The 2019 I Musical Genius Music Revue

Back again for another year folks. Here is all the stuff that I really enjoyed from this year in music. An insane amount of great stuff came out this year and I think that, more so than any other year in recent memory, it was tough to narrow down what would come on and what wouldn't. It may sound insulting to say that there was a big "middle class" in music this year, stuff that was very good, but not necessarily the best, but I think that speaks to an overall jump in quality across the board, which is a great thing.

As per the last couple of years, I haven't numbered anything. Maybe oso oso would take number 1. I don't know and care and I can't imagine you would.

oso oso - baking in the glow

This was absolutely my most anticipated release this year, as their last album the yunahon mixtape, quickly became one of my all-time favourites. The more tossed-off approach on this one put me off as first, as yunahon was fussed over, but I eventually came to appreciate that as a different side of the band. Some of their very best songs on this one.

field medic - fade into the dawn

Folk music doesn't normally do it for me, as I find it difficult to not read it as incredibly pretentious. field medic gets around that by having honest lyrics about substance abuse and relationships and putting some added production, like fake drums and lo-fi guitars and bass, in just enough places around the acoustic guitar. Though not included on the album, their 2019 single "I Want You So Bad It Hurts" is also one of the best songs of the year.

The Berries - Berryland

Punks all started listening to Neil Young this year and no band did a better job of bringing all the best parts of Crazy Horse into the present than The Berries. Huge vibe on this one. Guitars, guitars, guitars.

Chastity - Home Made Satan

Beautiful shoegaze about killing cops and klansmen? Yeah bro. Most importantly, the album's a tight 10 songs in 26 minutes, getting around the useless vamping that gaze bands sometimes lean on. Tons of hooks and vocals that aren't buried under production.

Skatune Network - Pick It the Fuck Up!

I think a lot about what the future of ska will be like, as a lot of the genre has been stagnating in the sound of the 90s for a long time. This album by Jeremy Hunter, which consists of ska covers of the emo bands on Counter Intuitive Records, is hopefully a sign of interesting and valuable things to come. More genuine earnest stuff like this, less jokey shit in the future. 

Sheer Mag - A Distant Call

On their second record, Sheer Mag tightened everything up and went a little heavier. Though less hyped then the debut, this one works better as a full album. The Mag have their sound completely figured out, so it will be interesting if they continue to put out punk/hardcore/arena rock every couple of years, or decide to make a big a change in how they approach their music.

Woolworm - Awe

Like shoegaze, I think that post-punk is getting to its saturation point and most of the new releases just don't have enough substance to keep me interesting beyond a couple of listens. Woolworm is the exception, as they perfectly balance the effected vocals, big guitars, and mountains of chorus and reverb pedals to produce something that nods to its influences without being a shitty imitation of them.

Wayfarer - Reckless Spring

When I heard Wayfarer play "Fifteen" last year, I knew that this album would be good. Kyle lowered himself to write a merely "normal" album instead a concept record and the results are amazing. Another amazing Wayfarer release from a band that will continue to be slept on because everyone is stupid.

Ancient Shapes - A Flower That Wouldn't Bloom

Re: the question I asked about Sheer Mag. Ancient Shapes bucked the trend of their earlier '77 style punk pastiches by leaning heavier into power pop and glam influences and the result was my favourite record by them. The songs are exactly what they need to be and there's no wasted space or effort. Romano's best work since Modern Pressure.

Blood Orange - Angel's Pulse

I admit that I was much later to the Blood Orange train than others, but this album won me over. Wonderful mix of poppy R&B with occasional forays into other genres. "Gold Teeth" was the song I listened to the most this summer. I'm sucker for Triple 6 features.

White Reaper - You Deserve Love

You Deserve Love doesn't have the same sort of ironic sense of humour that White Reaper's last album did, like piped-in crowd noise to start the album. Instead the album is a cross-section of early 80's rock radio and it works in the best ways. This band's amazing.

Young Thug - So Much Fun

So Much Fun came out while it was still summer in Montreal and it was everything I wanted from a rap record. Perfect to listen to while BBQing on my back deck with a joint.

Fury - Failed Entertainment

The thing that makes this record great is that it balances the newer influences working their way into most rock music (grunge and somehow nu metal) with the exact type of hardcore I love (Snapcase). Fury knows when to hold back with all of that to not make anything corny and then allows it to hit huge when it needs to.

Caught Amongst Ourselves

A quick to post to plug Threadpuller's new EP Negative One.

 

This thing is mostly the work of Tyler Savage, formerly of the excellent bands The Decay and Mold Maker. Tyler is one of my favourite songwriters and I am really excited to see output from him in a new band. Plus, playing in a noisey post-punk thing is great excuse to throw 20 years of gear into one rig!

Think of the Fine Times, Pushing Down the Better Few

Once upon a time I used to think that this song was a lot of corny fun. Damien and I were far enough away from the early 90s when we were 14 that we thought that the video full of 90s fashions and sideways hats was an amazing piece of retro pop culture.

When Brian, Konrad, Pat (and Mark), and I moved into our first house in our second year of university it was a period of transition for all of us. We knew we were being thrust into adulthood and weren't kids anymore, but we also didn't realize that we were still behaving like teenagers for the whole year. Actual responsibilities were still a ways off from us, so we were free to fuck around a lot and (mostly) not worry about it.

Brian and I were attached at the hip that year and did everything together. He had brought his mom's old Ford Windstar, affectionately called "Mama Link" by all of us because of its "LA LINK" license plate, and we drove all over Guelph in it. We were usually pretty high while doing so. Using Brian's ancient iTrip to hook our ipods up to the stereo, we would try to put on the most ridiculous music we could to make each other laugh. I have many memories of us listening to "Unbelievable" while driving at night in a big minivan.

Now I'm able to recognize that "Unbelievable" is really great song and I like it unabashedly. Maybe I always did on some level. It's also nice to think of how good it is now, while remembering the life it used to have with us in 2008.

I Tell Myself

Somewhere in an alternate universe, this post would be about how Greetings and Salutations is the last good Less Than Jake release because it seems to me like the last time that Vinnie was really driving the creative direction of the band.



Instead, it's about how this song has been sticking the side of my head while I think about finishing a giant pile of work. In the past I would have been anxious and stressed about whether or not I would finish everything, and what that would that would mean for my future, but I have better work habits and a better perspective on school now. I know I'll get everything done and I know it will turn out okay at minimum. I'm still stressed and anxious, but I start working earlier and have better ideas about how to organize myself. Only took me like 10 years!

Even though every line of the lyrics doesn't necessary hit perfectly, the whole thing encapsulates me slumming around my office in Zubaz pants and trying to work through some ideas.

Let's Keep It That Way

A strange thing that I often do is try to convince myself that I'm starting to care less about baseball, my favourite sport, which I talk about constantly. This usually happens when I'm feeling burnt out at the end of a disappointing Jays season and, understandably, do follow each game with the same zeal that I do in April. Maybe I feel guilty about not watching every game? On some level, I definitely do think that it is my duty as a fan to give each Teoscar Hernandez at-bat my full attention, which is ludicrous.

These fits of self-inflicted paranoia about my devotion to the sport are always brief and I feel a huge wave of relief once I realize I'm not a piece of shit or, worse, a bad fan.

During the off-season, I try to fill the void left by the World Series ending by consuming baseball in different ways. In general, this means either playing as a fictional shortstop named Tony Balony in MLB The Show 14, which I haven't done much lately, or reading books about baseball.

My love of baseball literature is something I inherited from my dad, who gave me his copy of The Summer Game by Roger Angell to read as a preteen. This then developed into a fascinated with Jim Bouton's Ball Four, Lawrence S. Ritter's The Glory of Their Times, and, doing his nationalistic duty, W.P. Kinsella.

