But Here I Am

 Feasting on music seems to come and go. Some weeks, it feels like all I do is listen to podcasts as I finish work or do chores and this, for some reason, makes me feel extremely guilty? If I'm such a huge music fan, then why am I not constantly consuming new records? I have lots of time to listen while I work from home and Spotify now puts basically all of the history of music at my disposal, so by my logic it is a gigantic failure of mine and a glaring sign of hypocrisy and weakness that I am not more of an expert.

Fortunately, I'm in a feast phase now and all of those feelings are gone until next week. We're riding high baby!

Mo Troper recently released a single from his forthcoming album and the story about it made me go back and check out some of his older material, both because of the namechecking of Guided by Voices, an IMU fav, and the Expendables reference.* Turns out it rocks! The aesthetic is pretty perfect, both visually and sonically and the songs really hit this need I have to hear a jangly major key chorus about people being stupid that I have at all times. The discography has been a joy to get into so far, so rather than the new tune, here is a fav from the old stuff:

*Look, we're not getting into here, but the Expendables might be the most underrated film franchise in history.

It turns out that when I read music blogs, I often end up finding things that I really like!

Pop-punk is something that I feel very conflicted about liking. It was such a huge part of me finding my own musical identity as a young boy and then I loved the first wave of easycore bands so much (in hindsight, sigh). That being said, the pop-punk revival during the last decade really didn't click with me at all and a lot of the bands I liked in 2009, I really started to hate in 2015. Also, like 90% of the bands who played pop-punk were fucking shitty creeps. Could we have just traded in 2014-18 for another Fireworks record?

That all being said, sometimes a pop-punk song hits me in a way that I just can't get anywhere else. I know most of the genre truly sucks, but the highs satisfy this crazy hunger I have for the genre and it drives me to just pump a song on repeat, which I almost never do. Cue this Heart Attack Man song. I had been meaning to check out their 2015 record Fake Blood for a minute, but I think this is what I really want from them. The video also makes me so hype on the song and I can't think of why. Maybe it's the Sugar shirt? 

Lastly, one of my favourite bands from my Southern Ontario heyday was Windsor's Shared Arms. Probably the most skatepunk of all of them, and the most shreddy, but they were so melodic and fun. Shoutout to Kyle's welcome home show in Guelph with them, Junior Battles, the Decay, and Wayfarer. A superbill if there ever was one. Their guitarist Jesse now makes solo guitar pop like Supercrush or Young Guv. It rocks!