But first, some background: This past November, WAMA board member and musician Diana Quinn asked me to suggest some nominees. Each year, WAMA members select most of the nominees, but the organization also contacts "experts" for additional assistance.  I sent her an extensive list of local performers and recordings in the areas of rap, pop, rock, EDM, world music, blues, soul, jazz, roots rock, and metal, and included links from a variety of publications covering those artists and recordings. On the jazz front, I urged her to contact Washington City Paper critic Michael J. West and DJ, writer, and recording engineer Larry Appelbaum.

Quinn said she'd bring my suggestions to WAMA's board. She said WAMA compiles the votes of its dues-paying members, and if there are not enough nominees in some categories, they consider the suggestions of the experts, which have to be seconded by someone in WAMA to make it on the ballot. As for the number of experts contacted this year, WAMA president Mike Schreibman says "anywhere from 2 to 10 depending on the category."

Obviously, I'm pleased to see some of my suggestions made it. For the first time, rapper Fat Trel, experimental-pop act Bluebrain, Mariachi Los Amigos, and eclectic indie label Sockets Records were nominated. Oddisee, Zenizia Allstar, Orquesta La Leyenda, The Caribbean, Deleted Scenes, Kid Congo Powers, and Edie Sedgwick also are included. The Wammies will be that much more diverse this year. The addition of these artists helps make the rapper, electronica artist, record company, Latin duo/group, and pop/rock duo/group categories more reflective of what D.C. had to offer in 2011.

Now for the bad news. The go-go categories almost entirely ignored younger musicians, such as popular and critically lauded bounce beat groups like TCB, XIB, Reaction Band, TOB, and ABM. (I suggested go-go talker Killa Cal, but he didn't make the list.)

The omissions continue. Maryland-based Haitian band Rafrechi may have played Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage recently, but they weren't nominated. Maryland soul singer Jim Bennett won a southernsoulrnb.com award, but he didn't make the cut, either. There is no heavy metal category. Sockets Records got a nomination, but indie-rock acts associated with that label, like Hume and Laughing Man, were not (nor was the Sockets hip-hop band The Cornel West Theory). Few of Michael J.  West’s favorite local jazz musicians are included—where are Brian Settles, Nasar Abadey, and Brad Linde? Volta Bureau , Protect-U, and Outputmessage released acclaimed EDM recordings, but they're not applauded here. I've made the case for many of these musicians in earlier articles on the Wammies, but WAMA doesn't seem interested.

Real talk: In the end, my complaint isn't that individual artists I like are ignored by the Wammies (although plenty are), but that the Wammies need to reach out to a truly wide variety of experts, and do a better job demonstrating they care about all styles of music. It was nice that Quinn reached out to me and included some of my suggestions this year, but it's still disappointing how much impactful local music—much of which is heralded by local media—is ignored each year. While time and time again, WAMA insists it does its homework and that it's the responsibility of skeptics to become paying members of WAMA if they feel a sound needs more attention, the hit-and-miss nature of this year's ballot shows that WAMA's approach is not working. After a quarter century, WAMA has not convinced many local musicians that it is worth it to join the organization.

To get a sense of WAMA's biases, look at the general music awards at the bottom of the ballot. WAMA’s “musician of the year” nominees include roots rockers, folkies, and a klezmer musician, but no modern jazz, reggae, R&B, go-go, metal, or indie-rock players. It should probably go without saying, then, that the category is disappointingly homogeneous—it includes 10 white men and one white woman. Since the Wammies include a wide range of genre categories honoring musicians from all walks of life, you'd think the "musician of the year" prize wouldn't seem limited to such a narrow few.

But that is WAMA. Dues-paying members  have until Feb. 5 to vote for their choices.

*correction-This blogpost originally said there were no metal bands nominated.  While there is no metal category, Periphery was nominated for best modern rock group, and Pentagram for best modern rock recording.

Wild Flag @ Black Cat

We covered a lot of music in pictures this year, but some truly stood out.

