Anyway, maybe the barriers to producing and distributing content online have fallen, and God knows that in spite of becoming a social wasteland for the 2.0 generation, Myspace is still a treasure trove of unsigned acts many of which will illuminate the days to come. But we are talking about the physical stuff too, black shiny discs of perchance anachronistic physically embedded content lining the shelves of the lounge at the centre of the spinning web which is our black crystal palace. In the following posts we will be telling you about these things.

As it has become traditional, and because we don’t like to repeat ourselves, these posts will bristle with music that either we didn’t post the first time around, stuff we just got access to, or stuff that shall be coming out next year and has us excited like the forward looking motherfuckers with a tiny speck of madness in their bloodshot eyes we actually are.

Love and napalm, let’s kick this punk out in strictly alphabetic order, synthesising minimalistically the best albums and things from that cradle of drone, fuzz and wail which is the ‘modern rock and roll scene’.

Blank Dogs- Under and Under: A cadre of No Wave terrorists slide past the vigilant gaze of Cerberus to steal torch music from the cold embrace of Death herself.

Cold Cave- Love Comes Close: The pale ghost of Ian Curtis smokes a cigarette in the back alleys behind the Hacienda wearing a garish dress and smudged make up.

Divorce – Pipe Down – A public service announcement in the library of Punk.

Eats Skull- Sick to Death- We will play top trumps in the smokey back of the bar, you bring your deck of forgotten country stars and I shall bring my deck of renowned American cannibals.

Foot Village- Anti-Magic- My daunting drumming halo wakes the underground dragon from its slumber so that it can rise and impale the love denialists with its mighty horn.

Ganglians- S/T- If Syd Barret had been born in Sacramento, the Piper at the Gates of Dawn would have sounded like this.

A Grave With No Name – Sofia – The disembodied spirit of Grunge possesses the Beach Boy’s lost reverb pedal.

HEALTH – Get Color- Splice the history of hardcore with stills from Lucifer Rising, take some drugs and fast forward so you can stare into the mad face of God

JD Twitch- 60 Minutes of Fear- A manifesto which is a love letter written in the concrete grounds of the parking lot which now stands where our culture was born.

Meth Teeth-Everything Went Wrong- There is a message written in the discarded license plates that pile up at the bottom of the Columbia river. It reads: ‘boogie is full of win’.

Lightning Bolt- Earthly Delights- Hyeronimus Bosch was a Hawkwind fan.

Little Claw- Human Taste- Spectral songs from deep in the well where I hurled my daughter in a moment of madness.

Mi Ami- Watersports- Mutant flowers stretch twisted towards the sun in the jungles that survived Agent Orange. There be Dub panthers here too.

Pens – Hey Friend What You Doing- Punk music to hold up the candy store

Railcars- Cathedral with no Eyes- Cenobites in the Warehouse.

Thee Oh Sees- Help- That gaunt crook John Dwyer is the master priest of a religion with temples spread across the garages of the land.

Times new Viking- Dig Yourself- And you will know them by the trail of broken hearts, and smouldering amps.

Vibes- Psychic 7”- The faces whose eyes belong to the hills have mouths that shriek and necks connected to torsos, arms and hands that slap the wah wah with abandon, because doom funk is such a blast.

Wavves – Summer Goth – Lightning rod for the distortion backlash crafts beautiful pop tunes before burying them in the garden of feedback hoping they’ll grow.

We warned you, and it happened- 2009 has been the year of Dude Culture: Upset the Rhythm’s Yes Way and the string of Sex is Disgusting London/Brighton celebrations  are examples & symptoms of an effervescent DIY UK  scene which has become the locus of mega-rapid forms of evolution with viciously exciting outcomes: Mazes, Cold Pumas, Male Bonding, Human Hair, Graffiti Island, Thee Fair Ohs, The Shitty Limits, Pens or Lovvers are some examples. We look forward to see what happens in 2010, which should be the year of Teen Sheikhs (scratch that, we just heard they are splitting up after their show this Sunday) and Peepholes amongst others.

In the meantime, we leave you with excellent Graffiti Island as featured in the G.G. Allin tribute 7” that was released earlier in the year. Here we have another new era barnyard stomper drenched in echo and nonchalant menace, cool stuff.

Graffiti Island- Drink, Fuck and Fight

Bathetic and LA Station Radar have kept the spiral of the eerie drone and haunted folk wheel spinning most mesmerisingly. Derelict landscapes of ambient beauty fractured by shards of noise, sing-along rhymes whispered in your ear by an invisible presence. Cough Cool, Jeans Wilder, Ela Orleans and The Dawns are but some examples of this craft.