Recently I've had a hard time reading for pleasure since reading for school takes up basically all of my time. After struggling through a D.H. Lawrence book, I decided to read something about baseball to get my reading habits back on track and picked The Iowa Baseball Confederacy off of my shelf. In high school, I did a project on Shoeless Joe well before I saw Field of Dreams, and then read the short story collection The Thrill of the Grass (one of the all-time best book titles) a little later, so I was well-acquainted with the Kinsella oeuvre. I was surprised then to find this book appealing to me much more than his previous work. Already, I'm getting that deep feeling and can tell that this will be my favourite of his and that rush of relief that I am in fact still very invested in baseball washed over me.

"I saw my grandparents only once. When I was about eight my father and I drove to spring training in Florida. I saw Curt Simmons, Robin Roberts, Allie Reynolds, Vinegar Bend Mizell, Yogi Berra, and my grandparents.

They lived in a very small house on a side street in Miami. There was an orange tree in the backyard. The house and my grandparents smelled of Listerine, peppermint, and Absorbine, Jr.

They left Iowa irrevocably behind them when they retired. They never returned for a visit, never invited anyone from Onamata to visit them, including us, I suspect, although my father never said so.

What he did say, on the drive back, as if he was trying to explain something to me but was not exactly sure what, was, "We are haunted by our past, which clings to us like strange, mystical lint. Of the past, the mystery of family is the most beautiful, the saddest, the most inescapable of all. Those to whom we are joined by the ethereal ties of blood are often those about whom we know the least." I think he was talking about much more than my grandparents.

I listened to my father's tales with half an ear. I knew he was obsessed with something no one else cared about. He wrote letters, articles, talked of a book, which he eventually wrote. Complained. I didn't pay half the attention I should have. Children, thinking themselves immortal, assume everyone else is too. He died when I was a few months short of seventeen."

W.P. Kinsella. The Iowa Baseball Confederacy. Don Mills: Totem Books, 1987: 25-26.

Flat on My Face, I See What It Takes

I'm now entering the heavy part of my first semester as a PhD student. So far the semester has been a lot f work, but relatively smooth sailing. There have been stressful periods, but my work habits have improved significantly since I was an undergrad student and I've gotten better at planning out my work and (mostly) getting going on things ahead of time.

Now that the major work is starting to come to a head though, it feels like I'm running up against the limits of that. It always feels like there's more work to do than there is time to do it. I know that's not the case, because it will get done one way or another, but it does feel that way. There's some huge dark spectre of yet-to-be-completed academic standing behind me and I'm always looking out at nothing in front of me, trying to acknowledge it without turning around.

It's hard to talk about how much work I have to do without sounding like an entitled shit. "Oh, a PhD student has stressful deadlines? Not shit." I know that, but it feels like there's a stress valve on the side of my neck that needs to be released, or else my hair will start falling out.

The school tells us all to not be too hard on ourselves, to think of mental health strategies, and to take breaks from work so we don't overwork ourselves. But when you take a break, all the work you weren't doing still is sitting there? How do finish all the work that's assigned and take breaks to stay sane when there's already more work assigned than you can finish?

It's starting to feel like old times again, where I'm laughing at the insurmountable mountain of writing and research I have to do and getting pissed at myself for not being able to climb it. When I look back to writing all morning in the Guelph library to finish something due that afternoon, or staying up all night in my office, I think about them fondly, but boy did they ever feel like shit at the time. Maybe I'm subconsciously addicted to this feeling, and that's why I keep doing it.

Trying hard to remember that I always find a way to get things done and they'll turn out okay. Hard to think that way now though.

I Just Wanna See You Smile

Following Friday's extremely earnest and sentimental post, I thought I would keep it simple and give you some music recs for a rainy Sunday in Montreal.



Back when Beat Noir had just put out Ecotone, we played a flurry of shows in support of the release, including a particularly good one in Toronto to a packed house with bands from Ontario. We were getting a good response to the album and were feeling ourselves. The morning after that show, Kyle sent us Sleep Through to the Light way before it came out and we were all struck by how much better it was than what we had just done. Wayfarer's been one of the best emo bands in the world since Our Fathers and I'm not sure why more people haven't taken notice. While most of the bands from the Southern Ontario punk scene of the 10's have broken up, like The Decay, Orphan Choir, and !ATTENTION!, Wayfarer has stuck around and continued to put out music that grows on what preceded it. This record's fucking amazing.



The World's Best American Band was one of my favourite releases of 2017 and has stayed in pretty consistent rotation since then. Given how much I enjoyed that record, I was predictably eager to check out White Reaper's new album You Deserve Love when it came out last week. They dial down the performative stadium rock irony a little bit ( :'( ), while staying devoted to giving you a cross section of early 80's FM radio rock. Wonderful stuff and a for sure presence on the end of the year list.



I went and saw Ancient Shapes in Montreal last week. Absolutely loved the S/T debut, but TBH didn't invest as much time in the follow up, Silent Rave. I was shocked and excited at the show when the newer cuts they played tended more towards a power-pop (as much as AS could get more power pop) and lo-fi glam direction than the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants catchy punk of the first two records. Huge choruses all around and for sure my favourite Ancient Shapes release and favourite Romano release since Modern Pressure.

Also on that show were Teenanger, who I had never checked out before. They were great!

An Honest Answer For All of Them

Earlier this month, I was browsing I, Musical Genius, as I sometimes do when I'm bored. While looking at the index on the right side of the screen, I noticed the "2009" near the bottom and realized the 10th anniversary of this blog had come and passed earlier this year without me recognizing it.

Happy 10th birthday I, Musical Genius!

This is already the most navel gazing-est of all websites, but you'll have to allow me revel in it in this case. It's a big occasion!

Even though there are posts labelled as being from 2008 on this site, those are actually from before this blog started. I used to post blogs on MySpace (dating myself badly on that one), and I imported those when I started IMU because I thought they were good longform pieces and I wanted to flesh out the content a bit and give people something to check out when they came. That's very funny in hindsight, because boy oh boy was I very bad at writing and editing at that time.

I started IMU on March 8th, 2009 for a couple of reasons. As I said, I used to post blogs on Myspace, but people were moving away from that platform and there wasn't nearly the same level of engagement. I sometimes posted blogs on Facebook, but most people on that site focused on simpler social interaction. Realistically, most important factor was that I had gotten dumped for the first time in January of that year and I was having a difficult time coming to terms with that.

A fewer of my newer punk friends had blogspots, so I decided to shift over here and start this site as a new project for myself. Being the sheltered suburban teen that I was, getting dumped seemed like the hardest thing in the world to go through at the time and that difficulty was bleeding into other areas of my life. I was struggling at pretty much everything and had a subterranean sense of self-worth. Of course, given that I was emotionally fragile and loved ska, the name had to come from an ASOB deep cut. I hoped that through starting the blog, I could channel all the things I was feeling into something that was creative in some way.

I think that comes across in the early posts of this blog. They are truly bad and embarrassing, and many of them are just me talking about how important cheesy pop-punk breakup songs are to me. That's okay though! The site served its purpose!

I hesitate to say something like "IMU saved me!" because that's dumb and saccharine and not true. I think what's closer to the case is that IMU  has always been a reflection of my life at the time. This is why I've never deleted any of the cringey posts from the beginning of the site (or the cringey posts from much later as well). I don't think it's bad to acknowledge who you used to be and look back at how you've changed. If anything, you should be glad that you've changed over a decade, because if you haven't, you for sure suck ass.

As I matured and learned more about myself, who I was a person and what that meant, that started to come through in the posts. Gradually I moved away from short sentences accompanying videos to longer entries with a central idea. I definitely got much better at writing and developed a voice somewhere along the way.

I used to hope that my audience would keep growing and that I'd have this big community around the blog. Not so much that I could monetize it or anything like that, but so I could interact with people who read it and talk about stuff. I hoped that people would drop into the comments and dialogues would start. I guess I've always been sort of desperate for that sort online community, but I never made much of an effort or did a good job in fostering that around IMU.

That's okay though. At this point, IMU is basically just for me. And Matt and Rebecca. And you random lurkers, who I know come here sometimes.

