Cobra Noir

Whenever I am having trouble thinking of something worthwhile to write, I go to one of two wells. 1) An anecdote I still think about. 2) A draft on my blogger dashboard. This happens to be both.

Since the age of 12, the only thing I've thought about has been being in a band. First came the daydreams of me playing Urethra Chronicles II-style pranks with my friends, then came the red Squire P-Bass starter pack, then came learning "Smells Like Teen Spirit". Then the Chinese Fingertraps, then the Pragmatics. I had a gap in bands where the desire to play was stronger than ever, until Mark asked me to join the "new" version of Beat Noir. We played together for a couple of years and it was really fun until it wasn't.

I still think about Beat Noir a fair amount. I try to be careful to not veer into embarrassing wistful nostalgia about playing in an unsuccessful punk band for five years, but at the same time the band was a big part of my life and it's hard to not think about it. I remember a friend of Colin's reminiscing on their old hardcore band and talking about it like they were paradigm-shifting. I don't want to be that. I'm aware that we were just a fairly run-of-the-mill band and that's okay.

Along the way, we had a couple of experiences that I think are part of a larger, shared experience of "being in a band". There's the corny, well-worn examples of sitting together and getting the first copies of your first album or getting your first van, but I think it's the shittier times that do more to bond you to your bandmates and others you meet. Those shit circumstances are also a lot funnier in hindsight and more entertaining to others, even if it doesn't seem that way when it's happening.

With all this being said, I'm going to dive into a story from Beat Noir. I don't mean to glamorize our existence or try to make it sound like we were super cool. Just the opposite, we were pretty pathetic most of the time and it was amazing how much money we threw away in this endeavor. I think most musicians will agree that being in a band is frustrating most of the time 

When Duff and I talk about the band, the consensus worst time we ever had in it was a show we played in Hamilton.

During one summer, we were particularly hard up for shows. Our first album was almost a year old and we were finding that it was getting hard to convince people to listen to us and even harder to find good shows to play. We had played with a couple of great bands around the release of Ecotone, but that pool dried up quickly and all of a sudden we were playing parties in Burlington. People always preach that you "just need to keep grinding", but that's hard you're not getting paid and a crowd of people are even giving you the "standing about 10 feet away from the stage" courtesy. Out of everyone in the band, I leaned most towards "I'll play anywhere", but that has its limits too.

A friend of ours told us that a friend of theirs was putting together a show in Hamilton with the band Brutal Youth, who we came up with in Kitchener and who we liked a lot and two others, Dry Socket and Dirty Kills. On top of that, the show was at The Doors Pub, which is a great rock bar where we had played one of our best shows earlier in the year. Thinking that this would be a good way to interrupt our run of terrible shows, I convinced the rest of the guys to go along with it. Then Brutal Youth dropped off the show. We in a shitty position where we all didn't want to play the show anymore, since the only band we liked and knew wasn't doing it anymore, but were also desperate to play and didn't want to look like we were unreliable. We decided we would stick with it, just because. It was at The Doors, so even if it was a shit show, it would be fine.

On the way to the venue, we stopped to get food. Colin brought a pack of cigarillos and for some reason he, Mark, and I smoked one on the way to a burrito place. It was grape flavour.

We got to the venue about a half hour before doors and were surprised to find that the only people there were the other opener, Dry Socket. We weren't familiar with the band, but were happy to find out that it was made up of acquaintances and friends-of-friends. They said that the promoter hadn't been at the venue at all and nobody at the venue knew what was going on. Both of us talked about giving up on the show and bailing, but ultimately decided that we would just both play and see what happened. While I figured that the show would turn out fine, I also wasn't surprised to see something stupid like this happen.

While we were loading our gear in, my stomach started to feel upset. I laid my bass down in the back room of The Doors (it has a pool table, a full bookcase, a high-back chair, and an Ozzy Osbourne poster) and then rushed downstairs to the washroom. The washroom walls were covered with old Marvel comics covers from floor to ceiling. I had the worst diarrhea that I've ever had in my life. Liquid was streaming out of me. The guy who made my burrito must have cooked the meat on a radiator it was so bad. I eventually had to go back down a couple of other times to fully clear myself out.

Just as Dry Socket were set up and were getting ready to start, Dirty Kills and the promoter, who was friend of theirs, showed up. To my immense surprise, the promoter who decided to go incognito and not show up until after doors was a crusty. Predictably, pretty much no one had come to the show. The rest of the band and I were incensed that this promoter was being so lazy about the show and the fact that it was the capper on a terrible summer as a band was the cherry on the sundae. We decided that we would finish our set and then get the fuck out of Hamilton. Out of solidarity, we all made sure to watch Dry Socket's set at the front.

Once they finished, we went and started to bring our gear to the front of the venue when the promoter stopped us halfway and told us that we would be headlining instead. Great. Plans of heading home early were dashed and we would be stuck watching Dirty Kills to boot. Why wait until right before we thought we were playing to tell us?

Mark was over it all and went to use our drink tickets downstairs. Duff and Colin were both straight edge and I didn't feel like drinking because I was mad and my stomach was upset, so Mark got the lot of them.

It all was a very defeating feeling. We were playing a show we didn't want to play to no one and most likely wouldn't be getting paid for it. It wasn't fun to play shows like this. All of us were frustrated and having a bad time. We spent a lot of time loading up and driving to the show and our van was gas guzzler, so we were essentially paying to play it. It was the exact opposite of the way you hope a show goes. And on top of all that I had bad diarrhea.

