Music >>

• Best Music Festival
  River Splash
  In case you didn't notice, 2004 is a big anniversary year around here, what with Lewis, Clark and the World's Fair ice cream cone and all. And if there's one thing St. Louisans like to do, it's commemorate an occasion with music. Case in point, St. Louis 2004's River Splash concert series on the... More >>
• Best Local Single of the Past 12 Months
  "Holidae In"
  So many throwdowns to choose from, in this, the most exciting St. Louis musical moment in at least 40 years. In 2003 and '04, Chingy, J-Kwon, Murphy Lee and (of course) Nelly bombarded the charts. The resulting coverage did wonders for St. Louis' national image, with Rolling Stone, The New... More >>
• Best Local Album of the Past 12 Months
  Yes-Wave
  Cast away your aspersions: Julia Sets have arrived. They're veterans of the St. Louis scene, playing their Midwestern brand of garage rock to small, devoted crowds. But it wasn't until the release of Yes-Wave that they truly cemented their position as one of the more formidable local rock bands.... More >>
• Best Concert of the Past 12 Months
  The Dresden Dolls at Frederick's Music Lounge
  If you're a fan of onstage theatrics, these days you're pretty much limited to the Flaming Lips and a bunch of bands that hop around wildly in the hope that it'll pass for bombast. But those lucky souls who were at Frederick's Music Lounge this past March to catch Boston's Dresden Dolls saw more... More >>
• Best Local Act Gone National
  Gretchen Wilson
  Where's Pocahontas, Illinois? One answer is, "Thirty-odd miles south of St. Louis." Another answer -- and one you're more likely to hear these days -- is, "That's where Gretchen Wilson's from." The 31-year-old singer raced to the tippy-top of the country charts this past spring like a squirrel... More >>
• Best Appearance on a Hollywood Soundtrack
  Bunnygrunt
  There's only one moment in the dour Christmas fable Bad Santa better than the one that comes when a Santa-garbed Billy Bob Thornton tells a small child that he (Thornton) is sick because he "loved a woman who wasn't clean." The even-better moment occurs when the closing credits roll to the tune... More >>
• Third Best Band Name
  Camp Climax for Girls
  Camp Climax for Girls More >>
• Best New Artist
  Rough Shop
  They trade instruments onstage like eager kids swapping baseball cards, write expansive folk-rock songs called "Destination Anywhere" and "I Wonder What It Means" and, at times, harmonize with the evocative happenstance of the only band they resemble: The Band. The core of Rough Shop derives... More >>
• Best Producers
  The TrackBoyz
  Boom! Thwap! Ba-boom thwap! J-Kwon's "Tipsy" was everywhere this year, from basement parties to Busch Stadium, and it all owed to the minimalist inspiration of the TrackBoyz. The beat is raw and propulsive -- "We Will Rock You" with crunk in the trunk. Few songs of 2004, or any other year, could... More >>
• Best Rock Band
  Riddle of Steel
  Proficient instrumental virtuosity can ruin a rock band. When a group's members get too good on their instruments, it can lead to grandiose pomposity or, even worse, jam-band wankery. Riddle of Steel falls into none of these traps, though its three members could claim the bass, guitar and drum... More >>
• Best Blues Artist
  Bennie Smith
  Given the depth of the local blues talent pool, there are plenty of plausible contenders for this category, from revered elder statesmen to hardworking, talented younger players. Bennie Smith represents the best of both worlds. He's a veteran musician with a rich history who still gets out and... More >>
• Best Jazz Artist
  Willie Akins
  An old-school jazzman in the tradition of Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter and John Coltrane, tenor saxophonist Willie Akins blows both tough and tender while conjuring entire universes of sound from a few pounds of metal and a few lines on a score. On the bandstand, wielding his sax like a tool and... More >>
• Best Gospel Artist
  Levi King
  The founder and driving force behind Belleville's gospel-music juggernaut El-King Records, Dr. Levi King belts out the tunes that make you a believer. A favorite of local gospel stations, King can also be heard on a number of albums, most recently A Family Point of View. But to hear the... More >>
• Best R&B Artist
  Coco Soul