How I've thought of this blog has changed a lot over its existence. I feel like I used to think of it as a music site, where people could discover new stuff thanks to my ~excellent taste~ (this meant generic pop-punk bands from Florida). Shockingly, that did not take off. These days, I like to think of it as an online zine. Most people probably find it closer to a diary. I guess it's somewhere in between those two things.

It's hard to explain why, but I'm extremely proud of I, Musical Genius. I think a huge part of it is that it's something I've stuck to for more than a decade. Many friends have started online projects that they're "throwing themselves fully into" and then given up shortly thereafter. That's totally okay, as keeping up with personal projects while having to navigate your life and your job or school or anything else is hard, but that's exactly why I'm proud. This site is just writing. There's no filler that's just me re-posting photos that someone else took or sharing a meme with no comment. I've sat down and written things that I'm thinking for ten years and inside of me, that feels commendable.

Maybe Blogger will get deleted one day. If and when that happens, I don't know what I'll do. But for the moment, IMU is still here and is more less a digital reflection of my existence and everything I've done.

In the early days of this blog, I used to end every post with lyrics from a song that I thought captured the ethos of the entry and I remember one of those quotes coming from "Faction" by Less Than Jake, the last song on Borders and Boundaries. In wrapping up a toasting of this project, there wouldn't be anything more appropriate than to end with an introspective pop-punk song about sticking to your ideals from the band who stuck with me so closely along the way.

Strike a match folks.

Leads to Somewhere I Don't Know

Bro, shirtless Vinnie with star tattoos, counting in "Gainesville Rock City" with a dart is my everything.

Focused Vision, a Life of Your Own and It's Worth Living

I promised a playlist on Monday last week and am posting it today. Never say Timmy doesn't love you.

Some real homesickness is starting to set in over here. It was easy to not miss Toronto when it was bright and sunny in the summer, and we were regularly going back. Now that some of my yearly traditions that were tied to Toronto, like my annual baseball game with my mom or Thanksgiving, are starting to come around, I'm feeling a lot more aware of the distance between my friends and family and I.

Boo school.

Boo rain.

Boo watching former Blue Jays succeed on playoff teams.

School is starting to ramp up, and while I'm doing a decent job of balancing my work (and do need to remind myself of that), it feels like I'm running through a restaurant with a tray of filled water glasses. One of them has to spill soon, right?

To do a very "me" thing and use a horribly over-used cliche, this is all a marathon and not a sprint. I can't rush through work hoping that there won't be more waiting for me next week, because that will never happen. What's more important to diligently wade through things, trying somehow to pick out ideas and books that relate to my research when they come up, and hope somehow that I'm still standing in December.

I Guess That's Just the Way Life Goes, Ya Know?

Montreal is starting to feel like home now. I find that places and routes come to me automatically now that they've been built into my routine. I still hesitate a little bit while asking questions in French and feel self-conscious about butchering the official language that everyone speaks, but that's slowly improving and eventually that doubt will shrink into a recess of my mind where I don't notice it so much.

It's weird, I thought I had above-average French, but realized quickly that I had above-average Ontario French, which is not the same thing as speaking it well. That was a tough thing to realize when we moved hear and I had to come to terms with the fact that rather than being bilingual, like so many people told me throughout my life, I would need to put serious work into learning it and getting to a point where I can adequately speak it. That's a long way off, but hopefully I will get there before long.

EV, and Faubourg Tower and Grey Nuns have turned into my academic homes and without even thinking about it, they've become the places I rely on to spend time in. It's funny to think about that sort of place, where you can count on it hosting you and not having to worry about a time limit or spending money or being welcome. On one hand, I need those places to have a spot to work, but it's also nice to know I can relax and do nothing if I need to. Not that I ever really get a chance to do that with the demands of a PhD, but it feels good to know I can if I really want to.

I've been reading a dense and esoteric-ass Michel Foucault text for the last two weeks and it seems like that is influencing how I'm writing at the moment.

NO!

Maybe the path to getting back to my actual writing voice is to talk about something a little more lowbrow.

This past weekend, Rebecca went to go visit a friend and help them prepare for their wedding. While Two things that she generally doesn't want to watch? Extremely bad movies and things about skateboarding. I covered both bases by watching the 2009 movie Street Dreams.



It was the exact type of bad that I love to watch: Horrible acting with equally terrible writing and a plot that is just linear enough to not make it a slog to get through.

Maybe it will only be funny for skateboarders, but there's at least one thing in every scene that made me howl. "There are 10 million street skaters in the United States. This is their story." as the title card. P-Rod is heinous as a leading man. Rob Dyrdek's character saying "I heard about this unreal spot in Ohio" and it cutting to the public skatepark he had just built at the time. Dyrdek and Terry Kennedy playing 24 (?) year-olds. P-Rod talking about his white whale trick "The Knack" and him landing it in a sequence but the movie not acknowledging that.

I could watch things like this endless. My brain is bad.

I've found a lot of good music lately, so I'll compile that and post it on Monday. Capiche?

I Swear I'm Hearin' It, How He Laughs

You may ask yourself, while the friendly lime glow if IMU reflects on you, how I could have the audacity to not write anything of substance for a month or so, and expect you all to be content with two posts that aren't much more than an embedding of some music.

Well friends, school is hard and all that reading has to get done some time. While I finish up the last of this current mountain of work, before heading onto the next mountain, and hopefully start to think about something I want to say here, join me in listening to Berryland by The Berries and thinking about everything in the world (mostly semiotics) (but, in many ways semiotics kind of are everything in the world) (weird that even the bibimbap I just ate was a sign).

Reflected on Your T-Shirt

New achievement:

Now able to listen to Paul Baribeau in public without crying.

Liberties, Vol 17

I started making this one with the goal of included upbeat riffy songs from 2019. It's raining today, so listening to Sheer Mag was a funny juxtaposition with the wet grey outside. Maybe that's why we turn morose near the end. Either way, these ones all make me throw up a thumbs up like my boy Drago on the over for one reason or another.

There Will Be No Pulling Out of Rug Beneath Your Feet

While in a strange Twitter hole, I saw someone who used to be in a band I like recommend Slaughter Beach, Dog's new record Safe and Also No Fear.

It's great thoughtful indie rock in which the world of the songs seems super lived-in. Afterwords, I found out that this is a project by one of the members of Modern Baseball, which surprised me, as this, in my opinion, absolutely pisses on everything that band did.

While listening, the delivery of the songs, especially the vocals, reminded me so much of something, but I couldn't place it. Putting the record on while I worked through OSAP forms today (FUN!), I realized that what I was searching for was Sean Bonette's Skateboarding's Greatest Hits, which I've touched on here a couple of times in the past. Knowing that now, of course I liked this record, as that EP is one of my favourite little oddities, and if we're being serious, one of my favourite things ever.

Hey! We talkin' about skateboarding?

I've been diving into Epicly Later'd again lately. The series is unbelievable, but like most things skating, it seems to be doomed to only ever be consumed by skaters. I like that, because it means we get to have something only for us, but I guess I also wish others could see it and then gush about how amazing these people and this crazy subculture are. Recent highlights have been the Girl/Anti Hero tour episode, in which a pre-out Brian Anderson's excessive drinking around his teammates, to the point that he throws up blood, is put in a new light today (also, I could watch Tony Trujillo footage forever), but the big one for me was the series on Josh Kalis, a skater who I never looked into before, but have a new appreciation for now.



Go swimming or something.

God Only Knows Where I'd Be Without You

I meant to write a post, and even had blogger open on my computer, yesterday but forgot to!

:o :o :o

Rebecca and I's summer is getting to a difficult point, where we've both had more time off than we could have imagined and are starting to feel restless and like we should be doing more important things. Being lazy and relaxing starts to feel like a waste of time and we both become convinced that any time in our apartment could be better spent *consults comprehensive mental rolodex* seeing new parts of Montreal and experiencing new things. Since it's now late-August, we'll both turn around in a couple of days and realize that our first two months here were a giant missed opportunity.

I'm aware that the previous paragraph sounds incredibly entitled and that was the point. We're both fortunate to be doing what we're doing now and I think both of us should appreciate the fact we don't have schedules to adhere to. We complain about being overworked all year, and then when we have time off in a beautiful city during a beautiful time of year, we complain about not doing anything. Millennials are we.

