Holyfuckingshit, this blog made it through the year!

I know I didn't just win a Cable Ace award or anything, but I would like to thank our comically underpaid contributors—Rob Simonsen, Ned Lannamann, Andrew Tonry, Minh Tran, Liza Lubell—and especially you dear readers who made room in your RSS feeds for this little blog of ours. Thank you.

We now leave you with one final song for 2008, and we hope that your New Year's Eve is just as eventful—"Woke up with fingers crossed, In a boy's bed with your pants off"—as the one in Casiotone for the Painfully Alone's "New Year's Kiss."

Thank you very much for a great year.

LISTEN:

Casiotone for the Painfully Alone - "New Year's Kiss"

The emcees—Animal Farm, Serge Severe, Line of Fire, Mic Crenshaw—that kick it under the umbrella of Focused Noise Productions offered up a tour-only mixtape earlier this year. But if you missed out, they are giving you a late Xmas present and posting the entire sampler right here, for free.

It's a Zshare link, so get ready for pop-up windows and bizarre ads involving women in bikinis, but your patience will be rewarded with 24 tracks of solid local hiphop.

LISTEN:

Animal Farm - "Move It"

Good morning my little lambs.

Get ready to twee your pants with this little audio treat from the Online Romance. "Ladybug, Don't Smile," is the first peak at a full-length album in progress from Jack Saturn's now-expanded indie pop band. Oh, and check out those matching scarf sets—remember bands, if you don't look good, you don't sound good.

The Online Romance looks damn good.

Copy and paste Jack's quote right here:

We are still hard at work on our album, and just recently acquired a new pianist and organist. We hope to be back on some Portland stages by March or so.

So until March, just listen to this song over and over and over again.

LISTEN:

The Online Romance - "Ladybug, Don't Smile"

Listen people, we're fucked. The weather is never improving and we might as well just accept our new existence on this planet of ice that we once called Portland. Unless—somehow, someway—we can change the weather.

We all know this blog is powerful—second only to God himself—so maybe if we post a sunny song, instead of our usual nonstop parade of bedwetting emo and occasional Bone Thugs-N-Harmony track, things will improve? Well, here goes...

LISTEN:

The Beatles - "Good Day Sunshine"

Crap. That didn't work.

Oh dear god, there is actual snow on the ground. Thankfully I'm sheltered inside, because if I touch the snow, it will burn, right?

That's what I thought.

So time to keep this Arctic Death series rolling along, and this time we have a request on the End Hits reader hotline. "ambrown" mentioned Minus the Bear's "Hooray," which is an excellent suggestion, seeing how it's a winter song from the pansy Pacific Northwest perspective: "It's cold and snow's actually on the ground of this no-snow town." Enjoy.

LISTEN:

Minus the Bear - "Hooray"

The great repeato-psych group from San Francisco, Wooden Shjips, have a Christmas present for you:

Our holiday cassingle is sold out, so we’ve made the songs available here as free downloads. All money from sales of the cassingle went to the SF Food Bank. If you enjoy these songs and have the means, please consider making a donation to your local food bank. Happy holidays!

Simply visit woodenshjips.com and click the little present thing. Also, if you do a "Save Link As" on the amp image, you'll get their awesome "Shrinking Moon." Now we just need to get the dudes to tour. Shit, Portland isn't THAT far from the Bay. Let's get to it, eh?

East Coasters and Midwesterners have been scoffing at Portlanders' overreactions to the tiny dribble of snow we've received here. Driving skills have been a particular subject of scorn. But what these intrepid snow-experts ("snexperts"?) forget to mention is that in other parts of the country, they lay down sand and salt on the roads. Portland doesn't. So the snow that falls, miniscule amount though it may be, ends up getting blown, compressed, and frozen, turning into a sheet of ice on the road that is entirely car-unfriendly. I'm from New England; I learned to drive there. I know how to handle cold weather, and I know how to drive in snow. But without any salt or sand on the roads, my Sunday jaunt down ol' Killingsweee Lane was a bit of a hair-raiser.

