The 2021 IMU Musical Revue

 I feel like the last six or seven years have been really good for punk and hardcore and when you combine that with the constant creative push forward that is always happening in rap, it's been an especially great time for music. Maybe I'm just too enthusiastic and that's boring, but damn homie you're the one here reading!

Angel Du$t - YAK: A Collection of Truck Songs

Something I found interesting this year was that both Angel Du$t and Turnstile released EPs ahead of their full-lengths and that every song on both ended up on the albums. A new style of marketing in the streaming age? A quirk of the Trapped Under Ice family tree? I think that AD's full-length ended up a lot better and is by far the best articulation of their sound. A great slow song featuring Tim Armstrong! Probably my album of the year.

Turnstile - Turnstile Love Connection

Like I said, I think the EP format worked out a lot better for Turnstile. Glow On is still a great record with cool songs, but this shorter release is more cohesive. This blew me away and maybe my expectations were too high. In any case, the feature music video for the entire EP is one of my favourite videos ever and one of the coolest things to ever come out of hardcore.

Tyler the Creator - CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST

Was never much of an OFWGKTA guy, but really enjoyed Tyler's last two records and how he's developed and changed as a rapper and producer as he gets further into his career. This album is my favourite yet and probably my favourite rap album of the year. Such an amazing vibe here that feels like you're touring Europe while listening to DatPiff.

Mach-Hommy - Pray for Haiti

Griselda Records and everyone associated with them has been pretty much bulletproof for the last couple of years and I've returned to this record more than any other. It has the same chill and mumbly/extremely hard contrast that Westside Gunn and Benny the Butcher have, but this record is super focused and the world-building is great.

Militarie Gun - All Roads Lead to the Gun I

For a while this year, I thought that this release might be my favourite release, but it felt like picking an EP felt like a copout. Feels like Dinosaur Jr. and the Lemonheads filtered through extreme hardcore and it's done basically as well as it can be. Would love to see what this band could do with a full-length, but am just as happy to see them continue putting out 4-songers.

Webbed Wing - What's So Fucking Funny?

Webbed Wing's first record Bike Rides Across the Moon was intriguing sonically but definitely unfinished in a few spots. This is a fuller version of their college rock from a punk background and is one of my favourites this year. Sometimes it's just fun to rock.

Mo Troper - Dilettante

Mo Troper was one of my biggest finds this year and I gave Beloved a tonne of spins ahead of the release of Dilettante. While this isn't as focused as the former, I really like them leaning into the Guided By Voices vibe of a 28-song record where most songs are under 1:30. 

Just Friends - JFC Crew Vol. I &II

Nothing but Love was in constant rotation during 2020 and even though I'm sure Just Friends' mix of pop-punk/funk/pop/rap is not for everyone, I find it super refreshing to see a band be so focused on not sounding like anyone else in punk. Seeing them also try new stuff here, doing remixes of songs, singles that sound like nothing else they've done, and a SONG FEATURING LIL B, was even better.

Anna Fox Rochinski - Cherry

I don't remember how I found this record, as I had no frame of reference for AFR or her old band Quilt, but this was one of the more original-sounding things I heard this year. A little shoegazey, but never slow, poppy, but off-kilter, firmly post-punk but definitely dancy. "Party Lines" and "Epilogue/Overture" are two of the best songs of the year.

ALLBLACK - TY4FWM

I had high hopes for this one after NO SHAME 3 and even if it didn't live up to that, this was still a tight full-length that has everything that makes ALLBLACK one of the best rappers alive. It makes me want to yell "Thank you for fucking with me!" all the time.

2nd Grade - Wish You Were Here Tour Revisited

2nd Grade has dominated my listening over the last two or so years and though I'm jonesing for a new full-length, this re-release of their first record, with new full-band versions of 7 of the songs from the original is a great replacement. "Favourite Song" has, predictably, been my favourite song of the last few years, so hearing a new cut of that was particularly great. The band is so jubilant that you can't help but love it.

9 Times Out of Ten I'll Be Thinking of You

 Was having a supremely hard day working through my thesis yesterday. Both now and in my MA I've found that the further you get into a self-directed research project like this, the more of a toll that it takes on your mental health. It sucks.

During this I started listening to the tracks that Bad Time Records has released from the forthcoming compilation The Shape of Ska-Punk to Come Vol. II. Included on this was a new Jeff Rosenstock song that made me start to tear up while listening and these are the reasons I can think of:

1. Rosenstock returning to ska and making a song that sounds like the early days of Bomb the Music Industry! that I love and connect to so much.

