Once I only knew about maybe three Mexican surf bands (Lost Acapulco, Telekrimen, Twin Tones). I always thought it seemed a bit low considering the great things I've heard about the crowds at Mexican surf shows. Bandcamp seemed to open the floodgates, and among other groups, Dr. Tritón came out. This EP is a handful of dark and moody instrumentals to match the album cover. My favorite is probably Pistolera Lady Mamacita

As we head on into December, naturally it's fun to corral all the releases of the past year and do a little retrospective. Which means culling together what's been released. That's what this is. The amount that I have published here is 71 LPs, 44 EPs, and 4 reissues. And it's probably missing a LOT of stuff; I almost forgot to include The Madeira's Sonic Cataclysm so if that slips through, who else knows what did.

So I could use your help! If you know that something's missing, leave a comment and I'll update it.

If you haven't heard Spindrift before, you better get on it. They've made some absolutely killer Spaghetti Western records and put on an excellent live show. They're not always instrumental, but usually they are, and the one preview we've got here appears to be as well. This appears to be a few extras from their soundtrack to Ghost of the West (which I haven't heard yet!), looks like only three tracks. More than anything, I'm excited to see this on Burger Records, a light-hearted punk label that I always thought could use a surf group.

Evil Waves hail from Valpraiso Indiana playin' trashy, dark lo-fi instros. They're saying that Vol 2 is following shortly behind in early 2015. Give it a listen!

Tuareg have an interesting thing going. Two guitarists in Middle Eastern garb (from Spain), no other bandmates, with both their album covers depicting them surfing on a wave of feces. That may not be 100% clear on this one, but it is on their previous album cover, where the brown wave comes straight fromthe toilet. It's unique, I'm pretty sure of that, and I don't think anybody's going to steal it. As you might expect, this isn't supposed to be relaxing, it's meant to be loud!

The Surf Raiders were one of the big "second wave" surf groups in the 80s. Admittedly, I haven't done my homework on them, but that task just got a lot easier now that their originals are compiled onto this 13 song CD.

While Brazil has no shortage of great surf groups, if you asked me to name the first that comes to mind, it would probably be the Dead Rocks. They've been around for about 10 years now and put out some great albums, my favorites being International Brazillian Surfs and One Million Dollar Surf Band. They're relentless promoters and have made their music easy to obtain across the world. And most importantly, who can forget those sharp outfits. After a brief Spaghetti Western stint on their last LP, they're back to plain ol' surf and doing it well.

Disclaimer: I hate Record Store Day and Black Friday, and if it weren't for the fact that they make a lot of money from it, your record store would hate it too. However, it often does bring a few surf records into the world, and I've found in previous years that they're not exactly the hottest items, so you can probably drop by your store at your leisure rather than hop in line at 7 AM.

Coffin Haze refer to themselves as blackabilly deathsurf. I like it. This one's kind muddy recording-wise, I'm guessing it was live, but it's indeed dark, fast and very well played. For now it's streaming and purchaseable on bandcamp, and there's a cassette version on the way. That's about everything I can find on these guys based on their facebook page.

North Carolina's Krektones have a new 7" with 4 swaggering, saucy intrumentals full of danger. A lotta trumpet in here, which you don't see all that often, backed up by some raw and ragged guitar. You can preview it and purchase it on bandcamp