There's No Control, Just Controlling Yourself

 Without checking, I feel like the great IMU hiatus of 2022-26 covered the time that I went to go see Militarie Gun, MSPAINT, Pony, and Spite House with my friends Val, Dave, and Anna. Looking back on it now, it was definitely one of my favourite shows I've been to, primarily because I had never heard of MSPAINT before the show and they absolutely blew Val and I away that night. Absolutely nothing better in the world than discovering a band live and knowing that they will be a favourite for years to come. We were outside smoking in front of Turbo Haus and our weed drinks were starting to hit. The band was so good that we said "We should probably head in" just from they way they sounded through a closed door outside. We talked about how good they were for the entire bike ride home. 

I never expected them to get to this level, but I do earnestly daydream about how friends would react if they saw this band live. I wish friends could have the same experience I did. The No Separation EP is the most recent thing they've done and somehow I am desperate for more, despite it coming out last year. Not on tour right now, so am I safe to assume to they're working on something? A boy can dream.

So I Can Erase the Rat

I was recently reminded of the Long Island ska-core band The Fad after listening to their seminal track "Vinyl Paradise" on an old playlist of mine.* Their lone full-length record, Kill Punk Rock Stars was on constant rotation for me when it came out, is absolutely one of my favourite records of the 00s, and still stands as one of my favourite ska-punk albums, especially when you consider that it came out in a real fallow period for the genre. I had a great time listening to the record for the first time in a few years and found that this time, the track that really stuck with me was "Ska-boom!"

*This song was my profile song on MySpace for like half the time I used the website.

Obviously, when you read that title you assume the worst about it being a terrible ska-punk song with a terrible ska pun title, but that's a purposefully metatextual move. The song is about the singer being present for the ska boom of the late-90s and then watching people dump the genre like it was nothing and then act like they were never into. He then calls for others to "light the fuse" again and reinvigorate the genre, which, if you are thinking of the New Tone era of ska from 2018ish-2024ish, The Fad absolutely contributed to. Beyond loving that message, and I don't think I need to get into a comparison of being into ska and 00s scene metalcore for the hundredth time, I think there's a lot of value in the earnest message of saying that participated in the third wave ska boom and then never left and tried to keep that scene alive. The opening line of the song is "I was there," and I found that really resonated me as a beautiful statement about participating in a music scene. We all have traces of our participation in DIY music to varying degrees, the records and zines we made, the flyers of shows we played and attended, but ultimately "I was there" is the most important thing you can say about it. If you can say "I was there" it means that you did something and helped to build the scene instead of staying home.

While poking around on Discogs, I found out that Ricky from the Fad played in Backtrack for that band's whole existence. A fun discovery that I never made even as I listened to Backtrack the whole time they were active. This is also evidence that all of punk's independent music scenes are way closer than most want to admit. To me it's 1) obviously cool that the Fad and Backtrack share members, as it also explains why they were better than 95% of ska-core bands, and 2) not that weird! Kind of makes sense to me when you think about Long Island punk and hardcore! That led me to listen to his recent appearance on Toby Morse's One Life, One Chance podcast, interested to see if he mentioned the Fad. He touched on them a little bit, talking about joining the band and going on tour, and even more interestingly, mentioning that he started Backtrack after he and another member quit the Fad. So Backtrack is a Fad side project! Hmmm (I kid). 

Something that did bum me out a little bit was that he described the band as "more punk," instead of copping to the fact that he played in a ska band for multiple years and put out a full-length with them. Perhaps he didn't want to lose cred when talking to Matt Henderson, who was co-hosting the interview. I get it, but don't be ashamed to say "I was there."*

*For all I know, they could have talked about that extensively off-mic or something.

The Tubs have been one of my most-listened-to bands of the summer and they just put out a new record. I don't know if it surpasses their first one as my favourite of theirs, but it's great and I've really enjoyed having some new songs from the band to throw into the mix. "Stoop to Me" was the first single, but I found that with the rest of the album out too, it works for me in a way it didn't before. Just an absolutely wonderful band. Through them I've dug into the God Nation family of bands more and have found that most of it rocks (especially Spike and the TSG). This sounds like a diss, but I mean it very sincerely when I say it reminds me of the K-W scene in a good way. Kind of hard to articulate why, when I think it's around a lot of people doing a lot of completely different sounding things. Perhaps that's how I heal my own scene trauma.

I Just Screwed Up My First Bikini Contest, That's All

After hearing that Andy Williams, guitarist of Every Time I Die, died last weekend, and upon seeing all of the posts on social media eulogizing him, I felt compelled to write something myself. I then kept putting it off and it feels a little strange to write something about that now, but perhaps that's a sign that rather than just leaving it, I should push myself to actually do that.

Got to admit that I haven't really listened to Every Time I Die for the last 15 or so years but I don't want to give the impression that the band is an old guilty pleasure or something I try to to erase from my musical past. There were two years or so in my early twenties that Brian, Pat, and I, but especially Pat and I, loved Every Time I Die deeply. I bought New Junk Aesthetic shortly after it came out at the Stone Road Mall HMV and that served as my introduction to the band. I wouldn't say that I was new to hardcore at the time at all, but I was very much still exploring and learning about different permutations of the genre. Metalcore had really not jived with me at all and I was skeptical of Every Time I Die because they were scene adjacent in the 2000s. That's certainly an association that is downplayed now, but absolutely was there then. My ska kid-based aversion to every associated with 2000s third wave emo and screamo drove me away, but I quickly found that Hot Damn! was really good and really hard.

Something else that was a huge part of Pat and I's love for the band was the party vibe that the band put forward in their DVDs, Shit Happens and The Dudes and Don'ts of Recording, and on their social media. Beyond that, the idea of being a boozy hardcore luthario was also in their lyrics and part of the image of the band. We didn't have any responsibilities in our early twenties and wanted to pound cheap beer like Keith and Jordan Buckley and call each other on shinfo and play the Shitty Snack Game. The two of us really adopted the party guy persona and had a lot of fun staying out late and trying to be silly. We both grew out of it fairly quickly, and I'm glad we did, but it would also be disingenuous to act like a big part of our youth was dominated by the band.