2. Rosenstock caring about ska as a genre enough that he still makes ska songs and wanted to contribute to this comp by an emerging label to give new bands the rub.

3. Me getting emotional while struggling with school reminding me of the bad old days of my undergraduate degree when it felt like Jeff Rosenstock was the only person in the world who understood me.

My Energy's There but Wasted

A pleasant part of the recent... renewal... of interest... in ska? (trying my hardest to not say revival) is that a lot of new media about ska has accompanied it. I was a message board rat during the 2000s, which I would say was the height of that culture, and during that time it felt like there was a lot of cool internet stuff and communities focused on ska that were both fun to read and helped really expand my understanding of the genre. As the 00s moved into the 10s, it felt like there was a lot less of that, though I guess I could also chalk that up to me becoming more focused on exploring other genres of music for a little while.

On one hand, I agree with the current view that saying ska died from like 2007-2019 unfairly glosses over the contributions of bands like the Fad, We Are the Union, and labels like Community Records.* On the other hand though, I think the generalization that the vast majority of ska shows were either headlined by Less Than Jake (still making good records then!), Reel Big Fish (vomit emoji, especially in 2010), or Streetlight Manifesto (opinion changes daily), or featured bands trying to be them, was correct. As sad as it is to say, I think that it's also fair to add the Johnstones to that list, specifically in Canada. I kept trying to find new bands, and I never got tired of listening to the genre, but shit did get pretty dark there for a bit and there was slim pickings.

*An interesting wrinkle is that this is also when Bomb the Music Industry's popularity began to really take off, but also when they began to feature less and less ska on their records, which I don't think is unrelated.

This is all to say that I am once again writing about happy I am with the current generation of new ska bands, all creating interesting music and none dressing like a caricature of a 90s cartoon character the way white kids from the suburbs did in 2012. Along with these new bands have come a bunch of new internet stuff  around that, and I'm thinking of the In Defense of Ska podcast in particular. It's not always great, but I really appreciate that it always focuses on the bands and how important they are, which is not something that often happens with ska. More so than any genre of music I can think, ska bands seem to be subservient to the genre norms.

 A recent episode of In Defense of Ska featured Dave McWane from Big D and the Kids Table, who were one of the most influential bands on me during my adolescence and legitimately played a gigantic role in shaping both me as a person and my outlook on the world. I've written about them and their effect on me before on here and I was about to say that I won't do that again, even though that's exactly what I'm about to do.

I haven't actually read that many interviews with Dave, who seems to be the main creative force in the band and is (I think) the only remaining original member, so I found his take on the history of the band interesting. In particular, McWane mentioned antagonism as a key part of the early days of the band, which was something I was always trying to name, but never really could. He mentioned that they never really enjoyed headlining shows because that generally meant that the audience was already on their side and was there to see them, whereas when they opened for other bands, whether that was the Dropkick Murphys or even bigger, but less punk ska bands, their was more of a friction with the crowd that the band thrived off of.

 

That sense of antagonism was palpable and was also a huge part of what drew me into the band. As much as they were still a ska band, they really did push back against other bands, labels, and trends in a way that, in my eyes, legitimated them as a punk band too. It felt like everyone in the band were actually punks, so that when they played fast parts or hardcore parts, it seemed completely natural, as opposed to the hackneyed "clean verse, kick on distortion pedal for the chorus" model that all bad ska-punk followed. A big part of that was me being young and impressionable and this being the first time I had heard the "fuck everyone else" message given in such an emphatic way. But even though I was a naïve teen who was inspired to take on the world from this record, that still matters.

A memory that sticks with me that kind of sums this sense of connection up is something that happened to my friend Pat in high school, who was just as into Big D as I was. It was definitely not cool to like ska at the height of third wave emo and Pat was wearing a Big D hoodie to school that had a checkerboard pattern across the front. In the halls, a guy we knew who was a hardcore kid, without even acknowledging or speaking to Pat, just said "ska sucks" under his breath. It felt like all the people who were into punk, in whatever way, hated ska, but Big D made it feel cool to say "Fuck them anyways."