After showing up like two hours late and changing our set time at the last minute, the promoter hung out in the back of the venue drinking with her friends for the entire show. We were steaming mad and were still entertaining the thought of bailing on the show and just driving home. A couple of us said "I'm down if you are", but we had already driven all the way to Hamilton and figured that we would try to treat it like a band practice in front of 3 people. The four of us were over it and decided that our silly petty way to get back at the promoter would be to play for as long as possible.

A funny, self-defeating thing about Beat Noir was that we always played our best when we were mad. More often than not, this was because we were stuck on a bad show. We'd be so pissed that we were stuck on a bad show doing nothing for ourselves as a band and that, more often than not, we had driven out of town to the show, that the anger would translate into us playing tightly. We would end end up playing great sets on bad shows and sloppier sets on good shows. We were bad at being a band.

We decided to play every song off of our LP that we could play live. We also threw in an older song from our truly terrible EP. Halfway through the set one of us, I can't remember who, suggested that we play a cover of "The Good in Everyone" by Sloan, which we had played live regularly for about a year, but hadn't practiced in about as long. We pulled it off well. Spontaneously whipping an old cover out without practicing it felt like the coolest thing we had done as a band.

"Well, I played that set drunk as fuck." Mark said.

As soon as we finished we tore down and loaded out as quickly as possible. At bare minimum, it was August and warm out. Loading out your gear in the winter is one of the least fun things about being in a band, so I'll never complain about getting roll amps down the sidewalk instead of the snow. The Doors Pub is at the top of Hess Street in Hamilton, which is most of the city's student bars are. Since it was warm out and late, there were many people out drinking. While the four of us stopped to take stock of everything and make sure that we hadn't forgotten anything, three 30-ish drunk bros who looked like they spent a lot of time in Barrie came up to talk to me.

They asked me if the four of us were the band that had just played upstairs, as they had been outside on the patio and heard our surely muffled set from there. They complimented us and said that I in particular was talented. They were drunk and obnoxious and looked like they hung out in Barrie a lot. One of them told me that he sang and played guitar in a band and asked if I like Avenged Sevenfold. He also told me that one day he was going to steal me away from my band to play in his band. He asked what our name was.

"Beat Noir."

He smacked his forehead, smirked and half-turned away.

"You won't believe this." one of his friends said. They were all very excited to tell me.

"What?"

"One of our songs is called 'Cobra Noir'."

This was the point in my night when I crossed the Rubicon and the night became so dumb and annoying that it was funny to me. I had nothing left to do but laugh. All we needed now was the van to break down on us.

I told the bros that we had we to finish loading our gear and get going, went back to the guys and told them what had just happened. They were all at a similar point in their evening to me.

I asked everyone else if we should go and ask the promoter for money. Mark and Colin didn't care and weren't going to do it and I was at a point where I didn't care what happened, so I said I would do it and Duff said he'd come with me.

I asked the promoter if she could give us anything for gas and she said "Sorry, all the door money is going to the touring band." That pissed me off a lot. I had a lot of things that I wanted to say. How is it fair that we drive almost as far as the touring band and don't get anything? How is it fair that there's barely any door money because you did a shit job as a promoter? Don't you have any responsibility in this scenario? Why do you get to spend money drinking at the show instead of saving that for us? Even $10 would have been appreciated. The way that bands are often expected to just play for nothing because it's the "punk" thing to do is stupid. It's really just you taking advantage of us. As a promoter, you should be prepared to pay the bands that are playing your show. If you are uncomfortable being forced to draw a crowd in order to ensure you'll make out okay financially on the gig, don't be a promoter.

I didn't say any of those things. Instead, I rolled my eyes, exhaled and stormed off. I said "Thanks for nothing" as I walked away, but I'm unsure if she heard it or not.

It was a less than fun drive home. I sat shotgun while Duff drove, with Colin and Mark both passed out in the row behind us. This was our usual set up on the way home. Duff put on You Are Beneath Me by End of a Year. The intro felt great to listen to. We stopped at a gas station about halfway home so that Mark could rock a piss.

While Mark and Colin were inside, Duff confessed that he didn't want to play shows like this anymore. He would rather play no shows than play shows like this, I agreed. For a second it felt like Duff was starting the "We Shouldn't Be a Band Anymore" conversation. He assured me that he still wanted to play together, but we would have to take a different approach to things.

You couldn't fault him for thinking that way.

Don't Want to Lose What All Those Words Meant

The summer of 2015 was the last time that Beat Noir played shows regularly. During that summer, I bought a disposable camera with the intention of continuing that trend for the foreseeable future. I kind of always considered myself the archivist of the band and tried to make sure that I would have a lot of stuff to remember each thing we did.

I recently got these pictures developed and my friend Erik posted a few recently as well. I figured that posting a few of them here will serve as a proper memorial to one of my favourite things ever and putting film pictures on a blogspot will also be the strongest pledge I can make to my dedication to dead media.

Beat Noir Forever

As a child, rock music took hold on me early on. This quickly turned into me getting into your typical gateway punk bands, which quickly led to Paul, Damien, and I discussing how we needed to start a band. It was decided that I would play bass, because both Paul and Damien already played guitar. I got a Squier P-Bass for my birthday in grade 8 and after that, being in a band became the #1 priority in my mind.

