This was hard. After a lot of whittling down and changing around, these are my top 100 albums of 2009. There are some albums I really enjoyed that didn't make the cut and a couple (New efforts from 30 Seconds to Mars and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones) that I haven't heard yet (They come out the 8th), but these are the 100 albums I personally enjoyed the most this year. Cue the unfounded hate.
1. P.O.S. – Never Better
2. Brand New – Daisy
3. Gallows – Grey Britain
4. Say Anything – Self Titled
5. The Sleeping – What It Takes
6. A Day to Remember – Homesick
7. Thursday – Common Existence
8. Two Tongues – Self Titled
9. New Found Glory – Not Without A Fight
10. Set Your Goals – This Will Be the Death Of Us
11. Green Day – 21st Century Breakdown
12. Silverstein – A Shipwreck In the Sand
13. Fireworks – All I Have to Offer Is My Own Confusion
14. The Blackout – The Best In Town
15. Lucero – 1372 Overton Park
16. Every Time I Die – New Junk Aesthetic
17. Weezer – Raditude
18. The Used – Artwork
19. Third Eye Blind – Ursa Major
20. Poison the Well – The Tropic Rot
21. Queen City Station – Self Titled
22. Polar Bear Club – Chasing Hamburg
23. Them Crooked Vultures – Self Titled
24. Ace Enders & A Million Different People – When I Hit the Ground
25. Dashboard Confessional – Alter the Ending
26. Cage – Depart From Me
27. Converge – Axe to Fall
28. The Almost – Monster Monster
29. Ruiner – Hell Is Empty
30. Paramore – Brand New Eyes
31. AFI – Crash Love
32. Thrice – Beggars
33. The Chariot – Wars & Rumors of Wars
34. The Black Dahlia Murder – Deflorate
35. Anti-Flag – The People or the Gun
36. NOFX – Coaster
37. Despised Icon – Day of Mourning
38. Title Fight – The Last Thing You Forget
39. Trapped Under Ice – Secrets of the World
40. Dead Swans – Sleepwalkers
41. Billy Talent – III
42. Mastodon – Crack the Skye
43. Morrissey – Years of Refusal
44. Ben Nichols – The Last Pale Light In the West
45. Alexisonfire – Old Crows/Young Cardinals
46. Rancid – Let the Dominoes Fall
47. Reign Supreme – Testing the Limits of Infinite
48. Oceano – Depths
49. Young Love – One of Us
50. Suicide Silence – No Time to Bleed
51. Strike Anywhere – Iron Front
52. Taking Back Sunday – New Again
53. Doomriders – Darkness Comes Alive
54. Jonny Craig – A Dream Is A Question You Don’t Know How to Answer
55. Baroness – Blue Record
56. Maylene & the Sons of Disaster – III
57. Aiden – Knives
58. Dance Gavin Dance – Happiness
59. Hatebreed – Self Titled
60. Lewd Acts – Black Eye Blues
61. Soul Control – Cycles
62. The Red Chord – Fed Through the Teeth Machine
63. Marilyn Manson – The High End of Low
64. Struck By Lightning – Serpents
65. Lamb of God – Wrath
66. Darkest Hour – The Eternal Return
67. Job For A Cowboy – Ruination
68. Winds of Plague – The Great Stone War
69. Cobra Starship – Hot Mess
70. Conor Oberst – Outer South
71. Nightmare of You – Infomaniac
72. Iwrestledabearonce – It’s All Happening
73. Vanna – A New Hope
74. Earth Crisis – To the Death
75. Coalesce – OX
76. August Burns Red – Constellations
77. Placebo – Battle For the Sun
78. The Red Shore – Unconsecrated
79. The Color of Violence – Youthanize
80. The Devil Wears Prada – With Roots Above & Branches Below
81. Cold Cave – Love Comes Close
82. Born of Osiris – A Higher Place
83. City of Ships – Look What God Did to Us
84. Heartsounds – Until We Surrender
85. Killswitch Engage – Self Titled
86. Victims – Killer
87. Evergreen Terrace – Almost Home
88. Emmure – Felony
89. Between the Buried & Me – The Great Misdirect
90. He Is Legend – It Hates You
91. Leathermouth – XO
92. Miss May I – Apologies Are For the Weak
93. Shadows Fall – Retribution
94. Last Lights – No Past No Present No Future
95. Drop Dead Gorgeous – The Hot N’ Heavy
96. War From A Harlots Mouth – In Shoals
97. Atreyu – Congregation of the Damned
98. Architects – Hollow Crown
99. Wretched – the Exodus of Autonomy
100. Hull – Sole Lord
Monday, November 30, 2009
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Eve 6 Interview
I had the chance to sit down with some childhood heroes, Max Collins and Tony Fagenson from Eve 6 a couple weeks ago. They were super nice dudes and I'm very thankful for the oppurtunity. Check it out.
