Duff came through big rec in our music exchange this week, giving Crash of Rhinos' second album Knots.
We've recently been focusing on emo, which started a few weeks ago when Duff remarked that he had re-visited Braid's Frame and Canvasfor the first time in a while and was pleased to see it hold up as well as it did.* Emo is one of our biggest overlaps in music and in a genre that is hard to define sonically and has so many different parts and eras, we tend to agree more than we disagree, being picky about 2nd wave, missing the 3rd wave, and gravitating towards the fourth wave. I think it's also important that this overlap in emo taste was a huge contributing factor to the way that we wrote songs together in Beat Noir. We had the same vocabulary when it came to putting parts together, especially on Sovereignties.
*Duh
This all being said, we've both drifted away from the genre recently, as I don't think either of would say that any emo releases from the last five years have really stuck with us. The last one I really liked was probably Oliver Houston's Whatever Works? I feel like emo, pop-punk, and orgcore have slowly merged into one genre that kept some of the fans of those genres, but in my opinion lost everything that appealed to me from each of them. I also just grew out it too. I still love emo music and will check out new stuff, but I'm also too old for the GothBoiClique stuff and pretending I'm into it would just be posing. I don't want to be a 35-year-old who still deeply relates to American Football, but at the same time, a lot of emo music was super important to me for a long time and I can respect that.
Anyways, Crash of Rhinos was great, if a little long. IMO, if your punk album is over 35 minutes, it better be extremely ambitious and have a lot of stuff holding it together. BUT, the main thing that I thought about while listening to it was that since the 4th wave of emo is now over, I feel like I can say with hindsight that it was absolutely the best iteration of the genre. From my perspective, it took all the best parts of older emo, the DIY hardcore ethos of the first wave, the open-tuning guitar riffs of the second, and the hooks of the third, while (mostly) doing away with the over-the-top corniness that plagues the genre.
There's been a slew of great music releases of the last couple of weeks, which to me signals that the most blessed time of the year has started: The point in spring and summer when the Actual Good Records start coming out.
There's a been a few things that I've enjoyed so far this year, but to me the sign that 2021 in Music had started in earnest was the release of Origami Angel's Gami Gang last Friday. I'm not sure exactly what it is about the release, but it stands out more than the other good stuff I've heard this year, like Another Michael and Glitterer. It could be the warm weather creeping in around its release and letting me know that all the good stuff is about to come. It could be people I know getting excited about it. It could be a lot of things. I feel like one of these releases that reinvigorates my desire to jump into new music has to come every year and this is it.
That being said, it is good, but not perfect by any means. In terms of 4th (are we on 5th?) wave emo revival, it hits all my spots, but is too polished by half. I need it to feel a little more like everything is about to fall apart and it's a miracle that the band is staying together in the song. I also need a lot more off-key screaming. I'm also not one for video game references and there are a lot here.
It also weird in that it's sometimes almost too honed in on my interests. The promo pictures feature the members in a Bane hoodie and a throwback college basketball jersey, which is about as close to a perfect summation of my aesthetic in two articles of clothing as you can get. On top of that, it's a shreddy emo album with a lot of breakdowns and basketball references. How did I get so directly in this band's crosshairs? Is that my fault or theirs?
Anyway, Gami Gang is good and Counter Intuitive Records kicks ass. Sure is weird that I always feel the need to describe things I don't like about things I like, right?
I spent a decent chunk of the spring of 2016 listen to Oliver Houston's EP The Dork Ages.I discovered the band through hearing their name on a podcast I liked and then found them to be one of the better "Emo Revival" bands I had heard in a while.
Once bands like The World is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die and Into It. Over It. started to gain a little bit of mainstream musical traction, the label "Emo Revival" got thrown around a lot and it seemed like a new band with a pedal board a meter wide formed every day. Suddenly American Football was the inspiration for every band? I'm not complaining, but I found it pretty surprising. With that rise in emo bands though, I felt like some of the minor things that made the genre cool got a little lost in translation, which is bound to happen when that many similar bands form.
That being said, I think that Oliver Houston is a cut above almost every other "twinkly" emo band right now, especially with You Blew It!'s last album being pretty boring. There's a load of cool rhythms and grooves on the album and I really appreciate that the guitar work is built around riffs instead of excessive open-tuning shredding, which is pretty common place now. Not everyone can be Algernon.
I somehow missed that Oliver Houston put out a full-length in 2017 until yesterday. It's excellent and, with The Dork Ages, makes for a very impressive start to a discography.