I find that there's always an ebb and flow to having time off. At first it's very exciting and you relish it. Then you start to worry about organizing your tasks and fitting them. Then you shut down and default to watching TV. Then things start to come into focus and you can appreciate that everything is okay. At least, that's how it seems to work for me.

The other day, I was having a coffee and reading on our back patio in the morning. It felt nice and I couldn't imagine wanting to do anything else in that moment. I try not to be a hippy, but being present is extremely important and is the key to enjoying things like that. If you can appreciate a small moment in time, it can open up your perspective on many other things.

The end of the summer is a nice time. There's still bright sun every day and we can leave the windows open in the apartment. For whatever reason, I absolutely love the part of the summer where at night you end up still having your shorts on, but put a hoodie over your t-shirt and that's a very sensible outfit. It's only like two weeks at the end of August. Maybe that's my "fall weather".

The reality is that in three months, when we're covered in snow and it takes like 10 friggin' minutes to put on boots and a coat to take the dog out to pee at night and I've just submitted an essay I hate, we'll both think back on our summer without responsibility and how much we miss it. I should try to access that feeling now, rather than putting myself down for doing what I want to. I'll probably never stop beating myself up over small things, but I can try to remember that doing that is pretty selfish and masturbatory and I would be better served to know that I'm doing fine and am not the piece of shit I believe myself to be when I let my mind run around in circles.

Slow Down, Feels Like You're Rushing Away

This finally comes out this week and brother, I am JONESIN' for it.

Bonus extra cut for you on a warm Sunday night in Montreal.

How I'm Never Gonna Fight That

At first, I thought this post would be just an embed of a skate video I watched yesterday, so I have to lead with that right?




Unbelievable stuff. While the direction is slick and amazing, don't let it distract you from how crazy the skating is. The super quick vertical pole jam into 50-50? The fast nose manual/nollie out in the tiny hole. Additionally, it's amazing to see a completely different style of skating from the Asian members of Addidas' team. Everything is precise and their ollies are go vertical and then horizontal in a way I could watch all day. Can't way to see more.

Rebecca and I have been on a trip to Ontario since last Tuesday. We originally planned this trip when we moved and thought that seeing our friends and family would be a needed break from our solitary existence in Montreal. It ended up sneaking up on me and it kind of felt like we were jetting off right as I was starting to get settled in our new home. Part of my head felt like we had more things to do and that staying in Montreal would make us more comfortable in the city. I think that was mostly me being anxious about the trip though and I now recognize that coming home was a good idea. It's not like we had anything concrete to be done. Going on a week-ish long trip where we relax, have fun, don't worry about doing anything and see our friends was good. Crazy, right?

The trip has felt strange, though not in a bad way. It's taken me back to places I used to live and seeing them again has brought a bunch of different feelings in me. Rebecca and I being back in downtown Guelph, which is where we spent the first two years of our relationship and where we fell in love, made us remember why "Guelph" continues to stick in our minds and why living there will always be something we dream on. Coming back to Kitchener-Waterloo always reminds me exactly why I left; growing dissatisfied with the city, having to drive to get to anything worthwhile, and greater professional and academic opportunities existing elsewhere; but also exactly why leaving was so hard; a beautiful group of friends who live together and welcomed me into their scene and city. Sitting with people who I am so close with and just talking for hours in the house I used to live in and being surrounded by like-minded punks is something that I crave at all times. I don't realize how important it is to me and what I'm missing so much until I'm doing it.

In the middle of this trip, it feels like I'm attaining some level of clarity, so I offer the following demandments for myself, shouted into the void to keep me motivated:

1. Put a little more elbow grease into making things, whether they be short stories, blog posts, songs, or zines.

2. Challenge your body and remember that you need that.

3. Get a job Bobo.

4. Eat things that you like.

5. Think a big scheme, no matter what it is.

Everything I Said, I Practiced in My Head

You would think that a summer "off" would provide an opportunity to stretch my writing and work things out, start new projects, finish lingering ones, but just the opposite has happened. I've been caught up in the transition of moving and working on writing has only barely crossed my mind. Maybe that will come once we've finished painting the new apartment. Maybe school will start and I'll complain about how I didn't do enough this summer.

Rather than forcing a post, I'll just mention a couple recent enthusiasms.

I went to the Vans Park Series this past weekend at Parc Olympique, just up the street from my house. It's easy to forget how hard skateboarding is when the main way you consume it is skate videos, where everyone is landing tricks. Seeing it live reminds you that each video is only the tip of the iceberg, and behind each 5-second clip of someone skating a rail is two days worth of slams, roll ups, breaks to smoke joints, and screaming at yourself in frustration. I haven't been able to skate since late April when I got hit by a car (listening to this song after seeing them live the night before), but at the comp, I was feeling inspired and bought the new deck I've so sorely needed for the past year or two from a local shop, Empire.

Something that I've always valued is how insular skateboarding can be, in a good way. The true heads protect the community and fight against big businesses and brands that try to move in and get a piece of the industry. Supporting your local shops and building communities around this thing that we all love is always valued. Thinking about those things made it extra special when I was buying my first pro deck from Hogtown (RIP) in Toronto and seeing how different it felt from something like West 49. That's why I wanted to get a shop deck and why I'll always ride shop decks. Stay local.

On that note, here's a brief, but sweet doc about a shop in Austin from Thrasher. These places are everywhere if you look for them.




This past year at TCAF, I bought two books.

Wage Slaves is an autobiographical comic (or am I supposed to call it a graphic novel to give it that extra esteem?) by Daria Bogdanska about organizing your work place and fighting for more from your employers. Black and white autobio comics are like catnip for me, but this one hits a lot of spots for me, as it touches on issues I care deeply about and the characters listen to the Modern Lovers a lot. The book is a valuable look at what you can accomplish if you try. Speaking from experience this year, organizing is possible if you work at it. It will be hard and it won't go as you expect and you might not get exactly what you wanted, but it will be better than it was before. They're scared of you caring. Don't forget that.

On the other end of the spectrum, BTTM FDRS by Ezra Clayton Daniels and Ben Passmore is a sci-fi comic about gentrification and issues of race. It's equally influenced by 80's John Carpenter and Atlanta, and is a head on collision between two artists with similar tone in their writing but completely different visual styles. I'm not finished yet, but can already tell it's one of the best comics I've ever read and is incredibly prescient in the way it weaves together class and race while making it thrilling, funny, and thought-provoking. I saw the two artists/authors give a panel at TCAF and they mentioned that the book has already been tapped to become a movie or TV show, and I swear that everyone will be gushing over it when that happens.

While we were unpacking, I found the above zine. Not much to say other than if you know, then you know.

Wouldn't Want to if I Was in Your Shoes

I was listening to Saves the Day's fourth, and unjustly maligned, album In Reverie today for the first time in ages. Like pretty much everyone else in the world, I can agree that the album which preceded it, Stay What You Are, is miles better, but I can also see what they were going for on the follow-up. In Reverie leans a little more into contemporary rock territory than the light classic rock feel they dabbled in before and you would think that would lead them to better performance on rock music charts, but it didn't. Chris Conley used a very different singing style on the record because of vocal chord problems, but that can't be it, can it?

Anyways, this post is not about that album. It was only to introduce it! What a sneaky cold open!

After In Reverie finished, Saves the Day's Self-Titled started playing automatically in my iTunes.* I don't really have much of a bond to the record, but it does take me back to a time when they were one of my favourite bands and I was absolutely all-in on everything they did.

*I actually think this album is okay. There are a couple of pretty fun, poppy rock songs ("In the In Between", "The Tide of Our Times", "Stand in the Stars") that almost make you believe the band is on some next level late-career renaissance shit, but there's also enough slow boring stuff to convince you they should hang it up. All told, it's at least a good creative direction for a band who's been active for over 20 years. I can respect a band for still trying new things and "doing it" as opposed to just rehashing their most successful sound in a pandering way, like blink did on California.

