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Music hosts Jedd Beaudoin, Chris Heim, Carla Eckels and Bill Pearce run down the year's best music, including world, rock, local music, jazz, R&B, gospel, blues, and books about music.Join KMUW's music hosts on Global Village, Strange Currency, Night Train, Crossroads, Soulsations & Straight No Chaser as they highlight their favorites. See show pages for upcoming show information or to listen to past shows through the streaming archive.Enjoy.

Best Local/Regional Albums | Best of 2017

Recordings For The People’s Freedom Vol. 1 with Mike Unruh and Craig Owens’ Bodo Trio’s She’s So Poplar deserve special mention as does Cleme’s Unfold. Joel Cachero’s Golden Living project issued a hefty listening experience via Autoscopy and Kyle Cramb’s The Coma Calling offered plenty for our listening pleasure as well.

Finding good music in the aforementioned crop wasn’t problematic, though finding the right category for the nature of the releases was. With more acts issuing EPs, it seemed necessary to open a category for that form as well. Releases that were 30 minutes or less in running time or presented as EPs were placed in that category while recordings with longer running times or which presented themselves as traditional albums (generally 10 or more songs, with some exceptions) landed there.

There is not a category at this time for singles, though Herd of the Huntress offered two tracks (“You Drew the Blood” and “Intersection Yellows”) to listeners this year. Sunshine Trucking brought us an A/B side effort via “Cold Woman Blues” and The T**s presented new material without the traditional album/EP structure as well.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of the local/regional music available from 2017 with recordings from Keen Kutter, Faux Reality and Tideway also available in a variety of formats.

  1. On My Way—Split Lip Rayfield
  2. Learned Behavior—Aaron Lee Martin
  3. Echo—Vehicles
  4. Tickor—Francis Moss
  5. Michael J. Engdahl’s Odisea—Michael J. Engdahl’s Odisea
  6. So Long and Thanks—Milmine
  7. Haymakers—Haymakers
  8. Return to the Earth Which You Have Borrowed—William Bloom
  9. Soul Shattered Sister—Jim Vegas
  10. Everything, Compromised—Berry

Best EPs (Releases with a running time of 30 minutes or less) 

  1. Intruder—Team Tremolo
  2. The Wichita Flag—The Wichita Flag
  3. Dik Dik Sounds—The World Palestine
  4. Tunnel Vision—Kill Vargas
  5. Waste of Kings—Bridegeist
  6. Dustin Arbuckle & The Damnations—Dustin Arbuckle & The Damnations
  7. Learn To Swim—The Cavves
  8. Consolation Prize—Old News
  9. When The Sun Shines—Shawn Craver
  10. Traveler—William Flynn 

Jedd Beaudoin is host/producer of the nationally syndicated program Strange Currency. He has also served as an arts reporter, a producer of A Musical Life and a founding member of the KMUW Movie Club. As a music journalist, his work has appeared in Pop Matters, Vox, No Depression and Keyboard Magazine.