Oh no. I got distracted. It's April and I haven't finished the Gremmy Awards. Most of this was actually written over a month ago, so I'm going to go ahead and make it happen. Here's a bunch of odds & ends, things that I think were noteworthy about 2021.

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.

This music isn’t about commercial success, so just about everybody’s in it for fun. So it feels kind of wrong to judge a band by how much fun it sounds like they’re having, but damn if these guys don’t sound like they’re having a little more fun than the rest.

After 2 EPs with similarly crude album art, this very persistanly robot supremacist band has put out their first LP. While one might expect clean sinewave tones from a robot band, Tsunamibots actually have a pretty trashy tone with occasional sound effects thrown in. Song structures are simple, easy to bounce along to and despite their forceful message, they still know how to have fun. Take the lighthearted beach party number "Robotic Meltdown", which even cuts loose enough to include handclaps -- presumably made with repurposed human meat.

This is the debut album from The Syndicate, and it features a slew of covers from punk legends like the Ramones, Sex Pistols, The Seeds, The Dictators. Despite those clear influences, the resulting sound is definitely more surf than punk, full of reverb and twang and adding a brightness and spaciousness to songs that often didn't have them in their original form. If you didn't know what you were listening to, you might not even realized it's a cover the first time you hear it --and that's a good thing.