It's funny that I mentioned how happy I was with New Tone ska in my last post, because last week a major thing in that genre happened when We Are the Union's singer Reade Wolcott came out as a trans woman. I've been a fan of We Are the Union for a long time, and even considered them my "favourite band" for a bit, so I was glad to see Reade feel comfortable enough to come out and live more comfortably as herself. My listening of the band has risen and dipped over the years, and I definitely prefer the old stuff, but I still listen to everything that comes out and will for sure always rep the band. The band always claimed ska through years when it was extremely uncool to do so in punk music* and will always have my utmost respect for that. Seeing them be a cornerstone of the new generation of ska bands warms my heart.
*They toured with A LOT of notable easycore/pop-punk bands who benefitted from their draw early on and then didn't return the favour later on. Jabronis, all of them.
The first single from their forthcoming album Ordinary Life, which will detail Reade's experience coming out, has been released and I've been listening to it a lot. Also, the moment when Jeremy reaches out and touches Reade's arm was very touching in an unexpected way?
I've been reading a lot of Stereogum this week and my favourite piece was this entry from their Number Ones series, which chronologically deep dives on #1 singles, on Billy Ocean's "Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car". I love this song, mostly because of funny memories of it being the theme song to Matt, Brian, and I smoking weed in university, so it was fun to read about the creation process and context of it's release. Craziest of all is that it was produced by Mutt Lange, an arena rock producer most famous for AC ⚡ DC's Highway to Hell and Back in Black, as well as all of Def Leppard's big 80s records. That makes a lot of sense when you listen to the song, but it still doesn't make sense why a mix of 80s pop, arena rock, and New Jack Swing goes this hard. You never know!
Anyways, I will honour Lange by posting this song, which is and will always be an insanely sick jam
Pyromania is vastly better than Hysteria. Is it bad to say that bands was better when the drummer had both arms?
How high is Joe Elliot's union jack sleeveless shirt on the ranking of All-Time Rock Outfits?
Everyone associates the headset microphone with Britney Spears and *N'Sync, but I feel Def Leppard were the pioneers? They somehow had two members rocking them in the 80s. Two members who could have easily used mic stands!
Something that has warmed my heart over the last 2ish years is the growing community of new ska bands and the scene they've fostered online. Pretty much all of these bands are involved in some way with Bad Time Records, who have done an amazing job of proudly trumpeting new ska bands, and then move towards being proud of playing ska has been so necessary.
About five years ago, Duff made a joke to me that every new ska band that started was a clone of either Reel Big Fish (the most popular), Sublime (the least ska), or Operation Ivy (the best version of this, but still not great). This is a hyper-simplified way to sum up an entire scene, by someone who's not remotely involved, but it mostly tracked. There were definitely new bands that excited me, like the new permutations of the Bruce Lee Band, Dan P and the Bricks, and the Nix86, but those were vastly outnumbered by white kids from the suburbs who were starting a band that sounded like RBF and wrote joke lyrics. I hate that people rip on ska without giving it a chance, but there were also many bands that weren't doing them any favours.
Jeremy Hunter, A.K.A. Skatune Network, A.K.A. JER, who has also played a huge role in the recent growth of ska, touched on this issue in many interviews over the last couple of years.* Ska has always been good, but so many people are hung up on the big bands from the 90s and still only supporting them, rather than seeking out new bands to see what is developing. Another problem is that what has historically a diverse genre, featuring mixed races and genders in bands, was boiled down to its whitest version. The saving of ska will rely on bands featuring POC and queer members emerging and everyone supporting that.
*I've read a bunch, but I feel like I remember their interview on blink-155 the best. It's at the end here.
That's been mostly borne out in the last few years around Bad Time Records and I love it. People are constantly asking "When will the fourth wave start?!" (puke), but Bad Operation gave this movement a great name by calling themselves New Tone. I really fuck with that term, so here are my favourite New Tone releases:
Frightnrs
Out of all these records I'm about to list, this one qualifies least as "New Tone", as it came out in 2016 and doesn't have any of the punk influence that the others do. It is an amazing trad ska/reggae/rocksteady album in the vein of New York's many masters of that style, like the Slackers, David Hillyard and the Rocksteady Seven, and Inspector 7.
Grey Matter
Grey Matter reminds of a a tonne of bands that I would try to listen to in high school, but find too abrasive and not understand. I would understand that they were cool and that there was interesting things going on, but was too conditioned to only like things that sounded like blink and NOFX. Fortunately, I am now ~mature~ enough to appreciate Grey Matter.
