The 2019 I Musical Genius Music Revue

Back again for another year folks. Here is all the stuff that I really enjoyed from this year in music. An insane amount of great stuff came out this year and I think that, more so than any other year in recent memory, it was tough to narrow down what would come on and what wouldn't. It may sound insulting to say that there was a big "middle class" in music this year, stuff that was very good, but not necessarily the best, but I think that speaks to an overall jump in quality across the board, which is a great thing.

As per the last couple of years, I haven't numbered anything. Maybe oso oso would take number 1. I don't know and care and I can't imagine you would.

oso oso - baking in the glow

This was absolutely my most anticipated release this year, as their last album the yunahon mixtape, quickly became one of my all-time favourites. The more tossed-off approach on this one put me off as first, as yunahon was fussed over, but I eventually came to appreciate that as a different side of the band. Some of their very best songs on this one.

field medic - fade into the dawn

Folk music doesn't normally do it for me, as I find it difficult to not read it as incredibly pretentious. field medic gets around that by having honest lyrics about substance abuse and relationships and putting some added production, like fake drums and lo-fi guitars and bass, in just enough places around the acoustic guitar. Though not included on the album, their 2019 single "I Want You So Bad It Hurts" is also one of the best songs of the year.

The Berries - Berryland

Punks all started listening to Neil Young this year and no band did a better job of bringing all the best parts of Crazy Horse into the present than The Berries. Huge vibe on this one. Guitars, guitars, guitars.

Chastity - Home Made Satan

Beautiful shoegaze about killing cops and klansmen? Yeah bro. Most importantly, the album's a tight 10 songs in 26 minutes, getting around the useless vamping that gaze bands sometimes lean on. Tons of hooks and vocals that aren't buried under production.

Skatune Network - Pick It the Fuck Up!

I think a lot about what the future of ska will be like, as a lot of the genre has been stagnating in the sound of the 90s for a long time. This album by Jeremy Hunter, which consists of ska covers of the emo bands on Counter Intuitive Records, is hopefully a sign of interesting and valuable things to come. More genuine earnest stuff like this, less jokey shit in the future. 

Sheer Mag - A Distant Call

On their second record, Sheer Mag tightened everything up and went a little heavier. Though less hyped then the debut, this one works better as a full album. The Mag have their sound completely figured out, so it will be interesting if they continue to put out punk/hardcore/arena rock every couple of years, or decide to make a big a change in how they approach their music.

Woolworm - Awe

Like shoegaze, I think that post-punk is getting to its saturation point and most of the new releases just don't have enough substance to keep me interesting beyond a couple of listens. Woolworm is the exception, as they perfectly balance the effected vocals, big guitars, and mountains of chorus and reverb pedals to produce something that nods to its influences without being a shitty imitation of them.

Wayfarer - Reckless Spring

When I heard Wayfarer play "Fifteen" last year, I knew that this album would be good. Kyle lowered himself to write a merely "normal" album instead a concept record and the results are amazing. Another amazing Wayfarer release from a band that will continue to be slept on because everyone is stupid.

Ancient Shapes - A Flower That Wouldn't Bloom

Re: the question I asked about Sheer Mag. Ancient Shapes bucked the trend of their earlier '77 style punk pastiches by leaning heavier into power pop and glam influences and the result was my favourite record by them. The songs are exactly what they need to be and there's no wasted space or effort. Romano's best work since Modern Pressure.

Blood Orange - Angel's Pulse

I admit that I was much later to the Blood Orange train than others, but this album won me over. Wonderful mix of poppy R&B with occasional forays into other genres. "Gold Teeth" was the song I listened to the most this summer. I'm sucker for Triple 6 features.

White Reaper - You Deserve Love

You Deserve Love doesn't have the same sort of ironic sense of humour that White Reaper's last album did, like piped-in crowd noise to start the album. Instead the album is a cross-section of early 80's rock radio and it works in the best ways. This band's amazing.

Young Thug - So Much Fun

So Much Fun came out while it was still summer in Montreal and it was everything I wanted from a rap record. Perfect to listen to while BBQing on my back deck with a joint.

Fury - Failed Entertainment

The thing that makes this record great is that it balances the newer influences working their way into most rock music (grunge and somehow nu metal) with the exact type of hardcore I love (Snapcase). Fury knows when to hold back with all of that to not make anything corny and then allows it to hit huge when it needs to.

Caught Amongst Ourselves

A quick to post to plug Threadpuller's new EP Negative One.

 

This thing is mostly the work of Tyler Savage, formerly of the excellent bands The Decay and Mold Maker. Tyler is one of my favourite songwriters and I am really excited to see output from him in a new band. Plus, playing in a noisey post-punk thing is great excuse to throw 20 years of gear into one rig!