  R&B cycles through divas faster than a high-school girl goes through crushes. Where is Erykah Badu? Why did it take four years for a Jill Scott follow-up? Where, oh where, is hometown star Toya? Beware, Coco Soul. A prodigiously talented singer built on the Jill Scott template, Soul is big and... More >>
• Best Lounge Act
  Alex Failoni Jr. and Tom Kelly
  Any restaurant/bar that has the guts to be closed on Saturday and Sunday has to be something special. Don't judge a book by its cover, though. Failoni's is located in an unassuming building on Manchester Avenue on the outskirts of Dogtown. As you might expect from an Italian-American joint, it's... More >>
• Best Country Band
  Well Hungarians
  It's important for the well-being of all fans of country music that we have a local group to root for, a group that sings about beer, train wrecks and the one or two other staples of good country living. In St. Louis, that band is Well Hungarians. They've got that thick-through-the-middle sound... More >>
• Best Garage Band
  The Electric
  It's hard to define what the best "garage band" should be. A lot of what qualifies as rock & roll began in the garage. Same with punk rock, with its three-chord simplicity and brash attitude. That's why St. Louis' best garage band could also be its best rock band, or its best punk band. The... More >>
• Best Noise Band
  Yowie
  There's a Twilight Zone episode where a woman lies in a hospital bed while a shadowed group of doctors gently break the news: Your face is horribly disfigured. Funny thing is, she looks pretty normal. Then the lights come up, and the doctors are shown to be pig-faced horrors. You know: Beauty is... More >>
• Best Metal Band
  Harkonin
  Black metal, a subgenre of extreme music that's often best known for the Satanic, pagan antics of some of its more infamous figures (beheading lambs onstage, killing people -- that sort of thing), normally originates in the dark northern climes of Scandinavia. In a place where the sun doesn't... More >>
• Best Pop Band
  Bunnygrunt
  Touted on All Music Guide as "the world's cutest band" and defined by that all-knowing rock-nerd Web site as "cuddlecore" (see www.allmusic.com), Bunnygrunt was St. Louis' claim to fame on the college-rock scene in the mid-1990s era, which the band dominated. After breaking up, its members went... More >>
• Best Jam Band
  Madahoochi
  This year Madahoochi went from being a local band to being somewhat of a local institution. Rest assured, at the head of the week if nothing is going on featuring a member of the Dead, Phish or Widespread Panic, you can find all your skirted, dreaded and patchoulied friends at Cicero's on Monday... More >>
• Best Cover Band
  Paint the Earth
  Cover bands usually don't get the respect they deserve. But do these bands not practice? Do they not have fans? Do their guitar-playing fingers and their drum-beating and microphone-holding hands not bleed? Well, of course they do, and Paint the Earth would know. The group is one of the... More >>
• Best Concert Cover
  Ben Folds & Rufus Wainwright, "Careless Whisper"
  At face value, the pairing of Ben Folds and Rufus Wainwright on a multi-city tour should have been a disaster: the misogynistic "Brick"-meister in a frat-fueled piano duel with the precious, operatic Canuck crooner. And predictably, their sets at the Fox (which turned out to be a Folds crowd)... More >>
• Second Best Band Name
  Femme Fatality
  Femme Fatality More >>
• Best World Music Band
  Nashid
  Waiting for the day we hear local Bosnian hardcore punishing the Lemp Neighborhood Arts Center is much less painful when we have the fearless Nashid bending convention and illustrating the future of Middle Eastern music in haunting, passionate arabesques. Is it Persian classical music? Jazz? Or... More >>
• Best Bluegrass Band
  The Lonesome Pines
  The Lonesome Pines might not be the most ubiquitous of area bluegrass bands, but it's certainly the most tenured. Members of the group have been playing bluegrass together since the early 1970s, and while today it's easier to catch them in one of their many rockabilly or zydeco incarnations... More >>
• Best Folk Artist
  Dave Landreth
  Once he brought old-time music to the hipsters at Tangerine; now banjo maestro Dave Landreth spends his Tuesday nights outside the Cabin Inn at the City Museum, leading a group of players half his age through fiddle tunes as labyrinthine as the tree branches and mangled metal above them.... More >>
