January 11-13, 2015

rossgrady, , , , , , Leave a comment

I’ve been doing a lot of technical interviewing lately, and I have a suggestion for the nation’s universities’ Computer Science departments:

Quit making your undergraduate curricula so polyglot

I feel like a decade ago, you had a pretty good chance of talking to a Computer Science student who had at least a solid 2 years of Java or C++ under his or her belt, and at some schools more like 3 or even all 4 years.

This was of course highly problematic – it meant that you would encounter students who hadn’t the foggiest idea about web technologies, or how to use useful scripting languages. But at least they knew a pretty solid range of advanced topics in their department’s language of choice.

Lately I’ve been talking to a ton of students who had maybe two semesters taught in Java freshman year, and then perhaps a couple of classes in C, and some more advanced classes in Python, and perhaps a web class in PHP or Javascript, and then maybe some crank of a prof teaching in a functional language.

Which is neat, right? They get exposed to all of these different languages, blah blah blah. 

So they can barely remember how to write a for loop in any of them.

I would like to suggest that perhaps a minimum of four consecutive semesters or eight core CS courses should be taught in the SAME LANGUAGE, which should be enough time for the students to get past the initial learning curve, master the basics, and pick up the more advanced concepts. 

Because right now I’m talking to too many students who’ve essentially repeated the basics in three different languages & never seen advanced topics in any of them.

Anyway. I’m backlogged on writing diary entries again. Let’s see:

  • Sunday was Sunday, with the added bonus of a power outage at WXDU that resulted in no show for me. But I was able to switch our internet radio stream over to a higher-quality audio processor. I think it sounds better. You tell me. 
  • We watched the Golden Globes. I don’t have a lot to say about that, other than to register my annoyance that Selma didn’t win anything. I mean, I enjoyed Birdman, and I enjoyed Boyhood, but I liked Selma better. And COME ON there have already been a lot of movies about WHITE MEN.
  • Our Alien-series film festival has ground to a halt due to Having to Work At Night After Work. Yuck.
  • My nighttime work has mostly been refactoring someone else’s 10-year-old PHP code so that it doesn’t throw 10,000 errors every time a page loads now that we’re on PHP 5.x. It’s actually fairly straightforward, just gotta put EVERY SINGLE HASH KEY into single quotes instead of barewords.
  • M has had real work-work to do, which is a drag.
  • My work has been rendered far more pleasant by my incessant repeat playing of the new Sleater-Kinney. Gonna be hard to knock this one off of my #1 spot for 2015. It’s January 14th as I’m writing this. Yep.
  • I finished reading Altered Carbon, by Richard Morgan. What a great read. Thanks for the recommendation, zmagg! I’m kind of gobsmacked that there are more books in this series & I can read them RIGHT NOW.

January 11-13, 2015

A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT

rossgradyLeave a comment

A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT

believermag:

image

The following is an excerpt from the January/February 2015 issue of the Believer. Read the full piece on Believermag.com

A BIOGRAPHY OF JIMI HENDRIX’S ELECTRIC LADY STUDIOS, ITS OWNERSHIP, AND OTHER BLACK MEMORIES

DISCUSSED: A Man of Zero Sentimentality, The Preservation of…

Definitely click through for the full piece.

Link

January 9-10, 2015

rossgrady, , , , , Leave a comment

We watched Alien and Aliens. Alien is of course perfect in its way, hermetic. Kind of small in a 70s Dan O’Bannon way. I learned after this round of viewing that for the 2003 DVD box set, a “Director’s Cut” was slapped together with an hour of additional footage. After it was all finished, Ridley Scott watched it and decided it was stupid, and recut the whole thing to the same length as the original cut.

I was surprised at how well Aliens has aged. I still cringe at the couple of Cameron catch-phrases near the end, but overall I think I enjoyed it more this time than I did when it was released, or at any other viewings since then.

We did watch the “Special Edition” of Aliens, which has something like 18 minutes of extra footage, a lot of it in the service of colonist back-story and Ripley character development. I’m not sure if I had ever seen it before; maybe that’s why I liked it better this time.