An obvious difference between me and the huge amount of people who eulogized Williams online is that they had personal relationships with him, from touring and playing shows, and I didn't at all. I don't want to act like I knew the guy in any real way, or even act like he had an impact in life in a real way. But the more I saw people posting about how kind and genuine Andy was, the more I realized that what I was actually moved by was everyone else's mourning and outpouring of emotion. I sort of knew already that the band, but especially Andy, were big for other people. but his death prompted everyone to show that in a material way. Hardcore is a community that loves to gossip and throw shit at each other probably more than every other in the world. When someone dies, people rush to say something edgy or be the contrarian that is brave enough say that a person sucked. That didn't happen in this case and maybe that alone is cause for celebration.

Was recently reminded of this album by the San Diego band The Cry.

I listened to it a bunch a few years ago and in researching the band, learned that they came and went quickly with almost no press or media footprint, which is increasingly rare with the internet giving us access to archives everywhere. What was cooler is that almost every person who knows them learned about them from H-Street's Hocus Pocus video and the band was closely tied to skate culture. Great stuff, and Anthony Pappalardo speaks about that with more authority here.

Stranger to Blue Water

I was on a minor John Denver kick earlier this week, which basically entailed listening to the hits the album Rocky Mountain High. On my way into the Faubourg working space, I thought about a few conversation prompts that might be fun to go over with friends there. One was John Denver: Is he cringey good, in that his songs suck but contain nuggets of goodness that make the cringeyness endearing, or is he actually good? Ultimately I never got to mentioning that, because it's a dumb thing to talk about and no one would have cared, but I have been pondering on it for a few days. When I couldn't stop singing "Country Roads," I leaned toward the latter, but there are many stinkers in his music. It's actually like 60% stinkers. A few days later, out of the Denver kick, I think I'm back to the former. 

Really, the fact that one option is longer and more complicated probably means that's the one, right?

I occasionally feel the need to debase myself and tell the most embarrassing stories from my past. I think it's a way for me to be okay with previous versions of myself. If I embrace my corniness, and lord knows I've been insanely corny in the past, then I think I get better handle on who I am now. I think it makes me more kind to others if I think about times I've been stupid or embarrassing or immature. That's the way I think of it anyway.

On that note, and thinking about John Denver, I feel the need to say that after my first breakup, I listened to "Leaving on a Jet Plane" and an embarrassing amount. Not even just that I thought "Leaving on a Jet Plane" was deeper than anyone gave it credit for, because I just got dumped and the girl when on a trip to the UK, but that I spent most nights in my room in the basement of the house I shared listening to that song and "Nothing Compares 2 U" constantly. Feels like if that was a scene in a sitcom it would be too on the nose.

During the height of my obsession with "Leaving on a Jet Place," my house hosted 4/20 party. I was in the middle of taking a long break from smoking weed at the time, since I thought that it made my mental health worse and I was down bad. My solution to a crowd of mostly hot girls coming over to smoke weed at my house was to, in the genius of my early twenties, drink for the entire day. People started filtering into our house in the early afternoon and at that time I was making myself a giant sandwich in the kitchen to fill up my stomach for the day ahead. As I had done for each of the last 4 weeks, to our communal speaker in the kitchen and put on "Leaving on a Jet Plane by John Denver while I made food. My roommates were used to this. It had become my theme song for the previous month and this was a normal experience for them. All of the girls who had come over, however, we're kind of confused. I heard one ask in a loud voice after she had just taken her first toke out of a bong, "Why are we listening to this type of music? Can we put on something more fun?"

In that moment, I was a little hurt, not just because it was "my song" at that moment, or whatever, but also because, for some reason, I thought that overly sentimental populist folk music from the 70s was good smoking music. Insane take in hindsight. If we had just put on some mainstream rap music, though the situation in 2009 was pretty dire, maybe that party would have gone better for all of us. In hindsight, I think a lot of things would have been helped by me learning to just chill a bit in my early 20s, but that prob true of a lot of us, isn't it?

Lastly, I always thought it was "missed the taste of moonshine" not "misty taste of moonshine." Isn't the former more evocative? I think so.

You Put Yourself to Sleep when You Weren't Even Tired

 The band Wild Pink put out a new album, Still Coming Down, last week and the discussion of the album on the Endless Scroll podcast, which is the main music pod that I listen to, prompted me to gather a few thoughts that have been circulating since their last record.

I had seen the band's name a few times on Twitter, I assume in posts by either Stereogum or The Alternative, but what prompted me to actually check them out was the inclusion of their then-recent album Dulling the Horns on, again, several of the hosts of Endless Scroll's year-end lists. I'm not sure what I expected the band to sound like, but it definitely wasn't the reworked heartland rock that I found on that album. Since I often pair listening of albums, I was high on the recent discovery of Box for Buddy, Box for Star by This is Lorelei,* and I remember listening to Dulling the Horns for the first time while I walked in -30 Celsius January weather to get a flu shot before the semester started. My initial thought was that it sounded like a more indie rock version of the War on Drugs' Lost in the Dream in a good way. My second thought was that I really enjoyed the way that the band introduced a new, distinct riff in each song after running through the initial motif. That felt creative and was the sign of a true riffer.

*Becks and I listened to this record in the car while driving to Ontario last weekend, and I referred to it as my favourite album of the 2020s. Hadn't reflected on that statement before I said it, but it's true.