Think of the Fine Times, Pushing Down the Better Few

Once upon a time I used to think that this song was a lot of corny fun. Damien and I were far enough away from the early 90s when we were 14 that we thought that the video full of 90s fashions and sideways hats was an amazing piece of retro pop culture.

When Brian, Konrad, Pat (and Mark), and I moved into our first house in our second year of university it was a period of transition for all of us. We knew we were being thrust into adulthood and weren't kids anymore, but we also didn't realize that we were still behaving like teenagers for the whole year. Actual responsibilities were still a ways off from us, so we were free to fuck around a lot and (mostly) not worry about it.

Brian and I were attached at the hip that year and did everything together. He had brought his mom's old Ford Windstar, affectionately called "Mama Link" by all of us because of its "LA LINK" license plate, and we drove all over Guelph in it. We were usually pretty high while doing so. Using Brian's ancient iTrip to hook our ipods up to the stereo, we would try to put on the most ridiculous music we could to make each other laugh. I have many memories of us listening to "Unbelievable" while driving at night in a big minivan.

Now I'm able to recognize that "Unbelievable" is really great song and I like it unabashedly. Maybe I always did on some level. It's also nice to think of how good it is now, while remembering the life it used to have with us in 2008.

I Tell Myself

Somewhere in an alternate universe, this post would be about how Greetings and Salutations is the last good Less Than Jake release because it seems to me like the last time that Vinnie was really driving the creative direction of the band.



Instead, it's about how this song has been sticking the side of my head while I think about finishing a giant pile of work. In the past I would have been anxious and stressed about whether or not I would finish everything, and what that would that would mean for my future, but I have better work habits and a better perspective on school now. I know I'll get everything done and I know it will turn out okay at minimum. I'm still stressed and anxious, but I start working earlier and have better ideas about how to organize myself. Only took me like 10 years!

Even though every line of the lyrics doesn't necessary hit perfectly, the whole thing encapsulates me slumming around my office in Zubaz pants and trying to work through some ideas.

Let's Keep It That Way

A strange thing that I often do is try to convince myself that I'm starting to care less about baseball, my favourite sport, which I talk about constantly. This usually happens when I'm feeling burnt out at the end of a disappointing Jays season and, understandably, do follow each game with the same zeal that I do in April. Maybe I feel guilty about not watching every game? On some level, I definitely do think that it is my duty as a fan to give each Teoscar Hernandez at-bat my full attention, which is ludicrous.

These fits of self-inflicted paranoia about my devotion to the sport are always brief and I feel a huge wave of relief once I realize I'm not a piece of shit or, worse, a bad fan.

During the off-season, I try to fill the void left by the World Series ending by consuming baseball in different ways. In general, this means either playing as a fictional shortstop named Tony Balony in MLB The Show 14, which I haven't done much lately, or reading books about baseball.

My love of baseball literature is something I inherited from my dad, who gave me his copy of The Summer Game by Roger Angell to read as a preteen. This then developed into a fascinated with Jim Bouton's Ball Four, Lawrence S. Ritter's The Glory of Their Times, and, doing his nationalistic duty, W.P. Kinsella.

Recently I've had a hard time reading for pleasure since reading for school takes up basically all of my time. After struggling through a D.H. Lawrence book, I decided to read something about baseball to get my reading habits back on track and picked The Iowa Baseball Confederacy off of my shelf. In high school, I did a project on Shoeless Joe well before I saw Field of Dreams, and then read the short story collection The Thrill of the Grass (one of the all-time best book titles) a little later, so I was well-acquainted with the Kinsella oeuvre. I was surprised then to find this book appealing to me much more than his previous work. Already, I'm getting that deep feeling and can tell that this will be my favourite of his and that rush of relief that I am in fact still very invested in baseball washed over me.

"I saw my grandparents only once. When I was about eight my father and I drove to spring training in Florida. I saw Curt Simmons, Robin Roberts, Allie Reynolds, Vinegar Bend Mizell, Yogi Berra, and my grandparents.

They lived in a very small house on a side street in Miami. There was an orange tree in the backyard. The house and my grandparents smelled of Listerine, peppermint, and Absorbine, Jr.

They left Iowa irrevocably behind them when they retired. They never returned for a visit, never invited anyone from Onamata to visit them, including us, I suspect, although my father never said so.

What he did say, on the drive back, as if he was trying to explain something to me but was not exactly sure what, was, "We are haunted by our past, which clings to us like strange, mystical lint. Of the past, the mystery of family is the most beautiful, the saddest, the most inescapable of all. Those to whom we are joined by the ethereal ties of blood are often those about whom we know the least." I think he was talking about much more than my grandparents.

