The 2013 Listen To Me Top Ten - Nominations

As usual, my December show on Dandelion Radio will feature the Listen To Me Top Ten - a selection of my ten favourite bands or artists who've contacted me during the year and introduced me to their music, for which I'm very grateful.  The numbers doing this during 2013 were greater than ever so the ten selected came from a very large pool and inevitably form an extremely strong shortlist.

During the show, I'll attempt, with great difficulty, to put them in some kind of ranking order, but for now the ten selected bands and artists are listed below.  I'd recommend you check them out if you've not done so before, because they're all extremely worthy of your attention.

The nominations:

Burning Condors (Bandcamp)
Jude Cowan (Website)
DerTANZ (Bandcamp)
Dot Dash (Bandcamp)
Indidginus (Soundcloud)
Diane Marie Kloba (Website)
Labasheeda (Website)
Laurence Made Me Cry (Website)
Music For The Muted (Soundcloud)
Nac/Hut Report (Website)

A reminder again that you can vote for your own favourites of the year in the official Festive Fifty at Dandelion Radio here. 

Burning Condors - Love On The Rocks/Folsom Prison Blues

To survive in this territory your vocals have got to be rawer than anyone else's, your guitars louder than anyone else's and your approach meaner than anyone else's.  Yes, Burning Condors inhabit that ancient land of rock and roll, broad and uneven terrain filled with competing tribes of varying qualities; population: practically anyone who ever picked up a guitar.  But those who mark out the true parameters of this territory are loan wolves, men without a country, existing outside of those tribes and in some mean no man's land of their own creation.

Burning Condors are one of those bands.  Their recent single, consisting of 'Love On The Rocks' (their own composition, lest you're expecting some unwholesome trashing of the godawful Neil Diamond song) and Johnny Cash's 'Folsom Prison Blues' takes on every rock and roll cliche in the book, pummels it into submission and then rips the book to shreds. 

These Londoners are not some identikit garage four-piece who churn out press releases informing you they sound like Kings of Leon or any one of a thousand others.  The very fact they decided to cover the Cash song immediately tells you they're either out of their minds or brash and brilliant enough to take on rock and roll's canon and win.  There's no contest: the band have easily got enough about them to take on any material and batter it to within an inch of its life, transforming in the process into nothing other than a Burning Condors song. It's also available as a 7" single, which is only right and proper.

The release follows hot on the heels of their 'Dirty Girl Blues'/'What Your Mama Said' and 'Knockout'/'Riot On The Streets' singles and all of them are available via the band's bandcamp site.  Apparently there's an album in the offing, scheduled for a September release.  Can't wait.

I'm playing 'Love On The Rocks' in my Dandelion Radio show this month.  Join me, and remind yourself of what the true, raw spirit of no-holds-barred rock and roll sounds like with the cliches pulled out.  Through its arse.