I immediately latched on to the cliché adolescent dream of playing in band. I played in a few bands in high school, but none ever lasted very long. Also, they were all ska bands. I saw these bands as first steps in the following process, which dominated my thoughts all day through high school and university:

Start band > Write good songs with band > Play shows with band > Put out a “record”!

The last item on that timeline seemed like the most important thing I could do. Having a tangible, real record, which I could hold up and say “This is my record! I wrote this and made it! It is a product of me, and you can listen to it and consume it!” Putting out a full-length record seemed like an extremely noble thing to do. Part of that is suburban, male adolescent naivety, but part of it is also extremely true. Making art is hard. Putting your art out for people to hear, see, experience, and criticize is also hard. Beat Noir was my art.

I say this because Beat Noir decided to stop being a band last Friday.

It sucks, but it’s also something I’ve kind of seen coming for a little while, which lessened the blow a little bit. Being in Beat Noir has been one of the longer relationships in my life, so I feel like I need to say something about it and eulogize what has been one of the best and most fulfilling parts of my life.

After thinking non-stop about how badly I needed to be in a band through university (to the point that I romanticized my 12th grade trad band ska constantly), I joined Beat Noir right around the time I finished my Bachelor’s at Guelph in 2012. I had known Mark, Scott, and Duff for a few years, but had gotten especially close to Mark after he and I went to a music festival in North Carolina together. Mark had floated the idea out to me a few times, but I remember the moment I joined the band well:

I was in Hamilton to see Snake Charmer play a basement show there. My phone vibrated and I found a text message from Mark waiting for me asking if I would like to join Beat Noir. I, of course, gave an enthusiastic yes and then said to everyone around me “I think I just joined a band?!”

That summer I was living in Guelph and Beat Noir got busy fast working on new songs. We hashed our way through the skeletons of 14 songs, with the thought that four would be for an EP and ten for an album. Those became Permanently and Ecotone.

Beat Noir came around at a time in my life when I needed it most. Though I had just finished university, I didn’t have any real plans about what I was going to or could do. I was living in Guelph by myself for the summer. It was the first time I had lived on my own and I felt extremely isolated in the city. Then my lease ended and I moved back to Scarborough. I was going through a rough spot mentally where I didn’t know what I was doing, what I should be doing, or how I was going to stop feeling bad. Beat Noir was something that I was doing though.

At a time in my life when I was not doing much of anything, I could say “Beat Noir is doing ‘this’.” instead of “I moved back in with my parents and have no job.”

I moved to Kitchener-Waterloo not long after that, and lived in a very bad basement apartment with Mark. I was still going through a lot of shit and, to be honest, this was probably the worst my mental state has ever been, but Beat Noir was still a thing and it gave me something to work towards. It doesn’t matter that Permanently really sucks, because working on that EP certainly did something for me.

After that, Mark, Colin, and I moved into the upper apartment of a house, the lower apartment of which, Duff joined Erik from The Decay in shortly after. We had a “band house” and it was fun. When bands played in town, they would stay at our house. It was a fun way to live. This is also the time in my life when I started working at Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery and applied to grad school. Shortly after that, I started dating Rebecca. A lot of new stuff happened to me and it was basically uniformly good.

During the summer of 2013, we jammed a lot and then wrote and recorded Ecotone, which came out in January of 2014. We played a lot of shows (for us) around that time and started to slowly work on new songs. That was, more or less, the cycle for the next few years as we got through writing the songs for Sovereignties.

As I said earlier, I saw the end of the band coming. Mark and I both moved away, Mark to Toronto and me to first Guelph, then back to Toronto, for school and that made keeping up the pace of being in a band hard. It also made being in the band a lot more expensive for the two of us. It was fine for when we were working out the different parts of new songs, but it was hard to get tight enough that we were comfortable playing live with this set-up.

It was hard because Beat Noir was still definitely “the thing” that all of us did, but none of us were still doing it. This briefly subsided when we stayed in Niagara on the Lake for a week and change while recording Sovereignties, but after that everything went back to the way it was before, aside from a few trips to help Davis mix the record.

We played a really bad show in September of 2014 and after that we didn’t play another for a very long time. We decided to stop accepting every offer we got because we were tired of slogging through awful nights, but it also hurt us because we weren’t being exposed very much and eventually people just sort of forgot about us and stopped asking if we wanted to play. This live hiatus was kind of good, because during it we focused strictly on making Sovereignties as good as possible, but also hurt us because, like I said, people forgot about us.

I’m really not sour, that’s just bound to happen when you don’t play a show for more than a year.

We put out Sovereignties in June 2016 and it seemed to us like it didn’t make much of an impact, which is, again, to be expected when our activity as a band grinds to a halt.

That summer was when it first started to hit me that the band was probably over, even if it hadn’t been expressly stated. Nobody was focusing on Beat Noir. On consecutive nights, I watched We Jam Econo: The Story of The Minutemen, which is without a doubt the best thing to convey what it’s like to be in a rock band and what it means to its members, and then after that Spinal Tap to wallow in my band-induced misery. I was so sad about the state of Beat Noir that at the end of Spinal Tap, when Nigel jumps on-stage to join the Tap in the middle of “Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You”, a comedic moment that is really the punchline of the movie, I felt my insides twinge a little bit because I felt that, jokes aside, it still spoke to the bond that only long-time band members share and understand.

