Our House Had All the Summer Shade

Does writing out a blog here get my creative juices flowing and make it easier to write the annotations that I need to today? Hard to know if there's any correlation there, but let's believe that it's true today.

I'm not sure why, but Ontario Place has been on my mind a bunch lately. Maybe because it's August and it's making me remember the dog days of the summer working there and waiting for the school year to start (I guess I have always really liked school). Maybe the current heat wave in Montreal is making me think of the days at OP where the humidex would go up to 50 beside the lake. Maybe it's because I still use my OP windbreaker as a light jacket and I've recently worn it in the rain. In any case, the park has been circling back in mind over the last two weeks or so and smaller stories and memories that I haven't thought about in years are returning as a result.

Something you only noticed about Ontario Place if you were there every day for three months was that they just played a single Sirius Satellite Radio station for the entire summer. One summer it was Sirius 70s, one it was 80s, one was a weird PG Top 40. Though I assume the DJs who made the playlist thought they had made a huge mix of songs, I feel like I had heard the entire run of them in about three days. You quickly got used to this station being the background noise of this summer and not long after that started to hate every song because you had heard it so many times. 

That being said, there were always a few songs each summer that would cut through the haze and boredom and remain awesome, no matter how many times you heard them. On a long hot workday, these would be a welcome relief and boost to your mood.

 The Official List of Good Songs that Played at Ontario Place:

Thin Lizzy - The Boys Are Back in Town

I think that this might have been where my appreciation for Thin Lizzy started? So many losers made a big show of listening to classic rock while I was in high school that it was hard to not associate it with them and it took me a while to come around to the good parts of the genre. I legit perked up every time this song started and started to love it before long. There was so much boring 70s arena rock on the playlist, but the guitar harmonies and thumpy bass made me realize that Thin Lizzy was head and shoulders above them all.

Orleans - Still the One

Speaking of boring arena rock! I truly can't explain why this song appealed to me, as it's so fucking corny it hurts. I think I was just so overdosed on love songs by bands like the Ergs! and Descendents that anything in the genre could win me over. What if Grand Funk Railroad and the Eagles combined but left their small amount of songwriting skill behind. You get this band! It does pain me to admit that that's a huge vocal harmony on the chorus.

The Eagles - Lyin' Eyes

Much like the Dude, I just fuckin' hate the Eagles man. They're infinitely worse than all the other California easy rock from that time, having none of the guitar shredding and maliciousness of Fleetwood Mac or the dark moroseness of Jackson Browne. I guess chalk it up to the same reason that Orleans song popped out to me? Forgive me, I was painfully single and lonely.

PS: This song is 6 minutes? What the fuck?

The Miracles - Love Machine

I wasn't alone in getting tired of Ontario Place's music and most of the staff  felt like Bill Murray each time he wakes up in Groundhog Day. One day I was rotating around to my next position in the waterpark took over the spot of this big Chilean guy named Nick. As he left, he said something like "Oh man, that 'Love Machine' was playing." and started doing a little dance and singing "I don't work for nobody but you!" in a falsetto. I think he was high. It brightened up my day.

Kim Mitchell - Patio Lanterns

This one is no surprise as I'm about as a huge a Mitchell fan as there is, so I was stoked that it was part of the 80s playlist. One morning, I was hungover and stoned coming into work and this song was playing as I entered the gate of the park. What a perfect morning.

Miley Cyrus - The Climb

When we converted to a Top 40 playlist, it was weirdly all songs that were like three to four years old. I already thought this song was hilarious because of an inside joke with my friend Jamie, so that made it easy to vibe to it when it started to play at OP. I started to joke with all the 20-year-old biddies that I worked with that this was my favourite song and it often played at the bottom of one slide where I had to do rescues, so the over-the-top anthem about overcoming adversity started to be about me having to jump in and get kids.

Katy Perry - Hot 'n Cold

At the height of poptimism, I was super into Katy Perry's first two albums (if that weird debut doesn't count) and I think that "Hot 'n Cold" playing at Ontario Place was the start of that. I caught myself vibing to the song one day at the park because it's undeniably catchy. Once again, I fell prey to a song about someone fucking you around. I would go home after work and watch the video on Youtube because I loved it, but then also erase the video from my browsing history so that other people wouldn't know I was listening to it. I was punk! Punks can't like Top 40!