I listened to Dulling the Horns a fair amount in the winter of 2025 and I was elated when a Wild Pink/Greg Mendez tour came to Montréal in the summer of 2025. I rode my bike to L'Esco, a darkhorse for my favourite venue in the city, by myself and smoked a joint on St. Denis before I went in. It felt like a lot of the crowd was there to see Mendez, including a former student of mine that I didn't approach to talk to, and who could blame them? He and his wife played in dark blue light and I heard multiple people cry during the set. One of my friends was going through an intense mental health episode at the time and it was weighing heavily on me at the time. Felt like every song Mendez played touched on that. 

A lot of the room cleared out after the Greg Mendez set and didn't return for the Wild Pink set. I felt bad for them and tried to stand up front to deter the horseshoe. In hindsight, I think I was expecting the band to really blow me away, but that feeling never fully arrived. They were solid and I enjoyed my night, but ultimately I think that the live experience lowered my estimation of Dulling the Horns. Wild Pink's vibe, fuzzy, groovy rock, is decidedly different from the morose acoustic songs of Greg Mendez and unfortunately the songs seem a lot dumber in comparison. An unfair comparison, since the two are going for different sounds and achieving them, but nonetheless made Wild Pink seem less serious. The riffs also hit different live and didn't seem as good. It could have been the result of me standing stage left in front of the bass and drums, but it felt like those two were actually what carried the band instead of the guitars that each song was built around. Rather than the riff changing in each song, as I said above, I noticed that the change was actually the bass and drums introducing a new rhythm under the riff to make it pop. That's still good playing, but I guess we're moving the credit around in the band.

The actual reason I was so judgmental seeing them? The singer was wearing a Mets hat with an Orioles shirt, and, to me, wearing gear from two different teams in the same league is an insane faux pas. Which team are you a fan of? The band is from New York, so I assume the Mets, but then why rock an Orioles shirt with the hat? Are you trying to signal that you are a ball-knower by wearing vintage sports gear and a Mets hat when OMG! fever was still smouldering? The lyrics of the second song on Dulling the Horns, "Swallowing the Egg Whole" point to this, as after discussing the rebranding and relocation of the Washington Bullets and Expos, he says:

Don’t know how many switches I flipped

Flip a switch and then the thing just don’t exist

But my stupid ass is always searching

Hoping for a pearl when I open up my fist

He also wears a Portland Seadogs hat in a bunch of press photos, which takes my mind here:

Just can't get over the idea of a true ball-knower power clashing team branding like that.

I've had Still Coming Down and then Dulling the Horns on while writing this and after all these thoughts my verdict is that the former is listenable and the latter is still good and better than I remember after the show. Biting critique from Timbo there. More biting? Becks' absolutely feral take on the band:

They sound like a band from Kingston, Ontario.

Rest in peace to Rebecca's aunt Debbie, who was always kind to me. Felt powerful to hear teachers get up and talk about working with her on union business at their school. Ties like that still matter after death and it impacting you when you didn't know while they were alive is a way to keep them here.

So Can We Leave Today and Start the Next Mistake, or Are We Fucked This Time?

A quick summary of last night:

Jays surprised us all and won 10-5 at the Trop. Great game all around (Kaz home run and three really nice plays in the field by José Soriano), but I'll remember it for this three-AB run by Alejandro Kirk, which continued his hot streak that has lead the Jays back into playoff contention:

1. Double into the corner in which he barely legged out the throw. Then turned on the wheels to score on a single.
2. Home run on a pitch above the strikezone to deep left-centre.
3. RBI infield single.

Then watched Gregg Araki's 1999 movie Splendor with Becks. Already said it in my Letterboxd review, but I've been trying to get into Araki's movies and it just hasn't clicked yet. This was fun though, and I really enjoyed it.

Didn't want to watch any more TV, so I read some blogs on my laptop after, including this post from Former Clarity. In reading the part about Jeff Rosenstock's residency at the Metro, I was struck by the fact that the author mentioned Jeff playing the Bomb the Music Industry! song "The First Time I Met Sanawon," which felt... wrong to me?

I asked myself why I cared so much. The first response: BtMI! (always the abbreviation over "Bomb") was, ostensibly, a Jeff Rosenstock solo project in the beginning, even if it was always a collective, so maybe the division between Bomb the Music Industry! and Jeff Rosenstock is mostly semantics. I mean, some of the songs on I Look Like Shit were first released as BtMI! demos, right? But then why stop the band and stop playing the songs? I'm sure members of BtMI! beyond John play with Jeff live often, but is it a disrespect to play songs from the band with different people. Again, certainly no, but I guess I thought about it.

It might also be that I feel slighted because I went to the final Bomb the Music Industry Shows in Brooklyn in January 2014, documented in this, uh, documentary Never Get Tired, which always makes me cry and feel inspired. Maybe I feel slighted because I made such an effort to drive fourteen hours to the shows from a different country, and now the songs are being played live sometimes?

Jesus, there is a lot of self-righteousness coming out here.

I think it's more than I felt a certain amount of peace and finality in saying goodbye to Bomb the Music Industry! I had such an intense relationship to the band's music, where I identified with it so strongly at such an impressionable age and, to be honest, had a parasocial relationship with Jeff. I was young and very confused about who I was and how to navigate the world and Bomb the Music Industry! discography was something that made a lot of sense. In January 2014, I was starting the second semester of my master's, Beat Noir had just put out Ecotone, and I was on my first trip with Becks, three months into our relationship. More than saying goodbye to the band, I think I was also eager to say goodbye to the younger version of myself.

From a contemporary standpoint, I think that I'm still happy to leave the Timmy of his early 20s in the past. As a yute, I valorized the idea of never losing your youth and now, as an adult, when I see punk guys in their 30s that cling to records about getting broken up with and dressing the same as they did fifteen years ago, that idea doesn't hit the same. I think there's still a golden nugget of truth in the idea that you shouldn't grow up and lose the outlook and morals that defined you as a person when you defined yourself, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't evolve as a person.

Go to admit though, I put on some Bomb the Music Industry! while I wrote this and man, does it ever hit when you need it to.