We are particularly amazed by Pink Priest, who slip effortlessly between deconstructed drone, and industrial pounding and tearing. Some of the former in ‘Those Paws’, which could have soundtracked Valerie’s first menstruation and subsequent hallucinations, if she had been born in the post-apocalyptic landscapes that Cormac McCarthy described in The Road.

Pink Priest- Those Paws

Kill Shaman have been behind some of the coolest releases of the year, including Bad Dudes hyper-accelerated math punk and Pink Noise’s voodoo ruminations. Theirs is also the fortress of badness from which mystery grungegaze Angelino heroes Bipolar Bear organise their forays. They have released a couple of albums this year, including the pounding ‘Harlem Pripyat’ in Mexican Summer, as well as several 7” you’d be well advised to grab.

Graves is included in their forthcoming album, and it demonstrates why they make us drool every time: relentless crashing rhythms for a Terminator made of wood to rip the spine off the back of Sarah Connor, star-destroying zenta guitar rays and that oomph vibe, that oomph vibe which fills your aural space like psychedelic ooze collected from those magick places where the Red Crayola, the Seeds, Electric Prunes or Silver Apples first jammed the skulls of the clued upon populace of the Sixties underworld. Radness.

Bipolar Bear- Graves

We have another bunch of posts coming, which will cover other shadowy areas where we like to dwell. We will be dropping them during the next few days. Get ready.

Or perhaps Fuzz. We are talking about the dusty glue wave hurricane arriving to these shores as hatched in creative destruction cells all over fertile North American soil, fiery winds carrying sand that peels the skin off your bones, my friend, but don’t the chiselled skeletons continue spinning in a moshpit equivalent of the Dance Macabre? They do, they do.

All of this as heralded by the true master of all things weird, scrunky and wonderful, Mr. DJ Rick who rocks it every week from one of the best sites in the interwebs, the mighty Art for Spastics. You could do way worse than subscribe to it, because it always delivers with love and panache.

At this point in the history of Western Culture everyone has realised that No Age, Times New Viking, Deerhunter and Jay Reatard are hot shit. I think you heard about them in this humble page a loooooong time ago. Now they have signed for big indie labels but still remain true to their sonically damaged roots, they so do blow us away live. Pop tattooed noise knuckles is where it’s at. More greatness: Fucked Up delivered a propulsive sludge prog-hardcore opera somewhere in between Karl Orff and the Boredoms , with a very welcome nod to Pink Floyd that we dutifully reported to you, while HEALTH ripped a hole in our skulls with their speedcore streetfighter moves at a Primavera Sound to remember. Fuck Buttons represented the dice throwing fantasy drone massive, another show where we lost our shit.

We are very much in love with Vivian Girls’ stormy rendezvous of passionate girl pop and lo-fi C-86, Los Llamarada’s psyche trip over under and through primeval Mexican mesas and Sexy Prison’s basement party hyperkinetic what wave. Sic Alps made us wonder how awesome the Beatles would have been if they had been into cough syrup, and Psychedelic Horseshit threw us into a dozen simultaneous silly dances with one of the tunes of the year, ‘New Wave Hippies’. Ever so funny, ever so true.

The latter two bands operate from mighty Siltbreeze HQ, definitive furious record label of the year, they delighted us with U.S. Girls‘ astonishing ‘Introducing’ and drove a spike through our collarbone with its spatio-temporal reverse, insectoid no wave girl gang Titmachine. Hank IV’s psychobilly swing and Factums‘ percussive death trip deserve special mentions.

One day a black sun rose in the sky, it was of the size of a 7” and it dripped blood and tar all over our bedsheets, tough shit they were straight out of the cleaner, yet a messy room makes for unhinged dancing. This our most favourite of formats was indeed nicely represented by the nihilistic synth-fuzz of Catatonic Youth, Finally Punk’s turbo-DIY missles, Mayyors agit-propelled aggro and the so dumb it’s gotta be smart garage from John Dwyer’s latest incarnation, the mighty The Oh Sees. Coruscating indie antics also rock our boat, there you have the Wicked Awesomes and a Jay Reatard/Deerhunter split to kill for. We never managed to get hold of that one in its physical incarnation, life can be painful but we somehow keep going.

This is as far as the list goes, I know I am forgetting things, that means it was a sweet year.

The resurgence of the UK DIY scene truly deserves highlighting- 20JFG have been complaining for a while about the dearth of indigenous bands catering to our taste for alluring and sexily fucked up truly indie jams, well, we better shut up because Lovvers, Shitty Limits, Male Bonding or Pens have arrived to deliver excellence in this propituous 2008. Praise the dark lord, this is only right, or don’t most of the US bands mentioned above sip til inebriation from rich and nutritious sonic reservoirs of British post-punk and c-86? Just listen to JD Twitch’s 60 Minutes of Fear if you need proof.