Once more, I've fallen out of practice of writing in my free time. The 40-hour week will do that to you. 9-5 in front of a computer every day has a way of melting your brain and spending more time on a computer is generally the last thing that I want to do when I get home.
This all being said, it has afforded me to listen to a lot of music, so I'll you this post to talk about a few things I'm really into.
During my golden years of Ontariopunk, !ATTENTION! quickly became my favourite of all the bands I was seeing at every show. They moved from "Hey, that band was pretty good." to "I can't wait to see !ATTENTION!" to "!ATTENTION! is THE BEST." I placed a lot of importance on collecting everything they put out and listened to Another Year constantly while living on Dublin St. in Guelph. Towards of when they were still playing shows regularly in Southern Ontario, they had started putting new songs into their set that were going to be on their upcoming full-length. I couldn't wait for it. I would listen to Four or Five Ways to Play These Chords, the demo, Another Year, and their blink-182 cover all in row to pretend it was a full-length. Time started to pass and I figured that it was never going to come out.
Then, apropos of nothing, they announced in 2016 and put it out in October. Though I didn't listen to it tonnes when it came out, for some reason, it is absolutely great. I love the band and am so so proud that they are a product of the scene that I'm a part of. Please support this band however you can, because if there was ever a band that deserves it, it's !ATTENTION!
When I saw them play in October, they played a few "joints" and it was that perfect type of live experience where it makes you so eager to listen to their stuff as soon as you get home. The new songs sounded really good and I was really excited to hear them when they came out.
In a nice turn of events, they announced on twitter that were going to do a surprise release of their album the next morning, so I made sure to download it as soon as I woke up. The album, The Yunahon Mixtape, proved to be AMAZING and has stayed in constant rotation since then. It's a great progression in their sound that subtly adds complexity to the compositions while retaining everything that made them awesome in the first place (re: extremely catchy hooks and riffs). Oso Oso has now put out two very strong albums and that is something rare and is much harder to do than it sounds. The band seems to be on an upward trajectory and is getting more attention. I'm really happy for them, as their music deserves any and all attention it gets. I may expand on why I think this album is really special in the near future, but for now, all I can do is recommend jamming this.
A trend that I've noticed is popping up all over Canada and the United States is pop-punk/emo/whatever bar nights. I never would have expected something like this to be so popular, but obviously that was a huge oversight on my part, because these bar nights are the go-to night for punks in major metropolitan areas. There's one called Homesick in Toronto, one called Jukebox Breakdown in Cleveland, Emo Night in LA, and my friend Jay mentioned that there is one in Denver on his excellent podcast Ask a Punk that you should definitely listen to. This shit is EVERYWHERE right now and when the unthinkable happened and Homesick and Emo Night LA teamed up for an event in Toronto called Taking Back Tuesday, boy did the internet go mild.
My introduction to this sort of thing was a bar night in Toronto called My Friends Over You (sometimes shortened to MFOY and pronounced "em-foy") that started in Toronto during the summer of 2011. I know this because my friends and I went to it all the time that summer and it became almost a ritual for us each Tuesday. As you can probably guess from the name, the night focused mostly on playing pop-punk from the early 2000's to the present. At first, this was great because it took an environment I'm normally extremely uncomfortable in, a bar night/nightclub, and made it comfortable by adding the music and atmosphere of an environment I'm very comfortable in, that being a show. But MFOY got popular pretty rapidly and pretty soon it was impossible to distinguish it from any other bar night. I recall Dave from Careers in Science at one point going to the DJ booth and putting on "Broken Things" by Attack in Black and both of us just sitting around saying "Fuck, this is such a good song." while everyone else used it as an excuse to go order drinks. Though, to be fair, I can understand not wanting to hear a song with "I'd have the strength to face you, day, if not for the broken things in my life" as its chorus while you're out drinking.
I'm not trying to say this is "you had to have been there" or a "it was better in the old days" type of scenario, as it was just a bar night and I don't know why I shouldn't have expected anything different.
At first I thought this night was an exercise in fun nostalgia, but realized halfway through the summer that it definitely wasn't, and there are two specific moments that stick out in my mind communicating that. First, I guess that when you do this night every week, the playlist starts to get a little thin. On one night during the summer the DJ played "Way Away" by Yellowcard, which is objectively a terrible song. I turned around and there was a guy my age standing on a table, just giving it and making terrible "emotional singer" faces while singing to the DJ booth.
