The competition was absurdly tough in choosing Ear Traffic’s top 10 overall albums of 2022 and (especially) for picking the top 35 tracks of the year, aka the HI-35. I suppose that from my perspective,[…]
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Category: music opinion
Ear Traffic’s best local albums and tracks of 2022
Real quick, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it yet again: The year doesn’t end on Nov. 30. It drives me up … not a wall, but perhaps an easily scalable chain-link fence …[…]
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Yeah Yeah Yeahs have given us the Song of Anti-Summer. Now, hearts like mine need the comeback to be completed
For an ardent-but-realistic Yeah Yeah Yeahs appreciator, it’s a little surprising how astoundingly this comeback has gone — so far. Nearly a decade after one of the best bands of the 2000s left us with a barely-worth-any-trouble[…]
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SXSW Thursday: Yard Act and We Were Promised Jetpacks give Brooklyn Vegan some British variety
It was a heavy internal dilemma for, oh, perhaps 72 hours — where was my return to South by Southwest going to occur this year? On Thursday afternoon, I finally decided to cheer myself up[…]
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Austin Music Awards 2022: The return of the Dive Bar Grammys
Yes, I did miss this. Two years away from the ragtag, buttons-loose, buzzing, not-even-faux-formal feel of the Austin Music Awards made the heart grow fonder. The AMAs, which I’m christening the Dive Bar Grammys as[…]
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Ear Traffic’s top tracks of 2021: The Local 20 and the HI-35
(Photo of James McMurtry by Nicole Berlin Photography) In my ranking of my 10 favorite albums of 2021 (for historians, Ear Traffic’s first year-end album ranking), I mentioned how difficult it was to narrow[…]
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