@ZackTeibloom Welcome to the 4th annual Best songs of 2011 Festival Crashers contest. I’m pretty happy with this list. Lady Gaga is the only one on here that really pains me. After two years of doing catchiest song, we moved to favorite song so we could avoid Gaga-esque crap, but here we are. Oh, well. Andy made a good point that he wanted more of a cross-section of music. If it was only me picking, it would be almost all indie-rock. Andy made sure we had more pop, hip hop and dance.

We’ve whittled down our list of favorites to 7 each and left some room for suggestions. We’re down to 22 songs. 14 are in and ranked. The other 8 we’ll vote in this week. For now, your job is to pick a song that will be “yours.” Here’s what we have so far. Details on how to pick your song at the bottom. Read the rest of this entry »

@ZackTeibloom Not only were our new Easy Canvas Prints the first pieces of art in our living room, we put them up before unpacking our plates and bowls. I mean, a week before. The lights are directed on them. They frame the couch. They’re the centerpiece of the apartment. I’m getting ahead of myself. A couple weeks ago Festival Crashers and Austin Writes Music ran a contest with Easy Canvas to find our favorite concert photos. Over here at Festival Crashers, we were looking for the best photo of a show Caitlin and I had seen. There were some real gems, but a photo of Arcade Fire stole the show.

The winning photo was by Chad Wadsworth <–click for more of his awesome stuff. Caitlin chose a photo of our local favorite, Little Lo. Click here for her post. Thanks to everyone for playing. Check out  Easy Canvas Prints to make your own canvas and follow them on Facebook and Twitter. Read the rest of this entry »

@ZackTeibloom I’m excited to announce that I’m moving in with my girlfriend Caitlin of Austin Writes Music in two weeks, and we’re going to need some music portraits to fill our walls. That’s where you come in. We’re running a two-part contest. The Festival Crashers side of the contest is this: You send in a picture of one of the following shows that Caitlin and I saw together, and if it’s our favorite, we will give you a canvas print (14″x11″) and put a copy on our wall in the new apartment. You can pick from any of these: Read the rest of this entry »

@ZackTeibloom The Black Keys are our 2010 winners for Song of the Year. They join the ranks of Lil Wayne and Lady Gaga, who won the last two years when our contest was a strictly “catchiest” game. I’m happy with where we’re at. No one had The Black Keys winning. No one even had them in the finals. Meg was the only one on the bracket committee who had them as a one-seed. Andy and I had them in the three-hole. I’m glad they won. Sure, Andy keeps telling you he’ll remember this as the “Fuck You” year and I was convinced LCD was going to march their way to the win once it was eliminated, but this is The Black Keys’ year. They rung up a slew of Grammy awards, put out the most consistently great album of the year from top to bottom and even though I didn’t think they had the stand-out song to take the title, they did. Congratulations. So what does that mean for our contest? Who had the best bracket? Read the rest of this entry »

@ZackTeibloom Here we are. Will 2010 be remembered as the year The Black Keys blew up or the year LCD took the best farewell tour since Kareem Abdul Jabaar? Probably both, but there can only be one champion. It gets harder to come up with things to say by the final round. If you’ve been following this contest, you’re familiar with the arguments. The Black Keys added a couple members, which is kind of the opposite of “Tighten Up” and LCD created a song with enough build-up and tension to make Rachmaninoff sit up in his grave. They both tour through festival crowds in their early evening time slots and gave us two of the best albums of the year. Let’s see how this shakes out. Read the rest of this entry »

@ZackTeibloom Look, I was there. I was there when Local Natives broke out* with a series of shows at SXSW in March. I was there, running to catch them at Coachella. I was there for the in-store at Waterloo and night show at Antone’s for their double dip in Austin. Andy was there when the LA natives put the F Yeah in the FYF fest. We listened to that album so much we almost forgot The Talking Heads were the ones who do “Warning Sign” originally. 2010 was a big breakout for Local Natives and they certainly deserve it, but this was no LCD Soundsystem in 2010. I’m telling you, I was there. They played the show of the year at Stubbs. I was there when Andy went from not a fan at all to having LCD be his favorite show at his favorite festival of the year. This was their year. Front-man James Murphy said this album would be their last and he’d take it for a two year victory lap of a tour. God damn, it sure felt like one with my shirt drenched in sweat, pressed up against the guard rail. LCD is winning this contest. This is happening.  Read the rest of this entry »

@ZackTeibloom It’s the match-up Andy and I never wanted. It feels more like a first round match-up than the deciding factor on who makes it to the finals, but here we are. Sure, Andy tried to call you a racist if you picked Black Keys and I tried to let Arcade Fire have one more shot at Broken Bells, but you picked who you wanted. If I’ve learned anything, it’s not to talk smack about any song and just tell you why I like one. Broken Bells showed us the versatility of Danger Mouse, taking a cue from Jack White and moving back behind the drum kit. The Black Keys abandoned their two-man show, moved out of The White Stripes shadow and added a couple members to beef up their sound. Also like Jack White. Why didn’t he release “Ray Bans” with Jay-Z this year? He could have taken the whole contest. But I digress. Vote for your favorite. Read the rest of this entry »

@ZackTeibloom You’ve got a choice to make here. Do you want to give it to the most self-hyped, best-reviewed artist of the year or do you want to reward a small indie band who exploded on the scene in their first year by playing a ton of shows and constantly backing up the hype that everyone else gave them? Personally, I lean heavily towards Local Natives, the indie band, on this one. Kanye did everything from bringing out the back-up singers to sampling King Crimson to telling us he wonders if one man should have all that power. Should he? I don’t think so. Do we really need to inflate this man’s ego any further? Local Natives deserves this. They earned it with every perfect song on that debut album, with every harmony, with every inspired show where they played every song in their arsenal. Andy will probably argue that this isn’t his favorite Local Natives song, and that’s fine. This isn’t my favorite Kanye song on the album. It’s “Dark Fantasy.” We didn’t go for the barn burner encore of “Sun Hands.” We went for the subtle “Airplanes.” Subtlety. Something Kan’s never heard of. Read the rest of this entry »

@AndyShore This is the dance party match up. I’d be happy to have either one of them come on once I was sufficiently socially lubricated. Although, I don’t quite cut a rug like Zack does. This is honestly just a matter of preference. Some will be LCD Soundsystem “Dance Yrself Clean” people and some will be Duck Sauce “Barbara Streisand” people. The best part is, you can’t go wrong. I couldn’t honestly say that about all of the match ups thus far. I won’t be sad to see either advance, but I will be sad knowing that one of them is out of the race. So ask yourself: are you more of the indie-electronica type or the disco house type? Will you “Dance Yrself Clean” this round or get down and dirty with Duck Sauce and Babs? Read the rest of this entry »

@ZackTeibloom We’re having a three-way. No, it’s not like that. We’re just bringing one scorned song back to life, because evidence has come to light that the Broken Bells vs. Arcade Fire battle was tainted. So there are three options.  Andy will tell you why Broken Bells deserved our affection from the first time we heard it and I’ll try to convince you that Robyn danced her way into our hearts and should move on. But if you really want to be a hero, you’ll give the nod to Arcade Fire, my band of the year. Read the rest of this entry »