Mochipet

Our hand picked list of events worth your spare time, for the price of your spare change.

Zombie Beach Party (Friday)
In San Francisco, Zombies never say die. When they're not "killing" people during flash mobs, they're going to the beach--indoors, of course, because the real sun would damage all that rotting flesh. This event at the DNA involves performances by a bunch of undead-friendly bands, a photo booth to document the zombies in all their black, white, and red all over horror, and a costume contest. So look unalive--dress the part and admission drops from $10 to $7 (for "zombies and surfers"). (9 p.m.)

Eminent Domain Awareness (Friday)
Speaking of the dead, the SOMA art gallery Varnish is being forced into an early grave apparently, thanks to news that the Transbay Joint Powers Authority is going to demolish the building that houses the cool little art bar. They're not going down without a big party, though, and tonight's goodbye soiree includes speakers Jello Biafra, Matt Gonzalez, and Warren Hinkle. (free, 7 p.m.)

Groundsound Happy Hour (Friday)
Amplive of Zion I, The Tourist from the Magnificent 7 Crew, and other guest DJs hold it down at Laszlo's happy hour from 6 until 9 p.m. tonight. Get there between 6 and 7, though, and you'll be extra happy 'cause the beer's free for that hour. (free)

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By Michael McCall


Photo by Michael Alan Goldberg

Two young blondes with toothy smiles and hard-core work ethics, Taylor Swift and Carrie Underwood, helped country expand its fan base in these years of shrinking music sales. Meanwhile, Kenny Chesney, Rascal Flatts, Alan Jackson, Toby Keith, Tim McGraw, Brad Paisley and George Strait kept filling arenas and at least maintaining their popularity on the road, if not with record sales. But as has often been the case, the best country music has little to do with what's successful in the genre. It's made by those who care more about songs and arrangements than about what the radio is playing or what sparks an arena concert. Country music's strengths come from timeless elements; the same can be said of this list of albums.
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By Phil Freeman

In a year worthy of your rage, metal delivered in spades. What with the economy circling the drain and Sarah Palin coming down from the tundra and then refusing to go back, 2008's been the kind of year that really makes you want to smash your head into walls or punch random strangers in the face. Good thing there were so many awesome records available to serve as a soundtrack for exactly that kind of behavior. The ten discs below are just the tip of a very big, very heavy iceberg. Metal seems to grow stronger each year; 2009 will bring new albums by Mastodon, Deftones, Lamb of God and more. In the meantime, check these out.

Metallica
Death Magnetic
(Warner Bros.)
Five years after their last comeback, they did it right. Combining the punishing thrash of their early glory years with the thick, bluesy grooves of their 1990s output, the members of Metallica reclaimed their throne as America's kings of metal. Songs like "That Was Just Your Life," "My Apocalypse" and "Cyanide" are made to be heard blasting through speakers bigger than your goddamn house, but even on an iPod, they'll have you clenching your fists and banging your head like a fourteen-year-old amped on testosterone and Red Bull.

Opeth
Watershed
(Roadrunner)
Opeth's last album, Ghost Reveries, took its progressive black/death-metal sound to its logical endpoint. So the band took a sharp left turn, incorporating a new guitarist and drummer, psychedelic studio trickery, odd rhythms and even a female vocalist on the folky, emotionally affecting opening track, "Coil." Of course, none of this means that Opeth has forgotten how to bring the heavy: "Heir Apparent" is one of the most assaultive songs of its career, including a drum solo that announces its evolution quite capably.

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By Randall Roberts


You don't need a half-wit music critic to tell you it's been a remarkable year for America, one historians will be discussing and researching for centuries to come. War, financial collapse, politics, technology: All have been dinner-table topics for many Americans. Racial barriers in 2008 were demolished by a Midwestern black man, and gender barriers were hurdled by an Arkansan and an Alaskan.

Democracy has a few awesome new dance moves rolling into the Obama presidency, and it'll be a feast for the wonks to break 'em down. It's for those wonks that we've done some number crunching. When future pointy-headed academics are scouring data in attempts to better understand America in 2008, might it not be instructive to offer a snapshot of a different sort, one that attempts to explain the People and their mindset from a quasistatistical / analytical ethnomusicosociological perspective? 
Specifically, let's address the population in a head and/or heart space it cares deeply about: through its music.

