VANEK'S TOP LIST OF 2015

This thing was on top of our year-end list.

2015 was a year that went by entirely quickly, but when I sat back to think about what new music stood out I came up with a decent list pretty quickly. In Missoula I think we were lucky to have a major renovation done to our largest real-deal, non-sports hall live music venue, the Wilma Theater, which had been in dire need of it. The Wilma was always a funky and sweet place, and while I tend to prefer my buildings well past their prime and dingy to new and shiny, you can only see Yo La Tengo so many times with sub par audio and not start to wonder. So, thanks to the Top Hat's Nick Checota, the place sounds and looks great and here's to a sweet roster in 2016.

Additionally, this August's Total Fest was the last one, you can read about why here. I think it was the correct way to wrap it up, and I encourage people to direct a good amount of their live-show attention to smaller and mid-sized venues like the ZACC, VFW, Palace and Stage 112, all of which are helping keep Missoula vibrant with affordable shows chock-a-block with great locals, and amazing touring national talent. Camp Daze will happen June 2-4, 2016 and I'll be there.

V/A Long Time Comin': Lost Sounds From the Treasure State
Unquestionably, this double LP is at the tip top of my listening heap for 2015. This thing took Dave Martens (Best Westerns, Magpies, etc. etc.) many years to assemble, and his hard work digging up the great, never-released, or long-forgotten gems included on here speaks to a garage rock past in Montana that had scenes from Sidney to Kalispell and all points in between. It fascinates me that Montana bands were getting national air time and attention via the more democratized and culturally important radio. There are as many stories behind this record as their are bands, and the copious liner notes help contextualize all the great stuff that was going on about fifty+ years ago. The first pressing is selling through quickly. A+ stuff.

Dan Deacon "Gliss Riffer"
Dan's ideas continue to push electronic music and pop music in general, and I continue to really dig what he does, as indescribable as it can be.

Broken Water "Wrought"
This great band just called it quits, after probably 8 years of doing it. I always found their sheets of sound mesmerizingly hopeful and great.

Ciudad Lineal  "El Nuevo Hombre"
Spaniards (or I think actually Catelonians) Ciudad Lineal from Barcelona make decidedly 80s Cold War synth jams. Kid of Cure-y, I guess, but a little more awkward and eastern euro vibed.

Hammerhead "New Directionz
Duh. Hammerhead regrouped fully and officially this year, with Jeff and Paul's return to the snowy and windswept prairie of the north. And they self-released a full-on return-to-everything-you-loved LP.

Shahs "The Bodyguard"
Missoulians Shahs released a great full length this year, and it's a progression from their mostly Tom Helgerson dreamy tropical synth to something a little more layered and complex. Sorry this sounds like Wine Spectator. Trust me, mon.

DIÄT "Positive Engery"
Australian two-piece living in Berlin, making decidedly un-modern sounding and cold post punk/new wave. I hate saying the words "post punk" as much as you hate reading them, but I think they're pretty close to correct here. Damnation is this great. Heavily, heavily rotated.

Benjamin Von Wildenhaus "II"
As the title says, this is Benjamin Von Wildenhaus's second LP, and his first was a revelation. This one continues to mine the same great vein of subtle and wild, uh, guitarscapes. Uggh, right? Who said that word would be okay?

Miss Lana Rebel and Kevin Michael Mayfield "The Midtown Island Sessions"
Most of these are in no particular order, but this record is my co-top record of 2015. We'd been waiting impatiently for the next phase of Lana and Kevin's output, following up on their excellent A Real Subtle Beauty, and this album rings true to all the greatness of their songwriting and performance abilities. Heavy rotation.

Flesh World "the Wild Animals In My Life"
More stellar, depressed but frenetic kind of post punk, this time from somebody from Limp Wrist. I really dug this.

Swamp Ritual "S/T" 
Heavy Missoulians whose riff mastery became pretty clear in 2015. Riffin' bong-rock at its finest, with only a bass and drums behind it.

Shopping "Why Choose"
British band whose sound is like a kind of modernized Gang of Four. Super LP.