So there we go. I was in Beat Noir for a little under five years, while Mark and Duff kept it going for about eight. That is a long time to pursue something and a lot longer than most people keep at their interests. Something that should absolutely not be lost in the shuffle in the following:

Beat Noir allowed me to fulfill a childhood dream by writing and putting out a full-length record. Twice over, in fact. It may not have happened exactly the way I thought it would, I didn’t become a road warrior with a van tattoo, but it happened nonetheless. That is important and nobody can ever take that away from me.

Beat Noir made me a new group of best friends. In June, all of us were in Colin’s wedding party. I still see Mark regularly. I talk to Duff nearly constantly.

Beat Noir forever.

I Don't Know What I Want, What I Want's Where I've Been

I'm sure that, following my last post, the last thing anybody needs more is more self-reflection from Timothy Chandler on his band's second album, but you come here for my thoughts, so that's what you're going to get.

I actually wrote the majority of those notes a long time ago as a way to procrastinate while I was writing my thesis. In hindsight, that was a very productive thing to do. But since it had been three or four months since I had written these things, re-reading them and checking for grammar and spelling errors brought up some emotions in me. I have a strong bond with these songs, since I carried them around in my head for about two years. Always thinking about them. What we should add. What we should remove. What they mean. How people will hear them and what they'll get out of them.

But when we put out the record, those feelings just fell out of my head. I was also busy with a new job and finding a new apartment and the album took the back seat for a while. Didn't really think about it for a few weeks. The post preceding this one re-discovered those bonds though.

Brief aside: Was trying to invoke a sort of archaeological imagery with that last sentence. Funny that bonds and bones are one letter apart. In my younger days I might have linked to a gif of Dr. Grant dusting off the raptor skeleton in Jurassic Park, but I guess I've gotten to a point in my writing where I try to do a lot more alluding and be less on-the-nose. This sentence kind of negates that though.

The post preceding this one re-discovered those bones though.

The new job will be over in two years and though I will try my damndest to make a lasting impact at it, it may be a bit of a translucent filter over the final picture of what the place does from 2016-18. Sovereignties will still exist. Sovereignties is permanent. Should I be prouder of it? Absolutely yes. This is my fucking art. It may get lost in the shuffle. People may forget about it. People might remember Beat Noir as the band who put out Ecotone. People might remember Beat Noir as the guys from the message board. People will probably forget about Beat Noir entirely. But that can't make Sovereignties disappear. It will always exist. I'm going to carry my pride in it for the rest of my life. Even if people don't care about it, I know it was important. The feeling I get in my heart when I listen to the songs is the important thing.

Sovereignties

Shortly after we put out Ecotone, Beat Noir started to kick around ideas for new songs. We started with three acoustic skeletons and then gradually added more and more until we had 11 full songs. Then we went to Niagara-on-the-Lake and started recording them with Davis. Considering that I didn't know Davis before, it was amazing that he turned out to be a great friend and amazing adviser on what we were making. In my mind, Davis is a member of the band and I'm sure that Mark, Duff, and Colin would agree. Once we started recording, we added even more to each of the songs. We took our time and wanted to make sure it came out sounding the way we wanted it to.

We spent about a week and a half and during that time crashed with Davis. We'd wake up, start making a record and then go to sleep. If you weren't recording, you were sitting with Davis and giving input and hanging out. We ate cereal out of the same bowl for breakfast every day and then ate breakfast for dinner at Silk's Diner down the street every day. Then we would fall asleep on couches and start the same process the next day. It was probably the most fun I've ever had in my life.

We wanted to take a long time mixing and we did. The idea wasn't to put down each track and then level it and put it out, the idea was to make the mix sound like we imagined being while we were writing the songs. I think we got there.

When we put out Ecotone, we got it out pretty quickly and then it just sort of disappeared after a little bit. I got tired of some of the songs pretty quickly. With Sovereignties, we waited and sat on it until we knew it should come out. We wanted to see how much we could do with it. I guess I don't what we ended up doing with it or what we were thinking, but I do know that waiting on it was the right decision. Absolutely the right decision.

So now, Sovereignties is out. Actually, if you were hip to the links that I add to words on this blog, you could have gotten it months ago. It pays to read this blog.

I am very proud of this record. I think we made a big progression from the last record and I think it is a much better showcase of what we are able to do as musicians, the influences each of us want to bring to the band, and, really, Duffer's strength as a songwriter.

I've got a sort of liner notes that I've been writing to exapnd on the songs that I'll put up here once I finish them, so keep an eye for that, but in the mean time I guess that all I can say is listen to the fruit of our labour and enjoy.

Beat Noir- Sovereignties

It Sounds Stock!

Three post in one day?! We are a content machine here at IMU. Beat Noir, in various forms, was in Niagara on the Lake from the 5th to the 13th to record our second album. Here are some pictures I took during this week, which was one of the most fun I've ever had.

Greyscale Memories

While writing last week, I was possessed to listen to Beat Noir's only album, Ecotone for the first time in forever.

Hey, since I mentioned it, I guess here you go:

I GUESS I CAN'T EMBED BANDCAMP PLAYERS ANYMORE

Like I said, it had been a minute since I had actually listened to the album in full, which I guess means I hadn't experienced the songs from a listener's perspective in a little while. The main way I interact with the songs is through playing them at shows, or more recently since we haven't played a show in two months, at practice. And we barely play them at practice because we're getting ready to record!

