Friday, January 5, 2001

McQ's Best Of 2015 Vol 8 - Nut Squeezers

1. Uncle Mother's - Protomartyr
2. Love Her If I Tried - Royal Headache
3. Horsepower - Lightning Bolt
4. Hard Luck Kid - Beach Slang
5. Why A Bitch Gotta Lie - Death Grips
6. Franks Kaktus - Dungen
7. (S)HE SAID / (S)HE SAID - Titus Andronicus
8. March Of Progress - Viet Cong
9. Wouldn't You Know - Royal Headache
10. Acetate - METZ
11. Fatal Flaw - Titus Andronicus
12. Gifts For The Earth - Deafheaven
13. Too Late To Die Young - Beach Slang
14. Living Zoo - Built To Spill
15. Beautiful Blue Sky - Ought
16. Carolina - Royal Headache

Track List / Mix Write-up / Spotify /
McQ's Favorite Albums Of 2015
McQ's Favorite Songs Of 2015




About The Albums/Songs On This Mix:

Let's start with singles from two of the three veteran acts represented on this mix of hard-hitting thrashers.

And when it comes to hard hitting thrashers, few acts have delivered the goods over the last twenty years like Providence, Rhode Island's drums and bass noise-rock duo extraordinaire Lightning Bolt.

Though a "can't miss" live act, most of their recorded music is so extreme, the vocals so weird (drummer Brian Chippendale sings through a microphone stuffed into his mouth like an S&M plug), and the mixes so lo-fi that I've felt most of their music would be too much even for the open-to-anything ears of the fans of our mix collections, and thus I haven't included any efforts from the band since one track from 2005's Hypermagic Mountain.

But in 2015, Lightning Bolt entered a high-end studio proper for the first time, and the resulting album Fantasy Empire, while no less crazed or hard-hitting, really benefits from the improved production and is their most accessible album to date. There were several tracks I considered including in this mix, especially opener The Metal East and the wild Dream Genie, but ultimately, I went with the steady heavy-metal chug of Horsepower.

Another band that delivered the hard-hitting goods in 2015 was beloved Boise-based indie-guitar act Built To Spill, whose Untethered Moon offered another batch of those knotty guitar lines and Neil Young-styled vocals fans have been eating up since the band's inception back in 1993.

The album lacks the "through the roof" peak efforts of some of their better second decade releases like 2006's You In Reverse, but is still solid front-to-back, and as with Fantasy Empire, produced several tracks I considered including on this mix - scorching closer When I'm Blind, the quaint Never Be The Same, chugging opener All Our Songs - before settling on the album's tightest, punchiest number, Living Zoo.

Acetate was the lead single and best song off of Canadian hardcore/noise-rock outfit METZ chilling second album, the aptly titled II.  If you're looking for music to put the fear of God, or maybe Satan, into you, Metz II was as good a place to start as any in 2015. The enslaught comes at you, without let-up, with an almost biblical and often thrilling intensity.

Hard Luck Kid and Too Late To Die Young come to us courtesy of Philadelphia quartet with a serious Replacements fetish, Beach Slang, and their decent 2015 rock album The Things We Do Find People Who Feel Like Us.

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