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THE HOLIDAY WEEKEND STARTS HERE: 
...with FAVES 2025! I occasionally hear from folks who want to know what music -- from among all of the posts I do here -- I recommend. To some degree, I recommend all of it, unless I expressly write otherwise (e.g., it's not my thing, but it might be yours). With the holiday shopping season upon us, I have tried to make a list of reasonable size. It's an unordered list. I likely will have overlooked something that I really dig. Indeed, given some family matters this year, it's pretty likely. Let's get to it. THE REPLACEMENTS: Let It Be finally gets deluxe edition treatment this year, and Friends of Pate know there is no way this would not make my list, for objectively, Tim might be their best album, but Let It Be may still be my favorite. This is the one that took me from the guy who listens to classic rock, Ramones, The Clash, Elvis Costello, Pretenders The B-52s, U2, REM, etc. to the fully immersed in indie rock (then "college rock"), making a second home at the record store and getting a shift at the radio station (Thanks, Ken!) sort of guy. Eclectic, vulgar, and heartfelt, Let It Be was the band's announcement that they're coming out. A medium-fidelity masterpiece with intentionally uncorrected mistakes. And now you get remasters, outtakes and alternate takes (most of which were already out there) and a live gig at the Cubby Bear in Chicago. HUSKER DU: As the other Minneapolis band making the journey from Hardcore or Punk to critical darlings, there was always a whiff of "Beatles vs Stones" about the Replacements/Husker Du moment. I was always more of a 'Mats guy, but liked the Huskers only a hair less and lost a fair amount of my hearing on the final night of the Flip Your Wig tour. 1985: The Miracle Year, a live archival release by the Numero Group, faithfully documents their side of this moment. Whereas the 'Mats leaned into their beautiful loserdom, playing unevenly from gig to gig,and covering whatever they heard on the radio en route to a show, the Huskers were a cyclonic force, as relentless as the Ramones in jumping from song to song, debuting new material without ceremony, and much less ambiguously seizing the day. BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN lied about there not being an electric version of the Nebraska album in his vault. He claims he forgot but it seems much more like he held it back from Tracks 2: The Lost Albums box so that the release of the Nebraska '82: Expanded Edition would help promote the Deliver Me From Nowhere biopic. And frankly, I am fine with that, because I am used to Bruce's commercial calculations and the Tracks 2 box really does not do it for me, while this one, which includes the electric stuff, outtakes, and more, really does do it for me. STAX REVIEW: LIVE IN '65! captures two showcase-style gigs. The first, at Club Paradise, seems a bit more casual than the second, at the 5-4 Ballroom. And you don't get much of the label's most legendary stars, though the one track from Wilson Pickett is rapturous, and streamers will get Rufus Thomas doing a 19-minure version of "The Dog." No, it's mostly the lesser lights here, but you get some cooking tracks from Booker T & The MG's and the Mar-Keys and a classic vibe worth hearing. BENNY TROKAN has played bass and keys for Spoon, and his reedy voice undoubtedly compliments Britt Daniel. But Do You Still Think Of Me is a different proposition, a collection of minor gems that sound like they come straight out of the mid-Sixties... sort of. There is a garage-y vibe here that co-exists with an elevated pop feel (not as sophisticated as Wilson or Bacharach, not as obvious as the Brill Building writers) that results in a sound both utterly familiar yet truly distinctive. Also, unusually for this type of project, there's almost nothing aping the British invasion here; it all sounds very American in its way. "Nowhere To Be Found" and "Long Shadows" would be my picks to click, but they're all pretty boss. While this is an unordered list, I may rank this as my favorite LP of 2025, even though it came out in 2024 and I missed it. SHARP PINS, from Chicago, released two albums this year, and if you're thinking that's like Guided by Voices, well, kind of! Not just prolific, but lo-fi with classic influences, though Sharp Pins is much more firmly in the vein of jangly guitar rock, with Beatlesque flourishes and increasing dashes of psychedelia -- maybe somewhere between GbV and the Windbreakers. Radio DDR would have made this list by itself, but Balloon Balloon Balloon may be even better, though it just came out last Friday, so I'm still processing it. If a song title like "Queen of Globes and Mirrors" makes you think that Robyn Hitchcock and