Oh no. It's another Bandcamp Friday and I still have so much stuff to write about Surfguitar101 Festival. But there have also been so many releases I want to talk about! So as usual, I'm going to challenge myself to be as brief as possible while still saying something substantive. Buy these records!

After last month's relative dearth of new surf releases, sure enough October picked up the pace, accelerating towards Halloween day. And sure enough there were a ton of releases on that day. Stop doing that. Anyway, shall we unwrap some leftover Halloween candy?

It's been forever since the last Bandcamp Friday roundup I've done and there have been a whole ton of excellent surf releases. Unfortunately this one lands in the middle of a vacation with little internet or even time availability. But I've got a bit of a window to do something here, so I'm going to highlight as many as I can before my son finishes his nap or this laundry gets done. I'm really going to try to focus on quantity of reviews over quality, though the whole point is that the music itself is all something I'd recommend. Inevitably I won't get to mention everything I'd like to, but this is better than nothing.

I don't even know when the last one of these bandcamp fridays were. I'm just going to start from now and work backwards-ish.

I haven't done one of these in a while! It's another Bandcamp Friday, where Bandcamp skips its cut of sales and passes them to the artists. It's been a packed April, and full of lesser-known names to boot, so it's a good time for me to get back to sharing my finds. Here's some standout releases that I noticed, and I probably forgot some too. This is only April and early May releases, even though there was some great stuff in March too, and I they're super short since I wrote this whole thing starting at like 9pm Thursday.

Once again, today Bandcamp isn't taking a cut of purchases made on their website which makes today an excellent day to stock up on surf records. They got a little mysterious on us -- apparently June didn't have one and instead had a special Juneteenth event. I don't know if there was a July one, but in any case I have a lot to catch up on since the last one of these I did was May. That was so long ago we have a whole new coronavirus

Another day when bandcamp gives up their cut of profits from sales and gives them directly to bands. Paypal ain't givin' up their cut, so according to bandcamp on average bands get 93% of what you pay today vs 82% on a normal day. Of course, it's getting to the point where there's another way to support bands: MAYBE you're able to go see them live! Say hi to a musician, buy their records from a dimly lit table the old fashioned way.

This month was a BIG ONE for new releases. Believe it or not, I had to be pretty picky here and I had to upgrade from records I liked to records I loved. You've got your listening cut out for you!

Bandcamp Friday means Bandcamp doesn't take a cut of what they sell, so ALMOST all of your purchase will go to the band (almost because Paypal exists). Which is to say it's a great day to stock up on music. It's also become a time for me to go back and write something about some recent releases to help guide you.

Bandcamp Fridays are still a thing. Today your purchases go directly to the band, none of it to bandcamp (some of it to paypal, but what can ya do). What this also means is "oh crap Hunter, you better write about some of the new stuff".

Here are a few standouts since the last Bandcamp Friday -- which was actually in December, so we're going back a bit. These are about as brief as reviews get because I've got a lot of ground to cover, and they're in no particular order.

So there were some notable surf releases in November, but overall it wasn't a big month. Meanwhile I'm trying to scoop things up to get my 2020 non-surf picks and of course the 2020 Gremmy Awards ready to go, so let's do a lazy one.

One interesting trend about 2020 that I've noticed is that there's been a LOT of small one-offs. Halloween had a ton of singles ready for my show, and Christmas is shaping up to be the same way. Here's some 2020 releases to get you in the mood. I won't write about all of them because, let's face it, it can be hard to write about how bands play the same well-known songs and write about them in a way that sounds unique. OK I'll be more honest: I'm not in any rush to listen to Christmas music until week of, so I've barely listened to any of these. Also, for the sake of being thorough, I'll include a few non-bandcamp releases.