On that note, here is an excellent song from Cory Gray's Carcrashlander, from the similarly excellent Mountains on Our Backs album. It's not about the danger and excitement of driving down an icy Killingsworth Ave; rather, between meditative verses come blasts of guitar and electric piano, skidding and careening around with equal parts control and abandon.

LISTEN:

Carcrashlander: "Killingsworth Frost"

While I don't know much about the mysteries of snow—Witches make it, right?—I do know that the best music to accompany the bad weather we've been having is something emo, and preferably Scottish.

Thankfully we're in luck with the Twilight Sad who fulfill both prerequisites while adding their very own sense of impending doom to each and every song they deliver; hence titles like "Here, it Never Snowed. Afterwards it Did." The Scots do sadness quite well—that would explain why I cry every time I hear Nazareth's "Love Hurts"—but not even Belle & Sebastian can touch the misery of the Twilight Sad. Perhaps the two bands should conduct a sad-off? I volunteer my services as a judge.

LISTEN:

Twilight Sad - "Here, it Never Snowed. Afterwards it Did."

Brooklyn based singer Brittain Ashford makes spare, gorgeous folk songs, with a crystalline coldwater voice and various pluckings from autoharps and dulcimers. Here's a seasonally appropriate song from her Hinah session recorded in France back in March (you can hear more here); it's a song that doesn't appear on her fantastic, haunting record There, But for You, Go I—but I can't think of a better song to listen to as my circulation slows to a crawl and my extremeties become numb. She'll be in town next week playing a show with Shelly Short. Hopefully things will be warmer by then, but Ashford's nourishing voice is capable of generating its own heat.

LISTEN:

Brittain Ashford - "Snow" (from Hinah session)

Brittain Ashford plays at Valentine's on Tuesday, December 23.

Ever since having my mind blown by Swedish vampire flick Let the Right One In, one song has been stuck in my mind on constant rotation: "The Cold Swedish Winter" by Jens Lekman. Really, how can that picture of Oskar in the snow above not make you yearn for some time in the frozen forests of Sweden?

While it is not his best song by any means (I'll defend Lekman to the death, but his rhyming of chili with chilly is cringe-worthy), there are so many poignant, sweet, and utterly sad parts to it that it complements Right One perfectly. He sings about wanting to kiss his new lady-friend because he likes her and not because they're stuck in a blizzard together, but then follows that up with the chorus of, "The cold Swedish winter is right outside, and I just want somebody to hold me through the night." He's vulnerable and desperate, two feelings that run throughout Right One, and two things that seem to go hand in hand with being lonely in the wintertime.

Sweden may only—according to Cliff Richards—be porn and gonorrhea, but between the gentle croon of Jens Lekman and the incredible sweetness of Let the Right One In, I don't know if there is any place I would rather be more.

LISTEN:

Jens Lekman - "The Cold Swedish Winter"

Photo taken outside the Mercury offices

There is nothing like waking up to frozen car doors, ice everywhere, and the shrill panic of our local action news. But since we here at End Hits are still part of the media, we feel the need to contribute to the weather-based hysteria in the only way we know how: through song. So, all this week—or until we get bored with the idea, or the weather improves—we'll be posting music to soundtrack this icy hand of death that currently grips Portland. Panic! Arctic Death will kill us all!!

LISTEN:

Black Sabbath - "Snowblind"

Much like Scarface was an uplifting tale about a young Cuban entrepreneur—and nothing else—"Snow Blind" is definitely only lyrically focused on frosty weather and the limited visibility triggered by a snow storm. I mean, what else would a reckless rock band like Sabbath write about? Just like their tender ode to gardening, "Sweet Leaf," here Ozzy and company gives us a weather report that we can all relate to. Oh man, I can't feel my face.