Duff came through big rec in our music exchange this week, giving Crash of Rhinos' second album Knots.
We've recently been focusing on emo, which started a few weeks ago when Duff remarked that he had re-visited Braid's Frame and Canvasfor the first time in a while and was pleased to see it hold up as well as it did.* Emo is one of our biggest overlaps in music and in a genre that is hard to define sonically and has so many different parts and eras, we tend to agree more than we disagree, being picky about 2nd wave, missing the 3rd wave, and gravitating towards the fourth wave. I think it's also important that this overlap in emo taste was a huge contributing factor to the way that we wrote songs together in Beat Noir. We had the same vocabulary when it came to putting parts together, especially on Sovereignties.
*Duh
This all being said, we've both drifted away from the genre recently, as I don't think either of would say that any emo releases from the last five years have really stuck with us. The last one I really liked was probably Oliver Houston's Whatever Works? I feel like emo, pop-punk, and orgcore have slowly merged into one genre that kept some of the fans of those genres, but in my opinion lost everything that appealed to me from each of them. I also just grew out it too. I still love emo music and will check out new stuff, but I'm also too old for the GothBoiClique stuff and pretending I'm into it would just be posing. I don't want to be a 35-year-old who still deeply relates to American Football, but at the same time, a lot of emo music was super important to me for a long time and I can respect that.
Anyways, Crash of Rhinos was great, if a little long. IMO, if your punk album is over 35 minutes, it better be extremely ambitious and have a lot of stuff holding it together. BUT, the main thing that I thought about while listening to it was that since the 4th wave of emo is now over, I feel like I can say with hindsight that it was absolutely the best iteration of the genre. From my perspective, it took all the best parts of older emo, the DIY hardcore ethos of the first wave, the open-tuning guitar riffs of the second, and the hooks of the third, while (mostly) doing away with the over-the-top corniness that plagues the genre.
As I said in my last post, I've been reflecting on Ontario Place a lot lately.
New, updated beginning to this post:
Two weeks ago, I was thinking about Ontario Place a lot and the draft for this post was still here!
Really though, I think this anecdote is really about the school year starting and new students doing their orientation, so maybe it's actually more relevant now than the time when I wrote down a few notes.
At Ontario Place we would have a wide variety of groups that would have their "days" at the park. Caribbean groups would come through during Caribana. Muslim groups would come through for, I think, Eid. Etc. Etc. In hindsight, there were actually few days during the summer that didn't have a special theme or group coming. I think that it might have been because the park was run so badly, and management was scrambling to get as many people into the park as possible. Did Canada's Wonderland have themed days every summer? Were they successful enough not to?
One that I happened to remember and that gave me a full body cringe when I did was when the University of Toronto's Engineering School (*deeply sighs* I hate that I know about Skule) came to do its Frosh activities at the park. I was standing at the back of the splashpad when a group of like eight new students led by a senior walked by and decided to use the area to do one of their challenges.
Having lived with an engineer at Guelph for two years and being close friends with another at UofT during my youth, I feel like I have a deep knowledge of what most engineers are like, which is to say that I know why they suck and are annoying. There's this strange duality instilled in them by those older than them that engineers are not only smarter than everyone at the university (they're not), which makes them the most important people at the school, but they also party very hard (they don't). On one hand, they believe they are these crucial people that make everything that matters in the world happen, but on the other they truly see themselves as the same as the bros and jocks at the school. They believe that everyone wants to know them and be them, but in my experience no one wants to do either. So, even though they're dorks, they believe that everyone sees them as the cool bros at the school, because they have no self-awareness.
On this day, the challenge that they had to do was, I think, take a video of them singing in public. Wow! Isn't that crazy! Can you believe how cool engineers are? The senior gave the camera to a younger student, got up on a bench with water jets on it near me on the splashpad, and then sang a rendition of "I Want It that Way" by the Backstreet Boys.* At the time, the song was having this moment of being an ironic thing with bros. They would sing it because they totally weren't gay bro. And being sensitive is also gay bro. It was super obnoxious
*This is the first I've listened to this song what's gotta be ten years. Is it good? The chorus is undeniably cheesy, but the rest kind of fucks. I legit can't tell how I feel about it. Also who is the coolest one? Like, AJ is obvi the "cool one", but can any other member challenge him for the title? I don't think so.
What was weird though was that it was obvious that to some degree this senior didn't even want to do this. He was clearly doing it because he knew that's how cool loud bros acted and not because he actually thought that him doing an overly sincere version of "I Want It That Way" was funny. Masculinity, it's a hell of a drug.
Onto to good music. For some weird reason, I've associated these bands with each other even though, from what I can tell, they have nothing to do with one another (aside from both being on Run for Cover Records). Pairing two bands like this is something that I've done in the past, so I guess I'm just continuing that trend here. Both are post-hardcore, I guess, though two very different permutations of it. One a lot closer to hardcore like Turning Point, the other more Revolution Summer, but sounding contemporary. Excited for both of these records.
