I've seen great live shows this year.

Bands like Chives, Bloody Mess, Benny Sanders 25^th Street Crips, and the Last IV have been setting clubs and living rooms on fire with awesome performances. Older bands like We Are Hex and America Owns the Moon got back into the fray and put on incredible performances. But the band to watch as prolly the best live band of the moment is Digital Dots, who purvey a groovy blend of pop, shoegaze and Built To Spill-league guitar wizardry. Of the national shows I caught this year, The Toadies and Journey put on great nostalgia trips, and just a couple weeks ago, Diarrhea Planet sent the kids climbing the walls (literally) with the best cover of “Semi-Charmed Life” ever.

Great local Recordings.

There has been a shit-ton of great recorded music released this year, like Sir Deja Doog's Love Coffin and Ampersand Blues Band, but right now my ADD brain is fixtated on the Dollsy blast that is Hollywood, the Zero Boys' new EP, and the Atlas carrying the world heaviness of Apostle of Solitude's Of Woe and Wounds. The CD that I'm most in love with is Early Indiana Punk and New Wave: The Crazy Al Years (check out MFT contributor Seth Johnson's NUVO cover story on the comp here). One CD is punk and contains the best of the early Hoosier punks like Dow and the Industrials, Latex Novelties, and E-In Brino, which features a young Marvin Goldstein playing a shoebox of broken glass. The New Wave CD is just as fun, with unearthed treasures from the likes of The Positions, The Tools and Hoosier Daddies.

DJ's Sunday night Sanders clan hoe-down.

C-Tay calls it the Luckenbach, Texas of the Indianapolis scene. And he's right, but it's much more. It's a place where people from Nate Hammond to Dave Jablonski to Ko show up to jam alone and with each other and more often than not, make magic. As a bonus, the cheap alcohol and abundance of friendly faces means hearts are won, hearts are broken, and worlds and wars are created, often at the same time. Also, nobody cares if you show your ass.

-Jeff Napier