BACON. EGG.

The excellent, weird world that Bacon and Egg inhabit is a hard thing to completely grasp. It's part jams. Part beats. Part falsetto screams. Part a lot of things. All of it, grounded in riffs, poppy metal and prog, and a weird fascination with all that awesome fantasy imagery.

This year, Bacon and Egg made the ballsy move of going into the studio for months on end to create a record that attempted to put some kind of enclosure around the hundreds of ideas that are generally contained in a single song. The resulting All In One Basket is a surprisingly cohesive, expansive piece of work. And I say that as a fan who's enjoyed Bacon and Egg since they first started 10 or so years back. I thought they were more a live band, you know. Not always translating super well to a record. But this All In One Basket, with its Priest inspired cover art, is good. It'll suck you in, and you can tell these guys worked at this, forced some edits, made hard decisions, but didn't make a spare album whatsoever. Anyhow, Bacon and Egg, man.

One of my all-time favorite moments at Total Fest was when Bacon and Egg played at Jay's Downstairs at Total Fest II. They told everybody they knew, got a crowd and started the night. They began exactly on time at 8pm, I think (which bands never really did at Jay's) and got people stoked. Said it gave 'em more time to party.  Consummate professionals.