The Audio Perv

We’re not really organized with these kinds of lists so we’ll have a little bit of a best of and some ranting and some other stuff. Sooo let’s start this off:

Our favorite songs of 2010
Florence and the Machine – “Dog Days Are Over”
This is the song that you want to wake up to everyday because of all the crazy harps and violins. It makes you feel happy or at least less grumpy. True, this song was re-released this year but we don’t care. It’s great, Florence is great live and we’re pretty sure that she’ll be performing at the Grammys and win one for this song.

Mumford & Sons – “Little Lion Man”
Again, we first heard this song before this year. In fact, it was at CMJ in 2009 at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. Our friend and photographer Meimi convinced us to go check out this band (and stay for some “unknown band” who turned out to be The Temper Trap) and we loved these guys as soon as we heard this song. It makes us want to put on the soundtrack to O Brother Where Art Thou which is probably as mainstream as old country folk rock gets.

We Are Scientists – “Jack & Ginger”
When we found out that We Are Scientists would be releasing a new album in 2010, we were pretty excited. That excitement gradually turned to disappointment when we heard the new album Barbara. One highlight from the album is “Jack & Ginger”. We Are Scientists’s best songs are when Keith sings about drinking and being depressed. This is why we love “Jack & Ginger”.

Broken Bells – “The High Road”
We really didn’t care that this was a mini super group or collaboration. It’s the best pop rock song of the year.. mainly because we love singing the chorus and the end of the song when we’re drunk or when we’re driving alone at night.

Did we say that we’d have a top 5 list? nah and we’re not going to hold ourselves to it either.

Favorite Late Night Music Show:
Last Call with Carson Daly
Ever since Last Call ditched the old talk show format, this show has been great. The show’s more engaging with Carson talking to the viewer as if they’re at the same bar he’s sitting at instead of him trying to sell you on the next guest’s movie. What makes Last Call even more unique is the wide range of musical guests on the show. Last Call has shown performances from Fitz & The Tantrums, A Perfect Circle, Lissie, City & Colour, Weezer, Phoenix, The Walkmen, Menomena and so much more. Some of these artists would only appear on the other late night shows if an actor wore the band’s t-shirt. Also, Last Call has some really cool spotlight features and interviews like Maynard from APC, B.o.B, Black Dub, Jay Electronica etc. If you’re not watching Last Call because of some bias towards Carson and the old TRL, that’s dumb. Just shut up and watch the show.

Second place: Saturday Night Live
Although the comedy has suffered this season, the musical guests have been top notch so far. Check it: Arcade Fire, Kanye West, Kings of Leon, Florence and the Machine, Rihanna, Paul McCartney, Eminem and Lil Wayne. Next new episode on January 8th: The Black Keys. Geezus, SNL’s music booker is doing a hell of a job.

Favorite Interview:
Brandon Boyd from Incubus
When we first heard that Brandon would be releasing a solo album, we started doing some research and noticed that not a lot of outlets had picked up on it. We hit up one of our contacts at Sony who referred us to someone else and they wanted stats from our site. True, we’re not one of those 1/2 million pageviews per month sites but we do pretty well around here. We were positive and optimistic but tried not to get too excited. And then, we got confirmation and we shrieked! Once we started speaking with Brandon, the first thing we noticed is how serene he sounds. We’ve done a few interviews where the rocker on the other side of the phone was still drunk or high (sorry, we can’t say!) but Brandon was cooler than the Fonz. Also, Brandon was so.. well spoken. Maybe it was our expectation that he’d be like everyone else but he wasn’t. Yes, maybe we did develop a bit of a dude crush but we were talking to the lead singer of Incubus. Brandon told us all about his new album and how he played every instrument on it and how therapeutic it was to make this album for his own confidence as a musician as well as for recovering from his ankle injury. Brandon, we hope to speak with you again.

Favorite Concert:
There are so many. Maybe it was the Spin SXSW show with Muse and Metric. Or Muse and Silversun Pickups at MSG in March. Yes, we think that’s it. The set up for Muse’s stage show is amazing and the band sounds better at 50 feet in the air than most of your favorite bands do 5 feet in front of you. We actually have a beef with Muse’s booking agent but she does a hell of a job with the band so maybe we’ll let it go. You kind of forget that Muse had so many hits on Absolution which came out.. 7 years ago. Anyways, if you get a chance to see Muse and it’s $100 or less, do it. It’s soo worth it. And try to get a GA ticket.