BK: So if you could just say your name and what you do for the band. So Max on my left.
MC: I’m Max and I’m the singer and the bass player.
TF: I’m Tony, drummer and percussionist.
BK: The two original members of Eve 6 here, Matt being the new addition.
TF: Correct
BK: How’d you guys hook up with him?
MC: He’s been a good friend of ours for a long time, his old band Band Camp opened for us on a show that we did on long island in 2003.
BK: He’s a New Yorker?
TF: Long Islander, to be exact.
BK: Long way from you guys.
MC: He now lives in L.A.
BK: Oh cool, that makes things less awkward travel-wise.
MC: The majority of the time he’s been playing with us he’s lived there, but we made it work.
TF: We’d fly in and meet each other half way basically. Two years ago when Max and I were deciding to start playing as Eve 6 again, at the time we needed a guitar player, we were on the beach with some friends and Matt happened to be visiting L.A., and that was Labor Day 2007, and we’d just booked our first show back at a college in Virginia which was like, October of that year and we still didn’t have a guitar player but we’d booked the show a couple days before, so we were on the beach and the waves were coming in and it was a nice day and we were like “Matt, you wanna play a show with us?” and he said “sure” and that was it, and here we are 110 shows later.
BK: Is that really how many shows you guys have played since you got back together?
TF: Might be like 107, but we just crossed 100 like a couple months back.
BK: So this is your second time in New Hampshire, right? Because I saw you at a ski resort down the road last year.
TF: We’ve played up here a couple times. We played another college in Manchester earlier this year.
BK: Oh, Southern New Hampshire?
TF: I don’t even know, to be honest with you, we’ve played a lot in this area. Which is cool, we like it up here.
BK: So you two were also the Sugi Tap?
MC: Soo-gi Tap!
BK: Soo-gi Tap! OK. Named after a Japanese comic book?
MC: Yes, Battle Royale.
BK: Are you a comic book guy?
MC: Nope. We needed a name, but we loved the movie.
TF: We loved the movie, which is where the comic book came from and a friend of ours introduced us to the movie and gave Max a series of the comic books for Christmas or something, because he knew he loved the movie and we kind of breezed through them, we didn’t read them very carefully, but we were looking for a name and it popped up.
BK: So are those, because I know you guys are playing “Pick Up the Pieces”, which is a Sugi Tap song, are those Sugi Tap songs being absorbed by the new Eve 6?
MC: They have been, the good ones! Because some of those songs we really liked and we want our fans to hear them and we love playing them as Eve 6 and it’s working out. We’ve been playing a couple of those songs live like we did tonight and they’ll definitely be on the next Eve 6 record.
BK: That’s cool. I really liked the first new song you guys played tonight, “Little Tiny Everything”, which I don’t think you guys played last year. It’s got a great, old school Eve 6 vibe to it.
TF: Cool!
BK: My favorite record of yours is actually “It’s All In Your Head”, which I feel like is your “Pinkerton”.
TF: Haha, That’s awesome!
MC: That’s awesome, really cool to hear.
BK: I’ve bought all of your albums at least twice.
MC: That’s the highest compliment because I’ve bought all of my favorite albums at least twice.
BK: Yeah, I had the self titled on cassette and then bought it on CD.
TF: It probably sounded even better on cassette.
BK: I played it under it sounded like it was being played underwater.
TF: (Tony makes gurgling sound)Haha, yeah.
BK: So Don Gilmore did those first two records. Are you guys still in contact with him? I read that he had something to do with the Sugi Tap?
MC: A little bit. Yeah, Tony actually kind of stayed in touch with him. I was kind of doing this other thing when the band first broke up, wrote a few songs, these really rough demos.
BK: Is that the Brotherhood of the Lost Dogs that you’re talking about?
MC: Yeah, and he heard some of those songs and thought they were great. He thought, maybe this would be good if you got back together with Tony. So that’s kind of when we started working together again and as time went by we kind of, you know, it dawned on us that we’re Eve 6 and we’re calling ourselves the Sugi Tap, why is this?
TF: Don didn’t have anything directly to do with the Sugi Tap, a little, I mean, we’d come up with demos and send them to him and he’d be like “Awesome!” and just kind of support the idea of us getting back together. Because it was kind of hard, the idea, at first, it was like “we stopped being this band and we’ve taken and year off” and we were kind of just dipping our toe in the water but he didn’t produce anything. But he has remained a great friend and he’s a great producer and a great musician.