Bad Operation
Bad Operation popped up out of nowhere and immediately started promoting singles for a forthcoming album. My favourite thing about them is how different they sound from every ska band I've heard for the last 15 years. It's "Ghost Town" by the Specials filtered through DIY punk. And they coined the term "New Tone"!
Kill Lincoln
My favourite active ska band. Poppy and upbeat ska combined with super catchy pop-punk. All the best parts of Anthem and B is for B-Sides. No ska band since ASOB has put out two back-to-back releases like Good Riddance to Good Advice and Can't Complain. If ska were a wrestling promotion, they would be the Television Champion, and I mean that in the most respectful way possible.
JER
Skatune Network has been the loudest and most important voice in ska over the last few years and I truly appreciate all the work they've done. Their covers are fun, especially the excellent Pick It the Fuck Up!, but all they've done has made me eager to see what sort of original music they could make outside of We Are the Union. JER is their solo project and it fulfilled that promise. Can't wait for the full-length.
Other enthusiasms!
One of the most relaxing things during the pandemic has been watching skate videos. Like everything else in the world, it's found a home on Youtube and most companies now just just upload their stuff to stream online, instead of selling it. The Thrasher series Homies has been my favourite series this year bar none. It follows a group of skaters as they hang out and film for a day and I love the vibe of skaters not caring about getting tricks and just having fun. It also helps that skaters I love to watch, like the Deathwish team and Ishod Wair are front and centre.
I have heard through the skateboarding gossip machine that it is apparently no longer fashionable to like Toy Machine, a company that I've always loved. Vaccine is the company's first video in a little bit, it kicks ass, and it features a lot of new faces. Tyshawn Jordan is the big signing, but the supporting cast of flow riders and Braden Hoban really show up too (I also still love DanLu, Axel, and Leo). Fuck the haters. I'll continue loving Toy for as long as Ed Templeton runs the show.
A personality that I've recently latched onto and annoy Rebecca with is my disdain for streaming playlists. With music streaming services now dominating our music listening habits, I've found it interesting that most people I know have gravitated to curated playlists as their primary way that they consume music. It's interesting to me because that is so foreign to me. I vastly prefer listening to full albums, because I find that more satisfying as an experience, and I rarely get fixated on a single song. The idea of regularly listening to a playlist that is either auto-generated by an algorithm or made by someone I don't know, whose taste I know nothing about, is crazy to me and not at all appealing to me.
I don't think it's unfair that I think about music more than the average person. I have a pretty calculated way that I approach listening and I've found that doing so tends to reward me with stuff that I really like.* Part of this is that, like I said, I listen primarily to full albums. I think an album is a big artistic project and they are generally made to be consumed that way, in full. I know that this isn't a great, 1 for 1, comparison, but to some degree, picking out one song and listening to that without understanding the context of a full album is a little bit like only looking a one well-painted cloud in a painting. There's a lot that you're missing!
*We have officially reached rock bottom at IMU and this is the most douchebag thing I've ever written. There is nowhere left to go here. We have finished.
So I kind of hate streaming playlists because they deviate from that. Spotify is always trying to drive you towards listening to your daily mix or their playlists and they make it hard to just listen to a full album, often only letting listen to albums on shuffle, which I also find insane. The songs are in a tracklist for a reason? Why would I shuffle one album?
But there's also my big dumb left wing ideas for why I hold this position, as spots on playlists are now hold the prestige that radio rotation used to hold. Record labels pay for their artists to get spots on big playlists (like Punk Unleashed or Rap Caviar), so really the playlists that are presented to you on your home page are just industry plants. It's like every genre has its own version of Top 40 now and that is very strange to me, a dinosaur who would like to listen to something once through in order.
This all being said, I recently discovered an artist through a Spotify playlist, so I guess this who introduction was hypocritical and an elitist music nerd version of virtue signaling. Am I the worst? Yes. Anyway, the primary reason for this blog was to discuss that artist and I apparently needed to throw all this out there to get to this point.
I found this band Hundred Reasons through an "alternative rock" playlist that was mostly shoegaze and emo. That doesn't seem like alternative rock to me? Maybe that's a discussion for another time. Is alt-rock now just putting one flat 3rd in your chord progression and sometimes tending towards Vedder in your vocal style? Also for another time! After finding this band, I immediately checked out their album Ideas Above Our Station, which seems to be the "one".
I'm always interested in bands like this because they were so contained to a time. I was shocked that I had never heard of them, as 2002 was exactly when I was consuming rock music in all of its forms by the pound and I basically never turned off muchmusic. Like, why did I know the Exies and Trust Company (both: woof), but not Hundred Reasons?