The show whose ticket needed to come with industrial-strength ear plugs...
Archers of Loaf at Black Cat (more photos here)

Dinosaur Jr. plays Bug at 930 Club (more photos here)

The coolest band reunion...
Dismemberment Plan at 930 Club (more photos here)

The show whose audience had the most members from other D.C. bands...
Office of Future Plans and Title Tracks at Fort Reno (more photos here)

John Davis at Luce Unplugged (more photos here)

Living legends who came to the area...
Bryan Ferry at Strathmore Music Center (more photos here)

Alejandro Escovedo at 930 Club (more photos here)

Show that resulted in the most bruises...
Marginal Man at Black Cat (more photos here)

2011 WCP Shows in Photos
Grant Hart In-Store @ Crooked Beat Records (Jan. 13)
Jason Isbell & 400 Unit @ 930 Club (Jan. 14)
Dismemberment Plan, Poor But Sexy, Batala @ 930 Club (Jan. 22)
Girl Talk @ 930 Club (Feb. 1)
Avett Brothers @ DAR Constitution Hall (Feb. 18)
Tommy Stinson, Mike Gent, Emily Roberts @ Iota (Feb. 17)
Jonathan Richman @ 930 Club (Feb. 26)
Middle Brother, Deer Tick, Dawes @ 930 Club (March 2)
SXSW 2011 @ Austin, TX (March 16-March 19)
Sebadoh @ Black Cat (March 2)
Mike Watt @ Black Cat Backstage (March 31)
The Black Angels @ 930 Club (April 3)
Wire, Weekend @ Black Cat (April 7)
Title Tracks CD Release Party @ Black Cat Backstage (April 20)
Alejandro Escovedo, Jesse Malin & St Marks Social @ 930 Club (May 1)
Tame Impala, Yuck @ Black Cat (May 6)
Surfer Blood @ Rock and Roll Hotel (May 10)
Ted Leo, Drew O'Doherty @ Black Cat Backstage (May 14)
Neko Case, Y La Bamba @ Black Cat (May 13)
Sondre Lerche @ 930 Club (June 7)
Chris Mills @ DC9 (June 16)
Allo Darlin @ Black Cat Backstage (June 16)
The Feelies @ 930 Club (June 18)
Dinosaur Jr Plays Bug@ 930 Club (June 24)
Deleted Scenes @ Black Cat Backstage (July 16)
Title Tracks, Office of Future Plans @ Fort Reno (July 25)
Bon Iver @ 930 Club (Aug. 2)
Archers of Loaf @ Black Cat (Aug. 5)
Marginal Man Reunion @ Black Cat (Aug. 20)
Virgin FreeFest 2011 @ Merriweather Post Pavilion (Sept. 11)
Cymbals Eat Guitars @ Black Cat (Sept. 24)
Wilco @ Merriweather Post Pavilion (Sept. 25)
Bryan Ferry @ Strathmore Music Center (Oct. 3)
Jens Lekman @ Sixth & I Synagogue (Oct. 5)
Wild Flag @ Black Cat (Oct. 20)
St Vincent @ 930 Club (Nov. 1)
Blind Pilot @ 930 Club (Nov. 6)
John Davis @ Luce Center, Smithsonian Museum (Dec. 18)

Since November 2010, the Luce Foundation Center for American Art, located in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, has been one of the city's more intimate outlets for local musicians. Its monthly acoustic concert series,  Luce Unplugged, features an hour-long performance, accompanied by a discussion on an artwork chosen by the musician.

Yesterday the series featured Title Tracks frontman John Davis, who played an hour-long set of his own songs as well as covers from the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Buck Owens, and John Denver. Toward the end of the set, Davis brought up Washington Post pop critic—and Davis' ex-Q and Not U bandmate—Chris Richards for a handful of songs. Between stories and songs that showcased the duo's pitch-perfect vocal harmonies, Davis and Richards announced they've been working on a bunch of new songs together (the count is currently at 16!), and hope to release something by mid-2012.

More photos from the set can be seen here.