Nots "We Are Nots"
Memphis band on Goner who played here. Niki saw them and gave me the CD, I loved it.

Sleaford Mods "Key Markets"
British (I guess) hip hop that's so smart and political that it's kind of creating its own world around it and their documentary Invisible Britain is apparently great news too. Here's hoping that Big Sky Doc Fest or the Roxy get it next year.

John Carpenter "Lost Themes"
Arguably, the thing I waited most anxiously for in 2015, and it didn't disappoint one bit.

Shannon and the Clams "Gone By the Dawn"
I always have a blast watching this band. They're incredibly good musicians, and songwriters and something about them just makes them transcend so much of the rest of what's out there.

Live:
Fireballs of Freedom at Total Fest.
Red Fang at the Palace.
Big Business at Total Fest.
Earthless at the Top Hat.
The Whip at Total Fest.
Dead at Total Fest.
Black Cobra at Total Fest.
Built To Spill at the Badlander.
Humpy at Total Fest.
Everyday Sinners at Total Fest.
I think I'll need to get out of the house more this year.

TOTAL MIXTAPES

If you're the kind of person that enjoys convenience or just the satisfaction that comes from consolidating everything in one place, today is probably the best day of your life. We've put together three mixtapes featuring the majority of our Total Fest lineup for this year. They're not really tapes, we know, but they're streaming online so if that's the kind of the thing that totally floats your proverbial boat then hell, we're here for ya. Each mix is loosely based around a genre or two and we tried to make each one have a sense of flow because, well, half of the Total Fest committee is made up of radio DJs and that's something we care about.

Yeah, we're aware not every band playing Total Fest this year is on the mixes. We'll be posting more stuff like this in the future so no worries, we wanna make everyone part of the party. We'll keep you updated like we always do from this blog. 

Here they be:

ELEGANCE IN LEISURE: ANCIENT FOREST

To start off I'm gonna quote myself from a review I wrote on Weird Missoula a while ago: "Ancient Forest reminds me of the Tolkien-obsessed eco-folk of Tyrannosaurus Rex...leisurely singing songs in [a] near-vulnerable voice, tunes deconstructed to their constituent parts, referencing trees, referencing Tolkien, and warped along some magic line unknowable to the uninitiated." That was in reference to the very first iteration of Ancient Forest I heard, one in which Kalen Walther was the primary, and for the most part, lone member. This full band version he's been touting lately though, man, OK: much of those above observations are still kinda true but I'm hearing more Syd Barrett-y affectations; it's a better presentation to all this soft-psychedelia. I feel like I wanna reference the band Gandalf right now and hey, that's right back at that Tolkien nonsense. Apt, I guess.

Ancient Forest's recent lineups have been a relative who's-who of Missoula's small but fertile little weirdo scene: members of J. Sherri and Mordecai (both Total Fest alumni) have sometimes joined Kalen at recent shows. Every time I've seen 'em it's been hella magical and for something like this to be native to our neck of the woods means we're really pretty lucky. These guys are the tops and yeah, they're playing Total Fest XIV. 

LOTS HAVE BEEN DRAWN: ENTER MORDECAI

It's a profound pleasure to announce that those "small town losers" who need something to do, Mordecai, are putting things together to play Total Fest. Since the first time that I saw the Bodish brothers and "friend" play (2009, I think), I was completely blown away.

At this point, it seems silly to bring up their humble beginnings, but the fact that these dudes from Butte seemingly popped up from nowhere has always impressed me (more on this below). So a brief trip down my personal memory lane: Mordecai played the side room in the now defunct BSMT (not sure if this is the first time, but it's the one that sticks as the first time). From the first note, it was obvious that we were in for something special. The cramped room provided the perfect acoustics for their lo-fi, psych fuzz, Velvet Underground/Stooges style that weaves in and out of stability and coherence. Approving nods, winks, smiles, and "holy shits" were exchanged between me and virtually everyone I encountered. Throw in a Sister Ray cover that somehow seemed longer, more tangential, and more stoney than the orginal, and it was the perfect recipe for a mid-summer show, tucked away in the dark confines of a basement.