PS: While working at Ontario Place, I realized that "Tik Tok" by Ke$ha and "California Gurlz" by Katy Perry have the same melody and are almost the same song. I mentioned this to my co-workers and most didn't believe me, despite the similarities being obvious, or didn't care. Crazy! All of them!

Can We Just Lie Here and Find a Way to Kill Some Time Here

This Friday marks the opening of the new fall exhibitions at my work and that means an influx of work to go along with it. That means longer hours and less time to write. I'm sort of short on ideas right now, but do have a backlog of topics in my drafts, so my current plan is to knock one of those out to get myself back on track and resume my life as a content mule.

In the meantime, I thought I would talk about some music I've been into lately because that is easy for me to do and it's also something I used to do a lot and I kind of wish I did more.

Oso Oso played Toronto last night and I made a point to go. I find it's easy to let shows fall by the wayside while I'm busy with work and I hate that that has become a habit. The last time I saw Oso Oso, they were opening for The Hotelier and they blew me away. They sit at a halfway point between current "emo revival" bands like The World is a Beautiful Place and The Hotelier et al. and Third Eye Blind's Self-Titled, which happens to be one of my favourite albums. They pull off this mixture perfectly and are big-time on melody, guitar riffs, and vocal harmonies. This time they were on a smaller headlining tour and were just as good. The band is tight as hell and great at what they do. I was ready to sing along to my favourite bangers from the most excellent Real Stories of True People, Who Kind of Looked Like Monsters... (DISCLAIMER: LISTEN TO THAT RECORD), but was instead greeted by a set that was like half new songs that were just as good, if not better, than what I had already heard.

I can't say enough great things about that band. They're going to be big shit soon and if they aren't, they deserve to be. Support them.

Since last Friday I've also been going hard on the new Joyce Manor album, Cody. Every time Joyce Manor puts out something new, it also causes to revisit everything else they've put out. This time was no different and I've been in full Joyce Manor Mode since Cody came out. I really appreciate and love when band's try to do something new for each record and Joyce Manor is a great example of that. They started with a wonderful debut album that was equal parts emo, hardcore, and pop-punk, but in a way that was completely different from the awful, whiney, breakdown-heavy version that most losers were into. Instead of building on that sound and cashing in on hype, they put out an abrasive 9-song, 14-minute follow up that weirded a ton of people out. Of the 9 songs, two are short acoustic songs, one's a (phenomenal) cover of "Video Killed the Radio Star", and one uses a lo-fi synth as its base. While I initially wasn't huge on the record, but loved the idea, I now find myself coming back to it a lot. THEN, they hit everyone with a polished 3rd album of pop-punk hits that remain short, to-the-point, and idiosyncratic.

I lovelovelovelove bands who aren't afraid to write short songs and albums. "Keep it simple stupid."

With all of this said, I've been thinking that Cody may be my favourite of their's yet and also probably my favourite thing released this year. The band has started to show a huge power-pop influence (a direct path to my heart) and Cody sees the band taking healthy doses of Blue and #1 Record, in addition to their usual influences. It's mature and a great take on a sound that I daydream about using myself a lot. A link to the album is at the start of the preceding paragraph.

Joyce Manor is a band whose sound and influences have grown along with me, which has really endeared them to me. Their music has stuck around with me and now, like 7 years later, they are all of a sudden near the top of my favourite bands and definitely one of the current bands that matters the most, IMO. An odd reason that I feel really attached to them is that if I were still really serious about writing songs, and I had continued writing and working them after I just sort of stopped a few years ago, then I think Barry and I would have very similar writing styles. It's cool to see the style I sort of worked within be taken and done extremely well and much better than I ever came close to doing.

Good record. You should listen!

Another record that has been in regular rotation during my work hours is the most recent full-length by LVL UP, Return to Love. I love me some poppy, fuzzy indie rock and this album delivers that in spades. The songs kind of sound like In the Aeroplane Over the Sea to me, albeit without the acoustic instruments and the distinctive lyrics. Does that make sense? Listen, and you'll get it. Good. A good record that will no doubt be on my end of the year list of favs.

Lastly, I've been hanging out a lot with Thin Lizzy's Fighting, which is the record before the one that everyone knows. I love Thin Lizzy and feel like they are unjustly overlooked in the revered pantheon of 70's rock band. They got riffs. Fuck do they ever have riffs. This record probably deserves as much attention as anything from the decade.