Top 10 - Jan 2021

  1. Modern Family – It was out for over a decade. Somehow I missed this. Like I missed most of my life. It is never too late, it never is. You can take that pilot’s course, learn to fly fish, ask that girl in your chemistry class to the big dance. There is no time for regret in our blips of life in the span of this immense universe of time. Within that expanse was a beautiful, hilarious blip that you can binge without guilt as your laugh your ass off.
  2. Blender – I’ve plunged into this free open source 3d software and something has changed. My dreams in the back of the class scribbling explosions can now be realised with a mere 3000 hours of pounding my head into some software. I don’t care, because you can do amazing things for fun and nothing else on your own damn computer that film studios do. Did I mention explosions?
  3. Andrew “Blender Guru” Price – His moniker is sort of regrettable but I couldn’t ask for any other guy besides this smiling Aussie trying to crack jokes as he does the best job I’ve seen breaking down how to get into ludicrously complex 3d software. This guy is a prince.
  4. Kurt Vonnegut “Deadeye Dick” – This Vonnegut barnstormer takes place in 1960 but could just as easily be about about America today. There’s amphetamine addiction, death, the gun problem, conspiracy theorists, nobody giving a shit about the people of the Midwest, paranoia, the gutting of the American city, race and sexuality. More importantly were the pleas to not be an artist or try and love the creative life which I wholeheartedly endorse interspersed with recipes. “You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages the Dark Ages – they haven’t ended yet.”
  5. Soledad Brothers – Dirty, jump blues from The Great State of Ohio that you might not be able to handle. Consider that a challenge to your ideas of self worth and what soul you thought you might have had.
  6. Danny Kroha – Distressed, soulful Detroit blues from the founder of the garage rock legends the Gories
  7. Oathbreaker – Tortured, female-led blackened hardcore with a dynamic shift from quiet to blast I’ve never heard before and can’t get enough of.
  8. The Arctic Monkeys – There is no shortage in the ways I likely disappointed my father. If you lined them up, you could cross the Atlantic on them. I swore I would never be that sort of dad, but then my son started talking about One Direction and some guy named Zayn. I never felt a shame like that in my life. I didn’t think it was possible my brood would go there. He of course doesn’t know what’s right and is terribly confused. Or maybe not my kid. Then one day an algorithm saved our family and our lives by spitting up the Arctic Monkeys which took him into its rock bosom. Now I have to listen to this on repeat every day. I can get behind a lot of their early stuff and more recent slightly stoner meanderings, but it’s more that it’s actual rock and roll my kid was asking to listen to.
  9. The Quietus – Online magazine like the magazines you could buy way back when that had super obscure combinations of art, music, film and random political commentary.
  10. Open Movies – Open source movies are a thing that I can’t even handle philosophically and one of you out there should be doing something with.