There is a chance that this may be my new favorite band, which is a bold claim to make from a measly two song record. TERRIBLE FEELINGS, from Malmö, Sweden, sound like they are taking cues from THE WIPERS, GORILLA ANGREB, KNUGEN FALLER and BURNING KITCHEN while maintaining their own voice in the music. It’s difficult to write and produce a two song 45 that people will actually listen to more than a couple times, but this record has me flipping the thing over and over repeatedly because these two songs are both fucking amazing. “Impending Doom” hooks you in with the first staccato guitar chord and keeps your attention throughout the whole song. The lyrics are about losing your faith in just about everything and are so terribly bleak that I wanted to write a letter to the band to make sure they didn’t kill themselves immediately after recording this. On the flip side is “Death To Everyone”, which keeps the bad times rolling. The music is upbeat and poppy, but the lyrics are about complacency and forgetting about your dreams. There is musical interlude that sounds just like that part of that one GERMS song that says “I want out now!”. You can sing those lyrics along with this part and it fits in thematically but doesn’t detract one bit from the song! Clean guitars, steady drums and emotionally dark lyrics all combine to make you dance and feel like shit at the same time Listen to this and imagine living somewhere that only has five to six hours of daylight in the wintertime. This will definitely be one of my favorite records of the year and hopefully there will be enough bleak winter months over there to inspire a full LP. (Sabotage Records/Lack of Sleep Records)

Impending Doom by Terrible Feelings

Death To Everyone by Terrible Feelings

This record came out at the tail end of 2010 and made it onto my top ten list of the year, so you already know that I love it. Busy Days is everything I’ve ever wanted out of Chattanooga, Tennessee’s ADD/C in their ten (give or take) years of existence. Even though I loved every second of their last LP, I felt that it suffered at times from laziness and not giving a fuck. There are some glaring wrong notes and bad takes on that record. I know that they recorded it at home and could’ve fixed it, but they didn’t. We’re in the present now and this LP is flawless, full of songs that are thoughtful, sincere, depressing and make me want to flail myself around a room full of punks. I’ve never been able to compare ADD/C to any other bands besides themselves, which is fucking awesome. They fall into that gray area (not unlike the BANANAS) where they take the basic elements of jangly punk and filter it through their own region, their own style, and mirror what is going on in their own community while eschewing corporate influence and creeping monoculture. The result is a damn fine record that is less like another LP to add to the heap, but more like a triumph for the punks (the jangly pop ones, anyway). This are songs for the End Times with lyrics like “Where are we gonna sleep? What are we gonna eat? / When all the cars are just useless metal heaps?” and “I’ll never get to Heaven because I don’t believe there is one.” I could go on for days. The record comes with a beautiful full-sized zine/lyric booklet drawn by Heather Lacey and Billy Joe Johnson. The cover art is the most beautiful I’ve seen in years and if bands are not banging down Yuri’s (the artist) door in France and begging her to draw anything for their goddamn pitiful band, this world is fucked. (Mauled by Tigers / Plan-It-X South)