Anyway. Takeaway from Aliens is that Cameron was really good at interleaving character development with suspense, intrigue, and action. But that the balance he attained in the mid-80s was apparently a fragile one, one that was already showing signs of falling apart by the time he made Terminator 2.

Friday night I had dinner at Bar Virgile. The fried oysters and the bibb salad with duck are both amazing (as are the cocktails, of course). I’m not sure that enough people are aware that there’s a first-class chef, Carrie Schleiffer, running the kitchen at Virgile. 

It’s probably just as well that it’s sort of a semi-secret, though, as the place is tiny & it’s already getting packed around dinnertime.

Saturday we saw Selma. It’s a great movie, for any number of reasons. The dialogue is, for the most part, excellent. The cinematography & editing flow between naturalism and a more impressionistic mode that is particularly effective during the more violent scenes. David Oyelowo took a huge risk in agreeing to play Martin Luther King, Jr, and it paid off – he successfully captures MLK’s vocal cadences and delivers some fiery speeches, without ever sounding like he’s directly mimicking the recordings.

There’s a device where FBI surveillance notes are superimposed on the screen at various moments, but if the goal is to convey how creepy that surveillance was, it’s not effective. It feels more like convenient ways to shorthand narrative gaps.

J. Edgar Hoover only appears in one scene, and thus Tom Wilkinson’s LBJ is left to do a lot of the antagonistic heavy lifting. Many historians say that this is unfair to LBJ. I don’t really have a problem with dramatic license, but it does seem like there was ample opportunity for Hoover and George Wallace to be more realistically vile, and to perhaps just let LBJ recede more into the background.

Also unfair: What they did to Giovanni Ribisi’s hair.

All in all, it’s a great film, and I hope it fucking sweeps the Oscars. Because no black woman has ever even been nominated for Best Director.

January 9-10, 2015

January 7-8, 2015

rossgrady, , , Leave a comment

I grew up atheist (and weird), in the south, in a fairly small town. I got hassled by some people (mostly because I was weird), and proselytized by other people, some of whom tried to be nice about it.

I was never really tempted by religion, though. I may have lied to my first serious long-term girlfriend about possibly believing in God. If so, I knew it was a lie at the time.

Anyway. I suppose it’s really easy to grow up under those circumstances and wind up as one of those strident atheist types, always wanting to tweak the religious folks, wanting to be offensive & invade their space in the same way that their religion always seemed to be invading mine.

But instead I mostly grew up really hating proselytizing of any variety. Which in turn means I find someone like Richard Dawkins to be 100x more annoying than the happy Christians who attend church next door to our house. Especially since they never come over & knock on our door & try to convert us or anything.

I watch them out the window on Sunday mornings & they’re always so happy to see each other in the parking lot as they walk in together.

There have been plenty of examples over the years of my being a jerk, mostly about important things like music, or people being dumb on the Internet. I’m in no way saintly. Although I have tried pretty hard over the past 10 years or so to be nicer to people, generally, across the board.

It’s kind of tough to see the news happening in France, and see the reactions on Facebook and Twitter, and to look at the recaps of the many & varied obnoxious racist & anti-Islamic cartoons run by that magazine over the years, and to feel like I’m expected to fall in line in support of blind allegiance to absolute “freedom of speech” without consequences.

Of course the consequences shouldn’t be murder. But that doesn’t mean the rejection of all consequences. Hurting people’s feelings is a shitty thing to do. Attacking minorities is a shitty thing to do. Doing it under the guise of “satire” is no less shitty. The consequences, at minimum, of making people feel bad for one’s own petty amusement, is the slow eating away of your humanity.

It’s also kind of frustrating to see all of my liberal American friends weighing in on this as though it’s some kind of ultimate abstract Enlightenment vs. Fundamentalism issue.

France was one of the major Colonial powers. There has been more than enough third-world blood shed for the hands of every single “enlightened” man, woman & child in France.

