If It's Too Loud...

Closing out the end of the year the way I always do, with a massive playlist of my favorite songs of the year. Here's to a great 2026, whatever that might look like. Best when shuffled, but a specific shoutout to "Weight of the Wheel" by Kassi Valazza (probably my favorite song of the year).

This year's If It's Too Loud's Halloween playlist, we went a little more manageable than previous years. It's fifty-two songs at just under three hours, featuring songs about witches, ghosts, zombies, vampires, werewolves, and all of our favorite things about Halloween. You get some of our favorite local artists, all time classic artists, forgotten vintage songs, and bands you're just discovering for the first time. This one is perfect for your last minute Halloween shopping (just push past all the Christmas stock in the way), handing out candy, or drowning out your co-workers playing "Monster Mash," "Zombie," and Fleetwood Mac (for whatever reason) all day!

As always, we've outdone ourselves for this year's 2024 Halloween playlist. It was started as soon as 2023's was published, and clocks in at just under four hours and seventy-four songs. We have hip hop, indie rock, lost 50's classics, garage rock, world music, folk, grunge, metal, and more. It's a monster (pun intended) playlist, and perfect to listen to for all of your Halloween needs!

As we dive into 2024, it also means we start closing the books on 2023. Here's a nice long playlist of some of my favorite tracks of the year. Best consumed via shuffle.

If you've been here for a while, you know that I'm all about Halloween and tend to overdo it with our annual Halloween playlist. 2023 is no exception. I've been assembling it since right after the 2022 playlist came out, and this is another beast of a playlist coming in at over five and a half hours! You get songs from long time favorites (The Prefab Messiahs, Florence + The Machine, Anthrax, Lou Reed, etc.), new favorites (Puppy Angst, Miranda and the Beat, Fever Ray, Buck Meek, Twin Temple, etc.), local favorites (Wyn Doran, Eldridge Rodriguez, The Jacklights, The Freqs, etc), and many, many more! Plus, we're putting it out a full eight days before Halloween, so you have plenty of time to enjoy it and it will be available for any weekend festivities! Let us know what you think, and feel free to suggest songs for 2024!

Ken and I are obsessed with Music League, which is basically the turntable.fm replacement I was waiting for. If you follow us on social media (cheap plug: Twitter , Facebook , Instagram ), you had an opportunity to join us and celebrate 2022's music, and maybe discover some new tunes while you were at it. So for Monday Mix, enjoy the top three songs from our 2022 prompts . Best heard on shuffle. Want to join the next If It's Too Loud competition? Follow us on the socials.

If you've been here for a while you know that Halloween is my favorite holiday. The costumes, the candy, the scary movies, being able to walk around a cemetery without people thinking you're a weirdo, etc. Our 2022 Halloween playlist is ninety-seven songs and five and a half hours long! I started putting it together way back on October 26 of last year, and it features a wide range of artists and genres like classic punk, gothic country, indie rock, folk, hip hop, noise rock, country, grunge, New Wave, etc. I decided to put it out a week early to make sure it was available for all of your spooky happenings this week. Enjoy!

I am a big Meat Loaf fan. Bat Out of Hell II , alongside Ace of Base's The Sign , was the first album I bought at the Greendale Mall Lechmere with my own money back in 1994. "Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through" was one of the first music videos I ever remember seeing on VH1. As a nerdy theater kid, Meat Loaf's (and, to a further extent, Jim Steinman's) flair for the bombastic and dramatic definitely appealed to 13-year-old me, and the fact that it was loud and often-profane rock music in an era where I was finding Weezer to be a little too heavy for my tastes made it feel like a little rebellion with every listen. Meat Loaf probably hasn't aged well, musically speaking. Yeah, there's Rocky Horror , but Bat Out of Hell , a debut solo album that went neck-and-neck with Thriller in lifetime sales for a while, sounds very old in particular (and "Paradise By the Dashboard Light" especially couldn't get made today). The albums between Bats are larg...

I wasn't a Nick Cave fan three months ago, but I am now. Nick Cave is an Australian rock musician who is probably more than just a cult hero but definitely not a mainstream act, either. His baritone is unlike most male singers, his songs routinely pass the five minute mark, and the lyrics are filled with some of the most vivid and compelling narratives I've heard in a long, long time. I don't know why it didn't click the first few times I tried to listen, but it did now. So for Monday Mix this week, have some Nick Cave. The bulk of the mix is based around his work with his band, The Bad Seeds, but also includes some offerings from the Grinderman side project and The Birthday Party (the post-punk, ahead-of-its-time band that preceded the Bad Seeds). Trimming a playlist down to the best 30 songs of all eras was a challenge, which means there's none of his soundtrack work with Warren Ellis and none of The Boys Next Door, but if you're anything like me, you'll...

Forget your traditional stuff, we like our Christmas music to be modern, dumb, or dumb and modern, so here's a ton of Christmas music to put on shuffle and enjoy with/annoy the family. Subscribe and check back, since we'll probably be adding to it over the course of the season.

For the 2021 If It's Too Loud... Halloween playlist, I did what I've been doing the past few years: As soon as the 2020 playlist was posted, I created a new one and started adding to it. Every time I stumbled onto a song deemed appropriate, I added it. After a year, the playlist ballooned to eighty nine songs and five and a half hours! There's a ton of new stuff released in the past year (The Exbats, Viagra Boys, Nervous Dater, Hard Nips, The Jacklights) there are also plenty of classics (Sonic Youth, L7, Neil Young, The Cramps, Pulp) in here. It covers a wide variety of musical genres, and it's long enough to cover any of your Halloween plans! Plus, since Halloween isn't until Sunday, we get a whole week to listen. Enjoy!

If you've been reading If It's Too Loud... for a while, you know that Halloween is my favorite holiday, and that I tend to go overboard with the Halloween playlist every year. Since this is pretty much all we have for Halloween this year, it's a monster (o pun intended) seventy one song, nearly four hour playlist! I've been making it since literally last November, adding songs as I stumbled across them. There are songs from longtime blog favorites (Speedy Ortiz, Wussy, Melvins, The Gravel Pit, Against Me!), newly discovered favorites (Heather Valley, Comet Pond, Tysk Tysk Task, Gino & The Goons), some classics (Bruce Springsteen, Jello Biafra, Dusty Springfield, Alice Cooper, Siouxsie and the Banshees), and more! Whatever you're doing Saturday night (or this entire week) to celebrate, you're gonna to find some spookiness to love here!

If you missed Jeff's Quarantine DJ session on Friday, it's now on demand! Enjoy this hour long mix of new and recent indie music.

With Kathleen Edwards releasing her first album of new music in nearly eight years later this summer, I felt like now was as good a time as any to take a look back at some of her best work so far, so a new Monday Mix for your American Memorial Day is cookout appropriate even if you're socially distancing, and the irony that it highlights a Canadian artist on a national holiday is not lost on me. Edwards has released four albums up to now, and this mix covers all four plus her new release, "Options Open." The mix is best listened to in order, at least the first time around... Failer : Edwards's debut album is represented by five songs here. "Six O'Clock News" put her on the map, "One More Song the Radio Won't Like" kept her there, and the rest show some decent range. Don't sleep on "12 Bellevue," which remains a favorite of mine. After listening to this set, make sure to check out this highlight from her debut (and long...

Percussionist Bill Rieflin passed way last week after a battle with cancer. He is perhaps best known for his work with Ministry, but he was also a session/touring musician with a number of bands in the later part of his career, perhaps most notably with R.E.M.. R.E.M. is my favorite band, and Rieflin was the drummer for their final studio albums along with the late tours. I have a pet theory that Bill Berry, the band's original drummer, was the true glue that held all the pieces of R.E.M. together, and when he left after New Adventures in Hi-Fi the band's catalogue became less focused and cohesive as a result. We'll never know for certain how much of an impact Rieflin had on R.E.M.'s sound in those later years, but I can't help but think that a drummer of his caliber and style brought some energy to a band that, in retrospect, may have needed it. So, for Monday Mix this week, the best of the Bill Rieflin R.E.M. years. My favorite tracks from their last two ...

Same as last year, I got more than a little ridiculous with this year's If It's Too Loud... Halloween playlist. Starting on November 9, 2018, I began adding songs as I came across them, ending up with a 55 song, over three hour playlist. It features some of our classic alternative favorites (Jon Spencer, Holly Golightly, Meat Puppets, Mudhoney), songs more metal than our usual (Ministry, Orange Goblin), hip hop (STL GLD, L'Orange and Jeremiah Jae), folk and folk adjacent (Mary Lou Lord, Jittery Jack, Charming Disaster, Jason Hawk Harris), local favorites (Carissa Johnson, Diablogato, Hallelujah the Hills), new discoveries/favorites (The Exbats, The Tenth, Starcrawler), the loud (Screaming Females, Lightning Bolt, Scissorfight), and, of course, much, much more! It's perfect for all of your Halloween party and handing out candy needs!

Me: "Jeff, you gotta do the mix for Monday before Christmas. Also me: "On it." Also also me: "Hey, I liked a lot of songs this year. Gonna be hard to narrow it down to 30." Also also also me: "Screw it, do 40." Also also also also me: "Dude, you added 67 to the playlist." Also also also also also me: "Fine, I'll try to cut it to 50." Also also also also also also me: "There's no way I'm cutting 'The Hamilton Polka' from this." So yeah. Here's 51 songs for the year. Shuffle and enjoy!

I love Halloween, but even I think I may have gone a bit too far on this year's If It's Too Loud... Halloween playlist. Starting on November 1, 2017, I started a playlist and tossed just about any song I thought would be good for a Halloween playlist on it. What we end up with is a forty five song, nearly three hour playlist. Just about every style of music we cover is included on this. You get indie rock legends (Luna, Buffalo Tom, Lee Ranaldo), heavier artists (The Jesus Lizard, Clutch, Faith No More), Americana/roots (Sarah Shook & The Disarmers, Lucero, Murder By Death), current indie rockers (Caroline Rose, Melkbelly, A Place to Bury Strangers), some hip hop (Mr. Lif, Cypress Hill), and a whole lot more. It's perfect for this weekend's Halloween parties (which is why we aren't waiting until Monday) and to listen to while you hand out candy on Wednesday. Enjoy!

The finale of Twin Peaks: The Return was two weeks ago and my brain is still busted wide open from the entire series. No television show has exercised my brain the way The Return did, and the mysteries that were solved during the season being replaced by new ones has just kept me so engaged in the entire mythology of the Peaks universe up to this point that I see no signs of stopping. I am looking for books that are like Twin Peaks , shows that will somehow fill the orb-shaped void inside of me. While the music of the original series is iconic in its own right, The Return stepped up in an interesting and unexpected way. While the series itself played around considerably both with ethereal whooshing soundscapes and the use of silence, most episodes ended with a scene in the bar, where the music venue, "The Roadhouse," was hosting all sorts of indie artists. It was almost a game in and of itself to see who would be featured along the way. Also related were some of...

If you've noticed from my reviews as of late, I've become somewhat obsessed with a certain revival of 90s-era Juliana Hatfield/Veruca Salt-sounding acts. There's a lot of great stuff out there, and I was going to make a playlist for myself before I realized that I could just share it with you guys. So here's a fun mix for your Monday - don't consider this representative, but just a fun start.