Dann Lawrence is a member of local bands the Fucktrots and Bushmask.
1. Ed Schrader’s Music Beat – Jazz Mind
In the eternal words of poet savant critique master rocker and roller Ian Folk Svenonius: “The best rock and rollers are really just like comedians.” No performer to emerge this year greater exemplifies this eternal truth than Baltimore’s Ed Schrader. A wham city graduate and all around inspiration, Schrader has rightfully reduced the rock and rock and roll M.O. to it’s purest essentials: one floor tom, one bass guitar and a soaring, reverb-laden voice spitting words of shrouded and wacky wisdom. Hilarious, true, tasteful and forever teenage.
2. Black Pus – Pus Mortem
Providence requisite noise pioneer continually ups his game with this tasteful and forceful delivery. The name of the game on this release is control: Chippendale’s beats and blasts are harsh and ear splitting as we have come to be expected from this project, eardrums will be shattered and senses overloaded, but throughout the hullabaloo is an undeniable sense of discipline, mastery of craft. Chippendale at once assaults his trap kit with the aplomb of a chimp on a sugar rush and the tenderness of a violinist going through the motions of the most intricate of Beethoven’s work. A master at the top of his game.
3. The Hive Dwellers – Hewn from the Wilderness
Oh, Calvin. The guy with the incredible blue eyes remains the elite, steadfast, generation spanning DIY maestro he was when he started the legendary K Records in Olympia, WA way back in 1982. This record is surely full of classics, throw backs to ’50’s rock and ballads that reach far beyond nostalgia or rehash. Lodged somewhere around the halfway point is “Get In”, a welcome invitation to every rock and roll misfit from Boston to Timbuktu to join the gang and forget the squares. 2012 may have really been the end of the world if it weren’t for this timeless track.
4. White Suns – Sinews
White Suns are a noise band with virtue, style and most importantly tight as heck restraint. Obviously familiar with the old cliche that in one must first learn all the “rules” before one can proceed to break ’em. Instant classic.
5. The Dreebs – Bait an Orchard
The Dreebs really sound like no other act grooving these days. A couple of young bucks situated in Brooklyn concocting ghostly, pummeling and ethereal scuzz out of a most unusual palette of electrified violin, prepared guitar and a trap kit. Fusing classical, hardcore and humor into something nearly unheard of. Truly inspiring to hear a group sounding like no other group in an age where cynicism and repetition are the name of the game. A+ guys. Keep on keeping on.