France occupied (and dominated) Algeria from 1830 until they abandoned it (on the losing end of an 8-year war) in 1962. Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite – unless you were a Muslim Algerian.

Is this important? Algerians make up the single largest group of immigrants to France. The unemployment rate for African immigrants in France is 6 percentage points higher than that for natives of French ancestry. (And with an aggregate unemployment rate of 10%, that’s pretty significant).

Happy people are somewhat less likely to do desperate terrible things than unhappy people. People with jobs and families and a sense of belonging and a sense that the future will be as good as or better than the present generally don’t have as much time for indoctrination and hate.

So it seems to me that the naive optimal solution is to try to work as hard as we can to make space so that more people can be happy, and fulfilled in their lives. If worshipping some god somewhere is helpful in that regard, then more power to them. I may personally think that it’s sort of silly to want to believe in some mystical sky being who has strong opinions about how we should behave, but I can generally keep those thoughts to myself.

I certainly feel more confident about the positive outcomes from that than I do about the likelihood of positive outcomes from publishing smug, obnoxious, clearly racist cartoons that make fun of people for wanting to worship their god & be happy.

So yeah, sure, I believe in Freedom of Speech. But as an American, I believe in First Amendment Freedom of Speech. It’s an interesting amendment. Half of it is about freedom of speech. The other half is about freedom of religion.

January 7-8, 2015

January 4-6, 2015

rossgrady, , , , Leave a comment

Been reading Altered Carbon, by Richard Morgan, after a brief but glowing review by my friend zmagg. It’s most excellent hard-boiled Sci-Fi Noir, gory in some places, very explicitly sexy in others. The pacing is outstanding, and it has quite effectively scratched my usually divergent itches for vintage-style hard-boiled detective fiction & straightforward sci-fi.

Sunday was Sunday. The cold itself is effectively over, but the dry cough lingers. I’m told it will continue to linger for weeks to come.

I flew past the post & shipped the first major milestone release of my holiday project. It took a lot less time than I had figured it would – partly because I remembered more Javascript than I thought I would, and partly because Node, Mongo & their respective communities have rendered basic web-application development just absurdly easy.

There are still plenty of new features in the pipeline. I halfheartedly tried to mess with it some tonight, but I can’t ever really get into that headspace after I have been at work all day. So it’ll be a Saturday-morning thing from here on out, I guess.

This hasn’t always been the case – I did the entire movieminder.com rewrite in the evenings after work (and occasionally late into the night). But that was the late 90s. (Was it really? We were living on Bim Street, so it had to be pre-2000 …)

I don’t have anything pertinent to add to any current/ongoing political or ideological discussion. That is highly likely to change any minute now, so I’m not sweating it too much.

I’ll be in Austin in two weeks. Feel free to share food & drink suggestions.

January 4-6, 2015

January 2-3, 2015

rossgrady, , , Leave a comment

Finally started feeling well enough to leave the house & eat in restaurants again. This basically resulted in eating like three meals in a row at Geer St. Garden. Hard to argue with their seafood gumbo, tho.

Friday night we watched Girl, Interrupted, which neither of us had seen before. It’s a curious thing – it’s packed to the gills with celebrities, including quite a few (Elisabeth Moss, Clea DuVall) who are huge personal faves now, but who were just starting out then. Plus of course Winona, Angelina & Whoopi. And Jeffrey Tambor!

There are so many of them that it’s actually nearly impossible to suspend disbelief & just watch it as a bunch of characters interacting. 

And of course it’s also kind of overwrought & voice-overy in places.

Saturday we went to the Raleigh Grande to see Foxcatcher. Good lord Steve Carrell is astonishing. But mostly I kept thinking to myself “why is this so long?” It was clearly going for some kind of super-atmospheric personality/relationship piece, but for all the greatness of both Carrell’s and Channing Tatum’s performances, neither of them was particularly verbal, and they rarely actually interacted much.

So yeah, I dunno, I got bored. There’s only so much freakwatching I can do at one sitting, I guess. But man, Carrell’s John E du Pont is a FREAK.

