slapdash smokestack of his sound (even if the entire enterprise is in danger of collapsing under the hype of a very narrow band of IP addresses. Cue BLACKIE fans who take the internet too seriously calling us ‘faggots’ in the comments).

Blue Line – Andy McWilliams
The Shoegazer EP (Three Ring Records)
Years ago, when we were spending a considerable amount of time paling around with the Scattered Pages’ multi-instrumentalist Andy McWilliams, he burned us a CDr of some recordings he had been putting together under an umbrella name of his ‘shoegaze recordings’ in response to our sharing some of our own work with him that we were doing under the same nom de rock. Though neither his work or our would fall under any conventional understanding of that jazz-mastering, jaguaring genre of swoony-balooney stompbox fetishism (we appeared to both be taking the approach of litterally looking at one’s shoes in shyness), what those recordings did do was blow our minds. Fastforward to the present, and those recordings are finally getting a wider release. Blue Line, with it’s pastoral acousitcs married to drum and bass sensibilities is a standout among a collection of mostly instrumental explorations of rich sounds, honey-eared melodies and sad summer days.

Builds Brand New – Sharks and Sailors
Builds Brand New (Self Released)
Casting off any remaining doubt that they are still the plodding, loud, hipster metal act that populated their debut EP, Builds Brand New (both the album and the song) demonstrates how a re-alignment of dynamics away from brute force and towards a wider battle between greater angles and lesser demons can be both more captivating and weightier. This single song walks through a blue-water beach and a dead-dog ditch; a dumptruck with a swan’s grace; a hope with horror in the foreground. It shouldn’t ever be a suprise to see a bill with a band doing something interesting visiting town and Sharks and Sailors opening up considering most of the songs on this album are better than most of the songs on this countdown.

Carter – Woozyhelmet
Get Down (Soda Pop Productions)
Now, just because Woozyhelmet can come to your house and play in your livingroom and transform your dull chips and dips New Year’s open house into a spontanious baccalorian chariot race doesn’t mean that they play an endless series of dumb party jams or have shifted their focus from songcraft to mindless destruction and self elevation under the guise of a musical act (something sadly common). Carter is one of those jams that has your head nodding one way to the beat and another to the Brian May-bright guitar riff on the top of it all. And just when it does seem to careen into a premature end, there’s the comeback – a second round gift from a band that knows the difference between milking and satisfying as well as they do ortund and sonorous.

Champagne – The Gold Sounds
Gold Sounds EP (Self Released)
So, when you plug an electric guitar into a tube amp, the first stage (the pre-amp) amplifys the weak signal coming from the instrument’s pickups to a more managable level using a series of vacume tubes. If you amplify that signal too strongly, though, it will attempt to extend itself outside the physical limitations of the tubes, forcing an unintended modification of the original signal that results in a series of harmonics and other whatseycallsits when it comes out the other end. In short, distortion. It’s a pure, simple concept that allows for endless tinkering and variables and outcomes. In other words, its the perfect meaphor for Rock and Roll itself. Champagne is one of those pure, simple rock songs that hits all the highlights. A good, catchy riff with an amazing sounding guitar, a solid rythm section, and a fine (if harried) voice to top it all off. It shouldn’t catch us off gaurd whenever we hear something something so understandable come off sounding so effortless, but it always does.

Crooked Shepherd – Hollywood Black
Crooked Shepherd EP (Mia Kat)
You know, this spring and summer we were dating a jaw-dropper of a law student who invited us to spend a week with her in Guanajuato, Mexico which is this amazing Spanish Colonial silver town hidden away from the greasy hands of narco-gangs, neon lights and American tourists. But rather than our memories of this place being making love to the sound of cobblestone streets below or rooftop breakfasts in private gardens or cups of coffe and quiet moments holding hands or watching old couples dance in public squares while the sun goes down and fantasizing about one day joining their ranks, all we can seem to recall is the endless hours we spent wandering around waiting for her to get out of class while we listened to this record and tried to figure out how to review it. We can’t think of that amazing place or that astonishing catch of a woman without thinking of regret and our own shortcomings and this song and vice versa. So yeah, fuck this catchy ass song.