I listened to my father's tales with half an ear. I knew he was obsessed with something no one else cared about. He wrote letters, articles, talked of a book, which he eventually wrote. Complained. I didn't pay half the attention I should have. Children, thinking themselves immortal, assume everyone else is too. He died when I was a few months short of seventeen."

W.P. Kinsella. The Iowa Baseball Confederacy. Don Mills: Totem Books, 1987: 25-26.

Flat on My Face, I See What It Takes

I'm now entering the heavy part of my first semester as a PhD student. So far the semester has been a lot f work, but relatively smooth sailing. There have been stressful periods, but my work habits have improved significantly since I was an undergrad student and I've gotten better at planning out my work and (mostly) getting going on things ahead of time.

Now that the major work is starting to come to a head though, it feels like I'm running up against the limits of that. It always feels like there's more work to do than there is time to do it. I know that's not the case, because it will get done one way or another, but it does feel that way. There's some huge dark spectre of yet-to-be-completed academic standing behind me and I'm always looking out at nothing in front of me, trying to acknowledge it without turning around.

It's hard to talk about how much work I have to do without sounding like an entitled shit. "Oh, a PhD student has stressful deadlines? Not shit." I know that, but it feels like there's a stress valve on the side of my neck that needs to be released, or else my hair will start falling out.

The school tells us all to not be too hard on ourselves, to think of mental health strategies, and to take breaks from work so we don't overwork ourselves. But when you take a break, all the work you weren't doing still is sitting there? How do finish all the work that's assigned and take breaks to stay sane when there's already more work assigned than you can finish?

It's starting to feel like old times again, where I'm laughing at the insurmountable mountain of writing and research I have to do and getting pissed at myself for not being able to climb it. When I look back to writing all morning in the Guelph library to finish something due that afternoon, or staying up all night in my office, I think about them fondly, but boy did they ever feel like shit at the time. Maybe I'm subconsciously addicted to this feeling, and that's why I keep doing it.

Trying hard to remember that I always find a way to get things done and they'll turn out okay. Hard to think that way now though.

I Just Wanna See You Smile

Following Friday's extremely earnest and sentimental post, I thought I would keep it simple and give you some music recs for a rainy Sunday in Montreal.



Back when Beat Noir had just put out Ecotone, we played a flurry of shows in support of the release, including a particularly good one in Toronto to a packed house with bands from Ontario. We were getting a good response to the album and were feeling ourselves. The morning after that show, Kyle sent us Sleep Through to the Light way before it came out and we were all struck by how much better it was than what we had just done. Wayfarer's been one of the best emo bands in the world since Our Fathers and I'm not sure why more people haven't taken notice. While most of the bands from the Southern Ontario punk scene of the 10's have broken up, like The Decay, Orphan Choir, and !ATTENTION!, Wayfarer has stuck around and continued to put out music that grows on what preceded it. This record's fucking amazing.



The World's Best American Band was one of my favourite releases of 2017 and has stayed in pretty consistent rotation since then. Given how much I enjoyed that record, I was predictably eager to check out White Reaper's new album You Deserve Love when it came out last week. They dial down the performative stadium rock irony a little bit ( :'( ), while staying devoted to giving you a cross section of early 80's FM radio rock. Wonderful stuff and a for sure presence on the end of the year list.



I went and saw Ancient Shapes in Montreal last week. Absolutely loved the S/T debut, but TBH didn't invest as much time in the follow up, Silent Rave. I was shocked and excited at the show when the newer cuts they played tended more towards a power-pop (as much as AS could get more power pop) and lo-fi glam direction than the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants catchy punk of the first two records. Huge choruses all around and for sure my favourite Ancient Shapes release and favourite Romano release since Modern Pressure.

Also on that show were Teenanger, who I had never checked out before. They were great!

An Honest Answer For All of Them

Earlier this month, I was browsing I, Musical Genius, as I sometimes do when I'm bored. While looking at the index on the right side of the screen, I noticed the "2009" near the bottom and realized the 10th anniversary of this blog had come and passed earlier this year without me recognizing it.

Happy 10th birthday I, Musical Genius!

This is already the most navel gazing-est of all websites, but you'll have to allow me revel in it in this case. It's a big occasion!

Even though there are posts labelled as being from 2008 on this site, those are actually from before this blog started. I used to post blogs on MySpace (dating myself badly on that one), and I imported those when I started IMU because I thought they were good longform pieces and I wanted to flesh out the content a bit and give people something to check out when they came. That's very funny in hindsight, because boy oh boy was I very bad at writing and editing at that time.