How does it sing and dance? Who does this singing? Who best moves our collective booty and tugs at our heartstrings? I've been crunching Billboard album and singles chart data in order to better understand Who We Are in 2008. I've compiled information on every artist who cracked the Top 10 album chart and the Hot 100 singles chart this year. I've researched each artist and tallied the lot of them based on a number of factors, including gender, ethnicity, nationality, state of origin (if American) and record label. I've then analyzed these numbers. What follows are some conclusions.

(Note to Nate Silver: I'm a lowly music journalist who can add, subtract, multiply, divide, and use a calculator, but not much else. Let this serve as a springboard. Margin of error: 4 percent. Results reflect chart positions up to and including the Dec. 6 issue of Billboard.)
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And now it's time for the "I love you like a fat kid loves cake" memorial Worst Lyrics of 2008, March Madness-style tournament, this year a terrifying mélange of appalling oral-sex requests, bargain-bin philosophies, grammatical atrocities, and cringe-inducing pillow talk. To elevate the drama, I provided a trusted colleague with the 16 artists who qualified and had him assign seeds--Lil Wayne you expect to go deep into a showdown like this, but Lucinda Williams? Some fantastic match-ups resulted, but in the end, nobody is topping Nickelback's backstage-pass bon mot, as devastating a blow to feminism as Katy Perry and Sarah Palin combined. Oh, for those innocent days of 50 Cent.

Click to see the full "Worst Lyrics of 2008" finals

--Rob Harvilla

By Dan Leroy

A couple of weeks ago, an expert on the Harry Potter series told an audience of high school kids how lucky they were to have this Big Shared Experience--these seven books and 41,000 words in common. What does Harry Potter have to do with hip-hop in 2008? In an age when many year-end lists should be subtitled "Ten More Albums You've Never Heard of and Will Never, Ever Hear," plenty.

Technology has made the world smaller, and in response, we've found smaller and smaller worlds to inhabit. Think of a specific era--in some cases, a specific artist's work from a specific era, or even a specific year--and someone, somewhere is re-creating those very sounds. Which is fine, and sometimes a lot of fun. It's just that those folks who are still striving for the Big Shared Experience were the most interesting stories of the past year in hip-hop. They were the people who believed that hip-pop didn't automatically equal T-Pain, or the real pain of automatic IQ loss.

There were several such moments in 2008.

See the Top 10 after the jump...

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By Chris Gray

It's time to rank the best of what went around and came around again.

BILLY JOEL
The Stranger
(Columbia/Legacy)
As punk and disco exploded, the Piano Man's deeply unhip 1978 breakthrough proved that top-shelf Broadway/Brill Building songwriting could still sell - and, occasionally, rock. "Scenes From an Italian Restaurant" and "Anthony's Song (Movin' Out)" remain priceless snapshots of Annie Hall-era NYC, the title track bares real teeth, and the Kenny Chesney fave "Only the Good Die Young" - banned from several college-radio stations for its unseemly insinuations about Catholic schoolgirls - is still a corker.

Extras: Complete June 1977 Carnegie Hall concert; DVD of Joel's March 1978 appearance on the BBC's Old Grey Whistle Test; thirty-minute making-of doc and facsimile of his lyric sketchbook, scratch-outs and all.

WILLIE NELSON
Stardust
(Columbia/Legacy)
Nelson's 1978 dunking of the Great American Songbook into his whiskey river, with producer Booker T. Jones riding soulful shotgun, shattered all sorts of precedents. It gave Irving Berlin ("Blue Skies") and Hoagy Carmichael ("Georgia on My Mind") their first number-one country hits, proved record-buyers wouldn't blanch at long-haired rednecks covering Duke Ellington and Kurt Weill (more than five million copies sold) and set the tone for this year's stellar Wynton Marsalis Quartet collaboration, Two Men With the Blues.

