Old Irish

 Becks and I made good progress packing and managed to leave the apartment about five minutes after we had planned to. Normally, we're happy to participate in the fantasy that we'll actually leave on time, both secretly knowing that a 10 AM time of departure really means leaving at 11. Val and Vic were ready to go, and my choice to put the cargo box on the roof was vindicated when the trunk filled up. Val and I had been listening to trip-hop while working lately, and I put on Without a Trace by 16 Underground as we drove away from their apartment. When the EP ended about 15 minutes later, I asked for the next album, and Val vindicated me by saying, "I don't know, I like this trip-hop vibe." Becks chose Deadringer by RJD2, but said they wanted to change it after one song. I put on Twice Removed by Sloan instead.

We stopped at a McDonald's in Blainville for lunch, and Val, Becks, and I all teased ourselves for getting, and loving, it despite BDS. The menu had dirty sodas, which I guess means that trend will die in under three months. I think that the 15 is my least favourite highway in Quebec. Almost as soon as we turned off the 15 for a rural road, Val chose to put on Rainmaker by Last Days of April. I really dragged the lake of second-wave emo while I was at the height of my fourth-wave emo phase, but I think it's a fun quirk that I can still find things that are good from the era that I have no idea about. Since Last Days of April are Swedish, I'll also chalk that up to Val having a European perspective on punk, which in turn shows the value of meeting new people and expanding your worldview.

We got to the cottage about five minutes after Anna and Dave, and it was tiny and cute. I was giddy and couldn't wait for the weekend to start. They have a solarium in the back, and Val and I immediately had visions of smoking a joint there later. We sat around and talked while Dave put up string lights around the interior roof. I took the acoustic off the wall and started to lightly play. I used to avoid playing guitar around people like the plague, for fear of being corny, but I am trying to accept that most people like it. When I think back to living at Shanley, Mark, Duff, and I always had a guitar in the living room upstairs and it was something we passively did around each other at all times. Maybe it's silly to hide a pleasure like that from others, but I think it's also a sign of intimacy when you do it.

We went for a walk around the lake and looked at the other cottages. One property had made a path lined with orange cones and children's toys. I'm not sure if they meant it to evoke The Blair Witch Project but it kinda did. All the cottages were delightfully quirky in their architecture compared to the McMansion vibe you get in most of Muskoka and Kawarthas. What is the English word for a big rock? What qualifies as a boulder? Would you ever have your house number aligned vertically?

When we got back, we started to build a fire outside. I smoked my first dart of the weekend while we stood and blew on the fire. Anna brought out beers and chairs for everyone and we were all happy that they had bought Cracked Canoe. Each new log on the fire brought a new discussion. It got cold when the sun went down, and I regretted only bringing a windbreaker to wear over my hoodie. Val, Vic, and Becks all light smokes, and I decided that was a good time for my second. I asked if Becks would light theirs off the fire, but they just used the briquette. I lit mine off it instead. Crouched down to get closer to the fire and warm my hands. Turned around to warm my back. Eventually said I was going in and everyone followed for we could start making pizzas. 

Dave and Anna worked on the pizzas while the rest of us sat in the living room. Felt good to warm up and be among friends. We devoured the pizzas. I was excited for everyone to try Matt's hot sauces that I had brought. Becks always teases me about bringing my bluetooth speakers on trips, but I love to be the person who facilitates music on a trip. As we got ready to leave earlier in the day, I brought our old iPod Nano just in case we didn't have cell reception. That turned out to be my best idea of the weekend, since it worked with the speakers. We listened to Neil Young, the Cure, the Cars, Desmond Dekker, Nas, and Eddy Grant while we slowly ate and drank red wine over the course of a few hours. Anna expressed a desire to play Clue, since it was her favourite game as a child, but we worried we were too tired for it. Instead, we played Taboo and Dave, Val, and I went to the solarium to make good on Val and I's plan from earlier. You could see Val get sharper as the game went on and the joint wore off. What a joy it is to spend time with people you love. 

Went to bed and slept terribly. Woke up to piss, moved down from my single bed to another single bed with Becks and despite being slightly cramped, the extra three hours of sleep compensated for the first four. Our room was now cold from the door being closed and the radiating heat of the fireplace not making its way through. I second-guessed my expressed interest in a morning swim in the frigid lake, but I immediately changed my mind when I went outside and the autumnal morning sun hit my face. Quick dip and a few strokes out and back to the dock. Cold, but then adrenaline hit about 10 seconds after getting out of the water. Felt wonderful. 