The art-tainted/prog-damaged* dudes of Hume left town awhile ago for a fall tour. What's the net result? It's a screwed & chopped version of a Steve Miller song set to some C-grade sci-fi clips. But hey, if you're gonna drag yourself Around The Indie-Rock Circuit In 80 Days, it's probably better to bring back "a YouTube video" instead of "herpes and a collection of trucker hats." Hume appears to be lucid enough to organize a show on Dec. 17 here in D.C. They have made a poster for it. It would awesome if that extremely large JPG file used steganography to embed the complete audio code for the original version of "Fly Like An Eagle," so future cryptographer-archaeologists would have something to keep themselves busy. This smaller version probably does not:

* Art Tainted and Prog Damaged would be great rock & roll aliases.

Now, it turns out the MiniDisc doesn't actually contain "Misery Let Me Down." But it does tell us even more about Smith's Third Rail Radio performance at WMUC.

After the Post's story went online, WMUC record librarian David Taylor spent a couple days digitizing material from that MiniDisc. He sent me an e-mail Wednesday afternoon explaining his progress and the process:

I currently have the session in a single wav file. I messed around with the EQ and amplified it, so you could say that I've 're-mastered' it. All that needs to be done now is to split it into tracks and convert to FLAC and mp3. We are looking at over 18 minutes of content here. It should be done and online by tomorrow, but I might just finish it later today.

Taylor finished the job Wednesday night and quickly posted the tracks to WMUC's Tumblr along with an explanation of what he found. The MiniDisc that Weisholtz sent back to the station isn't the original recording of Smith's session; it contains six songs and promo Smith recorded for the station, which makes it shorter than the CD. "Misery Let Me Down and the aborted versions of "Division Day" and "Say Yes" are missing from the MiniDisc. What's more, the MiniDisc has one cut, "The Biggest Lie," that's not on the CD  version of Smith's performance. So neither the CD nor the MiniDisc contains the entire session.

Judging by the content on the newly acquired MiniDisc, it's safe to guess that it's an edited compilation of Third Rail Radio performances meant for future on-air play. Smith's unfinished takes are omitted, and the singer likely didn't even want "Misery Let Me Down" to be recorded, so that's not here either. (Before he started playing the tune, Smith asked, "Can I like warm up and play a song before we tape?") On the MiniDisc, Smith's performance is also paired with one by Braid, and while the emo foursome did a Third Rail Radio set, it wasn't with Smith. Though it's hard to say for certain that the MiniDisc was indeed created for future radio play, it's clear that the disc doesn't contain the original recording of Smith's performance.

But Taylor hasn't given up on finding the original recording of Smith's performance. In fact, going by that Tumblr post, it's become something akin to his white whale:

We will not have a definitive version of Smith’s WMUC performance until we can find the original ADAT that it was recorded on.  It has become one of my highest priorities and I will keep you posted on any developments.  This will have to tide you over in the meantime.

He's got a big quest ahead of him, but faithful Elliott Smith fans might want to take solace in a short note the record librarian left at the end of his Tumblr post—he found the ADAT of the Braid session. At the very least, now Braid fans can rejoice, too.

Kropp says there are plenty of recordings that get sucked into a black hole only to pop up at some point later, including some reel-to-reel promos for the station by The Beatles. In fact, he says he found a copy of that Elliott Smith session back in 2004. So, he did what any curious crate-digger would do: He ripped a copy of it. But Kropp "never thought to share it with any of my friends," and he didn't know that the recordings he found contained an unreleased song. He was just pleasantly surprised to find a copy of the session after hearing whispers about its existence.

The same goes for former WMUC live music director Chris Henry when he found a CD copy of the performance back in 2009. As live music director, Henry was responsible for running Third Rail Radio, the program Smith appeared on in 1996, but he discovered the CD before he ran that show. Henry wasn't even trying to find a recording of Smith's set when he decided to go digging through the archives, though he'd heard about it—he was actually hunting for a rumored WMUC performance by Will Oldham. But when he found it in a binder, he opted to do the same thing Kropp did some five years prior. "I had an engineer make a copy for me and I brought the copy back to my apartment and ripped it to my computer," Henry says.