I saw Saves the Day play at Pouzza Fest in Montreal the summer before Self-Titled came out. They played a new song at that show and I remember being pretty stoked on it, but that can also be chocked up to me seeing one of my favourite bands for the first time and having an all-around amazing time. Later that summer, they released "The Tide of Our Times" and my hopes were high on them putting out a solid follow-up to Daybreak, which I loved. As a fan of the band's entire discography up to that point, I was convinced that this would be another addition to a storied career. When it did come out, I gave it a decent amount of listens, but eventually found that it just didn't resonate with me like all of their past material did.

However, the feeling of anticipation I had before the record came out is exactly what I chase as a music fan. Watching an artist operate at the best of their abilities and put things out that matter to you is special. It's even more special when it's a lesser-known band and you get to have this relationship privately, just you and the music. I know that Saves the Day is a huge band, with singles that are a touchstone for the genre and nine full-length albums, but I got that feeling a little bit while waiting for Self-Titled to come out.

Today, I started to think about who I'm currently "all in" on. The obvious first one is Oso Oso, who I won't spend another post gushing about right now (I will take an opportunity to link to their newest single though, it's great!). Tony Molina is another. Since Bay Dream came out, I would say I'm getting there with Culture Abuse, as their "Police on my Back" cover, "Goo", and "Wartime Dub" have all been excellent.

This brings me to Baggage, the new(ish) band of Jono Diener, who was the drummer and one of the songwriters in IMU sentimental favourites The Swellers. So far, they've put out two excellent EPs that continue the 90's alternative/punk hybrid that The Swellers were moving towards on their last two albums. Maybe Jono's vocals were the secret sauce to me loving that band? Highly recommended!



Baggage recently signed to Smartpunk Records and are going to release their first full-length album later this summer. So far, they've released two songs from the record, "Horseshoe" up above and "Misophonia" below, and I find that I've been looking forward to the record more than many others that will come out in 2019. In terms of being all in, I'm not sure if I'm there with them yet, but a good record for me to blast while I'm all alone in a new apartment in Montreal will almost certainly put them there. Here's to hoping.

Speed On

As a person, I am very bad at evaluating the worth of what I'm currently doing. I tend to think all the things I've done in the past are miles better than what I'm currently working on and I immediately start to wonder why I've gotten so lazy and less motivated to produce writing and do cool stuff. I know that a lot of this is nonsense and is mostly just me idealizing the past, but I also rely on it to keep me working on things. If I don't beat myself a little bit, then I won't keep writing. It's just how it is!

Something I've done in the past is talk about the space that specific songs have carved out in my mind. I did one on "Motown Never Sounded So Good" by Less Than Jake and one on "Chicago" by Big D and the Kids Table.* Maybe there's more! I'm not going to check! I wouldn't say that either of those songs is an absolute tattoo-the-lyrics-on-my-arm favourite of mine, but they are tied to specific memories and do stir something inside me each time I listen to them. Maybe that does make them an all-time favourite. I don't know. When you've been consuming music for 20 years it gets harder to delineate your favourites like you did when you were a teenager and discovering the Arrogant Sons of Bitches.

*Most of IMU's titles are lyrics from songs. Oddly enough, neither of those two posts use lyrics from the song they're talking about it. Seems like a layup, no?

While remembering that series, I was listening to "Motor Away" by Guided by Voices, another song which will live in my brain forever, and bam, the next IMU post was born.



I had seen Guided by Voices name-checked in online music journalism many times in my youth, but assumed they sounded much different from their name. Since I was so deeply in love with punk music in my late teens and early twenties, I thought that indie rock was death and strictly for poseurs. Spacey, grandiose, and esoteric bands like the Arcade Fire (whose first record I now like) convinced me that any musician who deigned to think themselves an artist was clearly way too pretentious and not worth my time. This changed a little bit when I started to listen to Pavement and Superchunk, whose riffing and quasi-punkness showed my that there is good in the genre, but it's really something that stuck with me a while, and still kind of does (Animal Collective fucking blows ass bro).

The way that I discovered Guided by Voices was through a collection of covers by Sean Bonette of AJJ. I've for sure written about this release before, so I won't go deep into it, but it's a collection of lo-fi versions of his favourite songs from skate videos. It's great stuff and has stayed in constant rotation for me since its release.

http://quoteunquoterecords.com/qur076.htm

Among the songs he does is "Motor Away". Even though I knew a couple of the other songs, "Motor Away" had an immediate impact and I got that lightness in your chest and slight shiver when a song shoots right to your chest. I looked up the original right away and was shocked to find a trebly and fuzzy song that was in the middle of a 28-track album of 90-second songs. This was not what I expected Guided by Voices to be at all. I thought they were a, like, 6-part band from Scotland who used glockenspiel and shit, not a rough rock band from Ohio who ferociously put out songs.

I tend to really love bands who focus on output rather than meticulously crafting records. I think it stems from Bomb the Music Industry!'s early output, when Jeff Rosenstock was making everything himself on a laptop and putting out an album per year, having a deep impact on me as a teenager and that informing the way I look at all music now. When somebody has each song be just the execution of one idea and not fussing over it, it screams DIY to me in the most encouraging way. Rather than reading it as "the song isn't finished", which I guess some (I'm looking at you Duffer) could, I see it as valuing the process over the product. The art lies in all of us trying to do it and putting it out there. It's why I'm head over heels for Tony Molina right now.

What I find great about bands like GBV and BtMI! is that when the songs hit they really hit. The idea behind the song is so simple and complete that it doesn't need anything else, and that is beautiful. "Motor Away" is basically just two chords for most of the song, with simple guitar leads over that. The lyrics are just poetic enough to stir up images and ideas in you, without getting up their ass. A perfect song.

When I discovered Guided by Voices and "Motor Away", I was living in Kitchener. I had just started writing my thesis and Beat Noir was starting to work on Sovereignties. Rebecca and I were just past the one-year mark in our relationship and that was becoming more obviously one of the most important things to ever happen to me. I was living with Mark, Colin, Duff, Erik, and Jeff still, but commuting to school where I was on my own. I was becoming more independent and still doing some important thinking about who I was.

When I listen to "Motor Away", I see myself sitting on my bed in Kitchener with the door open and the song playing. Everyone else is home, but I'm doing my own thing in my room for the moment because I have school tomorrow. Maybe the seeds of me moving to Guelph and then back to Toronto, moving in with Rebecca, finishing my thesis and starting at the gallery are there and that's why "Come on, speed on" hit me so hard.

How Many Horror Movies We Sat Through

I listened to a podcast where one pro wrestler I like interviewed another pro wrestler I like.

The one mentioned he contributed to a song by Kimya Dawson, so I read the Wikipedia entry on her.

The article said she was friends with Paul Baribeau.

Thought about how my friends listened to him a lot in university.

Asked a friend where to start with his music.

Watched a video of him playing on a couch.

Put on his record and tried to start looking for jobs.

Ended up staring into the air and listening instead.

Thought about you and the tough times you've gone through. Thought about the night we had like in the song.

I've seen you since then and I think it was better for you.

Know that you're a little better now, but I still worry a lot.

Never Say Goodbye

Something about I, Musical Genius that is interesting to me is that I'm able to interact with past versions of myself by looking at what I was writing on the internet. In addition to the many awful posts that exist in the archive, there's also a pile of drafts that sit in the platform and haven't materialized into anything. As much as there's many swings and misses from when I was trying to process breakups online, most of these drafts didn't even make that cut.

One of the things that comes up a bunch in the drafts, that I may have mentioned on IMU in the past, was a series called Under the Radar in which I would talk about bands I thought were underappreciated. How did I not name that name was corny and hackneyed as fuck?! The drafts are all from September 2013, so my only excuse is that I was wired on coffee in my office at Guelph and trying to come up with ideas to write about to get my chops back up as I entered academia again. Folks, it was a moment of weakness and I will never use a title that bad ever again, promise!