Robert Pollard had a love child, you already know how good the song sounds. ASIDE: Sharp Pins is technically a side project for Kai Slater of Lifeguard, a band that's more aggro postpunk and fine, I suppose, so long as we still get Sharp Pins. GUIDED BY VOICES: Speaking of GbV (and I was), Thick Rich and Delicious plays more to Robert Pollard's pop instincts than the more arty-proggy stuff on the album that got an honorable mention here last year. And while "Lucy's World" is a good single, the album really ascends to a new level with "A Tribute to Beatle Bob,"a fitting memorial as anyone who saw the man at shows (GbV and otherwise) over the years. THEE HEADCOATEES, unlike Benny Trokan, are doing the Garage, Punk-Before-Punk thing straight on and doing it really well on Man-Trap, which I believe counts as a reunion album. That they cover not one but two Ramones songs (one well-known, one less so) and "Paint It, Black" should give you a sense of their sonic universe. It's an all-female combo; the one you would be most likely to know would be Holly Golightly. "Walking On My Grave" would be my pick to click, but there are a couple of poppier selections to round things out, and "Becoming Unbecoming Me" would be my pick of those. THE MINUS FIVE: Friends of Pate know I've been a fan of Scott McCaughey going back to the Yong Fresh Fellows. But this has been his main project in this century, and iirc, Oar On, Penelope! is the third Minus 5 LP since his stroke. So I am glad to say that this one is uniformly strong -- from "Words & Birds," which is vaguely Byrds-y both in therms of the melody and McCaughey's plaintive vocal -- all the way to "We Shall Not Be Released." But being me, I am going to have to mention the hilarious backing vocals on "Death the Bludgeoner." DAVID LOWERY, the frontman for Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker, gets a bit more serious on a solo double-LP, Fathers, Sons and Brothers. As the title suggests, this song cycle is autobiographical, though it's not limited to the titular categories; other family members, an ex-wife, musicians (including Sparklehorse) and a doggo turn up in these lyrics. By turns brutal and brutally funny. and generally at his own expense, Lowery grabs your attention and holds it, even with a more subdued (but well-arranged) sonic pallette and lyrics that can stray into free verse. WET LEG's critically-acclaimed debut made my Faves list, so the question was always going to be whether moisturizer was going to be a sophomore slump. And my answer is that it's an album that strikes me like The Cars' Candy-O or Pretenders II: maybe considered a "more of the same, without the jolt of the debut," but gaining in stature once people come to grips with the fact that you can only get that novelty of discovery the first time. Like those albums, this one continues mostly in the vein of its predecessor, and a fair argument could be made that it shows the band's limitations, particularly in the sprechgesang tendency in their melodies. But that would ignore bangers like "magnetout" and that the last few songs do hint at possible musical directions Wet Leg could take next. PANDA BEAR: I have/had a soft spot for Animal Collective, mostly because I thought Panda Bear in particular brought a Brian Wilson-esque vibe to the proceedings without being obvious about it (which may be imagined on my part). On his latest solo LP, Sinister Grift, the arrangements may remain thoroghly modern, but the bones seem even more vintage than the Beach Boys. I suspect it's an extension of Reset, his 2022 collab with Sonic Boom. He's not sampling the Drifters or Eddie Cochran this time, but the songwriting seems to reflect spelunking through that era. U.S. GIRLS: Weirdly, I think that on Scratch It, Meg Remy does the female version of what Panda Bear did this year. It's not quite the indie version of Dusty in Memphis, but the presence of legendary Nashville session man Charlie McCoy gives an indication of what she was going for here. Cat Power's The Greatest is probably also a helpful reference here. Oddly, I don't think the single "Like James Said," really fits on here, so you may want to skip it the first time through. RYAN DAVIS & THE ROADHOUSE BAND: Ryan Davis is one of those names I tended to see pop up in interviews of other songwriters but I never investigated. The buzz for New Threats From The Soul finally got to me, and I'm glad it did. It's easy to hear why someone like the late David Berman was a fan, for this definitely adjacent to the Silver Jews, just with a more Country than Folk influence and perhaps a bit more ironic distance. Davis has real wit and wisdom without falling into Country tropes (don't get me started on today's Country as whitebread pop). NEKO CASE: OK, so Neon Grey