My reaction:
Another was a time that Damien, Party Pat and I were leaving the bar to catch the subway home. While Pat was rocking a piss on the side of the bar, a couple was having a loud fight in the doorway of the bar, in front of a sizeable line of people waiting to get in and us. Both seemed like just awful people, a sort of punk "barstar" and when Pat came back to join us, yelled "WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU STARING AT US?" when we were actively trying to avoid the awkwardness of their interaction. The guy threatened to "kick all of our asses", so we just laughed at him, smoked a joint and went to buy cans of Mountain Dew.
My Friends Over You continued to be a pretty popular night out for punk subculture in Toronto for a few years until it stopped and Homesick, which is still going on, started in its place. One thing that I guess is commendable is that Homesick promotes a lot of shows in Toronto.
This past summer, Beat Noir played a show promoted by Homesick. It was us, Camper from St. Catherines and two other locals opening for Dikembe. They put us on the show without any hassle, which was cool, but they did stress that we had to have a backline and that the show had a hard cutoff at 10 PM for the "afterparty" which was a Homesick night. Now, I can understand having a hard cutoff for shows if the bar has other things planned and I can understand having an afterparty for show, but why cut the show short, and run it early when not as many people will attend, for IT'S OWN AFTERPARTY?
That doesn't seem right to me.
At the end of the show, Mark and I were loading our gear out, which can be annoying at Sneak Dee's because the venue is on the second floor of the building and carrying your amps up and down a narrow stair case suckssssssssssss. The show was sparsely attended, but as soon as the bar night started it filled right up. Like, packed. While we were tag-teaming my bass cab, two girls were paying cover and one proclaimed in an unpleasant, high-pitched voice "Oh my god! Are they playing fuckin Fall Out Boy?!" They were completely oblivious of us holding heavy stuff and while it feels really petty to complain, just get the fuck out my way while I carry this heavy and awkward object.
And, like does this girl come from some alternate universe where Fall Out Boy hasn't sold a million billion records and been the most popular rock band of the 2000's? Of course a "pop-punk" bar night is playing Fall Out Boy. Christ.
This brings up one of the biggest thing I've noticed about these nights and current punk music in general, which is that a lot of people grow out of the traditional ways of participating in and supporting scenes, that being going to shows and buying things from bands (I feel dirty typing that), and do this instead. The new way to "be punk" in Toronto is to have tattoos and wear skinny jeans and go to "punk" bar nights. I hope this doesn't sound condescending, because I'm just trying to be observational. Hell, I used to go to one of these nights all the time and I'm sure that for every two people at these nights who just go to Homesick, there is one who goes to tons of shows and supports bands. While I do think it really sucks, I've also tried to accept that this is just the way it is now.
It just seems odd to me that people apparently grow out of what I would consider to necessary aspects of being a music fan, but still try to desperately hold on to that part of their life by getting drunk at a bar and singing along to Fall Out Boy. I don't know, there's so many different thoughts I have about this whole thing and I don't want to complicate this blog post more than I already have.
So, back to Taking Back Tuesday. Apparently this was a much-hyped night, but I did not hear about it until today, its "Boxing Day". I really feel like this night and the reaction to it on its facebook event page sums up all of the things that make me not like these nights, so I will do a first for IMU and do some sort of photo/writing thing.
Slut-shaming is pretty fucking lame. Why you gotta make these girls feel bad and self-conscious about themselves? Especially when you, Jason, were presumably (this is a huge assumption on my part, but probably accurate) there to find a girl to make out with yourself? Wait, you were there "just for the music"? I'm sure. It came up in the comments that the two girls are dating to boot!
A lot of things echoed this sentiment. Hey! Get your current popular music out here and play the 10 year-old popular music I payed $5 to hear!
Though you swear that you are true, I'd still pick a relatively narrow scope of music over you.
A fucking joke I tell you!
Fortunately Deyan was there to open up a discourse.
There was one person above all who was most angry and he let everyone, on every post know it:
Had to include an acquaintance of mine, Jason, roasting Jan like a Portuguese chicken.
Who the fuck is this guy?!
At first, reading all of this stuff, I got kind of mad, mainly because of the ignoramus I posted first, but really all of this is so fucking ridiculous. How can this many people be this mad about a bar night? It's a fucking bar night! This whole thing has convinced me that the popular emo music from the aughts has completely and majestically jumped the shark.
I thought I would end with this:
Man, I know that it sucks to lose that stuff, but why would you have it with you?!