Pretty much all of the bands that I chose for the project were ska bands where I was the only listener I knew of among my friends.* I guess some people would say "Wow, glad you dodged that bullet!", but TBH, I still like all of the bands I chose, even if I don't listen and relate to some of them as much as I used to. Anyways, one of the bands was The Impossibles, and all of this was the intro for the following.

*Turns out I ended up finishing one, on The Stereo, in October 2013. Funny that the only one I did was on the only non-ska band, right?!



The Impossibles are now more of a signpost for true power pop heads to me than anything else. There will be times when the discography still appeals to me, but for the most part I find that I don't turn to ska-punk music from the late-90s as readily. I still love all of it, but it's so nostalgic for me and the more I age, the less I want to indulge nostalgic feelings. They can be a bit of a trap that keeps you living in the past and not moving on from things. There's proper ways to go about it, of course, but having all your main interests be nostalgic is a little poisonous, is what I'm saying.

That all being said, whenever I hear someone from a band mention that they love The Impossibles (and loving The Stereo often goes along with that), my ears perk up and I become way more interested. In fact, what kind of inspired me to come back to this post was Barry Johnson from Joyce Manor mentioning in an interview that he loves the Impossibles and that was why he got Rory Phillips to produce Million Dollars to Kill Me.* They never ascended to the top of the genre in the way that a Mighty Mighty BossTones or Reel Big Fish did, so they occupy this interesting space for me, as an invested ska fan in 2019, of having been around and put out lots of material and having toured, but not being a band that most punks know, in my experience.

*Bud, there's a huge fucking Rory stink (especially Three Hundred by the Stereo) all over that album. I love it.

I guess, what I'm interested in is why does the discography hold weight with people nearly 20 years later? Why does this album still kick around and allow the band to do reunion shows, while pretty much all of their contemporaries from the late-90s don't get the same treatment? People aren't exactly knocking down the door to demand Animal Chin and Hippos reunions.

My theory is that it's because the Impossibles' music (and especially the contributions from Rory Phillips, who went on do similar work in the Stereo) is indebted to a certain tradition of pop-rock songwriting that gives their music more staying power than some others. Most of the verses on Anthology are fairly standard fast ska-punk, but they build around that with huge chorus hooks and distorted intros that elevate the songs from being just "genre". There's nuance in the way the songs' parts flow into each other that for me recalls power-pop of the early 80's or album-oriented rock. Knowingly copping the tricks of hook-centric rock bands is an easy way to beef up your music, and the Impossibles were smart to do it in a genre where most other bands didn't focus on song-writing. This was further emphasized on their farewell album Return, which was entirely power-pop with no ska.

I think one of the first bands to really pastiche that late-70s and early-80s style of writing rock songs was Weezer, who did it perfectly on Blue and also managed to work the idea of bringing back that music into their lyrics (especially "Buddy Holly" and "In the Garage"). So much so, that now a band trying to put big overdriven riffs, catchy chorus melodies and guitar solos in their songs is now just referred to as "Weezer influence". That type of thing has gotten fairly common today, but I think that the Impossibles were one of the first to start doing it and the fact that they did so in a genre with pretty narrow sonic parameters, ska, is commendable.

As a musician, it's hard to stretch ska out and make it work in a variety of ways. A band like Reel Big Fish, who for better or for worse are a mainstay of the genre, hasn't changed its sound at all since its formation. The same can even be said of better ska bands, like the Slackers, who stick to a 1st-wave/reggae formula because it works and they can live in the subtleties and nuance.

When ska-punk bands are more song-writing focused than, for lack of a better term, "playing ska-focused", they inevitably move towards albums that downplay upstokes and dance-y parts in favour of better songs as a whole. Less Than Jake did this on Borders and Boundaries and Bomb the Music Industry! did this on Get Warmer. It's a jump that you need to make if you are part of the weird niche of loving ska, but also loving song songs. I guess that I just wish more people respected the Impossibles for making that jump.

It's Hard to See in Those Murky Waters

Winter exhibitions are over and now I have a three-week break before our fundraising gala, after which I'll have another three-week break until our next exhibitions open. That's a wrap on Toronto. With so much time off, I'll be busy packing for the move, culling things we don't need anymore and packing the things we do. Times of transition are rarely ever as well-defined as this one, so it seems a little strange, but I think it's also a good thing. More so than ever before, the break will have to be busy and productive, but I don't foresee that being a problem this time around. Here's some things that I'm currently enjoying during this time of transition.

Barry is currently my favourite show on TV. It's a dark dramedy created by and starring Bill Hader about an Iraq war vet who is now a hitman but also trying to make it as an actor. As ridiculous as that description sounds, the show gets real as fuck. The supporting cast is wonderful, but it's really the Hader show as he shows off an intensity I don't think many people expected from him. The second season did that impossible thing of making a big jump but staying good. Amazing stuff.

I wouldn't classify myself as a "gamer", but there a couple of video games that have stuck with me and made an impression on me throughout my life. One of those games is the Dynasty Warriors series, in which you fight as Han-era Chinese warlords. The game is based on the Chinese novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of China's "Four Classical Novels". The mythology surrounding the story, which toes the line between history and fiction, has always fascinated me and drawn me into the story and this year I decided to read it. It was a very fulfilling experience.



I saw Big Nothing while they toured their debut 7" during the summer of 2017. The band made a huge impression on me at the show, so I've been anticipating further material since then. They recently put out a full-length and it's great stuff. A little fuzzy and dreamy in a 90s alt sort of way, but everything still building towards big poppy choruses. I also really love the songs where Liz Parsons sings lead. It would be wonderful if every pop-punk band was this good instead of being derivative horse shit.



I've seen Fury one time, when the opened for Power Trip and Sheer Mag in May 2018 (fuckin' huge gig bud). While tuning between songs, the singer spoke about how big of impression the music of Gord Downie (recently deceased at the time) had made on him. A couple of songs later, he recited a poem of Downie's as stage banter and I don't think many people in the crowd realized what it was. This obviously turned me into an instant fan, in addition to them play the exact type of vaguely-Youth Crew-ish, vaguely Snapcase-ish hardcore that I crave. They put out a new album this May and it fucking rocks ass.


Do you ever mean to check out a band for ages because you know that you'll like the band based on their name and album name? And then the guitarist appears on your favourite podcast and you realize he's a similar personality to you and that reminds you that you still need to check out his band because you'll almost definitely like it? And then you do and you realize you like Wild Side?

Lastly, I have a secret album that will be released by an Ontario band later this year. They've been playing songs off it for the last year-ish and I've been patiently waiting for what was sure to be another release that is heads and shoulders above everything else everyone is putting out in this province. It's absolutely wonderful and already shot right up to the top of my 2019 releases. It's crazy to think of what your friends are capable of.

Liberties, Vol 14

A new Liberties? Bud, I'm feelin' crazy and had to build one around the new Fury record, which is wonderful.

There's A Lot of Things I Want That I Can't Have, and to be Honest, the Older I Get, the More Pissed Off I Am About it.

This weekend, I will be volunteering at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, as I've done each of the last four Mother's Day weekends. This means that this coming Friday will be the last shift I work during our current exhibition season, leaving less than ten (the real number is still unknown, but for sure less than ten) shifts at my current job.

Over the last year or so, there's been a lot of false endings at the place, where there was a good chance I would leave, but ultimately ended up staying put. This time, the change is set in stone because of the big move at the end of June. I can't work here while living in Montreal.

Some people would get wistful leaving a place they've worked that long, but I can't say that I am at all. Maybe there was a bit of that once I left the office last year, but certainly not now. Being at the same place and following the same procedures every day has gotten beyond monotonous and I think I've been sleepwalking through the motions for months now.

This type of boredom crept up on me and I was fully snared in its trap before I even realized it. The idea of having a job where you do nothing and have limited responsibilities is appealing, but this type of existence also bleed into the other parts of my life and it feels like I didn't do anything for the last year.