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm not as familiar with the songs as I once was. But I also think that an album is a work of art itself. Bands put a lot of effort into the track order, artwork, overarching themes, etc., so it's been forever since I had experienced Ecotone as a whole. I still know the songs we play live, "Nicky Driscoll", "Ancienne Gloire", "The Wars", inside out, but that's not the same for other songs. There was even songs I forgot were on the album! Somehow I forgot that "Sheltered Town / Bitter Sea" which, frankly, I think is our best song, is on the album. The Six Feet Under clip in between "Nicky Driscoll" and "Deathwish" completely slipped my mind, which is funny, considering that Ecotone is basically Six Feet Under: The Album! and we watched the entire show while writing it.

It's also much different listening to the 10 songs now, about two years later (I think?!) then it was hearing them all the time while making the album. There's a lot of things going through your mind while creating an album that seem like a good idea at the time. Making an album is a really hard and long process, so you end up having a million fucking ideas about what you want to do with your art to make it stand out, to make it good, to make each part of it distinctive and different. "Hey, we all like Sloan and Thrush a lot, so let's make this song an alt-punk song." "Hey, we like C.C.R., so let's put 70's rock riffs in this song." Some of those work out and some of them don't, but it's kind of impossible to tell what will at the time.

I think it's been long enough now that I can see the warts on the album, which I assume were evident to listeners when it came out. "Collages" is a bad song. I should never, EVER, write a bassline as dumb as the one I wrote for the verse of "Nom de Guerre". "Song for Movement" might be a better song if we just took out the intro.

But for all the miscues I saw while re-visiting the record, I was also very refreshed by the fact that I'm still very proud of all of the songs. I also re-listened to Permanently and was really ashamed of how bad it is. That did not happen with Ecotone. As soon as the first track (not the intro) was about half-way through I said to myself, "You know what? This is a good song." and found myself repeating that a lot through the listen. Even the songs I don't necessarily like so much have good parts. I think the lyrics and ending of "Collages" are still good. Really, all of the lyrics are good, in my opinion and Duff doesn't get his due. The ending of "Nom de Guerre" is really fun. Maybe we're just good at writing the outros of songs? Who knows.

I've always wanted to be in a band and I guess I should count myself lucky that I've been in one that's enjoyable to be in with friends that I really like for the past 3 1/2 years. For a long time while I was in high school and university, my dream/goal/whatever was to be in a band and have a full-length record so that I could point to it or show it to people and say "This is my album." And I can do that and be proud of it.

Something funny to me is thinking about how each member of Beat Noir would react to this situation. I know that Duff would hate every song, maybe admitting that one or two had miniscule redeeming qualities. Mark would probably love every one. Colin is the wild card, though if I had to guess, his opinion would probably be close to mine.

This is also interesting to me because Beat Noir is going to Niagara on the Lake to record our second album soon. Is that breaking news?! IS THIS AN IMU EXCLUSIVE? Anyways we are and we are a much different band now. We don't practice very much. We haven't played a show in forever. We aren't nearly as active as we were when making Ecotone. In Mark's words, we sort or morphed into a "studio-only" band by accident. That sounds silly, so please know that I was joking. Though that was also due to us playing a bunch of dumb, bad shows this summer.

I don't even know it there's a central point that I'm trying to get to in this post besides "Beat Noir is different now." Maybe also that I still like our record? These seem like dumb and trite points, but I do know that I felt something while listening to the record again. It's a lot like going back and looking at an old part of your facebook timeline. These songs represent a very specific time in my life. I have great memories of writing the album in Colin's basement, Echo Base, and the Breithaup jam hall. I still remember when the album went got "released" (I was at a dinner with several art history profs and smile at my phone. Such a 21st century digital boy I am.).

I think in general though, this is a weird side of the excitement I'm feeling about recording our new songs in two weeks.

Jody Husky Sandals

Because I write so rarely in this blog anymore, whenever I do I feel like I have to write some huge entry that I put a ton of thought into and spend a lot of time on. This is some type of penance, where I have to do a whole lot of work on something to make up for the fact that I neglect it so much. This can be counterproductive though, because I end up putting off writing just because I don't feel like spending 2 hours on something*.

Anyways, what I was getting at is that there used to be a ton of posts on here where I would just throw up a bunch of stuff because that's what I was doing or listening to at that moment. Like seriously, if you go back and read all of that, there's so many posts about nothing. YOU SEEN THIS SHIT? I think I kind of need to do that still sometimes, because it keeps me in the habit of putting up stuff and staying involved.

Aight:

My friend Jay started a new podcast. I fuxxxx with it. I recommend it if you enjoy rap music and hangin' with your homies:

WHITE NONSENSE

A hip-hop album I have been waiting for for a long time leaked. It is very good.

This June I'm working with the Contemporary Art Forum,  Kitchener and Area (abbreviated and referred to as CAFKA). They put up a ton of public artworks in Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge. It's SIQ.

CAFKA

YO, BEAT NOIR STILL HAS OUR ALBUM UP FOR FREE DOWNLOAD. LOOK INTO THAT YOU JABRONI.

We played the worst show ever in Hamilton last week. It was truly awful!

Lastly, here's 90's skate footy of a dude in Timberlands. Hell yeah.