Had dinner at Saigon Grill, which now closes at 7:30. I don’t get that. But the pho was divine.

January 2-3, 2015

December 30, 2014 – January 1, 2015

rossgrady, , , , , , Leave a comment

No longer able to differentiate the days. My only plans for the holidays were to work on this programming project and see some movies, so by that measure, this vacation has been a rousing success.

Nevermind the hideous virus that has plagued us both. M is rounding out her second full week of torment, with what has apparently morphed into a sinus infection every bit as noxious as the original cold.

Mine seems to be winding down after a full 7 days. All credit to zinc.

Movie-wise, we saw Big Eyes on New Year’s Eve. It was diverting. Christoph Waltz’s bug-eyed enthusiasm was well suited for his role. Amy Adams had less to do, despite being the nominal protagonist of the story. I will have forgotten all about it in a week.

A few days ago, my friend Claire tweeted:

And I was like No, OMG, WTF? But then I read through Amy’s filmography and realized that I’ve only seen maybe ¼ of her work & maybe I’ve mostly seen the great ones? 

Said great ones being Junebug, Enchanted, The Muppets, and American Hustle. 

I also saw The Master, Her, The Fighter, and Charlie Wilson’s War, and I don’t remember disliking her in those. But I don’t remember much either way about her roles.

Must follow up with Claire.

Last night we watched Source Code. It served its purpose (to distract us for 90 minutes before bedtime) but as science fiction it’s terrible. If you want to see the same basic conceit done 1000x better, watch Edge of Tomorrow. Or Groundhog Day.

Project-wise, I’m able to pull data from the Discogs.com API, and I’m able to extract all of the necessary metadata from iTunes-originated ALAC m4a files. There are multiple node modules that claim to do such things, but none of them support all of the fields that the iTunes UI lets you write to. In fact, even finding the frame designators for those fields on the Internet was surprisingly difficult. All hail the Python Mutagen folks for maintaining the only accurate list I could find.

All that’s left is to glue all of that stuff together. A lot of glue. That’s what the next 3 days will hold.

December 30, 2014 – January 1, 2015

December 28-29, 2014

rossgrady, , , , Leave a comment

M got this cold first, and it has hit her much harder than it has hit me. I credit my obsessive zinc usage from the moment she got sick, but it could just be that my stress levels are a lot lower now than they were 3-4 months ago.

Or maybe the worst is yet to come for me.

In any case, what was already going to be an uneventful holiday period has turned into a gruellingly uneventful slog through endless days filled with moving as little as possible, interrupted only by brief forays out to get food.

Reminder: Mami Nora makes some incredible chicken.

And the chicken soup from the Whole Foods hot bar is more than adequate when you’re sick and probably can’t taste anything correctly anyway.

The other night we watched Frank. I enjoyed it, up to a point – I wanted more Frank, more weird music, and less of the bland protagonist & his bland blandness. After we finished watching it, we looked up the music of the real Frank Sidebottom. Weird dude, but I liked the music from the film better.

I’m actually getting huge amounts of coding done. This is my first major project in node.js, and I have to say I’m enjoying it quite a bit. Some of that has to do with the fact that I’m comfortable in Javascript – its flexibility and ramshackleness remind me of Perl, a language I’m hugely fond of. Although if I wanted to do more formalized & proper OO coding in Javascript, I could do that too, which is another reason I love it.

And some of it has to do with the fact that NPM is so painless, and the Node community has just exploded with useful packages.

Anyway. I’ve been pushing Javascript & Node on students for 3 years now, after having really only just played around with it on small projects. Relieved to see I wasn’t crazy.

December 28-29, 2014

25 Albums from 2014*

rossgrady, , , , Leave a comment

I’m going back to alphabetical order this year. There’s so much genre spread here that I don’t really feel like trying to figure out whether I like insane satanic death metal more or less than Beyonce.