This is, of course, completely untrue, as I spent the better part of that time applying to and finalizing my school for the future, and then organizing all the logistics that come with a shift that big. Still though, I can't shake the feeling in my gut that I need to break away from where I am right now (professionally that is, I will always love you Toronto) to spur myself into news ways of thinking, new experiences, and some much-needed uncertainty.

Two months of hot Toronto weather. A couple of engagements in that time. Packing up a whole life. Let's rock.

Yeah Yo

I promised another post about my future ages ago, didn't I? I've been caught up in a couple of other things and, as usual, the idea of writing an update post on IMU slipped from my mind.

The reasons for neglecting that writing is explicitly tied to the writing though. I've been meaning to write about moving to Montreal, but more important than that is tackling the very real tasks related to that move. I need to be in a constant state of passively looking for apartments, taking care of small registration tasks at Concordia, and trying to make plans with my friends before I leave. If can believe it, those are all above "hash out a blog", but just barely.

Now that I'm here typing out, that leaves us with "telling people how you feel about the future" and there's no easy answer to that. Watch, as I work through ideas!

I think it's fair to say that I am primarily excited about beginning a PhD at Concordia University in Montreal. I've loved all the time I've spent in the city and I'm sure that living there won't be a difficult transition. There will still be all the things I need and love (public transit, good food, music, art) and some new things, the most obvious being that everything will be in French. This new setting for my life will be easy enough that I won't die, but also different enough that I'll be forced to change and grow. That's good.

For example: Live Blue Jays Baseball only two times. Man!

Most important, from a personal perspective, is that since I finished my MA, all my work has felt like I've been keeping my brain warm for when I went back to school. Graduate studies and teaching is what I do best, what gives me the most fulfillment, and is where I have the most to offer other people. I am so happy to return to it and also glad that Concordia has so far given me the impression that it is the right place to do this.

I'm also stressed. I hate moving. I know that everyone hates moving, since they've told me so when we speak about me moving, but the point stands. It gives me anxiety and I mostly shut down and get irritable while I'm doing it. The furthest I've moved before is an hour and a half now. Now I'm moving 5 and a half away. It's going to weigh on me. Lord is it ever going to weigh on me.

I'm scared about the move too. Like I said, the furthest I've moved in the past is an hour and a half, from Scarborough to Kitchener. This will be my first time living outside of Ontario and even my first time really out of the Greater Toronto Area. I know that I'll be able to do it, but it is daunting. The scariest thing about not living in Ontario is that I don't know what to expect about a lot of things. I guess I need to live in that uncertainty. Right?

I'm going to end on a music note, since that's what IMU has traditionally done. This year has been relatively light on new music for me, but Masked Intruder put out a new record and I've found it pleasantly surprising. I've never been huge on the band, but the new record sounds much different and hits a sweet spot between early power pop (like the Rubinoos) and late 70s/early 80s album-oriented rock, which is to say that there are hooks upon hooks that occasionally delve into some wonderfully cheesiness. There's a way bigger emphasis on vocal melodies, which is much easier said than done, and I always appreciate bands making that effort. The album isn't world-changing, and I could easily see it being one I forget about in 6 months, but at the moment it's a solid listen and a great surprise to see the band trying to mix it up in what they do.

Blacktop Manhattan Closed Reilly's

I've had this post ready in the chamber for a while, but didn't really know what to do with it. I think it came out way too nostalgic and sappy, when I intended it to be funnier and more self-aware. It started as a small idea with the title, but it turned into something else once I started writing it. Now that I've finished it, I can't say that I have any desire to go back and re-configure it to make it into something, but it's also big enough and took enough time that it doesn't feel right to completely delete it. The nice thing about IMU is that I can take these types of posts and let them live here. Nothing has to be complete and shiny here, it can just be a real-ish representation of my creative process.

Here's a thing about a band my friends were in in high school. Please know that I do not have the emotional investment in this band that the piece makes it sound like, but also know that Blacktop is one of the funniest and best things ever. That's a strange balance, I know.

***

One of the most exciting times of being a teenager was when my friends and I finally got around to starting our own bands in high school. We had logged our requisite hours of learning "Smells Like
Teen Spirit" and "Dammit" on guitar and were now ready to show those around us what we had. The dreams you have of playing in front of an arena when you're young immediately become a little bit realer once you've seen people you know take that crucial first step: Starting a real band that plays its own songs.

One day, you'll look back on this band and laugh at how many silly cliches they performed, like dedicating songs to their 10th grade girlfriends or playing simple guitar solos behind their heads, and the songs will seem hilarious in hindsight, even though you thought they were so cool at the time. 15 years later, no one will think about the band or ever mention it, but 15 years later you can still say that the band was the first one.

It didn't take long for Blacktop Manhattan to occupy a central role in the lives of all of its members and their friends. Funnily enough, I didn't even hear about the band from its members, who were close friends of mine, but from other friends who had been at one of their shows. "Our friends play in a real band now!" Their legend grew from there, I guess. Blacktop's shows were a premier social event. All of your friends would be there and someone would definitely have beer and weed. You would definitely meet at least five new people through mutual friends, including girls. You would immediately get the rub from the band because you knew them. On top of the social benefits, it was also a fun thing to do because you would get to watch your friends' band play and when you are a teenager at a concert, actual quality of performance means next to nothing. Damien is playing a guitar with a Bad Religion sticker onstage? That fucking rules. One person would always do a Nestea plunge off the stage and be carried around by 5 or 6 people. A concert! This is the best! On top of all that, there would also always be at least one other high school band on the show who was so bad that they will stick in your mind until the day you die. Teen Stranger! Broken Home! The Thundernuts!

Blacktop shows were a monthly pilgrimage for teenagers where we gathered at Victoria Park Station to head to the FunHouse or the El Mocambo or Club Rockit or the Opera House as a huge group. More so than house parties or dances, this is what my friends did. For a couple of shows, a friend and I designated ourselves as "merch guys" and sold the band's copyright infringing Pulp Fiction t-shirts and some pins that I had shoddily designed on Microsoft Paint.

I can't tell you how long Blacktop were a band, but it couldn't have been much longer than a year and was definitely less than two. After they broke up, the members formed two new bands, which also broke a begat new bands after that. The family tree began to include more and more members and started to intersect in new ways, but Blacktop Manhattan was definitely the thickest part of the trunk, right near the bottom.

After Blacktop and a post-BM band had broken up, Damien, who had played guitar in both, uploaded the band's songs on the website Newgrounds' audio portal. Since Damien was an active user, another user had found them and included them as playable songs in a online Flash game he had made called Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe 2. Online teens are noted for their verbosity, after all. The game was a simplified version of Guitar Hero when the latter was at the height of its cultural influence. Just like getting your song in Guitar Hero could vault you into millions of t-shirt sales at HMV or Spencer's Gift, "Hollywise" being the first song in SCGMD2 immediately vaulted Blacktop Manhattan into an internet legacy that none of the members could ever have expected.

Teens from all over the world began to leave comments on Blacktop's abandoned MySpace page saying "Please come play in Texas!" Teenaged girls would add me on the site simply because I was in Blacktop's "Top 8". Things snowballed from there. One day we found a video on Youtube that was a stationary picture of my friends in 10th grade set to "Hollywise". The video itself was weird enough, but even stranger was that it had 50000 views. We hadn't even made it! We later found even more of these videos, all with the same picture, likely pilfered from MySpace, and all featuring "Hollywise". Then we found a video of a pre-teen boy demonstrating how to play "Hollywise" on acoustic guitar, but not playing any correct notes. Just playing random parts of the guitar along to the song! Before long, we found videos of tiny teen boys covering "Hollywise" in their school's gymnasium. It was so strange and unbelievable that it eventually became the most plausible thing. Of course Blacktop Manhattan had turned into a viral sensation. What else would have happened?

