Here it is: Bored In Pittsburgh’s favorite local tracks from the past year, arranged in no particular order. Not a best-of list by any means, just a collection of music that stood out to one person. As always, there were so many great releases that it was impossible to include everything, but here goes.
###
Benji. – Jorja
Funky, laid back house-hop serenade that probably isn’t about the English singer, but could be if you wanted it to.
###
Tyler Heaven – Mongoose
A Deserter‘s Songs cut if Deserter’s Songs had been inspired by nostalgia and nighttime BMX rides as opposed to depression and drugs.
###
Buffalo Rose x Tom Paxton – Runaway
A sunny country collaboration with folk legend Tom Paxton that celebrates the messy, uncertain nature of romantic relationships.
###
Same – Another World Record
Bummerdom rendered widescreen; shuffles along with head down and hands in pockets, then grabs a guitar, strikes a pose, and absolutely rips.
###
Mila Moon – Wood
A gnotty grunge artifact situated among wispy shadows, all sourced from a woodland clearing frozen with dew.
###
Sadurday – Mary
A seething, glowering rocker that creeps in like a hangover before erupting into a ferocious chorus. The screams kick in at just the right time.
###
Pat Coyle – Glimmer of Gordon
Synth pads quaver like Jello cups and acoustic guitar sways while the teakettle-voiced Coyle waxes poetic about a person lost to time.
###
Cliff Fields – 4BLUNTS
As Astral Weeks-y as I’ve heard hip-hop get (it’s actually a Milton Nascimento sample but stay with me), from its rapturous strings and guitars to its stoned, poetic musings.
###
NOX BOYS – My Umbrella
The final track released by the throwback garage outfit pre-hiatus was a good one, combining Kinksian snarl with topsy-turvy instrumental flourishes.
###
Cartoon Forest – The Unknown
An alien sound bath–comprising both organic and synthetic elements–that would act as a perfect soundtrack to Jeff VanderMeer‘s lysergic eco-sci-fi books.
###
Fig – Body Study I
The line, “These days I feel like just a mind/I’ve forgotten my own body,” sung in deceptively chipper fashion, is a poignant illustration of the freezing effect of lingering trauma.
###
Ramon Yancey – Empathy
The motormouth Yancey skips rhymes across an airy instrumental, effortlessly linking themes as disparate as ancient Egypt, gentrification, crowded Megabus rides, and Malcolm X.
###
MIRAKLER – The Shootist
Apocalyptically anti-colonial metal that brings a clanging hammer down on the head of the American cowboy archetype.
###
String Machine – Churn It Anew
A driving, anthemic shrugging off of winter malaise that rides chunky bass, cascading drums, and rousing horns into the soppy relief of the spring thaw.
###
Deej – Deejor
“They don’t know you like I do,” Deej murmurs over watery synths. She’s not pining, though; she follows up with, “They don’t know you’re full of shit.” That hand isn’t carrying a torch, it’s raising a middle finger.
###
Nate Cross – Push It!
A stomper that hits like a rise-and-grind anthem for aspiring monsters. “Push it, it’s your job or mine,” growls one ghoul to the other, backed by fuzzy guitars and horror house synths.
###
Wisbands – Big Room
12-string guitar improvisation that courses like a river’s current, assisted by Shayontani Banerjee’s pastoral violin swells.
###
Water Trash – Yellowstoned
Comically nihilistic demotivation that smirks and hits a cowbell in the face of climate collapse, economic stagnation, and existential dread.
###
Bring Her – In Time We’re Downtide
Bleak, pummeling waves of guitar and synth sludge. A merciless drum machine. Monotone doomsaying delivered through gritted teeth. For a good time, listen while staring at one of Goya’s Black Paintings.
###
Essential Machine – Almost Outta Here
A road-warrior track that hovers on the ambiguity of the word “almost,” which could signify either tantalizing potential or painful regret.
###
VO2K – gucciandsex
Did John Mayer and PARTYNEXTDOOR collaborate? No, but VO2K’s lazy ballad, simultaneously detached and infatuated, could have fooled me.
###
Ol Whitetail – Little Creek
A wistful, banjo-assisted daydream that stands outside of time as it describes a blissful, perhaps long-gone afternoon spent falling into things–a stream and love, specifically.
###
FLOOR BABA – NO FEAR OF DEATH
Who needs antidepressants when you’ve got this array of bouncing beats, supercharged video game arpeggios, and vocoded poetry?
###
Tough Cuffs – It Got Colder
Hardcore punk that walks away from an exploding cop car in slow motion. Guitars ooze like molten lava, sculpted into recognizable forms only by a cymbal’s unrelenting crash.
###
Sad Girls Aquatics Club – Plastic & Pearl
Twinkling, rippling synth pop that explores the letdown that comes with realizing your dreams, and then realizing that you’re still you.
###
Nardo Says – The Arrival
A tribute to the late Reese Vex Brown (introduced by a voicemail from Brown’s mother), this track stirs both body and soul with ecstatic vocal echoes, clattering percussion, and robot bass.
