Wednesday, June 7, 2017

Your Ugly Human Heart

Full disclosure: I actually started writing this post a week and a half ago, after thinking about writing it for a week, before promptly leaving in my "drafts" (pulling back the curtain for you a little there). Anways, I badly need to write something and finishing this seems like the best way to accomplish that. Here you go:

Something that really, for real, happens to me is that after I’ve put up a bunch of longer posts in a row, I begin to think that every post has to be that way. I convince myself that only long posts are worthwhile and that if I’m not making some profound examinations about life, then it’s not worth doing any writing at all.

The reality, of course, is that I can write whatever I want, about whatever I want and put it up here because I am the “auteur”.

I was thinking about all of this on my lunch today because I was having trouble coming up a topic that would be suitably "big" to explore for a log post. The reality is that I can really talk about any topic I want. Putting a healthy amount of pressure on myself to write things "long" and "big" is good, because that I will write better things more often and it keeps my critical thinking active, but I also need to be wary of killing my writing drive by placing my expectations too high. It's a delicate balance.

After realizing that I am in fact the author of this blog, I decided to focus on a simple topic and write about music.

Every year, for the first six months of the year, I am convinced that I am not checking out enough new music and am so behind on what's going on in punk. I worry that I am losing touch and am in the process of losing my interest in music. Do I spend too much time listening to podcasts? Is that curtailing my music intake? AM I LOSING MY IDENTITY!?

But then, every single year, a whole tonne of new music comes out in the summer and it clicks with me really well and the problem is averted.

This year, I worried about the absolutely phenomenal Yunahon Mixtape by Oso Oso (Get it! It's free!) and Nightmare Logic by Power Trip being the only two releases of the year that were really sticking with me. How could my year-end list be two releases long?! Come on!

And then I got Vision by Pet Symmetry and Modern Pressure by Daniel Romano on the same day. Everything is okay. Flashing red light and blaring horn alarm have been turned off.

I loved Pet Hounds by Pet Symmetry so much; it was one of my favourite releases of 2015; so I was eager to see how the band would follow it up. Pet Hounds was a tight and compact power-pop album that was just banger after banger. Vision changes that up by adding some more experimental elements (keyboards, noise, a lot of different effects), a few longer, softer, and slower songs, a hardcore-ish number, and a WAY different and more distorted bass tone. This may just be me speculating, but I feel like Evan Weiss wrote this album on bass, as it figures a lot more into the backbone of the songs, whereas I feel like that last album was written on guitar. Cool stuff.

I am a pretty big Daniel Romano homer. I LOVE Attack in Black. His country albums range from "I like this" to "I listen to this with the lights off while I'm sad". Mosey was a wonderful departure in his style and sound and it made me wonder what type of 60's music he was going to pastiche next. Modern Pressure follows Mosey and is, somehow, even better. Romano moves into a mix of roots rock, country, and folk that, to me, sounds a lot like Music From Big Pink filtered through Romano's musical past. The bass playing is insane, the lyrics are wonderful, and the arrangements are sublime. Also, the various artworks are wonderful. Though I don't know if anything will touch Yunahon, this is making a pretty serious run at it. Amazing album.

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