The group of friends in Blacktop Manhattan's orbit separated but didn't split up after high school. Some of us went away to university, some of us stayed in Scarborough, some of us started working.
Near the end of my first year at school, Pat and I got a Facebook invitation to the Blacktop Manhattan reunion show at Reilly's, a venue north of Dundas on Yonge, across from the strip club Zanzibar. The band had a good sense of humour about their status as a viral phenomenon and thought it would be fun to bring everyone together to relish it. This happened in the golden age of Facebook event pages, in which many people would post on the page's "wall" in anticipation of the event taking place. Our friends went crazy and acted as if Guns 'n Roses then-yet-to-be-released album Chinese Democracy was finally coming out. Blacktop purposefully booked the metal band that Teen Stranger had turned into to open. It was perfect.

A big difference between the reunion show and the ones we had gone to high school was that now almost all of us were 19 and getting alcohol was significantly easier. In addition to the usual cast of characters at the show, there was another generation of kids, between a year and four younger than us, who came out because they had heard of Blacktop as the "cool" band when they were starting high school. Much like us when we were attending the real Blacktop shows, this was an elite social event for them. They were all wasted.

The show was a perfect party. The band was super sloppy because they had only rehearsed several times in advance of it. They played every song they had ever performed, even the stupid one-off ones, and indulged in silly things like dualing guitar and slap bass solos in a funk song that they had for some reason. It was a ridiculous and bad show, but that was exactly what everyone wanted. Blacktop Manhattan wasn't a good band by any measure and realistically, the reunion show performance was probably not that far off from how they had sounded in their prime. Everyone was drunk and had a ball.

Blacktop booked and ran the show themselves. Quinn's parents ran the door and security and let everyone in. After the band played, the crowd lingered in the venue and slowly spilled out onto the street. The wave of younger kids, all much drunker than they had probably ever been, wreaked havoc on the venue, wrecking the banister on the staircase and climbing all over things, undoubtedly doing permanent damage to Reilly's.

This briefly turned into a serious scene. The owner of the venue was pissed that this many drunk underage people had been let into the show and done so much damage to everything. Word filtered out, through a drunk and broken telephone, that he had told the band that he would never book another all-ages show at Reilly's ever again. To risk the actual structure of the venue was too big of a gamble.

Reilly's did indeed stop having all-ages show. Not long after that, the venue closed permanently. By my logic, the success and health of the venue depended on the fact that they regularly hosted all-ages show featuring local bands, so it followed that Blacktop Manhattan's reunion show was the reason it closed. I have no idea if that's actually why, and Reilly's' online footprint is scarce, so I will never know for sure and will instead continue believing in the myth of the first real band that my friends ever formed and is much more famous than anything I have or ever will do.

And She's Got One of the Best All-Time Laughs in the History of All-Time Laughs, She Laughs with Her Entire Body

Since I consider IMU to be the definitive document of my life, I feel it's important to write about important things that happen to me and the big changes I go through. I've accepted an offer to begin a PhD at Concordia in September! I think I should access my emo side (as if I have another side) and write a full post about that, but now I want to revive an old IMU classic and document this time in my life in a series of High Fidelity Top 5s.

Top 5 Things I Will Miss About The Annex
5. Wiener's Home Hardware.
4. Living by Bathurst (the 'Thurst) Station.
3. Korean food.
2. Christie Pits
1. Being able to see the CN Tower from Borden Street.

Top 5 2019 Records I Can't Wait For
5. Whatever Daniel Romano's 2 new records will be.
4. Vince Staples
3. Crying?????
2. Baggage
1. Oso Oso

Top 5 Post-1992 Steven Segal Movies
5. Fire Down Below
4. Half Past Dead
3. Under Siege 2
2. On Deadly Ground
1. Exit Wounds

Top 5 Bench Players on the 2019 Raptors
5. Patrick McCaw
4. Norm Powell
3. Chris Boucher
2. Fred Van Vleet
1. OG Anunoby

Top 5 Things That Will Happen During the 2019 Baseball Season
5. Clay Bucholz getting traded for a A piece that won't turn into anything.
4. Bryce Harper hitting 50 bombs in Philly.
3. Mike Trout leading the Angels to the playoffs and winning a series.
2. Yasiel Puig and Joey Votto becoming best friends.
1. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. getting called up and winning American League Rookie of the Year.

Top 5 Things I Can't Wait to do in Montreal
5. Eat a smoked meat sandwich every day and get high cholesterol.
4. Learn.
3. Become a better French speaker.
2. Go to see the Jays each year at Olympic Stadium.
1. Start a nice new life with Rebecca and our two bobos.

The Things That Set Us Apart

A big part of what keeps me so invested in music (in my case punk music specifically) is that seeing live performances can seem magical. The performer and their equipment mix together and during that time, they are more than what either contributes. The feeling that I get from watching a performer truly kill it is my equivalent of a religious experience. For that brief time, the world makes sense and I understand why we exist. You could say that this fleeting nature is frustrating, but for me it's part of the appeal. I have to be present because I know it will be done soon. It's special.

Equally special as that type of performance is when you see a band who you've never listened to and they blow you away. The feeling of their music taking you in and you realizing that you've found something new you love is hard to describe. It's joy, but you feel it physically.

I can think of a couple examples of this happening to me. Videos from the actual shows I was at are scarce, but I can find stuff from those eras. Sounds like a good IMU feature, right? Let's rock.



The first example I always think of of being won over is when I saw The Sidekicks open for Bomb the Music Industry! in 2011. I had been at a friend's going-away party the night before and was in a little bit of a rush back into the city on a GO bus so that I could make to the show on time. It wound up being one of the best, if the the best, shows I've seen. I had heard the Sidekicks mentioned on then-venerable punk music site Punknews.org, but their live show was a better introduction than anything else I could have done. They were touring on Weight of Air and were so tight and dance-y and their soul-influenced power-pop was way different than all the 'org stuff from that time and has aged way better than all of it as a result. I've never stopped listening to the band since and have loved all their material (well, Runners in the Nerved World is just okay) since.



Once I went away to university, I almost immediately become interested in hardcore music, which I formerly scorned in the name of my love of ska. The aggression and heaviness of the genre started to make a lot more sense to me and I waded into the genre, as many other Canadians did, by listening to Comeback Kid's Wake the Dead. Comeback Kid then announced a big Canadian tour package with five other bands and I decided that this would be my first hardcore show. Would I throw down? Stagedive? Would there be a fight? I didn't know what to expect. Rather than Comeback Kid though, it Bane who awed me that night. They were hyped and charismatic and exactly what I hoped a live hardcore show would be like. I bought a classic plain shirt from the Bane t-shirt factory after and couldn't have been happier about it.



I was really excited to see The Aquabats in 2006. I had just finished my final exams for the year and the show was the day before my birthday. The Aquabats were amazing and exciting and everything I hoped they would be. A different type of exciting was seeing the Aggrolites play material from their first two records. Before seeing the Aggrolites, I had never seen a good reggae band before. I loved listening to the genre, but my exposure to it in a live setting had been subpar local bands. The Aggrolites showed how dynamic, energetic, and heavy reggae could be. Their Beatles cover was one of the craziest things I've seen.



Just like the Sidekicks, I heard a lot about the Menzingers before I saw them tour on Chamberlain Waits with the Flatliners and Fake Problems in 2010. I expected a lot from the show, since all three bands had recent albums and were on an upward trajectory, and it was a great night. As soon as the band started, I could tell that they would occupy a lot of my listening for the foreseeable future. A lot of my friends kept mentioning that "Time Tables" was their favourite song they had heard in ages and I was convinced of the same when I saw it live. I've fallen off the band recently and haven't been a huge fan of their last two records, but they were such an exciting band in the early teens and it felt special to have all of my friends be captivated by them.


I've been working on a longer feature for the Wordpress on Oso Oso and that is what got me thinking about this specific thing happening. I was introduced to Oso Oso when I saw them open for the Hotelier in the fall of 2015. As the band set up, I asked a friend what they were like and he said "Super poppy. Like Third Eye Blind." It felt like under a minute later the band was into "Track 1, Side 1" and I was all the way in. They were really tight, with a big-time drummer, and I felt like I lived an entire life during song. That performance and Real Stories of True People Who Kind of Looked Like Monsters made them one of my favourite active bands and me seeing them the next fall and the yunahon mixtape convinced me that they are the best band in the world.