Best Coast are back with their sophomore release The Only Place. Check out a recent performance of the album’s title track on The Late Show with David Letterman.
In the midst of preparing for Mexican Summer’s May 15th release of The Only Place, the follow-up to 2010’s Crazy For You LP, Best Coast is proud to announce a
For the second consecutive year, we concocted an innovative little experiment for our year-end Best Albums list. Instead of picking the old fashioned way, we opted for something a little different: a collaborative, collective list that incorporates the opinions of everybody here at HT.
To begin, we devised an all-encompassing list of well over 100 nominees, whereby most everything our contributors recommended made this list. Then, we invited our crew of writers to independently and blindly vote on each album within the list on a scale of 1 to 20 (20 = epic). We ended up with varying degrees of familiarity for the nominees as some folks voted on just about everything, while some ranked just a few. From there, we deployed our egghead algorithm for rating albums: (two times the average rating) + (the total number of votes). At that point, we took the top 25 highest scores and presto: Hidden Track’s 25 Best Albums of 2010. No bullshit, no big opinions; just the results.
Let’s kick off our week long countdown of our favorite albums of 2010 with numbers 25 through 21…
25) Sleigh Bells – Treats
Key Tracks: Tell ‘Em, Infinity Guitars
Sounds Like: Electric Guitars and Cheerleaders
The Skinny: Sleigh Bells came out of nowhere in 2010 to emerge as a break out of the highest order. Despite being a just a duo, the boy-girl tandem of Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss manage to slug out bombs with their stomping beats, cutting guitar attacks and anthemic vocal hooks. With Treats, Sleigh Bells have created a genuinely unique twist on amped-up party music.
READ ON for the next four albums in our countdown…
As we continue to do some more end of the year house cleaning around HT’s home office to get it all tidied up for 2011, I figured it was about time to continue with a tradition around these parts by taking a look at my favorite six albums of the last half of the year with the Top 6 Of The Last 6…
Prior to his success as a solo artist, José González fronted the indie-rock band Junip in the late ’90s in his native country of Sweden. The short-lived group released a lone 4-song EP, before going their separate ways, mostly in part because of their label’s interest in González’s own material. The singer-songwriter regrouped with his off-again, on-again band mates deciding to record their long in the works full-length debut. The album features González’s familiar Nick Drake drenched in reverb vocals backed by a hypnotic mix of psychedelic folk-rock that draws its influences from jazz, electronica and Indian ragga-style rhythms.
READ ON for the rest of my Top 6 Of The Last Six…
In our never-ending quest to dig up great bands whose tickets cost less than a corned beef sandwich at Katz’s, we bring you another round of Blips. Blips highlights some great bands that are largely still in their larvae stage, but will soon morph into their beautiful butterfly. In this edition, we have some really cool new music, so take a sec, poke around the bands’ various websites, and see what you think of these four under the radar acts…
Best Coast
In music critics never-ending quest to label every sub-genre we now have something called “chillwave”. While I won’t wax poetic on that subject, one of the acts that have been lumped into this ever growing movement – along with the likes of Neon Indian, Beach Fossils and Memory Tapes – is Best Coast (whether they actually like it or not). The two-piece act, fronted by Bethany Cosentino, have been garnering a lot of much deserved blog attention over the last year after releasing a series of much buzzed about 7-inch singles. READ ON for more on Best Coast and three other acts…
