The Desolate Coast's previous album Without a Planet felt like it was destined to be a hidden gem of surf music. While I don't have an issue with calling them "surf music", I found myself thinking "The Cure" more than "Dick Dale". There was a melancholy mood to the record, though not without some explosive pent-up bursts, and a unique approach to a three-guitar attack with a low-mid-high formation.

It's hard to beat surf music in Southern California. Surfguitar101 was ostensibly a meetup for online forum members with a nice lineup of 10 bands, Today it stands as the premiere surf event of the US and possibly the world, with a globe-spanning lineup of over twenty bands, and I believe Saturday night was the biggest I'd ever seen it. Organizer Jeff "BigTikiDude" Hanson, modest pool cleaner by day, has been slowly tweaking the event and his support team to grow the event organically into something uncompromisingly accessible and genuine.

It's great to make music that sounds like the 60's, but sometimes you just want to make the surf music you want to make. Or maybe you want to push the genre beyond where it's been. There were a lot of great options here this year, and while I don't think my selections paint the full picture, these are the records that I felt were the best from start to finish.

The Desolate Coast entered the surf scene as a new project of Eric Cranfield of Seattle's The 'Verb, and that legacy echoed into the new band. Though Desolate Coast were certainly different, there were similarities in their guitar sound, their grasp of mood, and appreciation of misty pacific northwestern landscapes and grayscale-plus-pink displayed on album covers.