You are browsing the archives of 2008 December.

The more New Year’s Eve parties I experience the more I’m learning that the best approach is to keep drama and expectations to a minimum. I often have the most fun just finding a nice little bar, getting their early with some friends, drinking some beers and letting the night unfold in a natural way. [...]

Since the inception of Tuesday Night Social Club there’ve been some seriously awesome shows made that much more awesome by the complete lack of a cover, but I think this one takes the cake (and the pie, and whatever else you got to take).
Mission Freakers (full disclosure), Datagun rev up their engines (and hopefully your [...]

In the midst of holiday travel and end of semester hi-jinx, the last bit of our year end coverage here at Mission Freak has kind of been buried under a mountain of snow, but we’re excited to unveil this evening the compiled lists of several of our friends within the Iowa music community. By no [...]

We made it.  The end of our list, the end of 2008.
And at number one we find Fuck Buttons’ debut, Street Horrrsing.  The album that topped my list for the year did so on it’s dual strengths of comfort and confrontation.
Street Horrrsing is a revelation in repetition.   Like Phillip Glass or Stephen Reich, Fuck Buttons rely [...]

Hip-hop in the 2000s has been ruined for me by the mere existence of 90s hip-hop. In high school, I thrived on a wave of creativity in the rap world, namely the mid-90s rise of Mobb Deep, Nas, and the Wu paired with final masterworks from the likes of Tribe and Tupac. Those artists marked [...]

I’m sorry to interrupt all these year-end festivities, but wouldn’t you know it, music keeps on going despite our best and ongoing attempts to encapsulate it.  And thank whatever power (if any) that’s the case.
Pieta Brown is one of the best things to spring from the fertile Iowa soil, and tomorrow night we can reap [...]

So many of this decade’s finest indie rock debuts, records that marked a new era of definitive alternative music, were followed up with duds. Funeral, Silent Alarm, Franz Ferdinand - these were all followed up by relative shit. Wolf Parade, on the other hand, quietly and patiently crafted an underappreciated epic while they were busy [...]

Usually the album that tops my year-end list is not actually the album that I listened to the most in that calendar year. Call it lame, or self-centered, or just downright stupid, but I always feel the need to use the modest powers of my best-of list picks to celebrate something “artistically important,” or an [...]

Today, we present the first in five consecutive days celebrating our favorite albums released in 2008. This operates less as a definitive top 5 and more as 5 albums that this staff loved personally this year. Next week we’ll be unveiling some of the favorite albums of close friends of ours. We hope you [...]

Short short notice indeed. Ray Raposa, the mastermind behind Castanets will grace Iowa City with his experimental folk songs on Sunday night. Softly strummed guitars, otherwordly sound textures, and a direct, confident voice: these are the elements that make up the seductive Castanets sound. We couldn’t really think of a better way to spend a cozy [...]