Now, in 2013, I think we're realizing just how good we had it. Here, in Montana, three young dudes played well beyond their years and, if you listen to all the chatter, well beyond their geographic boundaries. Thing is, that's all terribly wrong.

This is a tired discussion, but the internet has collapsed most of our traditional trajectories of time and space. For some reason, it's "odd" that a band like Mordecai sprouted from Butte, but it's not odd that, throughout the years, excellent music has erupted from small towns in Texas, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, etc. etc. etc. Before the internet, in spite of what some people may lead you to think, people made excellent music that didn't simply mimic what was spewing from big cities like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

Yes, there was a world before the internet. Fanzines, skate mags, radio stations, friends, random dudes and dudettes helped small town kids create some seriously crazy, unique, experimental, genre bending shit that killed it.

So, with that, there is no reason to say that Mordecai came out of nowhere. They came from somewhere: a rich personal history, inquisitive journeys, mathematics, and some damn fine musicianship. It's a shame that they cannot play as often as we want them to. But, what isn't a shame is that they'll bring their psychedelic mutations back to Total Fest. Following last year's 7" on Wantage, they've released College Rock, which is as dirty and full of mutations as anything else that's out there. Solid jams that find a way to morph our collective memories into a newly formed and welcome reinterpretations of a mash-upped personal take on what came before them. Fresh atonal guitar with sneering vocals, solid bass and drum lines that grate at everything your parents loved, while celebrating it at the same time. It's as punk as it gets. Here is an old-ish jam:
Mordecai -- Composition 07082011 from Ed Shaw on Vimeo.

THRONES CONFIRM.

Thrones is a band whose thunder is incredible. The plurality of the name, compared against the singularity of the band is a pretty interesting thing to think about too. Thrones have always been complex and weird enough to be a much larger entity than just one dude making music. That fact is a testament to the mind of Joe Preston, who is Thrones.

The pronouns and verb forms one normally chooses to describe a band (they, their, them, plural) all point at a guy who's able to conjure up more spirits, more depth and more sound than almost anybody else. Thrones essentially is a guy, a drum machine, bass and vocals, and while that may seem like a spartan set of tools with which to make music that is this epic, orchestrated and spacious, it's a pretty miraculous thing to witness live. One can't overstate the power and catharsis that come when you drop the needle into the groove of Sperm Whale, Alarune, the s/t record, etc.

I saw Thrones for the first time in 1995, at (I think), a winery somewhere in Portland. My brother's old band (the Waydowns) had been on tour with Unwound and Vern had put out the Thrones first cassette. We'd been listening to the cassette over and over, and when we finally got to see the band, I remember being at first a little concerned that there wasn't enough stuff to replicate live what we'd been listening to. Long story short, it was awesome and I'm stoked to still be listening to this incredible music 15 years later. Wish I still had that tape though.

Joe often gets name checked for his bass playing in other bands, but to us, Thrones is where it's at, and it needs no qualification. Ladies, germs: THRONES!

TOTALITY: INCOMING

Whether you are a Western Montanan, anti-government type from an enclave like Noxon (MT), or a Spokanite, looking to get away from the town with the gayest...yet weirdly anti-gayest mayor ever (or, we guess "former mayor"), Total Fest VIII is anticipating you, and awaits you with arms spread wide. Or as wide as you could expect from friendly Missoulians who spend the better part of 9 months making sure these three days rock hard as fuck.

It's hard to talk globally about a festival that goes to painstaking lengths to choose individual bands that we think represent the best shit going on in music currently, but hell, what's the harm: I honestly believe that we are proof that a festival can be thoroughly non-commercial, but feature some awesome talent that you'd be hard pressed to find at any larger/expensive/bogus fest. This year we've got rap, folk, punk, hardcore, metal and boogie rock, and everything in between and it's all unified by the same oneness of purpose: Quality. If you're these parts, please come out and bring a friend with you! Thank you, and we'll see you at the Badlander Thursday, August 20th!