Your Voting Guide to the San Diego Music Awards

We’re pretty big fans of Award shows. We like to think we know a thing or two about music. We even host an annual Grammy Awards party at our house. (And when Kayne West did that one song with Daft Punk! Boy howdy, that was really cool looking!) . So we feel we would be doing a real disservice to our loyal reader by not offering up some suggestions for who you should vote for the 18th Annual San Diego Music Awards using the SDMA’s super-advanced “Survey Monkey” technology.

Best Cover or Tribute Band
40 Ounces to Freedom
Cash’d Out
The Corvelles
Electric Waste Band
Midnight Ramblers
Rockola
Stepping Feet
The Baja Bugs

Comments: As is the case with most of these categories we have no clue who most of the nominees are. We can assume that 40 Ounces to Freedom is a Sublime cover band, so negs on them. People seem to like Cash’d Out, so we guess vote for them? We tried to find some of these other bands on Myspace, but like with the Midnight Ramblers they claim to be from Irvine, America’s biggest shithole. If they can be nominated, why not Oingo Boingo cover band Dead Man’s Party?

Best Acoustic
Alex Woodard
Astra Kelly
Barbara Nesbitt
Cathrine Beeks Ordeal
John Miller
Michael Tiernan
Nena Anderson
Veronica May

Comments: We haven’t been to Lestat’s in years, so we really don’t know where to go here. We decided to just look at all the girls until we found one who was hot, and the first one Astra Kelly is pretty cuet (and a really cuet name to boot, we like girls with cuet names we could never see ourselves dating someone named Crystal), so go with her! Also, we are saddened that friend of the punkboard Vanja James is not listed here.

Let’s just skip Blues, Americana/Country, and Jazz, shall we?

Best World Music
Elijah Emanuel
Skelpin
Society
Split Finger
Stranger
The Devastators
Tribal Seeds
Vegitation

Comments: The only thing we really know about OB is that Hodad’s is really, really good. But we like the band name The Devastators because it reminds us of Transformers.

Best Hip Hop
Addiquit
Deep Rooted
Miki Vale
M-Double-A-L
MC Flow
South Psycho Side
The Knee Highs
The Upstarts

Comments: We’ve seen MC Flow before and we thought it was pretty fun, that works for us. But what of Chicano legend Lil Rob?

Best Alternative
Alfred Howard & the K23 Orchestra
Buddy Akai
Mr. Tube & the Flying Objects
Republic of Letters
Scarlet Symphony
Spell Toronto
Swim Party
The Drowning Men

Comments: Despite the fact we know a ton of people who have slept with the dudes from Scarlet Symphony we gotta go with Mr. Tube. They’re a great band, lots of fun, the album works, and it does feature friend of the Punkboard, Mr. T-Bone.

We’d feel remissed if we didn’t say something nice here about Red Pony Clock and Di Nigunim. One of the most consistently entertaining bands in San Diego, Red Pony Clock is always a blast to see play. It’s pretty hard to not have fun when they’re doing their thing. Di Nigunim, we feel, is just heads and shoulders above everything else in San Diego right now. Do yourself a favor, see this band, you’ll have the time of your life.

Best Pop
Anna Troy
Anya Marina
Christopher Dale
Get Back Loretta
Gregory Page
Ryan Ferguson
This Holiday Life
Wendy Darling

Comments: We don’t think No Knife was ever good (we’re in the minority, we know) so pass on Ferguson, This Holiday Life makes us all tuckered out. We say go with Wendy Darling, theres a punkboarder who used to go by Miss Darling, whose first name is Wendy, so we’re pretty sure its actually her wearing some sort of clever disguise.

Best Rock
Deadline Friday
Dirty Sweet
Reeve Oliver
Roses on Her Grave
The Creepy Creeps
The Muslims
Transfer
Truckee Brothers

Comments: So our favorite genre of music just happens to be Surf Rock, and we consider ourselves to be somewhat of an authority on the subject and we cannot figure out for the life of us why The Creepy Creeps get all these write-ups in the Reader and gets nominated for this when Monsters from Mars never get 1/10 of the recognition, despite being 10 times better than Creepy Creeps. We say, write in Monsters from Mars. This isn’t to say we don’t like The Creepy Creeps, we do, just nowhere near as much as MFM. As for the rest of them nobody but assholes thinks Dirty Sweet is relevant and everyone else is just fine, we guess.

Best Hard Rock
Arm the Angels
Earthless
Get Your Death On!
Hostile Combover
Long And Short Of It
Mower
Sirhan Sirhan
Thieves & Liars

Comments: This one is kind of hard. We like Sirhan Sirhan, Hostile Combover and Earthless. Really just go with one of those three bands. Avoid Mower. We assure you they are not sick.

Best Electronic
Drew Andrews
Fantastic Magic
Gamma Gamma
Lights On
Manuok
Qu ‘est-ce Que C’est
Starcrossed
The Album Leaf

Comments: We saw Qu ‘est-ce Que C’est once, and we’re underwhelmed. People seem to like The Album Leaf, and we think they’re solid, if unremarkable. We have no idea.

And without a doubt, the category that determines the way the scene goes, the most important thing in our lives, these are the people that move our feet and make us sweat and wear nice clothes and are gosh, just so happy that places like U-31, the Office and Downtown exist. We give you:

Best Club DJ
DJ Artistic
DJ Edgartronic
Gabe Vega
Ikah Love
Junior
Mario Orduno
Rashi
Shark Attack

Comments: Let’s go ahead and take out Rashi and DJ Artistic out of the equation. We’ve never heard of them, in so far as that, I’ve never gotten a myspace bulletin advertising how they’re going to blow our mind at the Beauty Bar on Tuesday! DJ Edgartronic, despite what we said in our last piece, is a solid guy, but we do stand by those comments. We think Mario Orduno is funny, we see him at parties all the time, he wears the same jacket with the German flag on the side, has two girls with him and generally just hangs out in the background. It’s cute. Though we do wonder if the fat one (the one who does all the coke) in Skull Kontrol is jealous. Ikah Love, we’ve never seen him, met him, but we’re friends on the Space and Jesus Christ is this guy a son of a bitch. Most of his posts are in French! He’s so sophisticated and cool! And a dickless asshole! Junior actually posts from time to time, and Shark Attack has actually made us smile a few times, in between all of the other time we spent frowning. Our vote will go to a write in for Kipper. We’ve seen a lot of DJ’s in this town, and yeah, yeah we’re pretty close with him and stuff, the guy is one of our great friends/lovers, but quite honestly he gets the job done. We feel DJing doesn’t need to be a “Oh man, check out this new DFA band, try dancing to this motherfuckers!” It should just be nice classic pop hits we all know and love that we can dance and sing along too. If DJing is the future of North Park then Kipper is it.

Let us also congratulate the SDMA committe for not nominating Nathan Black, we hear he’s kind of a dick and he’s got a huge nose. And not creating categories like Best Party Hoster, Best Scene Photographer and Best Scene Videographer (they exist! trust us!).

And as far as the lifetime achivement award- how has John Reis/Rocket from the Crypt not won this yet?

If there’s anything we should really check out let us know in the comments.