• Best Electronica Band
  Glow
  Pity people who aren't blessed with eclectic tastes. Does a person who listens exclusively to heavy metal crank it up on a hungover Sunday morning? When enmeshed in the art of seduction? When getting dressed up so fresh, so clean? Think of how different life would be for our metalhead if he or... More >>
• Best Band to Die in the Past 12 Months and Then Return from the Dead
  Nadine
  Sometimes couples break up but don't really mean it. They've said they're through, they keep insisting they're single, but then a lonely Saturday night rolls around and they hop back together. You can start calling that behavior "pulling a Nadine." A heavy contender for the best band to come out... More >>
• Best Hip-Hop DJ
  DJ Stan the Man
  They can make a night, or ruin it. They can negate a lovers' spat with the drop of a needle, with a single well-timed "Magic Stick" turn your foul ball into a stand-up triple out there on the dance floor. DJs are the unsung heroes of the St. Louis hip-hop revolution. They, not radio, broke... More >>
• Best Club DJ
  Mike Gow
  DJs must lead stressful lives. Sure, playing for the masses seems like a glamorous job, but think about it: These turntable masters are pretty much solely responsible for the quantity of fun you have at a club. If the record skips, if the mixes aren't hot, if the tracks suck, the dance-floor... More >>
• Best Songwriter
  Chris Johnson
  As a creative idiom, the blues in St. Louis has barely survived; the well of songwriting from which all those bar bands guzzle all those tunes has all but dried up. Chris Johnson isn't a bluesman, not exactly, but his lyrical creations and gritty fingerpicking tap into the country blues with the... More >>
• Best Hip-Hop Artist
  Honors English
  Honors English are less defectors of the Soul Tyde crew than they are visionaries. Kash and Teflahn Poetix formed Honors English last year, and with the addition of Young Thunder this past spring, they've staked their claim to St. Louis' underground hip-hop scene. Hear them flow and it's hard... More >>
• Best Vocalist (Female)
  Sunyatta Marshall
  Don't hate her because she's beautiful, or because she got the part in the Insurance Xpress commercial you also auditioned for. Among other things, love her for her voice, the timbre of which is so tightly, solidly wound you'll think you can reach out and grab the emotion she's pumping into the... More >>
• Best Vocalist (Male)
  Mark Stephens
  It's not a cute stunt. The man who's lucky enough to be married to this year's Best Female Vocalist really is St. Louis' Best Male Vocalist. Where other raggedly glorious Midwestern crooners seem content with trying to break your heart, Mark Stephens succeeds, every time. When he goes into that... More >>
• Best Album Name
  Stop and Smell the Stinking Corpse Lilies

  The Ded Bugs

  Stop and Smell the Stinking Corpse Lilies The Ded Bugs More >>
• Best Rock Radio Program
  Juxtaposition
  There are other shows on KDHX where you might hear The The, Johnny Cash, Pet Shop Boys and Neil Diamond all in the same hour, but few have the same seemingly effortless flow as Juxtaposition, where all of the songs, even the last-minute requests, seem to fit together as snugly as the last... More >>
• Best Jazz Radio Program
  All Soul, No Borders
  Josh Weinstein prefers his jazz free. Yeah, he'll inject structure, and funk and, of course, soul, but he prefers wide-open spaces and out-there improvisations. He knows his East Coast jazz, 1950 to the present, digs the Chicago scene and understands its strong connection to the absolutely vital... More >>
• Best Music Web Site
  www.stlscene.com
  Ooh, an upset! The first year stlpunk.com has had any real competition for "Best Music Web Site," we're giving the nod to the new kid. The difference? Variety. Sure, many non-punk bands list themselves on stlpunk.com, but the 'scene strives to catch every flavor of St. Louis music, from dance to... More >>
• Best Local Label
  Pro-Vel Records
  Formed in late 2002 by Nancy Catalina and Kirk Filley and, according to the label's bio, driven by the local music scene "to sling releases by some of the unknown greats from the Midwest region out there for the rest of the world to finally taste and see," Pro-Vel Records has been making noise... More >>
• Best Band Name
  Dick Cheney's Dick
  Dick Cheney's Dick More >>