It's maybe related to them being British, as I think 00s rock in the UK was still pretty isolated. After the Verve and Oasis, it seems like the scene in the country really retreated into itself and turned independent again. It seems like there tonnes of bands like Keane or McFly that were big Reading-and-Leeds-type deals in the UK, but were mostly relegated to being "British bands Tim knows from muchmusic" in North America. Maybe there's a lot of other Hundred Reasons. Maybe they all suck. Who knows!
Upon hearing the intro riff, I was immediately very into the song because I love both octave chords and drop D tuning. It's hard to describe, but the album hit a particular feeling that I sometimes get from new music, in which an intro song immediately seems to capture both my interest and be exactly what I was hoping from the context clues around the band. Maybe this is just me thinking about great introduction songs, because they are a particular art. A good Side A, Track 1 needs to present you with the main sound of the band and album, but not be a single or principle song on the album. It should show a lot of what the band has to offer, but hint at there being more to offer. "I'll Find You" was a fantastic introduction track.
To be honest though, I found the rest of the album a little uneven and didn't think that it lived up to what was promised by "I'll Find You". It's a weird mix of sounds and to be honest that makes me even more interested. It seems like the blueprint for the band was to make post-hardcore that had a small amount of shoegaze in the guitar work, like Hum, but they are also much poppier than Hum. I think one of the guitar also plays in an open D/C tuning, and I am a huge mark for that sort of guitar style. There's times where the vocals and guitar also veer way into the parts of alternative rock that I do not like, that I mentioned above. Weirdly, it also sometimes sounds a lot like the 3rd wave emo stuff from the early 00s that I also don't fuck with, like Finch or Story of the Year, without ever going full on into that stuff. On top of all of this, homeboy's accent also comes through in the vocals, making this mix even more strange.
Maybe "I'll Find You" is great intro track for a different record? This makes it sound like I didn't like this record, which isn't true, it just wasn't what I thought and hoped it would be. Mostly, I can't believe this band that was apparently pretty big and successful for a time were totally off my radar. This would suggest that I should give playlist creation and curation its due, but fuck that. The album was still better and I still think that shit is dumb.
When you're feeling creatively stifled and creating anything at all, which you have unfortunately linked with your self worth, seems like a chore, you have to go back to what you know and feels comfortable: A series of Top Five lists.
Top Five Things I Miss About Going to School
5. Getting lunch with Terry 4. Seeing the people from my program and making friends 3. Cafe Myriade and Hvmans (RIP) 2. Riding the subway 1. Teaching in-person
Top Five Things that Suck Even More During COVID
5. Getting in contact with the National Student Loan Service 4. Marking 3. Communicating 2. Making plans 1. Multi-tasking
Top Five Shit Blue Jays that I Hope Will Get Better and Stick Around, but Won't
5. TJ Zeuch 4. Jonathan Davis 3. Alejandro Kirk 2. Cavan Biggio 1. Rowdy Tellez
Top Five Tricks I'll Tell Myself I'll Land this Year
If you've read this bog more than 10 times, I think that you had to know that it would eventually turn to art historiography. You probably hate that, and are just coming here for feelings and takes, but this is all I think about now, so you'll have to humour me here.
Anyways, this dumb movie introduction to WWII is all to get to the point that the war also had a profound effect on art history. And not just on people writing about artworks made during or depicting the war or something, but also on how and where the discipline functioned, which I find more interesting. The version of art history that is taught in North American and European universities originated in nineteenth-century German universities and this country remained the centre of Western art history until the mid-twentieth century.
The reason that centre of art history shifted is because many of the most prominent German art historians at the time were also Jewish and were obviously forced to flee the white supremacist government that had taken power in their country. A few went to Paris and London, but most went to the United States and as a result that country came to dominate art history for the rest of the century!
Okay, history lesson out of the way so that we can now get to why I brought this up in the first place:
Becks bought me this book at a University of Guelph book sale when we first started dating. I think it might the first gift they ever gave me? I've had this book for ages.
Recently, I was reading for my thesis, which is basically all I do now. During this reading, the text discussed Italian art history during WWII, which faced a similar, but less severe, version of the problem presented to Germany. While professors in Italy didn't get ethnically purged from their institutions, they did have to pledge to dictator Benito Mussolini, which entailed not opposing any of his views in their teaching. What kind of sucks is that out of like 1000 professors, only 12 refused to pledge allegiance to a fascist, opting to flee the country instead. What's cool is that Lionello Venturi was one of the 12.
Could be the COVIDmania speaking, but I live for these sorts of connections. Is it dumb to like the idea that the reason I still have the book is that it was written by someone who opposed the fascist regime in his country, even if I didn't know that? I know this to be true, but will like that idea from afar.
