Thursday, May 31, 2012

Rob, I'm Telling You This For Your Own Good. That's The Worst Fucking Sweater I've Ever Seen. That's A Cosby Sweater.

Top 5 Best Moments Of The ASOB Reunion Show:
5. Them bringing out all the old members to play songs off of Pornocracy and Built To Fail.
4. When they played "RSTLNE".
3. How genuinely emotional the band got towards the end of the set.
2. The "Hey heeeeyyyyyyy.....YEA!" during "Last On My List" and how I turned around and James was ready to belt out the "YEA" with me, right on cue.
1. Every time the chorus hit during "So Let's Go! Nowhere".

Top 5 Beers In The World:
5. Genny Ice
4. Genny Ice
3. Genny Ice
2. Genny Ice
1. Genny Ice

Top 5 Attack In Black Songs:
5. Ever Faster
4. Inches And Ages
3. Cut And Run
2. The Love Between You And I (Widows version)
1. Broken Things

Top 5 Things I Miss About Home:
5. Day-long drinking binges with Dwyer, Damien, Winkler, Paul and Pat.
4. Ridiculous nights around Bathurst and Spadina.
3. Late-night shitty TV and sports watching with my brother.
2. Jack and Trixie.
1. A lot of people I care about.

Top 5 Things I Do Not Miss About Home At All:
5. How far Scarborough is from anything that rules in Toronto.
4. Constantly looking over my shoulder, walking quickly and keeping my phone and ipod out of site when I'm in Scarborough and it's past 12 AM.
3. Wainting for the 116 at 2:30 AM at Kennedy.
2. The TTC.
1. Sleeping on the couch in the basement.

Top 5 Things I Am Most Excited About During This Jays Season:
5. COLBY.
4. NO MORE LIND.
3. E5 keeping this up.
2. Jose eventually going on a real huge tear.
1. Maybe having a shot at contending?

Top 5 Records I'll Be Jamming This Summer:
5. The Hippos- Heads Are Gonna Roll
4. Saves The Day- Stay What You Are
3. The Copyrights- North Sentinal Island
2. Attack In Black- Marriage
1. The Nix86- Evil Empurr

Cool, I'm going play guitar for a while, watch Pretty In Pink, pass out and then try to find a job tomorrow.

Hey, Hey.....YEAH!

My first summer in Guelph is in full swing now. I still haven't found a job, though to be honest haven't put the most effort into looking and I'm pretty much flat broke. This leads most people to ask me "What do you do all day?" and I can't really answer that well.

I'm lucky because a decent amount of my friends who I attended school with stuck around this summer, so I don't have a shortage of people to hang out with. And hang out we do. I live with my best friend who I've known since senior kindergarden. Another two of my very good friends live only a block down the street. A house of friends is only two blocks in the other direction. I've been playing bass with a group of great friends and could not be happier about playing music again. They live only a town over and are just a $7 bus ride away.

Basically what I'm trying to get at is that there is no shortage of people around for me to see and I love it. Even better is that we always have room in our house, so friends come and go for weekends.

But still, what am I doing? Well I just returned from a trip to New York City. While I was there I got to see the Arrogant Sons of Bitches play a reunion show, which I never though I would be able to see in person. Three Cheers For Disappointment has been my favourite album since the first time I heard it right at the end of 11th grade, so seeing these songs (along with many other amazing ones from the band's back catalogue) was extremely important and special to me. Not to mention screaming as loud as I possibly could to "Have Fun Rotting By Yourself", "Yeah, I Don't Know What It's Like To Be Around A Bunch Of Hipsters", "Last On My  List", "So Let's Go! Nowhere!" and "Built To Fail Motherfucker" with James during the encore. Fucking amazing. On top of that, during Dan Potthast's set opening the show ASOB came out to serve as his backing band for some mu330 songs. Great night.

On top of my ska orgasm on Sunday night I also got to see a Mets game at Citi Field, show my brother around the city for his first time and meet a ton of rad people along the way. I love New York and especially Brooklyn and really want to move there at some point in my life.

The weekend before this I went to Montreal for the second edition of Pouzza Fest. The weekend was a pretty ridiculous bender, topped by staying up all of Sunday night to party in the streets. Even better than hanging out and having amazing times with a whole whack of friends was seeing amazing bands the entire time, especially Classics of Love, The Suicide Machines, Lagwagon, The Lawrence Arms, The Menzingers, The Bouncing Souls, Cheap Girls, Junior Battles and lots more.

A great part about travelling to go to music festivals like The Fest, Death To False Hope Records Fest and Pouzza over the last few years has been that I've accrued a ton of great friends all over North America (and even Austrailia and the UK!). So when a group of them were making travel plans for Pouzza Fest this year, they decided to come up to Southern Ontario a week early to see a house show in Waterloo I played and to hang out! It was more or less the best.

This stretch of events take us back to May 15h, the date of the show. The weekend before the show three of my closest friends came up from Toronto. I hadn't seen them in a long time and we had an absolute rager of a time. I miss the fuck out of them and don't see them enough so that weekend was a great time. The week before all of this consisted of my friends and I in Guelph relishing in our freedom from school by drinking and smoking and hanging out and skateboarding and raising hell and attending a particularly funny roof-top party on Wyndham Street.

This was, and I say this without exaggeration, the best month of my life. It really had everything I could have asked for.

So people keep asking me what I'm actually doing because I graduated and have no job. The easiest answer is that I've been having the time of my life and doing exactly what I want to.

Monday, May 7, 2012

You Took A Piece Of Me

I think this band really rules a lot. They play ska. They rule. You can listen to the entire album right here!




Friday, May 4, 2012

Sorry About The Mess

I didn't realize until after I woke up and cruised through Twitter once, but today is May 4th. This is significant officially for 0 reasons (Bird Day?) (Greenery Day?) (Lance Bass' birthday?), but significant unofficially for two reasons as it's considered both Jawbreaker Appreciation Day and Star Wars Day (Again, unofficially.). The More I think about this, the more I think it's pretty fucking dumb.

The Jawbreaker thing is because they have a popular song called "Sluttering (May 4th)" off their album Dear You. I guess that's fine? It seems like pretty much every band who has a song that has a date for a title experiences the same thing. For example, May 16th is Lagwagon day, August 8th is NoFX day, August 19th is Ergs! day, etc. Though the Jawbreaker one is by far the most popular (The Lagwagon one is kind of popular as well.), I think that this is more an example of fans of a band trying to show they like them and get others to like them as well. While I'm sure the multiple postings of "Sluttering" by friends may get a little annoying today, it's pretty harmless, mostly because Jawbreaker rules and more people SHOULD listen to them. It seems kind of dumb to me that a band's day would be based off the title of one of their songs, rather than the day they formed or played their first show or released their landmark album, but OH WELL right?

The Star Wars thing really grinds my gears though. Yes, yes, yes, I'm aware I've mentioned it here before, but let me have this one. As far as I can tell, the entire "Unofficial Star Wars Day" comes completely from the fact that "May the 4th be with you." sounds almost exactly like "May the force be with you." I don't know if it's just me being a jaded asshole or not, but basing a "day" around those two sentences sounding the same is pretty fucking stupid. Why not May 25th, the day it was originally released? Anything other than fucking May 4th because that date is completely irrelevant and it drives me up the wall. Don't get me wrong, I fucking love Star Wars. The original three movies are among my favourites ever and I watch them pretty regularly, but this day just seems like the dumbest thing to me. Especially since most of consists of people posting "may the 4th b wit u. LOL such a nerd!!!!!!!" or something to that effect on Facebook.

Or maybe I'm just overreacting? Probably.

Go Jays go.