The best part of Los Campesinos! is that the tap into something inside of me that I thought was lost a long time ago. The 19 year-old who would write cryptic live journal posts about a girl he really liked but couldn’t bring himself to let her know how he felt. It was all so dramatic, and I’d spend so much time thinking about this stuff that in the end wasn’t that big of deal.

This band manages to convert a certain paranoia and urgency that when looked out in hindsight, seems so silly right? They throw these overdramatic statements at us and want to celebrate the minutia that consume our brains sometimes, and even ask us to say “fuck it, let’s just dance it off.”

“My Year in Lists” embraces all those times we spent sending notes to girls in class and hoping they’d get the hint, knowing they’d succumb to the “cool” guys. It was hanging out with your friend and making declarative statements about what bands or books were “the best” before you really had a chance to discover anything. It celebrates all that youthful enthusiasm we think is so silly, but kind of want back.

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My senior year of high school was spent mostly taking long drives around the South Bay of Los Angeles in my friend Mike’s 1996 AstroVan. The soundtrack was made up of mostly Weezer’s Pinkerton & Guided by Voices’ Bee Thousand. We knew every lyric to every song on both of those albums, and had convinced ourselves that musical nirvana was singing along at the top of our lungs with the windows open speeding down long stretches of the Pacific Coast Highway.

So when we stumbled upon Centro-Matic’s Redo the Stacks it all made sense. Big overblown melodies just like Weezer all recorded on what sounded like a boom-box, á la GBV. It was the merging of everything we wanted, an album full of melodic guitar pop that sounded like it was pasted together on late nights of heavy drinking with friends.

Ten years later I still to come back to it, and it still all makes just as much sense. “Parade of Choosers” is a song that begs to ask the question: “Do we need more than some melodies, a couple loud guitars, some beer, and a 4-track?.” It makes me believe we don’t. Listening to this album, and particularly this song, makes me think maybe it really is that simple.

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My obsession in the last couple of years has shifted mainly to bands and music movements that no one really cares about. The ones that came and went and no one bothers to look back because they haven’t become part of the music “cannon.”

The early 90’s Bay Area budget rock movement is on the fence right around now. It’s still pretty hard to find some of these records, but with the emergence of a lot of kids claiming bands like the Mummies and Supercharger as influences it’s only a matter of time before we start seeing T-shirts and 180G reissues. So I’ll enjoy this time before some dumb critic starts talking about how “it was direct statement regarding the musical climate of the time” by digging in piles and piles of vinyl, hoping to unearth gems from that era.

I don’t know much about The Trashwomen. I know that within three weeks they formed, learned how to play their instruments, and played their first show….and that’s enough right? They were loud, used a lot of reverb, and weren’t afraid to scream a lot. While other all-girl punk bands of that era were so concerned with making important statements, The Trashwomen played irreverent surf-rock dumbed down so much all you could do was jump around and enjoy it.

Hence their cover of the Mummies “Justine” is a minute and 57 seconds of pure balls to the walls, punk rock bliss. They supplement the swagger of the original version with an urgency and somehow manage make it even more of a sing along affair.

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I try too hard to not be part of any demographic by reading “interesting” books and have insightful things to say about films and step out of my comfort zone when it comes to art. But no matter how much I try, I am ripe for the picking when it comes to Tom Waits fans:

1. I’m in my late 20’s.
2. I have a college degree in Literature (Philosophy or History work as well… or any other degree considered useless).
3. I live in major metropolitan city.
4. I grew up listening to a lot of underground music, and frankly I’m bored with the state of modern independent music (that’s a smarty-pants way to say I’m jaded).

But every 4 years or so, Mr. Waits seems to pop his head in through the door that is the boring, Pitchfork dictated, soda-company sponsored music climate and give us a collection of songs that are more raw, rambunctious, theatrical and sad than anything else. He just seems to put something out that’s always far more interesting to me than whatever is dubbed “cool” for that month.

“Back in the Crowd” is a heartbreak lullaby played on a Spanish guitar. It’s an amazingly vulnerable piece that’s not uncommon on Waits’ albums in between all the junkyard howling. A man coming to terms with a love that’s nearly gone, and not being angry, or even that sad, but just saying farewell in the most dulcet tone he can.

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“Back in the Crowd” is off of Waits’ 17th full-length Bad As Me, is out October 25th on Anti-. Pre-order it.

Check out the video for Wild Flag‘s awesome song “Romance” below. The video was directed by Tom Scharpling. The band’s debut record comes out September 13th via Merge Records. Pre-order it!