###
Ames Harding – Dance of the Red Flower
Cryptic, lively jazz recorded in a cavernous church, featuring the unadulterated claps, whoops, and interjections of spontaneous creation.
###
Partly Sunny – GOD BLESS
A raucous howler that uses hairpin chord changes, simmering bass, and lightning bolt guitars to build and release tension.
###
Bri Dominique – Rosie
A bedroom-based ditty that bobs along on a sea of contemplative viola and jaunty keys; its warmly sung lyrics pay tribute to someone who may very well be an imaginary friend or a dream figure.
###
Short Fictions – Don’t Start a Band
Sam Treber, backed by harmonized riffs and churning power chords, makes the slog of long van rides, drunken arguments, and financial desperation sound like an absolute blast.
###
TOBACCO – Giff Breed
It’s like the music to a partially taped-over nature documentary about a giant extinct centipede, recorded by a chemically enhanced person fiddling with an old synthesizer.
###
Halloway Williams- Appalachia
A sylvan ballad that follows the trajectory of a summer rainstorm, starting hushed and gentle before gathering force and thundering with emotion.
###
The Zells – Hell Car
Windmilling riffs and dentist-drill solos energize this twisted punk campaign theme for a deposed king awaiting decapitation.
###
fern – same side
One of the purest musical sugar rushes I’ve ever experienced, this glitchy pop lament made my brain explode with glee the first time I heard the beat drop.
###
vireo – Prize Fish
A rollicking folk tune that does the Fleet Foxes thing by sounding like it could have been recorded at any point over the past several hundred years.
###
Stunna2Fly – 50 Opps N Runnin
The instrumental is like a crime thriller score chopped into sharp fragments, and the bars feature stories of destitution that lend weight to cold-eyed challenges.
###
The Arden Room – Pastor Wren
A towering steeple of wide-open Americana that rains grace down upon its troubled titular figure as it climbs toward the vast dome of the prairie sky.
###
I4A – Fence of Pearls
A musical monolith that defies characterization, this one features gentle strums, honeyed vocals, tommy gun drums, blazing guitar solos, and electronic squalls. An entire album stuffed into one song.
###
Mani Bahia – Fisher
An ascending-descending guitar earworm and a flour-on-the-floor kick drum act as the backbone for a moody R&B jam that examines the push and pull of the flirt game.
###
Pink Gin Marimbas – Crumbling Spires
Remember being overwhelmed by the intensities of your own imagination when you were a kid? This song is that feeling set to grand, grainy music.
###
Stabscotch – XALLELUJAH DÆMON
An inexplicable tumult that can only be compared to Clown Core; like a William Burroughs character ranting in front of a Casio keyboard on Instagram Live while a grindcore band dies in the background.
###
Montell Fish – Fall in Love with You.
Spare and intimate, this acoustic slow dance taps the rich vein of one-man-and-his-guitar-and-his-feelings, a la early Bon Iver.
###
Yokai Jem – Just Kiss Me
Nylon-stringed bossa nova that brings to mind images of Jack Johnson paddling around on a boogie board off the coast of Brazil.
###
Echo Lightwave Unspeakable – Egress: 2
Bent circuits conjure a feverish brown study in which a decrepit cartoon wizard casts spells while being eaten alive by digital ants.
###
Glam Hand – Wanda
Throwback jangle filtered through a layer of detached, fried, screen-drenched 21st century ennui. How many syllables does the name “Wanda” have? Definitely more than two.
###
Living World – World
A crusty punk screed that curses our ossified government and our flattened cultural landscape with dirty middle fingers raised to the sky.
###
Sinia – Missed Exit
Minimalist, free-floating R&B that deconstructs the genre’s composite parts and scatters them loosely around a skeletal rhythmic framework.
###
Sober Clones – The Other Side
Begins like a Franz Ferdinand demo that’s been fried in a tub of battery acid, ends like a gurgling, nearly amorphous blob of raw dream material.
###
Trovants – I Hope Your Town Has Good Bands
You might hear several of Trovants’ members slyly conjuring mischief with other projects, but this half-hour track finds them in looming, cinematic mode, unfurling tectonic plates of guitar, synth, vocals, and trumpet.
###
Merci da Icon – Deer Corpse
A late-night drive over to a lady friend’s house becomes the site of high emo-rap drama; intrusive thoughts and alluring texts lead to a potentially deadly encounter with a shadowy deer crossing the road.
###
Sleeping Witch & Saturn – Knife
Channels the heart-on-sleeve grip of classic post-punk, complete with angular guitar figures, dancefloor rhythms, and jittery, emotive vocals.
###
Brother Bluebird – Holy Ocean
A stroll through through a wintry landscape; snarls of acoustic guitar litter the ground like dead branches, and plaintive, subtle hooks mingle with the falling snow.
###
MAKO – BLACK EYES
“…he’s got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eyes. When he comes after ya, he doesn’t seem to be livin’, until he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white, and then….” SHARK ATTACK METAL.
###
Darkpines – Bodydies (Realhumdrums)
A blurry melodrama whose wordless second half goes to some truly unusual places, including procedurally-generated garden, free jazz keyboard session, and car demolition scrapyard.
Bored In Pittsburgh 