Recently discovered this band Class Ring from Chicago through Axe to Grind's weekly radio show Friday Night's Alright. Really great lo-fi power-pop, college rock. Love the emo-y guitar lead on "No Faith."

Losing Grip of What I Used to Hold

For a reason unknown to me, I was compelled to listen to "Zip-Lock" by Lit this morning when I left to get groceries at the market. It's a nice and sunny day today and it felt good to listen to poppy bro-rock from the late 90s while I walked through the neighbourhood. It reminded me of my last summer at Ontario Place, when it was often sunny, and when I was trying to give Lit's A Place in the Sun an honest go to see if I was into it.

From 2010-2011, Brian and I's musical taste was dominated by the Wonder Years' The Upsides. We got so excited during the press rollout for the album and then fell head over heels in love with the record when it came out.* During the height of our Wonder Years obsession, the band put out a cover of "Zip-Lock" that we, naturally, checked out because we were inhaling everything the band did. I had no idea who Lit was, since I was just young enough for the one-hit wonder craze of "My Own Worst Enemy" to miss me when it came out. I excitedly wondered if Lit was a long-lost pop-punk gem from the 90s that I had missed out on, since that was the precious thing I could imagine at the time. Kind of unfortunate in hindsight.

*Can't say that any of their music does anything for me anymore and I haven't even gotten nostalgic enjoyment out of the music in the times I've tried to revisit it in the last ten years. Was a nice thing to bond over with my friends at the time though.

I will admit that "Zip-Lock" is a huge tune. I think the main riff is a solid melodic hook, even if the pinch harmonic does really stick out like a sore thumb. I love the stupid snare drum fill before the solo. I think the lyrics are bad in "sensitive bro who wants to express himself and accidentally spits" way that makes them okay.

Brian and I used to leave each other messages on Facebook Messenger* while we worked our summer jobs in our respective hometowns, mostly talking about music and our friends. Brian told me that he had been listening to Lit a bunch since the end of the school year and that he thought it hit a Third Eye Blind sort of spot in terms of it being something that we sort of remember from the late-90s, but was actually a lot better than it seemed. I downloaded the record and planned to listen to it on the train ride to work the next morning

*Really it was MSN Messenger, but by this point that was obsolete.

Those train rides were huge in my consumption of music back then, even if in hindsight it was just times that I listened to different types of pop-punk. House Boat and the Swellers seemed worlds apart back then in a way that doesn't really translate to me now. Still, the time that I spent listening to albums on my commutes to and from the water park was when significant parts of my taste concretized. I was alone and had nothing else to do, which meant that I focused on the minutiae of the music and committed drum fills and guitar licks to memory.

This all to say that I was ready to love the Lit record and was dismayed when I found it to be mostly bad. When you're intrigued by one song, like I was with "Zip-Lock," you hope that there will be deep cuts that are as good as the one you know, but that didn't happen here, aside from learning that "My Own Worst Enemy" was the actual hit. Instead, outside of two good pop-rock songs, there was so much weird shit. Even as a guy who admittedly adores octave chords, why was every guitar lead just moving octave chords? How in the world did "You make me cum, you make me complete, you make me completely miserable" make it through the process of writing, pre-production, recording, post-production and release?

I think part of it was seeing the music videos and wondering how these very douchey-looking guys with rattail beards in flowy bright suits could have ever been popular. Sometimes the context helps to sand off the edges of something that seems retro in a bad way, but here it just amplified the hokey parts of the band. In hindsight, are they the most late-90s band that exists? I feel like when all the videos from Woodstock '99 went onto Youtube in the late-10s, Lit's set was by far the funniest. Just a band that was out of time as soon as their set ended. Everyone has spiked hair, bowler shirt on the bassist, guitar player as a steel plate pickguard, and then the singer takes off his wifebeater to reveal a pierced nipple and a pelvis tattoo that I'm 80% sure says "STOKED." Corny as that all may seem now, it's all quite earnest, as are the lyrics of "Zip-Lock."

No. Immediate Disqualification Because of Its Involvement with The Big Chill. Oh God. You're Right!

 Had a bit of a strange day yesterday, where I was going through it mentally, but also spent the whole day socializing with people I love. My social battery was blinking red by the time I got home, so I figured that I would put on something that was fun and nostalgic and when I got to High Fidelity in my Raspberry Pi library, it felt like the only choice. Becks didn't really pay attention and I loved reading through the Letterboxd reviews of people who hate the movie. It had been about five years since I'd last seen it and it still felt like a cold glass of water on a hot day. There's like five lines in every scene that make me laugh and watching it is sort of a way for to exorcise the worst parts of my personality from fifteen years ago. One of my all-time faces and, in hindsight, probably the perfect thing to watch when I am sulking in depression even as I'm surrounded by people who are happy to see me.

Figured that I would come back with and an IMU classic and throw some Top 5s at you in honour of the rewatch.

Top 5 Songs of the Summer

5. Three 6 Mafia feat. UGK - "Sippin' on Some Syrup"
4. Power Trip - "Soul Sacrifice"
3. Greg Mendez - "Sunsick"
2. Blue Smiley - "bird"
1. The Tubs - "Round the Bend"

Top 5 Moments of Ballon Velours Football

5. Tipping a corner that would have been headed in
4. The first time Val and I hit the freeze
3. Marcus puffing his cheeks and running a ball out of bounds
2. Felix saying he should slam a beer at halftime after he scored
1. Our lone win that I played in

Top 5 Action Films Seen at the Cinématheque as Part of Action!

