The downside of assigning strange categories for your end-of-year review process is there's all these other things you want to recognize. So that's what this is for. These categories are completely unstructured. Some categories didn't exist last year, some categories disappeared from last year, and they might come back next year.

For the sake of layout I'm not posting individual Gremmy Awards images for winners, but if you won and you'd like me to send one, let me know.

Cat Sith (or Catsith, they never seem to settle on that) have released 3 EPs and 2 LPs since April of 2018, and every subsequent release gets a little more poisoned.

The surf band with perhaps the most uncomfortable name since Bambi Molesters have finally released their first full-length, and that mindset of pushing out of the comfort zone is all over this thing. However, this isn’t achieved by merely adding a theremin or doing a spaghetti western song; it’s with unexpected syncopation, different guitar tones, subtle effects and instrumentation. Not only is the band trying new things, but the listener is challenged as well. And most importantly, it works.

There are some things that deserve recognition other than just the albums themselves. This is the category where I get to spill out the rest of those observations. These categories change year to year.

One of the first groups on Green Cookie's companion label Surf Cookie Records, we have Bamboogie Injections from Russia (formerly under a different name that they have effectively swept under the rug). It makes an impression quickly though, with some frighteningly fast picking on the first two modern surf tracks. Thankfully for arthritic concern, there's some speed variation on this, with "Dandelion Wine" especially making for an interesting mix of mid-tempo song-writing, swirling keyboards (which by the way get pretty fast on this record too), and jittery-fast guitarism.