Extras: A complete second disc of Stardust outtakes, wherein Nelson unleashes trusty acoustic guitar Trigger on "What a Wonderful World," "Stormy Weather," "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)" and more.

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By Noah W. Bailey

Picking the best folk and Americana records of the year isn't nearly as hard as discarding those great records that just didn't feel right stuck in the category.

Releases by Calexico and DeVotchKa felt far too worldly to pigeonhole as folk or country, for instance, while Blitzen Trapper's fantastic Furr smells more like the Kinks than Neil Young. [Editor's note: That's why we put it on our indie-rock list.] We likewise discarded Shearwater's near-masterpiece Rook, despite the fact that the album's instrumentation includes both banjo and a hammered dulcimer. And while we certainly returned to releases by Bon Iver and Bowerbirds throughout the year, we actually heard both records last year, when they were first independently released.

After this arduous vetting process, these are the records that survived: ten releases that dabble equally in meat-and-potatoes alt-country, soft-focus '70s pop folk, and the old, weird America of Greil Marcus.

As a Zooey Deschanel character once put it, long before she ever met M. Ward: "Listen and light a candle, and your future will become clear."

Bonnie Prince Billy
Lie Down in the Light
(Drag City)
Perhaps even besting his 1999 high-water mark I See a Darkness, Lie Down is surely the most diverse and listenable outing of Will Oldham's lengthy career, with a sweet, playful side not often found on the Bonnie Prince's earlier records. From the Dead-does-country of opener "Easy Does It" to the earth-shaking duets with Canadian Ashley Webber (sister of Black Mountain's Amber Webber) on "So Everyone" and "You Want That Picture," the album is proof positive that Oldham is only getting better with age.

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By Michael Roberts

In 2008, independent rock returned to the underground, where it belongs. Given the grand catastrophe that is today's record industry, most major-label executives don't have the time or energy to convince music fans they might like something a little out of the ordinary. They're too busy recycling variations on what were once sure things while desperately searching for career exit strategies that don't involve tall buildings, open windows and running leaps. As a result, fringier artists have had the opportunity to develop outside the spotlight, sans the sort of unrealistic commercial expectations that can lead to self-consciousness, compromise and a lifetime of regret. Not selling means not selling out, as the following albums demonstrate.

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By Julienne Gage

Americans who still think of Latin music as mariachi bands and gyrating Ricky Martins and Shakiras might want to lend a closer ear to the genre. This country's Hispanic population isn't just growing, it's growing more diverse. More and more unique musical styles are being gobbled up, and that should come as good news to alternative gringos hoping to spruce up their castellano. This year's Latin-music highlights come from all over the Spanish-speaking map. We'll start in the farthest geographic corner: an island in the Mediterranean.

BUIKA
Niña de Fuego
(WEA International)
Afro-Spanish artist Buika epitomizes cultural and ethnic diversity. Over three decades ago, her parents fled political turmoil in the former Spanish colony of Equatorial Guinea and made a new life for themselves in a gypsy neighborhood on the island of Mallorca. After stints as a Tina Turner impersonator in Vegas and as the vocalist on some chic house and funk albums made for the European clubs, Buika has found her niche in flamenco and Latin jazz. This year's Niña de Fuego contains many of the same gitano elements found on her successful LP Mi Niña Lola, and pushes the boundaries further by adding Mexican ranchera. Only someone as strangely bohemian as Buika could pull together these emotive styles with just the right amount of melodrama.

THE PINKER TONES
Wild Animals
(Nacional)
Barcelona's Pinker Tones have traded most of their native Catalán for English -- both in language and in beat. On Animals, harmonic backing vocals combine with synthesizers and wah-wah pedals to produce 1980s-style pop and rock steady. The song titles couldn't be more fitting. "Hold On" starts with a choir and then hits the gas with an accelerated Beck-like groove. That's followed by the even more retro number "S.E.X.Y.R.O.B.O.T." and the happy-go-lucky reggae track "The Whistling Song." But Pinkertones do take pride in some forms of hip-swiveling: Be prepared to shake your mod booty to "Electrotumbao."

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