BK: Yeah he’s done some awesome records, some big albums. Didn’t he do a Linkin Park record?
TF: Two!
BK: What was the Catalyst for you guys wanting to play as Eve 6 again, you just missed the songs?
MC: Yeah, and I think, like I said, it was like “This is who we are, really.” What’s so vastly different about it? It’s a couple years later, we’re writing songs again, and we want people to hear them and the best way to do that is to be the band that we feel like we are anyway and start writing songs and once we did it just validated all of that.
BK: Are there any songs like, after all this time that you hate? Like “If I play ‘Inside Out’ one more time I’m gonna lose it.”
MC: All the songs have their nights. You know? Sometimes one song will feel amazing and then maybe the next night or a few nights later it feels terrible. So it’s not really about “I’m sick of this song” it’s just kind of how we execute every night.
BK: You guys have never really cut anything out f your sets. Like Green Day stopped playing “When I Come Around” and Third Eye Blind, when they started touring again they stopped playing “Semi-Charmed Life.” And you guys have never done that, which is awesome.
TF: Well those bands had a few more hits than we did.
BK: Well, not Third Eye Blind really.
TF: Either way, there are a few songs that as a fan of music , as a fan of songs, when I see a band and they don’t play the songs that a lot of people wanna see in addition to the rest of the collection, but some bands have a couple songs that fans wanna see.
MC: We find it slightly obnoxious when bands don’t play the songs people want to hear. We feel obliged to deliver that. The familiar songs are fun for us to play too. It’s fun to get the reaction.
TF: You know as we move forward and put out more albums and have a bigger catalog hopefully there will be a few more songs that people recognize and we’ll be able to take a few of those liberties. But for now we just try to do the best songs from every album that we feel have lasted the test of time
BK: Are ”Ttiny Little Everything” and “Black and Red”…..
MC: (Laughs) We were just joking about those titles because it’s easy to switch he around. It’s actually “Little Tiny Everything” and “Red & Black.”
BK: Oh, no and I’ve had a picture on my phone of the setlist I’ve been looking at all night.
MC: Dude, no worries. People closer to the band than you get it wrong all the time. Sorry, what was the question?
BK: Are those songs a good indication of the direction you guys are heading in with the new material?
MC: Some songs rock a little bit more.
TF: Those two are actually what you would call on the mellower end
BK: So more like “Horrorscope” than “Its All in Your Head”?
MC: Yeah, we’ve got one song that’s like a disco rock explosion as well that hearkens back to “Horrorscope” and takes a little bit of what we started with that and just kind of turned it up.
BK: So in the brief time hat I’ve been doing this, I haven’t talked to anybody that’s got like a platinum record or anything……
MC: You’re very good at it by the way.
TF: Yeah, totally.
BK: Well, that’s all I do is listen to music, and I’ve been listening to you guys since the self titled came out. 1998. So this is a question that I’ve been asking a lot and I’ve never talked to, like I said, a band like this that’s been on a major label or anything like that before, and you guys have had that experience, so how do you feel about where music is going? Do you need a label anymore, with the internet?
MC: I’m gonna give this one to Tony.
BK: Is that important to you?
TF: Well, for us and where our band is right now, we feel like we want some sort of a team around us. That can fall under a couple different categories now, because there’s the traditional record label but there are other people getting into the music business because there are all these possibilities. You’ve got things like, there are the big corporations, like Pearl Jam just put out their new record exclusively through Target, and that’s Pearl Jam. So the doors are wide open. But for where we are we do want some sort of a business moving around us that can help market I and help promote it, and all that kind of stuff. But the cool thing about today with iTunes and the promotional arms of YouTube and MySpace and things like that is that the traditional way of doing things is kind of going away, you know, CDs are becoming obsolete. I mean, in 5 years, who’s going to buy a CD at all? For us, we’d like to have some sort of a team around us, but we could put a record out, luckily we still have a fan base that keep coming to shows and stuff so there is a possibility of us doing it that way. But right now we’re keeping our options open.
BK: Is a physical release something that you need to do or do you care that much about? Would you do a digital only release?
TF: I think we’ll do both. I think there are still people that buy cd’s. we’re right on the cusp, we’re in the middle of a transition and we’re not totally over it yet, as in the music business we’re certainly not stuck in the past. SO I think you do both, maybe a limited run of CD’s, most kids are going to get stuff from iTunes and things like that.
BK: Would you ever go back to a major or are you looking more indie?
TF: We’re gonna see, the labels are kind of in an interesting spot right now, where we’re literally right now, next month, in the process of figuring out how we’re gonna get our music out. We can’t say right now if it’s gonna be on a major, or on an indie, on something totally different or even doing it ourselves but we’re not ruling anything out.