We are particularly excited about the awesome Graffiti Island, who shall be owning 2009 after blinding us in 2008 with a string of infectious sludge-pop hits. Picture a black cauldron simmering in a damp cellar accessed down precarious steps in a London backalley murder scene more than once, voodoo spices of primeval psychobilly and surfboard splinters retrieved from under the nails of a drowned corpse are wickedly sprinkled into a strange brew harbinger of smudged hallucinations, a gothic noir land which is both Beat Happening and Arthur Machen. Graffiti Island’s music sounds like an esoteric chalk message left in a damp concrete wall for the weird kids in the know to decipher, we can’t think of a bigger praise.

Graffiti Island- Head Hunters

Graffiti Island have first 7inch out on House Anxiety Records in February, closely followed by a 7inch on Sex Is Disgusting (big love to Andy & James). They will have numerous other vinyl and casette releases out next year on american and canadian labels too and hopefully an american west coast tour with Male Bonding at some point in the summer.

This 2008 we have been listening to our fair share of Minimal Wave, either directly from the source, as in the excellent comp Des Jeunes Gens Modernes, or via the frozen melodies of true believers such as Blank Dogs or SSPS. French death funk commandoes Cheveu have an element of synthetic compulsion in their glossolalic muddled post-punk golem outbursts, but then there is much more, a shitstorm of styles stitched together with the anarchic feverishness and strobe-like blinding genius of other agents of chaos Sun City Girls, Butthole Surfers or the Fall, no mean feat: if dusty apocalyptic shit is your thing you should definitely step in this joint, and start a fight to Lola Langusta’s discombobulated strutting.

Cheveu- Lola Langusta

And let us finish this retrospective gazing hopeful into the future, who shall be blowing us away in that 2009 whose gnarly claws already slide surreptitiously through a crack in the torax of this moribund year? Many will, indeed. For now we leave you with the warm drone of one Twin Lion, upon whose music we stumbled most serendipituously in the concrete seafront of the Californian Internet. Every single song in the myspace page of this dude is to become, we foresee, a genuine hit in that weirdo discotheque in whose corner we lurk. If you need but a proof listen to the sunkissed bass rumble which kicks off Safest in Bearhugs, total psychedelic romance in a DIY launderette decorated with west cost melodies, Brian Wilson via Panda Bear for a total heart-throb, and a thousand cycles spinning disjointed in a percussive coda which is the loving dubbed-out Motown Nibiru to Liars’ frightful Ahriman.

Twin Lion- Safest in Bearhugs

Twin Lion’s AWESOME POWER cassette will be coming put in Family Time Music early 09. It’s only the beginning.

The sound of monotony swamping your skull, Graffiti Island are not typical. Brought together through a mutual love of the deranged dilettante Jan Terri, their bludgeoned lo-fi is the sort that’d have even Calvin Johnson turning his nose with frontman Pete Dee’s vocal a coarse narcotic, one dragged from a LA suburb through Dalston high street, wading its way through a swamp of comotose reverberating basslines.

Though they’re yet to release a record (a 7” is due through House Anxiety in coming months) there’s plenty to set a jaw round. ‘Mountain Man’ is from a while back now, something no ointment can treat, rabid and pent up with carnal desires, the sort of output you’d expect from an outfit citing Meat Puppets beside The Pastels. Self-loathing mongrel pop.

Graffiti Island- Mountain Man

Sic Alps are another of those American bands to blip from time to time in 20JFG’s radar with the gusto of those who don’t give a fuck, and tonight we are definitely buyin’, their U.S. Ez (Siltbreeze, what would we do without you?) finds them straddling the thin line between disjointed noise of the sort you’d dance to just fine if someone smashed your knee with a bicycle chain, and spaces of melodic genius which have always belonged to the crazy and the illuminated.

You might ask for proof and we lay ‘Gelly Roll Gum Drop’ at your feet, this is the same sort of fucked up blues of Rolling Stones circa Exile on Main St. , our beloved Royal Trux or even Electric Eels shedding a tear in the midst of a shitstorm of distortion (Girl…), music unselfconciously beautiful and rightfully raw, usually to be found at the back of the bar surrounded by a cloud of smoke, a conclave of empty bottles of liquor and the shadow of a broken heart shining above like a Kirlian aura of the damned, bless ‘em they always come up with the best songs.

Sic Alps- Gelly Roll Gum Drop