Henry placed that CD back in its original file, where it probably still remains. ("It sort of surprised me that nobody touched the CD after that, which I think is kind of odd," he says.) He named the 10 tracks he ripped onto his computer as best he could, and gave the lead-off tune the title "Division Day, Take 1." That's because on the recording Smith began playing "Division Day" for about 20 seconds before stopping, mumbling, and eventually performing that impromptu version of "Misery Let Me Down." Like Kropp, Henry wasn't aware that the tune that followed his aborted take of "Division Day" was an unreleased gem. He learned that last Friday, long after he passed the digital files along to WMUC co-music director Vaman Muppala.

"It's always been a legend at the station," Muppala says of the Smith session. It landed in his lap in the form of a curious package from Weisholtz. As Malitz wrote, Muppala found a MiniDisc marked "Elliott Smith/Braid" in the package. But he couldn't do anything with it: Muppala hadn't seen anyone use a MiniDisc player at the station. Ripping the session from the disc got added to a future "to do" list, but nothing could be done then. That's where Henry came in.

When Muppala realized Henry had a digital version of the tracks—albeit a rip of a rip of the original MiniDisc—he asked him for a copy. Henry passed it along and uploaded the session to WMUC's digital music archive. In the wee hours of Oct. 17, Muppala sent an e-mail about the session's availability to the station's listserv with a subject that captured his rapt excitement: "Live at WMUC! on the music Archive and ELLIOTT EFFING SMITH." DJ Leila Mays played one of those songs almost two weeks later, and her public playlist helped lead to the realization that the session contained an unreleased tune.

Since the news of the session went viral, Muppala has been swift to try and set the record straight and give proper credit to Henry. That's because the session he uploaded to the digital archive didn't come directly from the MiniDisc Weisholtz sent him, but the copy of a CD copy Henry made in 2009. After Malitz's piece went live, Muppala wrote a humorous, scatterbrained post on WMUC's Tumblr explaining how the tracks got online and included a link to an edited version of the session. And the story keeps evolving: Muppala says that WMUC record librarian David Taylor is working on ripping the original session from the MiniDisc in order to obtain a higher quality version of the recording, and Muppala adds that Braid singer-guitarist Bob Nanna called the station to clarify that his band did not perform with Smith as Muppala's post indicates.

Discovery stories aside, Smith fans got their wish: a digital file of his WMUC show. Yet, it appears that new, slightly edited versions of that session dilute his set into listenable clips. (The above YouTube clip only contains the "Misery Let Me Down" cut, while the Click Track piece contains a slightly longer version with Smith introducing the tune saying "can I like warm up and play a song before we tape?") The reality of the performance is quite different.

"It's kind of a sad thing to listen to," Kropp says. Some on-air sets can be rough around the edges, but Smith's stripped-down show is messy to the core. He stumbled through the rest of the session after playing "Misery Let Me Down": He made two more attempts of "Division Day," a couple takes of "Say Yes," and also performed "Thirteen," "2:45 AM," and "Alameda." Along the way, you can hear him break-off mid-song, pause to fix his headphones, mumble, profusely apologize, and anxiously pick at his guitar. On Click Track, Third Rail Radio creator Eric Speck relates his impression of Smith, saying "He was SHOCKINGLY shy and it became clear he had on air jitters. He pretty much locked himself in the promotion office—alone—to tune and practice. He was super nice, but very sullen and soft spoken."

"I think he was wasted on cough syrup, this is how the story is told," Kropp says. In fact, between his first try at "Division Day" and "Misery Let Me Down," Smith mutters, "I just need to wake up. I took some Nyquil." That could also partly explain his erratic behavior during the session, and why "Misery Let Me Down" abruptly ends seemingly mid-song. Looking back on it, it's hard not to re-contextualize the event in regards to the painful personal issues Smith grappled with and his early death in 2003.