5. Lethal Weapon (forthcoming)
4. The Crow
3. Hard Boiled
2. Assault on Precinct 13
1. Mars Express

Top 5 Post-Trade Deadline Blue Jays Moments

5. Nathan Lukes extra inning flyou/OF assist to preserve the lead
4. Vladdy first-inning home run
3. Ernie Clement jumping catch in shallow centre
2. Brendon Little striking out Yordan Alvarez
1. Nathan Lukes extra-inning home run

Top 5 Pods I Look Forward to Listening to While I Make Breakfast

5. Blank Check
4. The Bunt
3. The Wrestler Review
2. Hello and Welcome
1. Gate 14

Top 5 Records for When It's Sunny and I'm Walking on Ontario

5. Terry Reid - S/T
4. Third Eye Blind - S/T
3. Blood Orange - Cupid Deluxe
2. The Tubs - Dead Meat
1. Home Front - Watch It Die

Top 5 Records for When It's Rainy and the Back Door is Open

5. Larry June - Who Coppin
4. Ratboys - Singin' to an Empty Chair
3. The Replacements - Let It Be
2. Feels Like Heaven - Within Dreams
1. Greg Mendez - Beauty Land

The World Had Its Evil Way

 At some point in your adulthood, you realize that leaving certain parts of your youth behind is not only good for you, but necessary. Even better is leaving them behind without making a whole big fuckin' thing about it. Break up your band and don't play a last show. It adds to the mystique. Any attention for a transition is self-interest, right? Do we need to be that self-interested? My inner punk says no.

It is in that vein, that I was happy to abandon IMU. I think the only thing cornier than maintaining a blogspot into middle age would be making a farewell post about it. I would occasionally look at the last post I made and wonder why the hell I was writing and posting that. It feels crazy that the last post is only four years ago, because it feels like it was at least twice that.

Was a return to IMU inevitable? Jawbreaker, the Misfits, and Carry On say yes.* Though I guess what makes my case different is that rather than my absence building an appetite for what it could be life and creating discourse around the event, it just cleared out anyone who ever would have read this blog in the first place. I swear there is no hint of sarcasm when I say "God, that is so comforting."

*Operation Ivy stays undefeated.

I've been in a deep rut writing this summer and at a certain point releasing the "Return to IMU" switch felt like best way to combat that. The only way to actually improve your ability to write is to do it constantly, so rather than bang my head against the same Word doc for the 500th day in a row, I figured that typing bullshit, not worrying if it sounds smart or right, and nobody reading that would make the most sense after all.

A speed run for Timmy lore* since 2022: Pierre died. Jays lost the World Series in extra innings of Game 7 at home. CREW won the raid. Testified in labour court. Changed supervisors. Accomplished some school shit. Hardcore boom is over and sucks now. New Tone sucks now too.

*I genuinely hate the term "lore" and the way everyone uses it. Hate the obsession on lore as the load-bearing beam of all enjoyment of media. And yet, I use it here. Do you see how I debase myself for this blog?

I'll finish by saying that Public Opinion put out a new record today, The Curse of Public Opinion. I really liked their last record, Painted On Smile, but something feels off about the new one. Vocals feel a little to clean and auto-tuned? Maybe that will change with repeated listens. I used to think they sounded of a piece with Drug Church and Militarie Gun, but that doesn't feel as apt with this record. 

After finishing D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (generally good, sometimes felt long, often felt transcendent), I started Kevin Barry's Night Boat to Tangier. Slight Elmore Leonard vibes in the characters, so I'm cautiously optimistic. Maybe I'm just giving it grace because I'm trying to cosplay as Irish through my fiction habits lately.

Was planning to see To Live and Die in LA last night after seeing some friends but ended up just staying with them and having a wonderful night of chopping it up on Aziz's patio while fireworks exploded in the distance. Some would say that friendship is sacred. I would rephrase that as "Man was put on this earth to chill."

Gonna Lose Your Mind

 An update: In April, I had a post where I mentioned reading Joseph Heller Something Happened and how much I was enjoying it. Now that it's mid-September and I'm just inside the final 100 pages of the book, I feel confident that I was absolutely wrong and the book kind of sucks. I thought it was, for lack of a better comparison, Pinkerton, meaning a weirder follow-up to a classic, but it was a lot closer to Green, a later effort that occasionally captures the feeling that hooked you in the first place but has mostly lost the plot.

The book centres around a WASP-y republican businessman in New York and the goal of the book is to demonstrate, entirely through first-person narration, how shitty the dude is and, by extension, how shitty American culture is. But is 530 pages too much? Especially when it's mostly one-note? How long can we listen to him talk? Does devoting that many pages to this lifestyle not validate it?

I was speaking to my friend Val about this last night. In satire, where is the line between competently taking something down and valorizing behaviour through attention? Good satire obviously doesn't do that, but it's a razor-thin line. So, as a satirist, you need to aim insanely high and then hit that almost unattainable peak to succeed. Seems almost impossible!

It also sucks that most people seem to be happy to slurp up shitty base-level satire and then tell you that you "just don't get." How do we stop that? Do I have to resign to the fact that most people's taste is bad? Why can't everyone like good things?

Alone in the City, like a Single Flame

Of all the jokes, ideas, and things that have stuck with me from the 155 podcast, formerly blink-155, the one that I might think about most is the idea of “walking around music.” The old blink episodes were an immediate listen to me and a genuine highlight of the week, as it hit this particular sweet spot for me at the intersection of cultural criticism, cancon, and the pop-punk subculture circa 1992-2015, all filtered through the lens of blink-182, a band that I’ve obsessed over probably more than any other band in history.

Weirdly, I have many more “favourite” bands than blink-182, but they occupied such a huge place in my mind right when I was starting to define my musical taste as a pre-teen that their place in my brain is outsized. I was obsessed, and MuchMusic was giving me content, quickly becoming a figure 8 of influence.

