It’s annual mix time again. Just a single disc’s worth, so there’s ‘new’ releases and archival discoveries in one package, though one tilted somewhat toward affiliates of a couple of the old standbys. Shorter commute and more kids made for less listening and what there was was tilted disproportionately to bootlegs on the theory they would be easier to winnow through. The flipside of going short is liner notes are more feasible. It’s a download as usual - say a third of these tracks won’t be found in Spotify or such.

The mix: After clicking on the link you need to do the ‘captcha’ on the right side of the screen, then click on the ‘download now’ immediately below that (not one of the big blue ‘download’ buttons).

1. “When I Write My Master’s Thesis”, John K. Samson. Narrowly beat out The Orwells’ “In My Bed” for the last slot on the mix, but the title/chorus clinches it. Introduced to this by Said the Gramophone.

2. “Naked Cousin”, P.J. Harvey. Discovered this in a Peel session from her glorious early days. The studio version was on the soundtrack to a Crow sequel and buried out of reach of the iTunes & co. world.

3. “Revolution”, Dr. John. The reincarnation of Amy Winehouse? Maybe not. I should know more about Dr. John, but I don’t. Came to this from the Forgotten Songs blog’s ‘Best of 2012’ mix, which on the whole wasn’t my can of soda but this was among the worthies, edging out “Old Ghost” by JFG and the irregulars (or is that the regulars? the web can’t decide).

4. “Yes, So On and So On”, Thao with the Get Down Stay Down. A deep cut off We Brave Bee Stings and All as I’d actually heard most of the tracks via blog search engines before I got the album (don’t think that’s happened with any other). But this far down the lineup, they still hit it out.

5. “Look Into Your Mirror”, The Soft Boys. Came into a passel of collections of Soft Boys demos and rare recordings, a number of which included this track which is standard excellence for them. This particular one comes from The Day They Ate Brick. an unreleased early album.

6. “Force of Habit”, by The Trypes. This New Jersey band’s only release, a 1984 EP, got a re-release accompanied by a host of unreleased material that showed how much its sound evolved before that.

7. “Stars”, by Primitons. A similar story of ’80s band with little released material getting a deluxe revisitation, but this is from a demo tape that surfaced on the web and I still haven’t really heard anything else or gotten round to getting the collection.

8. “I’m Not Like Everybody Else”, by The Kinks. Introduced to this song last year by the knock-down cover on Yung Wu’s second album (more to come), which set me on a search for the hard-to-come-by original, which dates to the Kinks’ mid-1960s golden age.

9. “Before We Were Born”, by The dB’s. Falling Off The Sky is one fine reunion album, and the band is in top form live too.

10. “The Light”, by NRg (aka Neon Rock Garden). More good (Southern) stuff dug up by the good people over at Wilfully Obscure. This was the track I had a hardest time working into the sequence, but this is just about right.

11. “Tit for Tat”, by Ruby Andrews. Haven’t started listening to the latest  - and first post-Marc Smirnoff - annual Oxford American music issue CD, but the last one still delivered the goods.

12. “Business Men”, by The Willies. Now this New Jersey band never released or recorded anything but demos. This, almost certainly my first ever live mix cut and maybe the first instrumental, comes from a April 24, 1983 show at the Peanut Gallery in Haledon. Some promise there?

13. “Drip-Dry”, by potty mouth. Introduced to them by One Base on an Overthrow. My initial enthusiasm - sparked perhaps by notion they were giving away all their releases for free on Bandcamp — cooled after a few listens, but this is the key track that stuck with me. (This is the Sun Damage version.)

14. “Manhattan”, by Cat Power. Winner from a let-down album. See earlier post.

15. “Nicotine” by Humidifier. Score another point for Wilfully Obscure, this from its annual ‘best of the blog’ mix which has got me digging into the catalog selections offered on the band’s site. This is the original version from the Gazer EP.

16. “The Drawback” by Telekinesis. From the M.L.10 mix.

17. “Salute Your Solution”, by The Raconteurs. From the M.L.08 mix. I’m no Jack White tracker but couldn’t slight this stomper which unexpectedly beat out the deeply sunk hook of “After You’re Gone” by the Len Price 3.

18. “All We Ever Got From Them Was Pain”, by Alex Chilton. Couldn’t be a bad year when it got started with newly released A.C. tracks, that is,those added to the released and repackaged 1970, now to be known as Free Again.

19. “She Ain’t Thinkin’ ‘bout Me”, by Will Rigby. From The Page Turner Diaries, a collection of 2001-02 demos quietly released online last year.

20. “I Wonder What You’re Doin’ Now”, by The DomNicks. From the Power Pop Overdose blog’s 2012 Top Ten mix. Somehow I missed the last couple years of this annual edition…. The DomNicks are co-led by Dom Mariani, who legend would have it, turned up one day from Australia at my college radio station looking for Mitch Easter, who was to be found about 700 miles to the south.

21. “Independence Day”, by The Doozies. From Said the Gramophone’s Best Songs of 2012 mix.

22. “You ‘n’ Me ‘n’ XTC”, by Chris Stamey. His solo album grew on me (and my wife) though sequencing still seems kinda odd… Haven’t figured out difference from this version of this track to one he released on SoundCloud a year or so before the album, but this is the album one.

23. ‘Morning Call”, by Yung Wu. To my regret, didn’t get to any of the Yung Wu shows across the river in New Jersey before I left NYC last year. But at least managed to pick up the second Yung Wu album - released on CD-R and not available in stores as they say - at a Feelies gig at Maxwell’s.

24. “Game Day”, by Peter Holsapple. Another regret was not making it to a taping of the Radio Free Song Club. But I think Mr. Holsapple has made maybe only one himself too, though he’s got a track with every program.