The thing with really good bands is that it's almost never just one creative force. The Madeira were a really good band, and though as lead guitarist of the group Ivan Pongracic was sort of the figurehead (Space Cossacks pedigree contributes too!) , I think I've even seen him point out how many songwriting credits go to Patrick O'Connor. In the time since The Madeira cooled down to apparent hibernation, Patrick's been in several garage-pop groups catering to the sci-fi con crowd, most prominently The Shake-Ups (who have been around for twenty years!). But now he (along with some members of The Shake-Ups, lest I ironically single out Patrick as the sole creative force) are back to surf with Thee Leviathans.

The new surf label House of Tabu is releasing Archipelago: The Great Hits of the Madeira. Normally I wouldn't review a greatest hits album. There are certainly plenty of new releases that I'm not reviewing that are more worthy than talking about songs I already know. But I thought it would be a fun exercise to approach this differently: how about I make my own greatest hits and see how it matches up?

The final chunk of the Top 100 Surf Records of the 2010s is here, with plenty of longstanding surf heavyweights but also some great new upstarts. Thank you to everybody that voted on this list and I hope you're satisfied with the results!

Let's Fly to Mars is a high-profile, long-term, cross-continental collaboration between Jeremy DeHart known primarily from The Aqualads, El Firetone from El Ray, Dr. Boris  from Messer Chups, and Dane Carter from The Madeira. Jeremy lays out the story in detail in this post at SurfGuitar101 that I would highly recommend reading.

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

Surf has always had strong visual iconography attached to nudge how we interpret these instrumentals. We've built and expanded upon that just as we've transformed the music over the years. Here are some of the records where the art really stood out to me this year.

Center of the Surf is a live recording of surf giants The Madeira playing at the 2017 Surfguitar101 Convention in Torrance, CA: essentially the center of US surf music fandom and surf music history. Present in the audience was Mark Linett, a 3-time grammy winning producer and engineer capturing it all.

After a great first day, it was time for a full 12 hours of surf groups from all over the globe.

These guys may trace their roots to a surf sound, might even call themselves surf sometimes, but their sound is undeniably modern and often unto themselves. Surf isn't a code to live by, and Instro is a genre of possibilities meant to be explroed and tinkered with.

There were no shortage of good records for this category, and it was extremely difficult for me to choose between them. I'm looking forward to publishing this so I can stop agonizing and be done with it!

I've had this one for a few weeks now and have already reviewed it, but the latest Madeira release just became available to purchase from Double Crown. The very quick version: it's another Madeira album, of course it's great, ya dingus. But if you need more convincing they've got a few songs up on their website.