Needless to say, it's an interesting document, and perhaps one of many waiting to be dug up at WMUC. Muppala says there are plenty of recordings from now-legendary bands like Q And Not U sitting in the station, and he's heard rumors of a Fugazi MiniDisc floating around. "There's definitely more shocking MiniDiscs to be found," he says. And finds like the Elliott Smith session remind old WMUC members the joys of their own musical treasure hunts. "It's fun to see that happen, because everyone gets to relive that discovery," Kropp says. For Kropp, it's stories like these that help build a special mythos around the station. "It's like Hogwarts with music," he says.

The Chicago quintet—which has been making jangly, beautifully loud ramshackle rock about girls and booze since 2003—recently released its fourth album, Mannequin Men. It contains 12 songs about being a self-aware rock 'n' roll fan and being in a band. The subject matter isn't exciting. In fact, I'd prefer not to hear about the road from 99 percent of the bands that sing about the road. But for the first time on record, Mannequin Men sound comfortable. Their first three records, full of competent blasts of garage abandonement, sounded like excuses to play shows. Their live act came first, and for any garage-rock band, that's how it should be. Now, it's difficult to classify Mannequin Men as a garage act. That'll be plain when the band plays at the Black Cat tonight.

Singer and rhythm guitarist Kevin Richard "learned to be in a band over the course of eight years," he says. What started as a group of guys who just wanted to have fun and get drunk and watch Chicago Blackhawks games before and after being on stage has turned into something of a veteran act. They've regularly released 7-inch singles, made full-lengths, and hit the road as much as four guys with dayjobs can.

That doesn't mean the tours are any less grueling. "In the past, at this point in the tour, everyone is tired, we feel like we're getting sick," says Richard. It's 11 days in, it's raining, that's when you get pissed off. Last night it was bad weather in Baltimore. The place wasn't too full, we maybe had 11 people and a bar back. We had just played a great show in New York the night before. But we figured out what works and what doesn't work for us. We played really well. Right now, it's still fun, which is strange."

As Mannequin Men have matured, their songs have moved away from the Johnny Thunders-style booziness by which the group first made its name. "The new stuff comes across pretty aggressive," says Richard. "We're playing songs twice as fast. The old drunk us wasn't fun for everyone. We're a lot tighter and we're playing our instruments better."

One highlight of the new record is "Hobby Girl," a song penned by lead guitarist Ethan D'Ercole. To my ears, the chorus ("You should get a hobby girl/Or find someone else to talk to") might be the best brush-off on record this calendar year. Richard disagrees. "Everyone asks, 'Isn't your girlfriend pissed about that song?' but it's a lot sweeter than it sounds."

Mannequin Men plays Black Cat tonight with Cheap Time and Highway Cross. $8. 10 p.m. The new album is available on Addenda Records. The first 150 albums were pressed on beer colored vinyl. Disclosure: Miles Raymer, the bassist for Mannequin Men, is a music writer for Chicago Reader, a sister publication of Washington City Paper. That really doesn't matter to me. I liked the band way before Miles joined.

On the 9:30 Club stage last night, the Portland, Ore. indie-folk outfit Blind Pilot showcased many generations of instruments, from banjo, to stand-up bass,  to squeeze-box. Luckily for the close-to-capacity crowd, the songs were pretty timeless, too.

Additional photos from the show can be seen here.

Annie Clark, aka St. Vincent, played to a sold-out 9:30 Club last night, pairing her ethereal voice with off-kilter indie-pop melodies full of sometimes-frantic beats and a bass sound so big it would have made Chuck D jealous. From the start of "Surgeon" to the finale of "Your Lips are Red," she had the crowd in the palm of her delicate hand.

Additional photos from the set can be seen here.

There was a moment last night, during Wild Flag's set at the Black Cat, when singer/guitarist Carrie Brownstein basically gave herself over fully to her band's musical frenzy. During "Racehorse," she fell to her knees as if in a trance, slapped her own face a couple of times, and writhed around on the stage, all while pulling chords from her guitar and taking the audience down a hypnotic path. Even the other band members were looking on in amazement. NPR streamed the sold out show last night; give a listen to it here.

You can see additional photos from the show here.