*Spending two hours on something productive and creative is not a bad thing. I should suck it up.

Shows, shows, shows

Beat Noir is playing a show that I'm really excited about. It has a ton of great bands from Southern Ontario and promises to be a rager.

The facebook event can be found here.

CAN'T WAIT TO SEE THE BOYS IN FUCK OUT HERE. YEAH YO.

Ecotone Mark II

While I certainly would like to write up a big post about the release of Beat Noir's new album Ecotone (I guess I sort of already did that), I'm really busy with my extremely hard grad class Proseminar II, my internship at Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery and organizing my trip to see Bomb the Music Industry!'s final two shows in Brooklyn. Rest assured that there is a 45% chance that it will come eventually.

Instead, I offer the following copy-and-pasted post from my tumblr:

(It pains me to type that, but you know you will always be #1 in my heart blogspot.)

HELLO,

Yesterday my band Beat Noir (http://beatnoir.tumblr.com/) put out our first full-length album, titled Ecotone. We’ve worked very long and very hard on this release, as some of the songs are more than two years old and are the first songs I learned when I joined the band!

So you say “Well frig Tim, how the fudge are we supposed to hear this incredibly hype and saucy album?” and to that I respond “Why, on our bandcamp page of course!”

So yes, if you go to http://beatnoirpunkrock.bandcamp.com/ you can hear the whole album and download it for whatever price you like! I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THAT YOU DO THAT, IN MY COMPLETELY UNBIASED IN ANY WAY OPINION.

Some would say that we are for fans of The Weakerthans, or Attack In Black, or The Clash or Thrush Hermit. I would say that we are for fans of RiFF RaFF and Birdman, as they are my greatest musical influences.

That was the speech device known as “sarcasm”.

Now you say “Well, that’s great, but I’m the type of person that prefers a hard, tangible copy of a release to all this digital, mp3 nonsense. N’AM SAYIN’?” To that I respond “You are in luck! We have preorders (because pressing vinyl records is expensive) of our album on our bigcartel page!”

So mosey on over to http://beatnoir.bigcartel.com/ and there you can pick up a vinyl copy of the new album. There is also a shirt with a black sheep on it that was thought of by my dad when I was talking to him about band stuff like two years ago on our back patio. I guess that’s cooler for me than other people, BUT WHATEVER. FUCK IT. IT’S REALLY FUCKING COOL.

So now you say to me “Okay, this is all wonderful Timothy, but in my opinion there is nothing greater than going to a live musical event where I may see songs performed live by a musical group.” My response to this is “Ha-ha! I win again! We are playing a bunch of shows in Southern Ontario over the next month or two (some still in the process of being booked), so you can come see us at those!

The best way to keep up to date on our shows would be to check out our facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/BeatNoir) or, since you are obviously reading this on tumblr, our tumblr page (http://beatnoir.tumblr.com/)

And hell, I post about our shows all the time on here too, so if you give me a follow, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ll be in the loop on our performances.

Thanks for bearing with me and my terrible sense of humour. I sincerely hope that you enjoy this release. I really mean that. Since I started getting into punk and playing bass in grade 7, I’ve always dreamed of being able to say “This is my full-length record.” Today, I can say that and it is a really big deal to me personally.

SMILEY FACE

Ecotone

Something I’ve always loved is when bands make extensive liner notes to go along with an album. I really appreciate when a band will add something to the lyrics, explaining where the band was at at the time, or the inspiration for songs, or little stories that tie into subject.

A great example I can think of it How It Goes by Big D and the Kids Table. They first had a little passage that expanded on the band’s attitude and existence and also what was happening with them up to the release of the album. Then, along with the lyrics for each song, various members would give anecdotes about writing each song and how it came to be. My personal favourite was when former saxophonist Dave Bush mentioned how he was having a lot of trouble coming up with a horn line for a particular song. Whenever he was met with that problem, he would take the first three notes from a John Coltrane, his favourite sax player, and the rest of the song would seem to write itself from there.

I don’t know what is about little bits of information like that, but they really appeal to me a ton and I eat them up. This is a big part of why I love Less Than Jake so much, as there seems to be a tour story or great anecdote that goes along with almost every song (ex: Where The Hell Is Mike Stinkovich, 9^th at Pine, Handshake Meets Pokerface, Best Wishes To Your Black Lung, every other song they’ve written). I guess I just get really, really into bands and I love knowing everything I can about them and this is a way to do that.

Duff and I have had a ton of talks about this stuff, as he’s just as into it as I am and we both kind of wanted to include something in this vein with our forthcoming album. We haven’t sorted that side out yet, but I wanted to get this all down before school picks up again and I wouldn’t have a chance.

So these are a bunch of random thoughts and observations about the ten songs (and an intro track!) that will make up the album we’re about to release. Duff wrote all the lyrics for all of the songs, so take everything I say about subject matter with a grain of salt. All of these songs titles are subject to change too; this shit’s a work in progress.