So we want to rant for a little bit here and thank a ton of people. First off, thanks to our fellow blogger buddies at Antiquiet.com, ConsequenceOfSound.net, RockItOutBlog.com, SomeKindOfAwesome.com and TwentyFourBit.com. Although we might not all share the same tastes in music, there’s a strong mutual respect for everyone. There are few sites more honest than Antiquiet.com. Plus they write about Queens of the Stone Age and Foo Fighters (two of our favorite bands). ConsequenceOfSound.net has more festival news (before it’s announced to the public and probably bands families) than anyone we know. RockItOutBlog.com is the only daily rock news vlog we watch to know what happened in music (and it’s 6 minutes or less, you can’t beat that!). SomeKindOfAwesome.com features the NEWEST and we mean NEWEST music that’s available on the internet. I’m told that they’re ready to compile their year end list for 2011 because they have every release from the year already. TwenyFourBit.com is the most eclectic out of all the sites in our little unofficial network. They feature all sorts of artists in a genuine way that piques our curiosity and wants us to “buy” new music. So thanks to everyone at those sites who support us in trying to be awesome and to linking to us. We appreciate it.

Thanks to Nicole Poulos of Sideways Media and Jeff Kilgour of Tijuana Gift Shop and the rest of the sponsors who welcomed us to SXSW as the media sponsor for their SXSW parties at the Belmont. It was an amazing time and we had sooooooooo many great bands. We went to a bunch of parties at SXSW and we won’t believe you if you tell us that this one wasn’t one of your favorites. So thanks again guys and hopefully we can do it again next year!

Thank you to Bob Berman and the entire RethinkPopMusic team for letting us do CMJ with you. We look forward to more shows together!

Next, let’s thank everyone who’s contributed to the site this year. Without you, we’d get even less sleep than we already do. We’d also be a lot more bruised and suffered a lot more hearing loss.
Sophia Hepheastou
Britnee Foreman
Kevin Aranibar
Bridget Maher
Meimi Yeung
Phil DeSimone
Jennifer Murtha
Rosie Sparrow
Meredith Newsome
Stephanie Kibbe (yes, we’re still claiming you even though you have your own site!)
Kristal Bailey

Thanks to the publicists/digital marketing/media people at the following companies. Without you, we’d have very little to post about and we wouldn’t get to ask your bands about their favorite sexual positions (kidding. although in the future… haha)

Big Hassle Media (Thank you Ken and your whole staff. You guys are great)
Total Assault (Thank you Danny, Melissa and the whole TA team)
Sneak Attack Media (Thank you Marni, Lisa and everyone)
Girlie Action Media
Press Here Publicity
The Musebox
BigMethod
Biz3 Publicity
Plan A Media
The Syndicate
ABC PR
Atlantic Records
Island Def Jam
Roadrunner Records
Universal Republic Records
InDeGoot Entertainment
Punk Da Funk Management

Looking at that list above makes me realize how many emails we get every week, wow

Also, thank you to Abigail and everyone over at MOG for making us a part of your community and helping us make money through the ads. Also, thank you to Seth and everyone at IndieClick.

More thanks to our friends: Bridget Maher, Maritza Collazo, Russ Rubin, Saint Motel, Farhaad Esfandiary, Myles Grosovsky, Alex Rossiter and everyone at the Studio at Webster Hall, everyone who still follows us on Twitter, all the Facebook fans, and anyone else that we may have forgotten (sorry!)

And thanks to everyone who comes to the site whether it’s once a week, whenever we have prizes to give away (you greedy bas.. just kidding, we love you) and especially everyone who visits everyday. We appreciate you for putting up with the ads (yes, we need them because they pay for our hosting needs, the blank DVDs we use to record the late night performances you watch on the site, our internet/cable bill, the new DVD recorder we had to buy, the replacement DVD burner we needed so we could import the videos onto our computer for uploading and our iPod touch. That, well, it’s a gift to the perv!) and our overtweeting. We like the attention and it does increase traffic. We know that some of you, even some of our friends may not respect the site because of all the genres we post and all of our tweets, but.. suck it. We love what we’re doing and apparently so did over 750,000 of you this year. So thanks. You make all the late nights recording the videos, calling and yelling at our host over malware that was THEIR fault and our slightly subpar performances at our day job (because of our blogging) worth it. Also, thanks to the girlfriend who competes for our time with the site almost all the time. Sure, you might see Arcade Fire on Leno a few minutes late but if I make the girlfriend wait anymore, she might do something horrible and break my computer. Thanks again and have a Happy New Year.