Behemoth – The Satanist

I hadn’t ever listened to Behemoth before this album; there are now some reissues of their earlier material out on Metal Blade, if you’re interested. Grayson Currin gave The Satanist an 8.2 in February, but I didn’t actually hear it until November. It’s phenomenal, and it epitomizes everything I’m loving in metal right now – thoroughly raspy Satanic vocals, pulsating speed, and the occasional oldschool guitar-solo flourish.

Beyonce – Beyonce

Sure, this technically came out in December of 2013, but I didn’t hear it until 2014, and based on the press coverage and general popular attention, I think that’s true of most people as well. Given the coverage since then, I don’t think I need to say much here, other than that it’s still amazing, a year later.

Blursome – Heavy Resting

2014 was the year that local indie/weirdo electronic acts multiplied like crazy. We had debuts from Doom Asylum and Faster Detail, and a great leap forward for VVAQRT, all on Hot Releases, and new music from Zeke Graves’s long-running Datahata project, on Grovl. My favorite of the bunch, though, was this debut EP from Raleigh’s Blursome. Spooky nighttime nervous ambient unease music:

LR06 HEAVY RESTING by BLURSOME

Body Games – “Perfume”

Still waiting for Dax to release more than one song a year. But when the songs are this good, I can’t really complain too hard.

D’Angelo – Black Messiah

Is this a brilliant album? Sort of. Is it as good as Voodoo was? Not exactly – but I don’t think it’s trying to be what Voodoo was. It sounds so skittish and erratic and overthought (it took 14 years to make, so yeah). I find it fascinating & really enjoyable to listen to, but more as a document of a particular Sly/Prince style obsessive aesthetic, rather than beautiful music to sink into & simply enjoy.

Demon Eye – Leave the Light

Straight-up no-pretensions old-fashioned heavy Sabbathy blooz-metal out of Raleigh. These guys are so clearly having a great time, and guitarist Erik Sugg seems to be a bottomless well of perfect riffs.

Leave The Light by Demon Eye

Ex Hex – Rips

I was kind of nervous about this album before I heard it, because I’ve seen Ex Hex a few times now, and they’ve never really clicked for me. I’ve really wanted to love them, but so far onstage they’ve just seemed a little too thin-sounding, or something. I’m always wishing for a second guitarist.

There is no such problem with this album. It’s tight and fast and stripped-down and riff-laden and lacks absolutely nothing. What a great pop guitar album.

Stream it here.

Horseback – Piedmont Apocrypha

I’m an unabashed Horseback fan, but I’ll also freely admit that I “appreciate” some Horseback more than I outright enjoy it.

This one, though, is pure crystalline enjoyment from start to finish. It distills the breadth of the Horseback project into a handful of songs, while continuing to push things further & further away from any sort of “metal” center.

Piedmont Apocrypha by Horseback

Last Year’s Men – Underwhelmed

It has been a few years since Last Year’s Men made their splashy debut, back when drummer Ian Rose was still in high school. They played garage rock, sure, but there was a ‘50s purity and a not-so-hidden undercurrent of country about it, which was even more surreal given that the average age of the band was around 19.

This new album further hones & clarifies those tendencies, and it equals or exceeds their first album in every way. It’s something of a mystery that nobody was leaping to release this thing (and that nobody has yet stepped up to do a physical release of it since its digital-only release in September). Not too late!

Underwhelmed by Last Year’s Men

Lord Mantis – Death Mask

I listened to a lot of metal this year, but most of it didn’t hook me. I was at least moderately disappointed by several albums I had been eagerly awaiting, and maybe that threw my general expectations off. Or maybe it was just ear fatigue.

Whatever the reason, the only metal that I really got into was mostly from the “hellish ritual soundtracks” camp, and this album is pretty much Exhibit A.

Death Mask by LORD MANTIS

Lud – Defenestration Boulevard

Lud are my favorite North Carolina band, and this album is as good as anything they have ever done. These are everyday middle-aged people with day-jobs, making extraordinary heartfelt music about stuff that really matters, like the importance of actually giving a shit about our fellow human beings. Never mawkish or easily sentimental; rather, Kirk Ross brings his reporter’s eyes & ears to bear on the world around him, and just tells it like it is. If this list were in numeric order, this album would be at the top of it.