Song For Passivity

This has always been one of my favourite songs to play and I’m fairly sure that that extends to the rest of the band as well. We wrote the skeletons for all of these songs and all the songs on Permanently at the same time during the summer of 2012. I lived in Guelph at the time, so sometimes I would come to practice and Duff, Mark and Colin would be like “Okay, here’s four new songs.” and they showed me this song during one of those instances*. The first thing I remember about it was how stoked I was that it was a fast song, because fast songs are the most fun to play. The second thing I remember is the first time we got to the guitar break after the second verse and Colin started doing the rim shots, everyone had a smile on their face a mile wide. That kept happening for the rest of the summer. It doesn’t happen as much anymore, but I assure you, we still love to play it just as much. I’m really proud of the bass line for this song and it might be my favourite that I’ve written for the band. While we were writing the song, I was thinking that I was really selling myself short and not writing hard or complex enough bass lines for the band and this song was what resulted from that. In reference to the lyrics for the song: “I feel you on that Duff.”

Nicky Driscoll

For whatever reason, when the guys first showed me this song I just could not wrap my head around it. It’s not really that complex or anything, but I just could not play it properly to save my life. It was seriously the bane of my existence. Then we did rough demos of all the songs at the end of summer 2012 and I was able to finally get into them. Once I actually learned this one proper and was able to write for it, I really started to love it and now it might be my favourite song on the record. My influences for bass are pretty weird because my favourite bass players are Roger from Less Than Jake, Royce from The Suicide Machines, James Jamerson, Ebin from Stay What You Are-era Saves The Day and Karl Alvarez from The Descendents and all of them have extremely different playing styles, so sometimes there’s just too many ideas in my head for me to work into a song in any type of logical way. I bring this up because the bass line I wrote for this song is sort of me trying to put a punkish spin on Motown bass, in my mind. If you slow it down and add in a little bit of syncopation, I assure you, you will hear it too. Oh and the song’s title is reference to the most-excellent TV show My So-Called Life. This song is about dead kids.

Deathwish

            Another song that feels like it’s been around forever and has never really left our setlist when we play. This song is one of the original demos we finished and is also one of the songs we played at the first Beat Noir show with Colin and I in the band. This one hasn’t really changed all that much from the version we initially composed, save for minor changes to parts that I, and I’m sure the rest of the band, made to our parts. I have a soft spot for this one because the bass line for the outro is the first thing I wrote for the band that wasn’t a simple eighth-note bass line. CREATIVITY.

Muscle Memory

            I remember one specific practice during that summer when we were writing all the songs where we finished both this song and “Midos”. Duff was kind of fooling around with a riff and Mark said “Hey, should we make a song out of that?” and Duff said “I don’t know, I’ve been playing that riff since I was 17.” (Said in a manner to suggest that it was just some dumb riff). About twenty minutes later, we had the song. It used to be a long, weird drawn out song that had this odd pseudo-folkish part at the end that would bleed into the then-acoustic beginning of “Nom De Guerre”, but we cut it down considerably this summer to turn it into what it is now. I wrote the bass line for this one really quickly at the practice where we wrote and I’m still really happy with what came out of me, though I did have to tweek it a bunch over time. Whereas some of the songs were really easy and more or less wrote themselves, this was definitely one that we had to sit down and work on and as a result, was one of the last ones to be finished before we started recording.

Nom De Guerre

            The only reason this song exists is because we decided “Hey, we should write a song that comes out of that.” when we finished the preliminary version of “Muscle Memory” at practice one day. Originally it was a really long acoustic song that eventually built up into a rocky ending. Then, as with many of the songs on this record, we decided we didn’t like it that much and totally re-worked it, so much so that it doesn’t sound anything at all like it used to, save for the ending. It took us way longer than it should have to release our EP, so I was a little bummed with how stuff was progressing with the band for a bit because we seemed to constantly be hitting roadblocks. With that in mind, I was not as enthusiastic as I should have been when Mark pushed us to start jamming and writing for the full-length right after we were done recording the EP, because we still had a ton of work to do on some songs and I felt pretty defeated about it. Then we jammed and sketched out the framework for the new version of this song, which totally rejuvenated me. I fucking love this song and think it shows a side of the band that we’ve always known is there, but maybe others haven’t seen yet. Also, a story I think is kind of funny and sort of led to the new version of the song is that one day Mark and I were getting ready to head to Colin’s while we were living in the worst basement apartment that has ever existed and Mark just said “Yeah, maybe I should palm mute the guitar.” in passing out of nowhere. LOOK WHERE THAT LED US.  Another sort of funny thing is that we talked about turning this into an electric song for a long time, so the thought of “Oh shit, I need to write some bass lines for it!” was always in the back of mind, along with the anxiety of maybe not writing/performing well enough on the song, which is pretty much always there. I had these weird ideas about using a lot of chords and playing way high up on the neck and then ended up playing something totally different, which works way better for the song in my opinion. This was actually a rare case of me sitting down and actively trying to write the bass line (What a novel idea!), which resulted in something different from what I normally play, at least to me.

Collages

            This song has definitely changed the most of any other from inception to its current state. It started out as a weird slow song that then became crazy 6/8 emo, then slow then big heavy ending song that didn’t really work at all and then changed into the groovy, 6/8 then heavy ending song that it is now. I really like how much this song has morphed over time and I think that it shows we can step outside our box a little bit. The ending is also still the most fun to play and is probably the heaviest that Beat Noir will ever sound. For some reason or another, this song reminds of the Constantines. The working title for this song was “Ski Iraq”, which is a reference to one of the band’s favourite jokes on Six Feet Under. During the writing of this album, the band was watching Six Feet Under together and we all loved the shit out of it. The show’s main theme is death and the way people react and deal with it and that definitely influenced the writing process quite a bit. This definitely pertains especially pertains to Duff, as death is one of the main things he thinks about (or at least, that’s the way it seems to me). INTERTEXTUALITY.