Midnight Green is not as obviously hooky as Fox Confessor Brings The Flood or as intense as say, Blacklisted. But her melodies remain distinctive in an oddly conversational way, and and I could listen to her sing the phone book, if phone books still existed. For me, one of the year's comfort albums. ASIDE: Case's former New Pr0nos bandmate Dan Bejar went his own way with Destroyer and also scores in roughly the same way this year with Dan's Boogie -- not as compelling as Kaputt or Posion Season, but close enough that fans of those LPs will want to check it out. FOXWARREN: Andy Schauf has been on my radar since The Party, and he's made the Faves List as well. Foxwarren is his "don't call it a side project," and their first LP was nice enough, but Foxwarren 2 is a bit of a different beast. Due to the pandemic and just plain geographic distance, Schauf ended up assembling this with remote contributions from his bandmates. The result still has plenty of Schauf's 70s soft-rock sensibilities, but the sampling of his colleagues gives them a more modern rhythmic feel, not quite hip-hop, but mildly disorienting in context. I don't think I would want Schauf to do this with his solo work, and it works better the more the groove matters to the song, but it's an intriguing work. NATION OF LANGUAGE grabbed me for the reason that they grabbed most listeners, which is their ability to evoke early- to mid-period New Order without it coming off as mere imitation. They're still doing it on Dance Called Memory, notably on "In Another Life." However, their fourth LP finds them expanding their horizons a bit; still very Eighties, but not aimed at the dance floor, perhaps something closer to early Talk Talk. I would guess some fans will be put off by it, but I'm older, so I appreciate the ambition. JEFF TWEEDY's arguably self-indulgent triple set, Twilight Override, could just as easily have been titled, "An Evening With Jeff Tweedy," by which I mean it's a mostly intimate collection. He's not breaking any new ground here, but if you're a fan of Tweedy/Wilco, you would probably prefer to have all of it than some slimmed-down version. Indeed, it's so on-brand that at times I wondered whether we needed the more arty touches on a number of the tracks, as I'm not sure they really serve the songs (which is not to say that I don't appreciate the more subtle touches he put into otherwise fairly spare arrangements). And frankly, I would recommend this if only for "Lou Reed Was My Babysitter," in which Tweedy pays homage to the legend in such a goofy, joyful way that one cannot help but be transported.. I am reminded of a bit deleted from Almost Famous in which Russell Hammond and William Miller bond over the importance of a "woo" on an early Marvin Gaye single. One tends not to think of Lou Reed in the same way, but Tweedy reminds us that we should. HONORABLE MENTIONS: in Americana, Patterson Hood's Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams, Jason Isbell's Foxes In The Snow, and Amanda Shires's Nobody's Girl are all quite good, and were this a more objective list, Isbell's would probably be on it. But they really were not my vibe this year for mostly personal reaons. And in Country, Margo Price's sharp-tongued Hard Headed Woman just missed my personal cutoff. Turnstile's NEVER ENOUGH made them the critics' darling, and I would have loved to pair their "hardcore band reaches for the mainstream" narrative with the Husker Du set, but the songwriting just doesn't cohere for me. I can't pretend that Britpop was ever close to my heart, but I give it a try periodically, so it's funny to me that the Oasis reunion got all that publicity with no new music, while (The London) Suede put out Antidepressants, which is a strong album; "Dancing With the Europeans" even struck me as owing a lot to 80s postpunk. Geese also got a lot of buzz this year, but I think that I prefer 3D Country to Getting Killed in the way that I prefer American Beauty and Workingman's Dead as studio LPs to Live Dead or Europe '72, though I like the Grateful Dead either way; Getting Killed isn't live, but you can get the parallel. Snocaps is a surprise release by Katie Crutchfield (Waxahatchee) and her sister Allison, and the spontenaiety is there in the music... but I had the same issue I had with the last Waxahatchee LP, which was that it was good but a bit weak at the start. And when I think of The National's frontman Matt Berninger's Get Sunk, I think of the period where Pete Townshend was making good solo LPs, but you sort of wished he was putting the effort into The Who, whose albums were declining because they started to sound more and more like townshend solo LPs (albeit with Daltrey vocals). Happy Thanksgiving all!
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