That sounds rather official doesn’t it? As if the following is somehow a respectable form of awards… Ah well, on with my unqualified praising of bits of plastic and other nonsense no one reading this cares about:

Music

I have to say, there were an obscene amount of good releases this year. So in order to make myself feel less guilty I’ll break it up into two genres, Rock and Metal.

Rock:

Dredg – Catch Without Arms
(runner-up) Porcupine Tree – Deadwing

From start to finish, CWA is one incredible album. Energetic, precise, and with nary a lull anywhere, it’s a damn shame hardly anyone has heard of the band behind it. As for Porcupine Tree, well, it took awhile for Deadwing to grow on me and to be perfectly honest, I think it’s one of their weaker releases. However, a weak PT album is still nothing short of spectacular on its own, and “Arriving Somewhere But Not Here” is by far one of the best tracks they’ve done in the last several albums.

Metal:

Rapture – Silent Stage
(runner-up) Soilwork – Stabbing The Drama

To be honest, I really haven’t had time to let all the metal albums put out this year sink in (especially Ulver & Dark Tranquillity’s newest), but Rapture’s latest is a shining example of everything doom metal should be so it gets my pick. And while the melodic death days of Soilwork are sadly long gone, Stabbing The Drama is still great in its own right.

Best live show: Killswitch Engage. Most entertaining thing I witnessed involving instruments all year. (*See this? This is me resisting a bassist joke at Ben*)

Film:

As of this writing, I have yet to see a few movies due to our local theater’s suckage at getting them (Jarhead, Saw II, A History of Violence, to name a few; actually it’s entirely possible two of those played but I’m far too lazy to go look every week). So this isn’t a really accurate pick either, but oh well:

Sin City

Completely over the top and sporting an insane amount of style. Sure, there were much better story driven movies (Cinderella Man, The Interpreter, Batman Begins, to name a few), but nothing came even remotely close to being absolutely kick-ass to watch.

Games:

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

Admittedly, I’ve bought a mere two games this year and have yet to finish either. But SA, despite a contrived story (same as the rest of the series) is like a giant urban sandbox: Hell, just the first island is enough to keep me entertained for at least an hour without actually going on a mission. And maybe that says more about my attention span in-game than the game itself, but to hell with it: It’s fun.

Random biased/useless/self-centered awards:

Best shiny new toy: My Canon GL1 DV camera. Is the lense dying? Yes. Does it have all the options I wanted? Nope! But it certainly looks cool, and it’s all about the looks when you spend five months saving up money for an item like this.

Favorite band discovered this year: Dredg. Simply put, they own. All.

Worst two hours spent in a theater: Mr. & Mrs. Smith. I probably lost a sizeable number of brain cells in the process of watching it…

Strangest occurrence involving my computer: CD exploding during play in my CD-ROM drive. Yeah, there’s nothing like a near heart attack at 2 am…

Worst Moment: Around 1:45 pm on February 25th.

Best Moment: You know, last year I had no problem picking this. But this year is quite different; Between two amazing concerts and how things have been more or less up-hill since the start of my senior year, I don’t know where to begin, so I won’t.

Well, that’s all I can come up with for 2005. So Happy new year, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll start writing more around here in 2006.

Comments(3)