Sheltered Town/Bitter Sea

I think this might be our best song, because it has Duff’s strongest lyrics, in my opinion. This one was originally going to be droney, whole note bass song with minimal other instrumentation, but then we realized that it sounded way to much like “Searching For A Former Clarity” by Against Me! Then it turned into what is now. Cool beans.

Ancienne Gloire

I have a really specific memory of writing this song with Duff and Mark in Duff’s old room at Echo Base. During that time I was back and forth between Kitchener-Waterloo and my home in Guelph constantly and as a result, more or less lived in that room. Mark came in with the lead riff and the song pretty much wrote itself in about 20 minutes. It’s funny how music works like that sometimes. I like this song because we were working on some really weird (for us) sounding songs like “Collages” and “The Feeling”, so it felt good to just right a punk song that just stays a punk song. When we were in that room writing this song I felt like I was really selling myself short in terms of the bass lines I was playing and writing, so I tried to write something really hard and crazy. The result was some Matt Freeman-esque over playing that sounded absolutely dreadful. Fortunately, this was rectified in time for recording. It’s no secret to most people that know me that I’m a huge Francophile, so I was really excited when we changed the name for this one from “Midos” to what it is now.

The Wars

More so than any other song we’ve written, I think this one completely encompasses the ethos of Beat Noir. It’s been around for a long time and has been a part of our live set for the pretty much the entire time I’ve been in the band. This song reminds me of “Firefly” by Saves The Day for some reason or another and that’s why I added the “B-slide up to F#/high B” lick at the end of the song. I think everyone in the band would agree that if somebody wanted to know what Beat Noir is like, having never heard our music before; this is the song we’d show them. IT’S LIKE OUR THEME SONG.

Weight

            When I first joined Beat Noir, Mark sent me demos of 5 songs to learn for our first practice. Those five songs were “Weight”, “1500”, “The Wars”, “Deathwish” and “Stalwarts” and as a result of being my first experience, those songs have special place in my heart. In fact, “Weight” is the one of those that we finished first and we played it at the first show with Colin and I in the band. It feels like we’ve been playing this song forever, so it makes me happy to see it finally seeing the light of day. Whereas most songs that we’ve been working on for the full-length have changed a fairly decent amount, this one has stayed pretty much the same. My brother, who certainly would not pull punches on anything I do, told me that he thinks this song sounds like Dinosaur Jr and that made me really happy.

So yeah, these are the things I think about while I listen to our album.

*If memory serves me correctly, the other songs at that practice were “Clastic Rock”, “The Feeling”, “Collages” and “Nicky Driscoll”

Feel That Engine HHHHUUUUMMMMMMMMIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNN'

I was about to finish up a post I've been writing for a few days about Streetlight Manifesto because I feel guilty about my last few posts having not much too them, but then THIS HAPPENED TODAY:


Beat Noir has finally gotten around to releasing our new EP, Permanently. This is the first thing the band has released in a shade over two years and it's also the first release that Colin and I have played on. This is especially important to me as it's the first real-deal-for-serious release that I've ever put out with a band (will write about this later). I'm real proud of these songs and really can't wait for everyone to hear them. Also, it is free. Y'ain't got nothing to lose.

All You Seem To Say Is Baby "How Could It Be You?"

So today I was listening to the Jonsi song "Sticks and Stones", which most people know because it plays during the credits of the most excellent movie How To Train Your Dragon (and man, it's an aweosme song), and when it ended my itunes went right into Joyce Manor. Like I said in my last post, I've been re-discovering a bunch of music that I haven't really listened to in the last few months and this is certainly an example of that. But while Lemuria gave me more of a "Wow! This band is so poppy and cute and makes me feel great! I can't believe I ignored them!" feeling, this was more of a "Hey Tim! Feel like getting ridiculously sad? Remember all those pent-up feelings from last fall? Well, here they are whether you like it or not!"


All their releases up this point sure are great though. Between an EP, a full-length and another full-length that is so short some people consider it an EP even though it's nine songs, there's not much filler and a whole lotta angst. I highly recommend checking them out.

Also, speaking of How To Train Your Dragon, I heard a lot of people rave about that movie when it came out but only ended up watching it yesterday. Holy shit a company that's not Pixar actually made an endearing, fun, touching and inspiring animated kids movie! (Siq use of adjectives brah) I really enjoyed watching it.

I've mentioned it a few times on here, but I joined a band with whack of my favourite homies in the world. We're called Beat Noir and are in the process of recording a whole bunch of music and we have a show in Toronto coming up in December! I'm excited for a number of reasons. 1: I haven't played a show in Toronto since my high school ska band The Pragmatics  (Oh, you know I still have that ASOB shirt I'm rockin' in that video) broke up on stage in grade 12. 2: The show is with Like Pacific, who I am pretty good friends with, are A+ dudes all around, just put out a new EP called Homebound and are what one could consider "on their grind".

I really think you should think about attending this show, so if you would like the info it can be found right here.

In hindsight I maybe should have not linked that Pragmatics video. It's really embarrassing man! That hair was such a bad idea!

I suppose I'll leave you with this because I want it so bad and it makes me smile: