Best

What a year 2018 was! Were there great releases? Heavens yes – there were enough great albums released this year that bands normally regarded as mainstays on my best-of lists of ANY year (like the Eels, for example) didn’t just get knocked down the numbers, they got knocked clean out of my ten best. Regarding metal albums specifically, Cancer Bats’ sixth album arrived and proved once more that, sometimes, a band’s sixth album can stand as proof that a good...

Without intending to overstate the point, what a year 2017 was. Throughout the last twelve months, the world has seen the most unlikely turn which brought power to President Donald Trump, mourned the loss of such fantastic musicians as Tom Petty, Chris Cornell and Chuck Berry, and saw an absolutely tremendous amount of new and exciting music appear on new release racks. Fans were absolutely awe-struck As some bands revisited their catalogues and capitalized on the recent renewed interest in...

2017 was another fantastic year for music, with tremendous albums from so many genres. It’s sad seeing how many obvious entries made the cut on all those other websites, which makes us even more confident that we’re giving you a pretty good list here on Ground Control. And really, would you expect anything less from us?   Though we had some favorites, it’s probably safe to say that the order of these releases would change depending on the day. One...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the “Best Of The Best” b/w “45” seven inch single by Roadside Bombs. It’s pretty uncommon for a punk band to publicly praise a music journalist (not that it never happens, just that it doesn’t happen regularly) so when Roadside Bombs doesn’t just praise a critic, they put his face on the A-side of a single and publicly promote him as being “The Best of The Best,” it begs attention.The critic in...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 2LP edition of Legacy by David Bowie. On the surface, the existence of Legacy – the newest compilation of the greatest hits from David Bowie’s songbook – likely comes off as a little confusing. The set arrived almost two years to the day after Nothing Has Changed (a.k.a. The greatest hits comp which was curated by the artist himself) and, name-for-name, features a very, very (very – it’s about 75% the...

While I heard a lot of people complain that 2016 was a really poor year for rock and all its associated sub-genres (punk, hardcore, hard rock, stoner rock, metal et c.), the only thing I can assume is that those critics simply weren’t listening. In fact; picking out just ten great albums this year was nearly fucking impossible; doing so forced me to leave out many albums, those by Fat White Family, Dandy Warhols, XIXA and Pup among them. It...

Editor’s note: There’s spectacular power in a simple list. It’s just so potentially affecting; there’s no pomp, no ceremony, no nonsense — all the power is just what’s there. That sense of power is what leapt to mind when Ground Control’s own Aging Punk Murray Thomas presented his list of the best albums released in 2016 to me as nothing more than a list of ten titles and about a sentence in the way of description for each. It was...

Sharpling and Wurster The Best of The Best Show box set (Numero Group) You know what we’re going to do right now? We’re going to push a collection of sixteen CDs containing radio comedy bits on you. These CDs don’t even have MP3s, but play in real time. For the twenty-first century, this is a truly baffling format. So what exactly is wrong with us? Nothing, dammit. I’m doing this for your own good. The Best of the Best Show...

A critical evaluation of The Best American Comics 2015 (Best American Comics) by Jonathan Lethem (Editor) and Bill Kartalopoulos (Editor). The Best American Comics series are simply imperative reading. Comics (note the editors don’t need to yank anyone’s chain like they do in the mainstream and substitute the words “graphic novel”) are undoubtedly a booming art form. More comics are being written, drawn and produced than ever, and lucky for us, Bill Kartalopoulos has the monumental task of finding the...

Oh boy! You know I love science fiction, readers. I’m a fan of Star Trek and Isaac Isamov, and even Andy Weir (who wrote The Martian) and, in an attempt to expand my science fiction literary horizons, I’ve been trying to get into some writers (old and new) to try and figure out what’s out there. Octavia’s Brood got a lot of attention earlier this year for being a collection of speculative fiction short stories written by writers with a...