Ask a random music critic to come up with a shortlist of the best rock songs of the Noughties, and it’s quite unlikely his or her picks will include any offerings by walking Hot Topic billboard AFI. The California quartet (which started as a snotty hardcore outfit before gradually morphing into a goth/punk/emo/alt-rock hybrid obsessed with all things black and somber) is very much a people’s band, one whose increasingly ham-fisted aspirations of seriousness and grandeur is directly proportionate to how many records it sells. Though AFI wishes for its records to be taken as Art, its ambitions have been undercut by a misguided (and frankly adolescent) understanding of what that means, best evidenced by singer Davey Havok’s unabashedly purple lyrics (sample lines from “The Days of the Phoenix”: “The words were mystical as / Purring animals / The circle of rage / The voice on the stage appeared”). Thus, you probably won’t find many AFI tracks on year-end “best-of” critics’ polls

Yes, AFI is pretentious as all hell and Havok comes off as little too in love with the sound of his voice whenever he sings, but nevertheless the group has always had a knack for thrilling, full-throttle rockitude (it’s never a good idea for this band to move at anything slower than a restless clip—witness “Miss Murder”). With the proper focus and the right touch, AFI is indeed capable of greatness—and its magnificent 2003 single “Girl’s Not Grey” is proof of it. Indeed, it’s one of the best the past decade has produced. Seriously. I mean it.

I’ve been admiring M83 from a cautious distance for the past few years. Though I’ve made the effort to grab all of the band’s records, and though I have seen it live once, I’ve tended to remain on the proverbial fence about the group. More often than not, M83’s Anthony Gonzalez gets it right. However, it has always seemed that for every one of those times where he got it right—for every “Teen Angst”, “Gone”, or “Graveyard Girl”—there were at least several moments when he inconceivably missed the mark. Take your pick: “Car Chase Terror”, “Midnight Souls Still Remain”, and, yes, a good chunk of “Beauties Can Die”.  All of them seem to suffer from either a stupefying lack of inspiration or, perhaps paradoxically, too much inspiration. In either case, tracks like those were enough to make me a bit guarded whenever news would break about a new M83 release.

So, back a few months, when the reports about M83’s forthcoming double album went viral, I immediately expected it to be a bloated, shambling mess.  After all, Gonzalez was readily admitting that he had taken his cues from the Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, which is a bloated, shambling mess.

Wow. Was I ever wrong… about the M83 record Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, that is. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is still is a bloated, shambling mess.

It’s been an interesting ride for Hurricane Bells’ Steve Schiltz. The man rose to prominence for fronting the underrated NYC guitar-rock act Longwave, but once Schiltz began branching out on his own for his more acoustic-based side project Hurricane Bells, a b-side from his project’s debut album, “Monsters”, wound up getting on the soundtrack to the second Twilight movie. Suddenly Hurricane Bells was more well known than Longwave ever was, even if the song was nowhere near indicative of the cathartic content of his newer project’s’ sound.

Just as 2011 wrapped up, Schiltz could proudly look back on what he accomplished: following the release of the solid Down Comes the Rain EP in late 2010, Schiltz went back and revamped his sound for this year’s Tides and Tales, a much more sonically dense, expansive album than his debut Tonight is the Ghost was. With Tides, not only do we see Schiltz expanding his musical palette, but we also get to see him really come into his own as a songwriter for Hurricane Bells: each band now has their own unique, distinctive sound, even if they do come from the same mind.

To help cap off his triumphant year, Schiltz sat down with PopMatters to reveal his top five favorite records of all time, explaining why these discs had a great influence on him in the way that they did, all while he muses as to why more kids aren’t a fan of the Edge . . .

I used to believe it was one of the minor musical tragedies of the last quarter-century that the great Mr. Bungle could not keep it together. Three spectacular albums (each better than the last) and… done. It seemed neither fair nor possible that one band with so much talent and eccentric, rejuvenating brilliance would call it quits. A lot of diehard fans, like myself, thought the individual musicians were making a big mistake; how could they walk away from what they’d created? I’ve since come to realize—and appreciate—that regardless of the reasons (one may have simply been that there literally were too many ideas and possible directions for one band to handle, plain and simple), the demise of Bungle was, ironically, a blessing on multiple fronts. For one, the band could end on the highest of notes, and secondly, it freed the boys up to leap headlong into their various—and quite varied—obsessions and distractions.

I can’t help but snicker at the recent ruckus that The Onion caused at the MetalSucks website. After The A.V. Club ran a crossword puzzle on July 13 with the clue “Faith No More’s only hit” (36 down), MetalSucks responded with a month-long blog series, spanning all of the following August, dedicated to celebrating that band’s music. Entitled “31 Days of Faith No More”, the series contains brief musings on one FNM track for each and every one of August’s days. What’s more is that the series is archived under MS‘s “Hipsters Out of Metal!” category.

Personally, I’ve never been a big fan of metal. I’m also beyond over the hipster backlash. Nevertheless, it brings me great joy to see MS‘s obvious full-throated attack at The A.V. Club. If Steven Hyden’s often brilliant series Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? proved anything, it was that metal (still) is not highly regarded among “hip” music writers. While expending several hundreds of words in the series, Hyden succeeded in ignoring Faith No More entirely, lambasting nü metal, and, of course, singing the praises of Guided by Voices. If all of us could just stop right here and, for once, be honest with ourselves, we could acknowledge that if, say, Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst ever wrote a song called “Tractor Rape Chain”, every indie/hip/left-of-center media outlet in the universe would get all Brent DiCrescenzo on him (those outlets have already done that, actually). But since Robert Pollard is kind of cheeky and weird, he (apparently) gets a permanent hall pass—as do men who name themselves after cute, cuddly animals.