Mannequin Pussy – Gypsy Pervert

This band came through town, and I was compiling show listings the week before the show, I was curious enough about them to check them out on Bandcamp. I don’t recall the specifics, but knowing me, I probably downloaded the record, barely listened to it, missed the show, and then realized later what an idiot I had been.

I mean, I know I missed the show, and I know I’m an idiot. This is a great record.

GYPSY PERVERT by MANNEQUIN PUSSY

Museum Mouth – Alex I Am Nothing

These guys are from Southport, NC, but they play around the Triangle a LOT. It took me way too long to actually get around to hearing them or seeing them – they are a frenzy of nervous energy & this album is the best pop-punk unrequited love album ever.

Alex I Am Nothing by Museum Mouth

No Love – Tape #2

Raleigh Hardcore is pretty dude-heavy and pretty serious nowadays, but No Love are neither, and that makes them The Best.

Tape #2 by No Love

See Gulls – “Don’t Write Me Love Songs”

The undeniable runaway smash hit of Hopscotch 2014. I really thought we’d have the full album by now, but it’s gonna be spring before it arrives, apparently. I’m perfectly capable of listening to nothing but this on repeat until then:

Don’t Write Me Love Songs by See Gulls

Soft Pink Truth – Why Do the Heathen Rage?

There are a handful of metal albums on this list, but none of them gave me as much pleasure as this queer electronic re-imagining of black metal classics by Matmos’s Drew Daniel. So profane & so beautiful.

Solar Halos – Solar Halos

The thing I love about Solar Halos is that they sound exactly like what the combination of Nora Rogers, Eddie Sanchez and John Crouch ought to sound like. You can hear the layers of their other bands (Curtains of Night, Fin Fang Foom, Caltrop), and you realize that they were always meant to be layered in exactly this way. Intensely heavy, but always moving ever upward.

Solar Halos by Solar Halos

Sylvan Esso – Sylvan Esso

Who knew? Well, near as I could tell, Nick and Amelia knew, and they were just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. All of the local bands on this list deserve the kind of attention this album got, but few of them have worked as hard or in as focused a manner to make it happen.

T0W3RS – TL;DR

It has been fun watching T0W3RS evolve, from a huge sprawling band getting over on vibe and energy, to a recording outfit that was still figuring out, over the course of a couple of EPs, what worked & what didn’t work. And then to Derek, himself, sans band, hunkered down & inventing this stunner of an album more or less on his own.

TL;DR by T0W3RS

Teitanblood – Death

Straight fukkin insane blackened death from Spain. It’s just an endless pummelling onslaught. I particularly love the vintage Hanneman/King style guitar solos that come spurting up periodically from within the maelstrom.

The Tender Fruit – The Darkness Comes

It took Christy Smith four years to record & release this, her second album. She told me that, much like some other folks I know, she learned that she’s a better & more prolific writer when she’s going through some hard times. Hard times are inevitable, but I’m not one to wish them on anyone, so I’m fine with listening to this gorgeous album for the next howevermany years it takes for the next one to happen.

The Darkness Comes by The Tender Fruit

The Tills – Howlin’

The garage-rock “revival” is endless and bottomless and meaningless, pretty much, but I know a great song when I hear one, and this EP is loaded with them.

Howlin’ by The Tills

White Lung – Deep Fantasy

I got pissed at these folks at Hopscotch because there were a half-dozen asshole mosh-pit crowd-surfing fist-swinging dudes at their show, and the band didn’t do or say anything to try to stop it. I kind of expect more from punk bands with women in them. Didn’t keep me from enjoying the hell out of this album, though.

Wye Oak – Shriek

Wye Oak put on one of the two or three best sets at this summer’s Merge 25 anniversary celebration, and it was due in large part to how much fun Jenn Wasner was clearly having playing bass & keyboards, instead of guitar, on the songs from this album. She looked ecstatic, and it came through in the music as well. Comes through on the album, too. This is next-level stuff.