BK: So if you could just say your name and what you do for the band. So Max on my left.
MC: I’m Max and I’m the singer and the bass player.
TF: I’m Tony, drummer and percussionist.
BK: The two original members of Eve 6 here, Matt being the new addition.
TF: Correct
BK: How’d you guys hook up with him?
MC: He’s been a good friend of ours for a long time, his old band Band Camp opened for us on a show that we did on long island in 2003.
BK: He’s a New Yorker?
TF: Long Islander, to be exact.
BK: Long way from you guys.
MC: He now lives in L.A.
BK: Oh cool, that makes things less awkward travel-wise.
MC: The majority of the time he’s been playing with us he’s lived there, but we made it work.
TF: We’d fly in and meet each other half way basically. Two years ago when Max and I were deciding to start playing as Eve 6 again, at the time we needed a guitar player, we were on the beach with some friends and Matt happened to be visiting L.A., and that was Labor Day 2007, and we’d just booked our first show back at a college in Virginia which was like, October of that year and we still didn’t have a guitar player but we’d booked the show a couple days before, so we were on the beach and the waves were coming in and it was a nice day and we were like “Matt, you wanna play a show with us?” and he said “sure” and that was it, and here we are 110 shows later.
BK: Is that really how many shows you guys have played since you got back together?
TF: Might be like 107, but we just crossed 100 like a couple months back.
BK: So this is your second time in New Hampshire, right? Because I saw you at a ski resort down the road last year.
TF: We’ve played up here a couple times. We played another college in Manchester earlier this year.
BK: Oh, Southern New Hampshire?
TF: I don’t even know, to be honest with you, we’ve played a lot in this area. Which is cool, we like it up here.
BK: So you two were also the Sugi Tap?
MC: Soo-gi Tap!
BK: Soo-gi Tap! OK. Named after a Japanese comic book?
MC: Yes, Battle Royale.
BK: Are you a comic book guy?
MC: Nope. We needed a name, but we loved the movie.
TF: We loved the movie, which is where the comic book came from and a friend of ours introduced us to the movie and gave Max a series of the comic books for Christmas or something, because he knew he loved the movie and we kind of breezed through them, we didn’t read them very carefully, but we were looking for a name and it popped up.
BK: So are those, because I know you guys are playing “Pick Up the Pieces”, which is a Sugi Tap song, are those Sugi Tap songs being absorbed by the new Eve 6?
MC: They have been, the good ones! Because some of those songs we really liked and we want our fans to hear them and we love playing them as Eve 6 and it’s working out. We’ve been playing a couple of those songs live like we did tonight and they’ll definitely be on the next Eve 6 record.
BK: That’s cool. I really liked the first new song you guys played tonight, “Little Tiny Everything”, which I don’t think you guys played last year. It’s got a great, old school Eve 6 vibe to it.
TF: Cool!
BK: My favorite record of yours is actually “It’s All In Your Head”, which I feel like is your “Pinkerton”.
TF: Haha, That’s awesome!
MC: That’s awesome, really cool to hear.
BK: I’ve bought all of your albums at least twice.
MC: That’s the highest compliment because I’ve bought all of my favorite albums at least twice.
BK: Yeah, I had the self titled on cassette and then bought it on CD.
TF: It probably sounded even better on cassette.
BK: I played it under it sounded like it was being played underwater.
TF: (Tony makes gurgling sound)Haha, yeah.
BK: So Don Gilmore did those first two records. Are you guys still in contact with him? I read that he had something to do with the Sugi Tap?
MC: A little bit. Yeah, Tony actually kind of stayed in touch with him. I was kind of doing this other thing when the band first broke up, wrote a few songs, these really rough demos.
BK: Is that the Brotherhood of the Lost Dogs that you’re talking about?
MC: Yeah, and he heard some of those songs and thought they were great. He thought, maybe this would be good if you got back together with Tony. So that’s kind of when we started working together again and as time went by we kind of, you know, it dawned on us that we’re Eve 6 and we’re calling ourselves the Sugi Tap, why is this?
TF: Don didn’t have anything directly to do with the Sugi Tap, a little, I mean, we’d come up with demos and send them to him and he’d be like “Awesome!” and just kind of support the idea of us getting back together. Because it was kind of hard, the idea, at first, it was like “we stopped being this band and we’ve taken and year off” and we were kind of just dipping our toe in the water but he didn’t produce anything. But he has remained a great friend and he’s a great producer and a great musician.
BK: Yeah he’s done some awesome records, some big albums. Didn’t he do a Linkin Park record?