Anyway, this idea of “walking around music” comes from chapter 3 of 155, when they transitioned into having themed months of their podcast, talking about a specific band or genre before moving on to something else the next month. I think the idea first came up during the first edition of Green May (take a wild guess who it was about) while discussing the song “Burnout” from Dookie. The two hosts were at a loss to describe the ethereal, nostalgic feeling that the most impactful music from your youth gives you. In this case, it’s pertaining specifically to the feeling of being a suburban boy listening to 90s pop-punk and eventually settling on “walking around music.” What they meant by this, or what I assume they meant by this, was that listening to the first song on Dookie reminded them of the feeling of walking to places as a teen, fresh with your first experiences of independence, and those memories being scored by that music. For me, All Killer, No Filler and Punk-O-Rama 8 would qualify as walking around music, as I have such specific memories of being on my grade 8 class trip to Ottawa and listening to those CDs on my Walkman while, well, walking around the city. It’s a term for music that strikes you as being unbelievably cool and exciting as a young person, and maybe more importantly, something new to you that you’ve never experienced. 

I should mention that the two hosts of 155 have never specified this reading of the term, and this is me dramatically extrapolating what they’ve said on the show so far (“Man, this is some walking around music.” “Oh fuck yeah dude.”). I also think walking around music can be applied to any era of music in your life once you understand the original context. Does me listening to Everything Sucks by the Descendents and Borders and Boundaries by Less Than Jake during the first month of second year qualify them as walking around music? Forty Hour Train Back to Penn and We Are the Only Friends We Have in third year? In my mind, yes. This is because the vibe of walking around music stays with you. I wasn’t as impressionable as I was as a 12-year-old, but I was equally excited about music.

What spurred the idea of this post was that this past winter, I was listening to the Greet Death album New Hell while I walked to my friends' house in January.* I was going through it school-wise at the time, and the mopey shoegaze of Greet Death was hitting me like nothing else at the time. I would work during the day, feel like a moron, listen to Greet Death because I was sad, feel even sadder because New Hell was hitting such a tender spot in my heart, and then… cook dinner for like two hours. New Hell is a winter album, as the band comes from Michigan and understands how coldness works its way into your being in a way bands from the rest of the States don’t, so trudging through the show to it felt like an enthusiastic handshake. As I crossed Bennett, I was illuminated like St. Paul, and it came to me: Greet Death is walking around music.

*Yes, I thought of this idea eight months ago and am only now writing—an IMU tradition. It may have also been February!

The pieces were all there. It’s a union of an independent music experience you’re having on your headphones vs the communal experience of being at a show, combining with the world around you in a way that makes sense to you at that moment. Am I just saying that walking around music is a historicized experience of finding the perfect soundtrack for something? That seems shallow and doesn’t express the strange, esoteric understanding of what walking around music truly is. It’s like that, but better.

Remember that You'll Always Be Part of a Ska Band

A common theme in my love of New Tone ska is that the releases have slightly disappointed me. I built up Kill Lincoln's Can't Complain, Bad Operation's S/T, and JER's Bothered/Unbothered a crazy amount before they were released, hoping that New Tone's ska-punk classic would come with one of them. Those records all wound up being good (maybe great?), but ultimately my expectations were way too high, though I've also come around on Can't Complain being better than I initially thought.

Bad Time Records put out a fantastic comp last year, The Shape of Ska-Punk to Come, Vol. II* and while most of the tracklist was bands that I was familiar with from the label, the fourth track by Eichlers really surprised me because it featured ska upstroke guitar over emo-trap drums. The vocals were also effected in a Wicca Phase/Lil Peep style. Honestly, it wasn't for me at all, but I was almost glad to see that someone was trying out this combination, because I hadn't heard anyone try it before.

*We've got to stop with the Refused/Ornette Coleman references. It's even worse than "____ is fucking dead."

Similarly I've been fascinated by Eichlers' record My Checkered Future because it presents a completely new take on the genre. Until the last few years, ska had been so stuck in its ways on both ends of the sonic spectrum. Good bands were often super orthodox and focused on trying to play an authentic version of rocksteady and bad bands were goofy Reel Big Fish rip-offs. Worse than there being no bands at that time was that there were almost no bands trying anything new or interesting. Eichlers is as far away from that trend as possible since it's a mix of emo-trap, hyper pop, and ska-punk. The songs are super short, which I always love, and the record is all over the place.

After giving it a listen for the first time and moving on, I saw a video of Eichlers playing live, featuring just the singer performing with a laptop, and it confirmed that it really wasn't for me. I love the idea of this band and the approach that they're taking, but ultimately there's a generational disconnect with some of the influences that I just can't get around. I'm just never gonna like emo-rap or tik-tok and have accepted that. That being the case, I still see weirdo kids making ska and that makes me happy because I was one of them once.

The most obvious parallel that I can think of for this record is the first three Bomb the Music Industry! records, which similarly took ska to places that it hadn't explored before. BtMI! (which I've always much preferred as shorthand for the band vs "Bomb") was the first ska band I heard to use fake drums and instruments the way they did and to me, Eichlers seem like a new version of what BtMI! were doing from 2003-2006. When I was in high school, I was so excited to be around what Bomb the Music Industry! did mostly because of how different it was. The songs were great too and I still like a lot of them, but their innovative things felt important and revolutionary.

So even though I don't like My Checkered Future, no matter how many times I listen to it, I have to respect it for being what it is and trying something new. I don't know man, this seemed a lot more articulate in my mind. 

The Killerman is Killin'

I'm deep into yet another writing of my thesis proposal, so all I have to offer is that I've returned to this music video a lot during the pandemic. I'm not sure why, but it's really comforting to watch it, and it's been reliable as something that shoots good feelings into my brain when school and a worldwide illness start to weigh a little bit. Is it creeping up my list of all-time favourite music videos? Yes!

Making All Our Bones Run Cold

 I've been finding it hard to write lately, so I did what I usually do when that arises and tried to think of a baseball post to write up. Laboured over that for about two weeks, and the end result wasn't quite the "professional" standard I aspire to on the WordPress, so instead it goes up here:

Something I struggle with is the urge to gatekeep being a baseball fan constantly. In my heart of hearts, I don’t want to, and I want to make sure that being a baseball fan in Toronto is fun and welcoming because sports can be such a toxic mess, but every time somebody I know hasn’t been a fan that long says something I find mildly annoying, it drives me up the wall. I understand that this makes me sound like an asshole, but I exclusively direct this attitude towards men if it makes you feel any better.

