Monday, November 2, 2015

Basements

There seems to be an inevitable lifecycle as a punk where you go from curious to nervous to invested to jaded to bitter. We all try to avoid this as much as possible, but it is apparently failsafe. If you've been interested music and ever involved in a particular scene, there is always a certain time period or group of bands that evoke the most nostalgia. You start to think "Back then, it was different. It mattered", but in reality everybody thinks that about something. The punk kids older than you thought that about what came before you and the kids younger than you think about right now. Life, of which punk is of course a part, is always changing

It's really easy to look back on a certain time period as the "Golden Age" of a scene simply because you were there to experience it. Maybe just being there is what really matters.

For me, that time was about 2005-2012 or so (or maybe now? I guess?) in Ontario. I went to a lot of shows, though more importantly I went to a lot of shows that featured local bands from Ontario. I have vivid memories of the first times I saw Junior Battles, !Attention!, and The Decay and when I think about that now, it's more or less like there's a rose-coloured lens over the whole thing. I couldn't believe how good the music and bands around me were. I made unforgettable memories in weird and awesome places. It mattered more than anything to me.

With that, I give you this collection of music made by my peers that affected me in a major way. I have strong memories tied to all of these releases and the people who made them. I tried to limit it to one release per band for the sake of it not being overwhelming and tried to go for 7"s or EPs when I could. It can sometimes be a little daunting to jump into a giant collection of music, or at least thats the way I find it, so I tried my best to curb that as much as possible. I hope you like these songs, because they were a big deal for me.

The Essential Ontario 2008-2012.

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