TF: Two!
BK: What was the Catalyst for you guys wanting to play as Eve 6 again, you just missed the songs?
MC: Yeah, and I think, like I said, it was like “This is who we are, really.” What’s so vastly different about it? It’s a couple years later, we’re writing songs again, and we want people to hear them and the best way to do that is to be the band that we feel like we are anyway and start writing songs and once we did it just validated all of that.
BK: Are there any songs like, after all this time that you hate? Like “If I play ‘Inside Out’ one more time I’m gonna lose it.”
MC: All the songs have their nights. You know? Sometimes one song will feel amazing and then maybe the next night or a few nights later it feels terrible. So it’s not really about “I’m sick of this song” it’s just kind of how we execute every night.
BK: You guys have never really cut anything out f your sets. Like Green Day stopped playing “When I Come Around” and Third Eye Blind, when they started touring again they stopped playing “Semi-Charmed Life.” And you guys have never done that, which is awesome.
TF: Well those bands had a few more hits than we did.
BK: Well, not Third Eye Blind really.
TF: Either way, there are a few songs that as a fan of music , as a fan of songs, when I see a band and they don’t play the songs that a lot of people wanna see in addition to the rest of the collection, but some bands have a couple songs that fans wanna see.
MC: We find it slightly obnoxious when bands don’t play the songs people want to hear. We feel obliged to deliver that. The familiar songs are fun for us to play too. It’s fun to get the reaction.
TF: You know as we move forward and put out more albums and have a bigger catalog hopefully there will be a few more songs that people recognize and we’ll be able to take a few of those liberties. But for now we just try to do the best songs from every album that we feel have lasted the test of time
BK: Are ”Ttiny Little Everything” and “Black and Red”…..
MC: (Laughs) We were just joking about those titles because it’s easy to switch he around. It’s actually “Little Tiny Everything” and “Red & Black.”
BK: Oh, no and I’ve had a picture on my phone of the setlist I’ve been looking at all night.
MC: Dude, no worries. People closer to the band than you get it wrong all the time. Sorry, what was the question?
BK: Are those songs a good indication of the direction you guys are heading in with the new material?
MC: Some songs rock a little bit more.
TF: Those two are actually what you would call on the mellower end
BK: So more like “Horrorscope” than “Its All in Your Head”?
MC: Yeah, we’ve got one song that’s like a disco rock explosion as well that hearkens back to “Horrorscope” and takes a little bit of what we started with that and just kind of turned it up.
BK: So in the brief time hat I’ve been doing this, I haven’t talked to anybody that’s got like a platinum record or anything……
MC: You’re very good at it by the way.
TF: Yeah, totally.
BK: Well, that’s all I do is listen to music, and I’ve been listening to you guys since the self titled came out. 1998. So this is a question that I’ve been asking a lot and I’ve never talked to, like I said, a band like this that’s been on a major label or anything like that before, and you guys have had that experience, so how do you feel about where music is going? Do you need a label anymore, with the internet?
MC: I’m gonna give this one to Tony.
BK: Is that important to you?
TF: Well, for us and where our band is right now, we feel like we want some sort of a team around us. That can fall under a couple different categories now, because there’s the traditional record label but there are other people getting into the music business because there are all these possibilities. You’ve got things like, there are the big corporations, like Pearl Jam just put out their new record exclusively through Target, and that’s Pearl Jam. So the doors are wide open. But for where we are we do want some sort of a business moving around us that can help market I and help promote it, and all that kind of stuff. But the cool thing about today with iTunes and the promotional arms of YouTube and MySpace and things like that is that the traditional way of doing things is kind of going away, you know, CDs are becoming obsolete. I mean, in 5 years, who’s going to buy a CD at all? For us, we’d like to have some sort of a team around us, but we could put a record out, luckily we still have a fan base that keep coming to shows and stuff so there is a possibility of us doing it that way. But right now we’re keeping our options open.
BK: Is a physical release something that you need to do or do you care that much about? Would you do a digital only release?
TF: I think we’ll do both. I think there are still people that buy cd’s. we’re right on the cusp, we’re in the middle of a transition and we’re not totally over it yet, as in the music business we’re certainly not stuck in the past. SO I think you do both, maybe a limited run of CD’s, most kids are going to get stuff from iTunes and things like that.
BK: Would you ever go back to a major or are you looking more indie?
TF: We’re gonna see, the labels are kind of in an interesting spot right now, where we’re literally right now, next month, in the process of figuring out how we’re gonna get our music out. We can’t say right now if it’s gonna be on a major, or on an indie, on something totally different or even doing it ourselves but we’re not ruling anything out.
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