Most of these fans came on board with the Jays during the 2015 playoff run, which captured the attention of Toronto in a way that no baseball team has done since. Maybe only the 2019 Raptors have done the same thing? I was as excited as I could get about sports during that Jays stretch run, but I also wondered how I would deal with the bandwagon since that was a phenomenon that I hadn’t dealt with yet as a baseball fan. I expected to be holier than thou, much like I am at this moment, but I found it to be a great experience. Ticket prices shot up, but the atmosphere at the park and around the team was fantastic, and there was more energy than ever before. 

Those years of playoff contention proved to be short, though, and it wasn’t long before the team tended back toward its familiar place in the middle of the American League East (somehow, the Orioles shot down to the basement even faster than us?). I found it much harder to deal with these new fans as they navigated the usual routine of the team being mediocre. Fans seemed to live and die with every game the same way they had when the games mattered more, and I wanted to shake people and tell them it was okay to tune out Steve Pearce at-bats.

I wonder if part of me is changing too. I also had a period where I cared too profoundly and dramatically about each game when I was younger and single and didn’t have as much to do, so it might just be a phase that everyone goes through when they’re finding their own identity as a baseball fan. You’re always going to look back to seasons past during the summer, no matter the vibe. 

More and more, I find myself inching closer to my dad as a baseball fan. I used to carry such a massive chip on my shoulder about advanced stats, but now I find it so tedious when they’re brought up on the broadcast. Rather than living and dying with each pitch, I find myself pulling out and looking big picture. It doesn’t matter if Vlad (and Teoscar and Lourdes and Kirk and Chapman) are slumping right now because, to quote my dad quoting Earl Weaver, we do this every fuckin’ day.

Too Good to Be True

 I recently discovered the band Dazy via their collaboration with Militarie Gun, one of my favourite active bands, on the song "Pressure Cooker". The tune is huge, but it has a lot more poppy bounce than your typical MG song and that intrigued me. Looked into Dazy and lo and behold, they, like Militarie Gun, have been on an extended kick of releasing short EPs for the last two years. All of them are collected, along with some new songs, on the comp MAXIMUMBLASTSUPERLOUD, which rocks. Personal favourite cut is "Crowded Mind (Lemon Lime)".

I've always been a big fan of the novel Catch-22, which I predictably checked out because of my high school obsession with the ska band of the same name. As a 32-year-old, and really as a 22-year-old, I can say that the novel is significantly better. After reading Catch-22, I read Heller's last novel Portrait of the Artist, as an Old Man. It has a godawful title and while the book isn't as bad as that might imply, it wasn't far off. That soured me, but I've had Something Happened sitting on my to-read bookshelf for ages and decided to pick it up for the trip to Ontario that I'm currently on. Since I wasn't familiar with most of Heller's other stuff, I wondered if he was a one-hit-wonder, but it doesn't seem that way. Still really funny and irreverent, but in a completely different setting than WWII.

I mentioned the trip in the last paragraph to forecast it being the topic of this paragraph. WRITING. Returning home is always weird. The trip has been the most social that I've been since the beginning of the pandemic, going to my first show, dinners at restaurants, and seeing a ballgame. The social guilt of COVID is and will continue to be there and I always have a voice in my head telling me I should just be staying inside, even though that has killed my brain over the last two years.

We've been in Montréal long enough now that it has become the new home and that coming back to Ontario doesn't carry the same degree of homey-ness that it used to. Speaking English in stores feels weird, though it took about a day to get used to it, and even more jarring is seeing people without masks. That being said, the city that I knew and that I will always deeply love is still right where I left it and I still get around intuitively because it's what I've always done. As my French friend Valentin said, "Connecting with your roots man, there is nothing like it."

Tomorrow I'll be Perfect

 I've recently run into the most problems that I've ever had with grad school. So far, I've felt most comfortable in grad school and it's an environment where I know that I am capable to take on whatever challenges are presented to me. That changed over this past year, when I've had to re-do the proposal of my research project a few times and keep finding that I haven't made any progress through it. It feels like something is wrong or that there's a giant thing that I'm missing, even though I'm doing my work the way I've always done it.

I hated working in the office in the art gallery and held onto the idea of going back to school to do a PhD as the thing to get me through that time. No matter how much of a dick my boss was being, how petty people in the office were being, how disheartening it was to see how the art world actually works, I knew that I would be past it all in about two years and move on to what I actually loved. It felt even better when that was proven right during my first year and change in the program. I blew through my coursework, got to teach a lot, and did some cool extracurriculars. Then, probably partly due to COVID, everything seemed to slow down and work became harder and harder to do. Even though it felt like I was working hard and trying my best to re-frame and re-think things, it would always come out as a different version of the same thing and I would have to start over from the same place.

An unfortunate result of this was that the Flatliners lyric "What do you do when doing what you love gets you nowhere, it gets you nothing"* from their song "July! August! Reno!" was the first thing to pop into my head. I hesitate to identify with a statement from '07 orgcore, but I guess that's where we are baby. I haven't even listened to that song in ages, but the lyric was the first thing I thought of when I asked myself about how to phrase a post about struggling with school. Didn't want to put it in the title, because lord is that dramatic, but it bears inclusion in some form, so here it is.

*Never thought of Cresswell as a particularly strong lyricist and the fact that it was more or less impossible to type out that line in a way that made sense grammatically supports me in that thinking.

The better metaphor for this that I've held onto for the last three-ish months is that I am Dave Stieb, putting all of the work in, toiling through the entire game, only to have the whole project yanked out from underneath me right when I thought I had finished. I guess that the important thing to hang on to in that is that though seeing myself in an under-appreciated pitcher who suffered though defeat after agonizing defeat helps me feel not so useless at the moment, he also got the no-hitter eventually and he's still the only one to do it for us and hopefully that means that a victory is down the road for me too.