Because Big D were "My Band" for a stretch of like three years, Good Luck, The Gypsy Hill EP, and How It Goes were all in my walkman on the way to and from school, something that seemed like a gigantic deal to me in like 2007 was the band starting to get a little bigger and also changing their sound slightly. From my perspective, on the band's new album Strictly Rude, which was released on the comparatively bigger punk label Side One Dummy, it felt like the antagonism was now clearly gone, though others didn't find the change as jarring as I did. 

My take on the changes in the band's sound were that it was partly due to member changes. The liner notes to How It Goes featured notes from the members about the writing process of each of the songs (the best) and something I noticed was that saxophonist Dave Bush, who left the band between How It Goes and Strictly Rude, had lots of notes and seemed to figure into the writing process in a major way. When the band left their harsher ska-core sound for something that sounded a lot closer to regular ska-punk on Strictly Rude, my take was that Bush's absence was the reason for less interesting music. I've never heard anyone else mention this, but it's one of those takes that I'll probably carry for the rest of my life.*

*Another note on member changes: Guitarist Sean P. Rogen, who is maybe my favourite ska-punk guitarist, left the band somewhere after Strictly Rude. I think he was similarly integral to the band making good music and I feel like his absence is glaringly obvious on later stuff.

I had never heard the band, or I guess more accurately McWane, talk about this period of the band, aside from the usual puff pieces in music publications that always come out during an album promotion cycle, so when he started discussing the writing period of Strictly Rude, my ears perked up and I was eager to hear about it. He actually did echo what I thought about the songs, saying that they're happier or more positive compared to their earlier stuff, but he attributed that to the fact that it was a generally happy time in the band's existence. They were signing to a bigger label, touring all the time, and were still young enough to just bask in the fun of being a band and fucking around. When he phrased it that way, it made a lot of sense to me and softened the record a bit to me.

In hindsight, they didn't really sell out in the way I thought they did, but I also think it's fair to say that they did a little. There was a tone of political hope on the record, as I guess they were now done being morose about the Bush administration, but even then (and more so now) that type of political outlook didn't jive with me. Getting the band's perspective on the record made the context of the record a little more in focus, but I still think that 17-year-old me picked up on something real, so I've got to commend myself for that.

First We Run, then We Laugh til We Cry

 I recently saw somebody on Twitter mention the "third year of COVID" and that knocked me on my ass a bit. As much as it's possible to mark out the things that I've accomplished and remember events that show how long it's been, it also feels like no time has passed at all. Pierre has turned into an old dog during this pandemic, but I don't feel like I've aged at all (I have, dramatically).

One of the ways that I'm able to recognize the passage of time has been the TV shows that Rebecca and I have watched. In general, we've erred on the side of caution with COVID, which has resulted in a lot of TV watching. It goes through cycles, where sometimes I feel couped up and stircrazy and another night on the couch makes me feel like a personal failure, and sometimes watching TV is the only thing that feels normal. Behold the TV COVID calendar:

True Detective: The first week of the pandemic, when staying inside felt good

The Wire: Rebecca working support in people's homes and COVID weighing the heaviest it ever did

The Mandalorian: Rebecca working overnights and me being home alone on Saturdays

Sex Education: Vaccines being handed out and things starting to feel normal

There's many others that I'm missing, but this was all just a prelude for me to mention that Becks and I's current watch is Game of Thrones, which I'm coming to well after it was one of the biggest phenomena in TV history. We're now halfway through the show (shoutout to the Free People and Brotherhood without Banners) and I have some thoughts on the progression of the show.

Mostly, I've been thinking about the balance of adapting a series of novels while still bowing to the conventions of Peak TV. Game of Thrones moves fast and has already killed off a bunch of characters who I thought would be around for the long haul, so the natural reaction is to guess what the next major plot event will be. The show is pretty conventional and straight forward, so often conjecture is pretty easy, because a character will have said exactly what they were thinking and going to do on episode prior.

However, what I find interesting is that the events of the show have to follow the book. For example, when Tyrion was sentenced to death, I would have normally said that there was no way he could possibly die because Peter Dinklage was the breakout star of the show and was one of its most-loved character. Normally, killing off a character like that would be the absolute biggest move that a show could do (Stringer Bell), but what about if the character Tyrion died in the second book of the series? Must suck to be the writers have to say goodbye to the guy who's carrying the show, right? An added wrinkle to this is that the series started after the first bunch of books were published, but then ended before the last book came out. The production of the two entities are braided in an interesting way.

I guess that in this case, it's to my benefit that I haven't read the books, because the surprises are still fun. This will be the one time that I support TV over the book, due to fantasy books being very much not for me.