It's Friday the 13th, Valentine's Day is tomorrow, and ICE is supposedly leaving Minnesota? What a weekend! We here in MN will believe it when we see it, of course. Here's this week's promoted fundraiser. Please help if you can. 

Times are tough, and music helps keeps us sane. I have fewer picks than last week, but they're all really solid stuff. Check them out below.

At the In Lieu show at Cloudland Theater in south Minneapolis on Saturday night, one attendee walked around the crowd handing out rebel loon stickers. The show, an album release party for Minneapolis rock band Battery Eyes, was also a fundraiser for MIRAC, a volunteer organization that fights for legal rights for immigrants. This is reality of seeing a concert in Minneapolis at this moment in time. People gather to have a good time, but a good time that can hopefully do some good to help our neighbors under siege. 

One of the disadvantages of running a hobby site is that real-life responsibilities can get in the way. That's my excuse not getting to this write up of Monday night's Agriculture show until now. That, and the fact that the mental load of *gestures broadly at everything* is completely exhausting. Late as this writeup might be, Agriculture was the show I needed as catharsis from reality. 

Praise Dio, it's the most wonderful time of the year! That's right, it's time for end-of-the-year lists! I've been compiling my own personal best music lists annually for the last ten-ish years, previously publishing them for friends to see on Facebook. I've largely given the finger to Zuckerberg at this point, so I wasn't sure where my 2025 list was going to live. Fortunately, I made the decision to jump to another dead online medium this year! It was a pretty damn strong year for music, and here are my top 20.

Last night I went to what is almost certain to be my last concert of 2025, a bill of local metal bands at an instrument store/school/coffee shop called Klash Coffee. I had never heard of any of the bands playing, nor had I been to the venue before. But I had a free night and it was a $10 cover (with Toys for Tots donations also strongly encouraged), and a friend agreed to go with, so we braved the subzero temperatures to go check out the show. I'm incredibly glad I did. 

Yesterday, I missed my weekly recommendation post, which I'm happy to say has been quite rare. This was partially due to it being an unusual day for me - I was at home doing things around the house rather than playing music in the course of my day job. But more significant is the fact that I just didn't care for pretty much anything I checked out. I gave several new albums a listen, and most I shut off before finish.

The only album I made it through in its entirety was Conflict DLC by Health. Health is a weird band for me in that I've seen them live and have liked many of their individual songs, but none of their albums in full have sucked me in the way my favorite bands have. They're also such a sprawling band that it's hard to get a handle on their catalog - they're incredibly prolific and have albums, compilations, EPs, collaborations, and soundtracks. This new album is apparently all tracks that were supposed to be included on their last album, Rat Wars. In short, its hard to know where to start with Health. That said, this is a strong collection of songs. In particular, the song "Shred Envy" reminds me of White Zombie, which is always a good thing. Maybe a Rob Zombie collaboration is on the way! 

TL; DR: Listen to the new Health album.

I wasn't planning on writing a post today, considering the post-Thanksgiving Turkey coma. But, I find myself with some time on my hands, and it's a pretty solid release day. What tipped me over the edge was the discovery of a couple solid Bandcamp finds, so away we go!

I am a pretty obsessive tracker. I record every show I see on Concert Archives, movies I watch on Letterboxd, records I own on Discogs, and of course I have multiple spreadsheets and apps for my workouts. Of course, I have to track the songs I listen to as well, for which I use Last.fm. As you can see, I'm getting pretty close to 100,000 scrobbles (Last.fm speak for "songs listened to"), and my obsessive nature has me itching to get to that completely pointless milestone.

For someone who is so obsessed with music, 15 scrobbles a day is pretty low. That's only partially due to the fact that I listen to a lot of music where tracks that are 10-25 minutes long are the norm. The rest is because of the age of my account. I've been using Last.fm consistently for the last eight years. But I actually signed up for it nine years earlier, back in 2009. I don't exactly recall what happened, but it looks like I used it to track 330 songs back in 2009, then completely forgot all about it until the very end of 2017 (which is when, as a Google Music/YouTube Music user, I got jealous of Spotify's annual stats). I've been using it consistently since then, but my account has a full seven years of inactivity. All those years of zero tracks really pulls the daily average down. 

My actual daily average is more like 30-40 songs, which would be even higher if I didn't have to do stupid things like "go to meetings" or "live my actual life." That's no where near high enough to get to 100k tracks before the end of the year - I'd need more like 60-70 tracks per day, and there's only so much grindcore out there. But I figure I can get there by February or so, when I'll begin by annual project of listening to an album I've never heard before each day of the month. And once I hit that 100k goal? Onto the next completely meaningless goal, I suppose. Maybe I'll focus on trying to fix that daily average count. 

Happy Halloween! Today has a lot of interesting releases, but I'm not going to have as much time to dive into them as I'd like - real life calls. That said, I did have a chance to check out a few records this morning before things got crazy. 

Last night, I caught the tail end of A Queer Ritual, a two-day festival highlighting local and national queer heavy bands that was held in the basement of a warehouse/art space building in an industrial pocket of Minneapolis. This show came to my attention because of its two national headliners, Ragana and Couch Slut. I assumed that these two bands would be split across the two days of the festival, but when the daily lineups were announced, both were billed on Saturday night. With two bands I was interested in seeing at a venue I'd never visited before, plus the interesting niche of a queer-focused lineup and audience, I figured I had to check it out.