Yob – Clearing the Path to Ascend

I had listened to plenty of Yob before, but they never quite clicked for me until this amazing, sprawling, epic album. So heavy, so gorgeous, so sad & yet so optimistic. It fills me with hope in a way that nothing else on this list can do.

25 Albums from 2014*

WXDU’s Top 65 NC Releases of 2014

rossgrady, , , , , Leave a comment

Based on airplay by all of our DJs during the 2-month period each album was on playlist. I’m pretty sure I’ve never had the same band back-to-back in the top 5 before.

1 – John Howie Jr & the Rosewood Bluff – Everything Except Goodbye
2 – T0W3RS – TL;DR
3 – See Gulls – 2 Songs
4 – Hiss Golden Messenger – Bad Debt
5 – Hiss Golden Messenger – Lateness of Dancers
6 – Reigning Sound – Shattered
7 – Dex Romweber Duo – Images 13
8 – Solar Halos – Solar Halos
9 – Various – Merge 25th Anniversary Covers EP
10 – Daniel Bachman – Orange County Serenade
11 – Lilac Shadows – No Dark / No Light
12 – Humble Tripe – The Giving
13 – Last Year’s Men – Underwhelmed
14 – Datahata – Spectral Cities
15 – Diali Cissokho & Kaira Ba – The Great Peace
16 – Sylvan Esso – Sylvan Esso
17 – Horseback – Piedmont Apocrypha
18 – Silent Lunch – Late to Bloom
19 – Horizontal Hold – This is Not a Living
20 – Logical Sound Discovery – Thrill Seeker
21 – Shipwrecker – III
22 – Wesley Wolfe – Numbskull
23 – The Loudermilks – The Loudermilks
24 – The Tender Fruit – The Darkness Comes
25 – Dan Melchior und das Menace – Hunger
26 – Jenks Miller/JJ Toth – Roads to Ruin
27 – Curtis Eller’s American Circus – How To Make it in Hollywood
28 – Sagan Youth Boys – Annotated Universe
29 – Ezekiel Graves – Chthonic Journey
30 – Wood Ear – Electric Alone
31 – Secret Boyfriend – This is Always Where You’ve Lived
32 – Ashrae Fax – Never Really Been Into It
33 – Davidians – 2014 demos
34 – Flesh Wounds – Bitter Boy 7"
35 – Ama Divers – An Echo in the Sound
36 – Lud – Defenestration Boulevard
37 – Le Weekend – No Object
38 – Spider Bags – Frozen Letter
39 – VVAQRT – Detainee
40 – Backsliders – Raleighwood EP
41 – Blursome – Heavy Resting
42 – No Love – Tape #2
43 – The Tills – Howlin’
44 – Whatever Brains – SSR63/SSR64
45 – Drag Sounds – II
46 – Flesh Wounds – Flesh Wounds
47 – Chatham County Line – Tightrope
48 – Tashi Dorji – Tashi Dorji
49 – Museum Mouth – Alex I Am Nothing
50 – Solar Halos/Irata – Split 10"
51 – New Light Choir – Volume II
52 – Jack Carter & the Armory – Anthropomorphic Transfiguration
53 – Bo White – Millennial Tombs
54 – Staton Embassy – From My Head to Yours
55 – North Elementary – Honcho Poncho
56 – Malcolm Holcombe – Pitiful Blues
57 – Brain Flannel – Empty Set
58 – Jenks Miller & Rose Cross NC – Hopscotch 2013-2014 Recordings
59 – Art Jackson – Tulip Tree Poplar Flower
60 – Beauty World – Beauty World
61 – Totally Slow/Black Market – split 7”
62 – Kneads – 2013 Demos
63 – King Mez – Long Live the King
64 – Kaleidoscope Death – Restofthdrumtracks/DeadDrum
65 – Alpha Cop – Cue the Cold Air

WXDU’s Top 65 NC Releases of 2014