Best dive bar
Faux-Irish pubs are an unfortunate (and sadly overabundant) breed of bar. What's worse, though, on the faux-factor scale is the try-to-be dive, a place that pretends it's all low-life, a barroom that feigns seedy, squalid, and cheap. You've got Budweiser lighting and serve PBR? Maybe even for two bucks or less? The patrons wear trucker caps and look young and well-heeled? No dive dice. T.C.'s Lounge, however, creased into a side street off Mass Ave by Berklee, is a veritable hole, and that's a compliment if ever there was one. Berklee rockers share the bar with downtown business types and everyone rubs elbows with the saturated barflies who hunker down for hours. The back wall is papered with Polaroids of people with big drunken grins, and the famed OxyContin shots will ease the pain of a lack of true dives around town.

Phoenix readers agree there's nothing pretend about T.C.'s. "Cheap beer and rock 'n' roll," runs the Abbey Lounge tag line (it says it on the T-shirts, too), and that's just what you get at this Somerville hole. With the feel of a basement under renovation (yellow wires hang from the ceiling, which seems to be on the verge of collapse), the Abbey draws aging townies in Red Sox caps along with young punks and aspiring (and hard) rockers. It's done so for a while now, and shows up on this list regularly as a result. An absolutely frill-less establishment, the Abbey is all the better for it. Photographs of past acts line the walls, and recent evenings have seen the likes of Asa Brebner, Slater, and Valhalla Kittens, with live shows, loud and long, four or five nights a week. And if the cheap beer and rock and roll aren't enough to get you going, the jukebox and bar-top video games should.

T.C.'s Lounge, 1 Haviland Street, Boston, (617) 247-8109; Abbey Lounge, 3 Beacon Street, Somerville, (617) 441-9631, www.schnockered.com/abbey/abbey.htm.