Val and Vic made French toast, scrambled eggs, bacon, and fried halloumi to go with our coffee, orange juice and kombucha they had made that week. We ate at a picnic table outside, and though it was cold, and the cold cooled down our food almost immediately, it was wonderful. Val rolled me a cig, and we sat on a huge rock right beside the water, talking. Could feel tension dissolving in me. 

We slowly packed and got ready to go. I thanked Anna and we hugged tightly. I've only seen her three times since she moved back. We took the scenic route back and it paid dividends immediately. I put on Who Coppin by Larry June and Becks asked if it was because he just put out an album with Posty. I realized I had forgotten to lock the cargo box and take the keys out of it, but I guess the wind pushed the lid down anyway. We pulled over, locked it, threw the keys in the glove box, and laughed about it. Vic put on Heroine by Wildcookie. I had been teasing her about having to choose something to put on during the trip, but she made a great choice. The drive was easy.

When we got back, Val and Vic insisted that they pay us for gas, but instead we just took six of their leftover eggs. That was more fun anyways.

All the Difference is Gone

I went through a bit of a Ceremony trip this week. Since the band now has seven records out, spanning 20 years, the band's place in punk subculture, and really in millennial culture as a whole, feels clearer to me. My friends wearing only black and white, HOAX and Iron Lung shirts, and Vans authentics with no socks felt normal at the time, but I can now recognize that it was indicative of the specific hardcore subculture that manifested in Southern Ontario from like 2006-2016. Ceremony was a huge part of that subculture and an omnipresent band, but TBH it took me a while to come around, and I think that my relationship with the band is different than the norm, or at least the norm as I observed it in the scene I was a part of. There's probably something to that about discovering music pre-algorithm, downloading records on your own, and having more autonomy during the iPod age. 

In any case, I felt unable to write a longer discursive post about Ceremony, so here are thoughts on them, organized by their releases.

Violence Violence

In the early days of blogging on here, a bunch of friends posted an early meme that was a picture of Ceremony singer Ross Farrar with two bottles of Sprite photoshopped over his hands and the caption "MY HANDS ARE MADE OF SPRITE." I didn't know that was a Ceremony reference at the time, but I knew there was something bigger going on in hardcore that I wasn't hip to yet because I was listening to Bane and Grave Maker. In hindsight, Ceremony was bigger and more popular than both those bands, but I felt like a poseur at the time.

Later, when I was living in Kitchener and playing in Beat Noir, most of the scene there was in power violence and playing in sloppy noise/hardcore bands. The impression I got was that they all held Ceremony's first record up as a classic of P/V, but lamented the direction they took after (the big homie James once posted a Facebook status that read "Man, Ceremony really fell off after Violence Violence), which is a funny point of view to think about now.

Still Nothing Moves You

When I finally got around to listening to Ceremony in like 2010, Still Nothing Moves You was the record that served as my introduction to the band, but I couldn't tell you why. I think that some haters were in my ear telling me that despite Rohnert Park catapulting the band forward in popularity, it was a dumb record, and the harder SNMY was the place to start. For a time, I said this was my favourite record by the band, which I guess had some benefit as a deep-cut pick that most people don't care about. I have a specific memory of listening to the opening bass riff of "Dead Moon California" in my bedroom in the Dublin House in Guelph, and though there isn't much more to the memory than that, I think that moments of art imprinting in the way you remember your life are worth something. Time, place, and sounds.

Rohnert Park

As much as the release of Rohnert Park was a 'moment' in hardcore punk, it bizarrely felt like my friends didn't talk about it that much. Sometimes you are in the eye of the storm, and you don't feel everything rushing around you. Or maybe I was on the outside. Still, while hanging out with Tanner, my friend who figures the most into my relationship with Ceremony, I got to his house, and he enthusiastically said "Man, listening to Rohnert Park!" About four years later, everyone started admitting that "Sick" was the band's defining song.

Zoo

The album I've listened to the least and that I think about the least, but I can give you another Tanner anecdote and say that he said it sounded like Nirvana after it came out.