I started IMU on March 8th, 2009 for a couple of reasons. As I said, I used to post blogs on Myspace, but people were moving away from that platform and there wasn't nearly the same level of engagement. I sometimes posted blogs on Facebook, but most people on that site focused on simpler social interaction. Realistically, most important factor was that I had gotten dumped for the first time in January of that year and I was having a difficult time coming to terms with that.

A fewer of my newer punk friends had blogspots, so I decided to shift over here and start this site as a new project for myself. Being the sheltered suburban teen that I was, getting dumped seemed like the hardest thing in the world to go through at the time and that difficulty was bleeding into other areas of my life. I was struggling at pretty much everything and had a subterranean sense of self-worth. Of course, given that I was emotionally fragile and loved ska, the name had to come from an ASOB deep cut. I hoped that through starting the blog, I could channel all the things I was feeling into something that was creative in some way.

I think that comes across in the early posts of this blog. They are truly bad and embarrassing, and many of them are just me talking about how important cheesy pop-punk breakup songs are to me. That's okay though! The site served its purpose!

I hesitate to say something like "IMU saved me!" because that's dumb and saccharine and not true. I think what's closer to the case is that IMU  has always been a reflection of my life at the time. This is why I've never deleted any of the cringey posts from the beginning of the site (or the cringey posts from much later as well). I don't think it's bad to acknowledge who you used to be and look back at how you've changed. If anything, you should be glad that you've changed over a decade, because if you haven't, you for sure suck ass.

As I matured and learned more about myself, who I was a person and what that meant, that started to come through in the posts. Gradually I moved away from short sentences accompanying videos to longer entries with a central idea. I definitely got much better at writing and developed a voice somewhere along the way.

I used to hope that my audience would keep growing and that I'd have this big community around the blog. Not so much that I could monetize it or anything like that, but so I could interact with people who read it and talk about stuff. I hoped that people would drop into the comments and dialogues would start. I guess I've always been sort of desperate for that sort online community, but I never made much of an effort or did a good job in fostering that around IMU.

That's okay though. At this point, IMU is basically just for me. And Matt and Rebecca. And you random lurkers, who I know come here sometimes.

How I've thought of this blog has changed a lot over its existence. I feel like I used to think of it as a music site, where people could discover new stuff thanks to my ~excellent taste~ (this meant generic pop-punk bands from Florida). Shockingly, that did not take off. These days, I like to think of it as an online zine. Most people probably find it closer to a diary. I guess it's somewhere in between those two things.

It's hard to explain why, but I'm extremely proud of I, Musical Genius. I think a huge part of it is that it's something I've stuck to for more than a decade. Many friends have started online projects that they're "throwing themselves fully into" and then given up shortly thereafter. That's totally okay, as keeping up with personal projects while having to navigate your life and your job or school or anything else is hard, but that's exactly why I'm proud. This site is just writing. There's no filler that's just me re-posting photos that someone else took or sharing a meme with no comment. I've sat down and written things that I'm thinking for ten years and inside of me, that feels commendable.

Maybe Blogger will get deleted one day. If and when that happens, I don't know what I'll do. But for the moment, IMU is still here and is more less a digital reflection of my existence and everything I've done.

In the early days of this blog, I used to end every post with lyrics from a song that I thought captured the ethos of the entry and I remember one of those quotes coming from "Faction" by Less Than Jake, the last song on Borders and Boundaries. In wrapping up a toasting of this project, there wouldn't be anything more appropriate than to end with an introspective pop-punk song about sticking to your ideals from the band who stuck with me so closely along the way.

Strike a match folks.

Leads to Somewhere I Don't Know

Bro, shirtless Vinnie with star tattoos, counting in "Gainesville Rock City" with a dart is my everything.

Focused Vision, a Life of Your Own and It's Worth Living

I promised a playlist on Monday last week and am posting it today. Never say Timmy doesn't love you.

Some real homesickness is starting to set in over here. It was easy to not miss Toronto when it was bright and sunny in the summer, and we were regularly going back. Now that some of my yearly traditions that were tied to Toronto, like my annual baseball game with my mom or Thanksgiving, are starting to come around, I'm feeling a lot more aware of the distance between my friends and family and I.

Boo school.

Boo rain.

Boo watching former Blue Jays succeed on playoff teams.

School is starting to ramp up, and while I'm doing a decent job of balancing my work (and do need to remind myself of that), it feels like I'm running through a restaurant with a tray of filled water glasses. One of them has to spill soon, right?

To do a very "me" thing and use a horribly over-used cliche, this is all a marathon and not a sprint. I can't rush through work hoping that there won't be more waiting for me next week, because that will never happen. What's more important to diligently wade through things, trying somehow to pick out ideas and books that relate to my research when they come up, and hope somehow that I'm still standing in December.