Friday Top 50: Songs Of 2010

Oh it’s the most wonderful time of the year isn’t it?  I’m sure some of you people are just about sick of all this year end list mumbo jumbo (as we sort of are too).  We do however realize that some of you may have secretly been waiting for us to drop more lists your way.  Well here you go friends, I give you the Austin Town Hall Top 50 songs of 2010.  This list typically proves to be the hardest one to narrow down since we usually start with over 200 songs and somehow get it whittled down to a managable number.  I guarantee some of you will love it and some of you poop faces will be disgusted by it.  Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.  Follow the jump for list.

Read more

Friday Top 10: Austin Albums of 2010

It’s that time of year folks, the time when we THINK we know what’s the best of the best.  In a year where some old faces reemerged, and some new faces joined the scene, we had a hard time narrowing things down, but these are our favorite Ten Albums by Austin bands in the year 2010.  If you think we’re wrong, we’re cool with you voicing your opinion, but be nice, these are just one group’s opinions.

Read more

Friday Top 50: Albums of 2010

How on Earth can a site run by several individuals come to a consensus on Best Album of 2010? Well, you missed out on some arm-wrestling, 100 yard dashes and other circus-like shennanigans, but we finally narrowed it down…well, down to our Top 50. Listen, we know you probably don’t agree with all of this, I mean we completely left off Sleigh Bells, yet we worked hard to combine our various tastes into one list. Fee free to tell us where we went wrong, but we’re pretty stoked on the list we put together as a whole.

Read more

Friday Top 5: 2010 Album Covers

It’s time again to turn the music down and put on your art-critic monocles and top hats. Yes, today is the day we judge 2010 releases strictly on their visual packaging aesthetics as opposed to their auditory aptitude. It’s also a way to highlight the ‘other’ artists who have created the artwork and often don’t get the credit besides a sub-par blurb in the liner notes. 2010 was filed with beautiful artwork and it has been a struggle to dwindle them down to 5, but alas, my favorites are to be found below. Just like last year, I’m looking at the entire package; composition, balance, tone, meaning and originality. Use of text is not necessary as we saw last year, but when it is used, it must compliment the piece as a whole. I don’t claim to be an expert, but when looking back through this year’s album artwork, here are the ones that caught my eye.

Read more

Friday Top 5: Psychopath Songs

Nothing brings out our core values like the holidays. Halloween, for example, is a day to celebrate the most important American values. Values like fake blood and childhood obesity. Come to think of it, there’s something unsettling about Halloween. Why do people dress their children up like monsters and parade them around the neighborhood to extort candy from strangers? And what about adults who willfully engage in dressing like zombies, or slutty nurses, or slutty nurse zombies? That all sounds a little. . . you know, crazy.

It’s one thing for us to invent Vampires and Werewolves. But the real monsters, the Dahmers and Mansons, that look just like us? That’s a little harder to get a handle on. I guess that’s why people write songs about psychopaths. They want to get up close and personal to get a big whiff of crazy. If you embrace lunatics, you demystify them. The ghosts just become people in bedsheets. With that in mind, here are five songs about psychos for your Halloween weekend:

Read more

Friday Top 5: Top Five Song Spots

In a conversation with one of our local blogger friend’s, Sonic Itch Mike, I decided that I really needed to take a close look at which spots on any given album are the killer spots to put your hits.  Some people think that the immediacy really makes Track 1 the best, but I’m going to look a little closer at this idea.  I mean, there are hundreds of classic albums out there, and surely they ascribe to this great song placement formula.

Read more

FT5: 5 Things From ACL 2010

So it’s time to wrap up our ACL festival coverage finally and I thought a great way to do that would be too look at my favorite things from the weekend. Now we’ve already posted our thoughts on the best bands from the weekend so I’ll stay away from repeating myself about my favorite acts. I would however like to touch on a couple things I noticed this year that really stood out as good moves on the part of festival planners and promoters. You might even see a knock or two about how said things could be made even better… Follow the jump for full list.

Read more

1 4 5 6 7 8 14