The L-Shaped Man

Probably my favourite Ceremony album, as I listened to it a lot during a summer that I spent by myself in Guelph in 2015. That was the only time I've lived alone and The L-Shaped Man is one of the records I associate with that experience. On a weekend in the city, I went to go see Ceremony with Becks at the Garrison. Pity Sex opened, who we were most excited to see, and it was the only time I got to see them. Tony Molina was supposed to open, before I became obsessed with his music, but couldn't make it over the border. Becks had just moved to Toronto after finishing their undergrad and we took the Dundas streetcar and then walked back to their Kensington apartment through downtown. That was nice.

Though I was a confused person at that time, when I listen to this record now, and think about that phase of my life, everything makes a lot more sense. Kind of like how Ceremony makes a lot more sense.

In the Spirit World Now

Duff hated Ceremony for a long time because they were a band that everyone else liked. When The L-Shaped Man came out and people derided it as their worst album yet, he said that while everyone else wished that band would go back to the Rohnert Park sound, he actually wished they would lean more into post-punk. They did and, I believe, he then said that this was the first album of theirs that he liked.

Tell Me Your Dream

Really wish I had something incisive to say about the new record, but I've listened to it a few times and it didn't make a huge impression on me . Not that I think it's bad or that I have a hot take about where it sits in relation to their other records, but I just don't know. It did spur me to write this whole thing out, so perhaps there is something to this record in terms of the band reflecting on their career. 

I'll end by saying that I really like the new Cold Gawd EP, Glory2 and that this is one of my favourite songs of the year.

Remember Me Now, Things Always Change

 A question that I've often asked friends is if there is a band whose logo they would get tattooed on their body. Not a tattoo of the band, like lyrics or a design related to album artwork, which would obviously be tied to your personal and individual relationship with a piece of art, but literally just getting the logo of a band tatted. I feel like that dramatically reduces the field of bands that would get chosen, because you, as a fan, get less say about what you would put on you. Lord knows I loved Less Than Jake for long enough to consider getting a tattoo of the band, but would I get their script logo or the Evo Kid? Both suck.

I feel like this issue isn't the same for non-punks, let alone non-music nerds. I know lots of people get classic rock and rap tattoos, but I think that getting a straight-up band logo put on you is more about you aligning yourself with the band's ideals and message for a punk than it is expressing your love for their music. I guess, writing all this out now, that same is true for metalheads, though I just think that's less cool because metal bands are, broadly, dumber and have a less radical worldview to express. Duff told me he would consider the Hüsker Dü logo (great choice), I know a guy with the Bad Religion crossbuster on his elbow, and the Black Flag bars are ubiquitous.

For me? I've long said Operation Ivy is the only logo I would get tattooed, though I think getting that in my late-30s zaps a lot of the youthful optimism and naivety that a band logo suggests. Still, I listened to Energy the other day and singing along to "Jaded" still felt the same and evoked the same feelings as it did when I was a teenager. For the moment, I'm happy to hold that feeling and power inside of me and draw upon it when it feels important.

I've been on a big Bouncing Souls kick for the last week, alternating between the albums I really like, How I Spent My Vacation and Gold Record, and a playlist of deep cuts I made called "Hold Onto 2 What U Got." I feel like orgcore is definitively dead now and as I listen to the Souls I feel like it's obvious that they were a bigger influence on that subgenre than they ever got credit for. Bands always cited Jawbreaker or Dillinger Four as their touchpoints, but those two bands were idiosyncratic and political in ways that their imitators never were. Listening to later Souls stuff, like "Lean on Sheena" and "Ghosts on the Boardwalk" it's obvious that 1) the simple major chord progression with a high single note lead and belted chorus was exactly what the Menzingers made a career off of and 2) the Souls even did it way better than the youngs bands in the late 10s. 

*One night Brian and Pat were on shrooms and had a transcendental experience watching this video.

I thought about saying that the Souls incorporating a Springsteen approach to songwriting later in their career was an unbelievable pivot in sound, but when you listen to their great early songs, like "Kate is Great" and "Say Anything," there's such a wonderful sensitive and earnest point of view expressed in the songs. Greg Antonito is able to walk the tightrope while writing about relationships good and bad in which he invites you into an episode of his life rather than trying to vent frustrations about a breakup. This aspect of the band might have gotten emphasized more as they turned more anthemic and melodic in the 00s, but it was always there. I guess instead I would say that the little bit of hardcore and skin culture that's incorporated into the band is actually the special something. Terminally underrated band and grateful to have seen them many times over the years.

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."