Saturday March 23rd we're having a night of wild guitar action at the tiki bar Portside Lounge here in New Orleans. All $12 of your money goes to WTUL and therefore to support Storm Surge of Reverb.

Rad is a dumb term I use to describe more loud, aggro, punk influenced surf. I chose it because it rhymes with trad.

In 2014 the Del-Vipers came out of nowhere (technically Austin, TX) with the relentlessly charging Terror of the Del-Vipers, one of my favorite surf records of the 2010s. It's hard to believe it's only been 4 years since we've heard anything new from them, but Cannibal Safari is a welcome return. The opener "Cobra's Fang" is exactly the stuff from Terror, an aggressive first strike with pounding surf beat. "Kapu" is a bit more of a stomper, not quite subdued but dialing the tempo back from a 10 to an 8 or so.

Welcome to the first category of the first Annual Gremmy Awards, in which we'll line up what I consider to be the prettiest surf records of 2014. Any medium is fair game in both the artistic sense and the recording sense. There were a lot to choose from this year and a lot of great ones that didn't make the cut here. If you feel like something got overlooked, go ahead and leave a comment. By the way, given that this award is about art, I'm using the highest quality images I had on-hand, so be patient while it loads.