 

Graph Paper Guiding the Way

 Hard to describe just how hard orange and green CanCon rock videos that were just concerts hit in 2003.

I always figured that this was just a typical "boys out on the town" song, but it's actually about DnD? Don't know what I thought "Picked up an Elven barwhore" meant when I was 13!

Anecdotes! Anecdotes! Pt. 16

A precursor to the following anecdote is that in the summer of 2009, my friend Erik moved into a house in Leslieville with my friends Chris and Quinn. I basically lived at that house that summer and it was a fun time having our own place to go in the city for the first time. Since it was everyone's first house, everything inside was shitty in an endearing way. Their shelving unit for their DVDs, showing you just how long ago it was, was all lopsided and barely standing and Erik described it saying "Yeah, I got drunk the other night and tried to build it." Being young and just not caring about how things turned out and also thinking that drinking before doing chores was very funny to me.

Later that summer, Pat and I were the first ones to move into our new place in Guelph. We were excited about our new house, which was in a better location and was bigger and nicer than our previous one.* Everyone else in our house hadn't moved up yet and the excitement of the school year hadn't taken hold yet. We just bummed around, picked up a few things for the house, and then hung out at the new house, Fuck Mountain.

*Your first university house always has to suck, right?

Pat had a new desk for his room and we decided that we would put it together together because we had nothing else. We were also through a joint and thought that it would fun to, like Erik, do some menial chores while high. We put music on and started working on different parts of the desk before finally admitting that we were getting tired and wanted to stop about 15 minutes in. I finished the chunk I had going, looked at it, laughed and then took a picture.

I'm sure that both this picture of a crooked shelf and my memory of Erik's crooked shelf aren't that funny to you, but they absolutely kill me. Simpler times, I guess.

Every New Beginning is Another Beginning's End

I'm going to dust off an IMU classic and use a series of YouTube videos to go through a few thoughts.

Riley Hawk put out a new video part this week (last week?) and it's the first stuff I've seen from him since Baker 4. I was surprised to hear Turnstile as the music for it when the video started and will admit that I found it a little hackneyed at first, with how popular GLOW ON has been since its release. Don't get me wrong, the album is good, but for some reason the idea of taking the most hardcore song from the album and putting it to a Baker part was wack to me.

That is, until the end of the song started and the refrain of "I want to thank you for letting me be myself" started to repeat over Riley skating rails. It's hard to not read this editing as an intentional metacommentary on Hawk's family and how awesome it has been to watch him blossom into his own distinct skater that is constantly supported by his dad. Once again, I eat crow.

Someone posting about the "Closing Time" on Twitter sent down a wormhole. I am unable to resist that specific type of 90s power pop, especially when the band is known as a one-hit wonder. I love love love the bridge octave riff. It's the exact type of guitar work that speaks to me. Maybe it's me relating heavily to that sort of failure. Is a one-hit wonder a failure? Is achieving a huge level of success only to be unable to replicate that better than mid-level excellence? I'm not sure.

In any case, I watched a bunch of live videos, because I had never seen a live performance of the song. In this performance of the song on Leno, the band cuts out the extended intro, instead hitting the piano riff right away and only passing once before starting the verse. Dan Wilson's shirt and haircut combo is very bad. He atones for it slightly by playing a red SG instead of the weird sort-of Les Paul thing (why not just play a Les Paul) he has in the song's music video, but then starts this wavy hip dance during the song's first chorus. The shirt and dance combo is some big douche vibes, but "Closing Time" is at the peak of its popularity, so you can't fault the guy for feeling himself.

I also wanted to get a sense of what it was like to see the song performed for a big crowd, so I checked out this video from Pinkpop. Lo and behold, he starts doing the hip sway again! That makes me hate the move! It being a performative thing that he does each time makes it so much worse.

However, I was eventually won over by this video of the band playing the song in their hometown Minneapolis in 2019. The full intro! The same SG! The crowd knowing the words! This time, he waits until the second chorus to hit the shimmy and he got me. Him being old and embracing the fun of the song got me and it made the dance move fun. What can I say?

It Is an Up-at-Dawn, Pride-Swallowing Siege that I Will Never Fully Tell You About, Ok?

My fantasy baseball league has been preparing for our next season of play over the last couple of weeks, which has put me back in touch with a group of friends who I rarely talk to anymore. One of these friends is new to the league, and fantasy baseball in general, and when we assured him that he would do fine and that playing a six-month season of baseball wasn’t as daunting as it seemed, he responded “I figure that if the idiots that I went to high school with can do it, I can.”

His point stands, but it also made me wonder how long is too long to hang onto anger around the social dynamics of high school?

I guess I want to start by saying that the sentiment of my friend’s remark is something that I can relate to. I didn’t have an easy time in high school either and being bullied and relegated to the lowest social class of my high school was something that I carried with me for a while after that time. It profoundly shaped me in both positive (drove me further towards my interests, concretely defined my personality at a relatively early age) and negative (destroyed my confidence and mental health) ways. 

I say this because I too know how it can be powerful to take the anger and resentment you feel towards the popular or shitty kids at your high school and turn it into a personality that works for you. Saying that you’re better than them now makes you feel a lot better and most of the time it’s true. You’re out of an environment where other people have a say in what you’re supposed to like, at least mostly, and it turns out that you were right all along even though no one believed you. The lowness that you once felt is now being equaled by highs that you’ve created yourself.

I think that it’s also embarrassing to hang onto that for too long in your twenties as a big part of your personality. How long can you complain about people being dicks to you ten years ago? There must be an inflection point where your resentment about people starts to outweigh the power that it was providing you and really, if you are still holding things from that long ago, aren’t you just proving them right?

I don’t know that what I said is 100% correct. That original hurt doesn’t ever go away, but I guess I’m just advocating for having a way to deal with it after a while. Or maybe I just find it cringey to hear that sort of thing. That’s all I can offer.