Wouldn't Want to if I Was in Your Shoes

I was listening to Saves the Day's fourth, and unjustly maligned, album In Reverie today for the first time in ages. Like pretty much everyone else in the world, I can agree that the album which preceded it, Stay What You Are, is miles better, but I can also see what they were going for on the follow-up. In Reverie leans a little more into contemporary rock territory than the light classic rock feel they dabbled in before and you would think that would lead them to better performance on rock music charts, but it didn't. Chris Conley used a very different singing style on the record because of vocal chord problems, but that can't be it, can it?

Anyways, this post is not about that album. It was only to introduce it! What a sneaky cold open!

After In Reverie finished, Saves the Day's Self-Titled started playing automatically in my iTunes.* I don't really have much of a bond to the record, but it does take me back to a time when they were one of my favourite bands and I was absolutely all-in on everything they did.

*I actually think this album is okay. There are a couple of pretty fun, poppy rock songs ("In the In Between", "The Tide of Our Times", "Stand in the Stars") that almost make you believe the band is on some next level late-career renaissance shit, but there's also enough slow boring stuff to convince you they should hang it up. All told, it's at least a good creative direction for a band who's been active for over 20 years. I can respect a band for still trying new things and "doing it" as opposed to just rehashing their most successful sound in a pandering way, like blink did on California.

I saw Saves the Day play at Pouzza Fest in Montreal the summer before Self-Titled came out. They played a new song at that show and I remember being pretty stoked on it, but that can also be chocked up to me seeing one of my favourite bands for the first time and having an all-around amazing time. Later that summer, they released "The Tide of Our Times" and my hopes were high on them putting out a solid follow-up to Daybreak, which I loved. As a fan of the band's entire discography up to that point, I was convinced that this would be another addition to a storied career. When it did come out, I gave it a decent amount of listens, but eventually found that it just didn't resonate with me like all of their past material did.

However, the feeling of anticipation I had before the record came out is exactly what I chase as a music fan. Watching an artist operate at the best of their abilities and put things out that matter to you is special. It's even more special when it's a lesser-known band and you get to have this relationship privately, just you and the music. I know that Saves the Day is a huge band, with singles that are a touchstone for the genre and nine full-length albums, but I got that feeling a little bit while waiting for Self-Titled to come out.

Today, I started to think about who I'm currently "all in" on. The obvious first one is Oso Oso, who I won't spend another post gushing about right now (I will take an opportunity to link to their newest single though, it's great!). Tony Molina is another. Since Bay Dream came out, I would say I'm getting there with Culture Abuse, as their "Police on my Back" cover, "Goo", and "Wartime Dub" have all been excellent.

This brings me to Baggage, the new(ish) band of Jono Diener, who was the drummer and one of the songwriters in IMU sentimental favourites The Swellers. So far, they've put out two excellent EPs that continue the 90's alternative/punk hybrid that The Swellers were moving towards on their last two albums. Maybe Jono's vocals were the secret sauce to me loving that band? Highly recommended!



Baggage recently signed to Smartpunk Records and are going to release their first full-length album later this summer. So far, they've released two songs from the record, "Horseshoe" up above and "Misophonia" below, and I find that I've been looking forward to the record more than many others that will come out in 2019. In terms of being all in, I'm not sure if I'm there with them yet, but a good record for me to blast while I'm all alone in a new apartment in Montreal will almost certainly put them there. Here's to hoping.

Speed On

As a person, I am very bad at evaluating the worth of what I'm currently doing. I tend to think all the things I've done in the past are miles better than what I'm currently working on and I immediately start to wonder why I've gotten so lazy and less motivated to produce writing and do cool stuff. I know that a lot of this is nonsense and is mostly just me idealizing the past, but I also rely on it to keep me working on things. If I don't beat myself a little bit, then I won't keep writing. It's just how it is!

Something I've done in the past is talk about the space that specific songs have carved out in my mind. I did one on "Motown Never Sounded So Good" by Less Than Jake and one on "Chicago" by Big D and the Kids Table.* Maybe there's more! I'm not going to check! I wouldn't say that either of those songs is an absolute tattoo-the-lyrics-on-my-arm favourite of mine, but they are tied to specific memories and do stir something inside me each time I listen to them. Maybe that does make them an all-time favourite. I don't know. When you've been consuming music for 20 years it gets harder to delineate your favourites like you did when you were a teenager and discovering the Arrogant Sons of Bitches.

*Most of IMU's titles are lyrics from songs. Oddly enough, neither of those two posts use lyrics from the song they're talking about it. Seems like a layup, no?

While remembering that series, I was listening to "Motor Away" by Guided by Voices, another song which will live in my brain forever, and bam, the next IMU post was born.



I had seen Guided by Voices name-checked in online music journalism many times in my youth, but assumed they sounded much different from their name. Since I was so deeply in love with punk music in my late teens and early twenties, I thought that indie rock was death and strictly for poseurs. Spacey, grandiose, and esoteric bands like the Arcade Fire (whose first record I now like) convinced me that any musician who deigned to think themselves an artist was clearly way too pretentious and not worth my time. This changed a little bit when I started to listen to Pavement and Superchunk, whose riffing and quasi-punkness showed my that there is good in the genre, but it's really something that stuck with me a while, and still kind of does (Animal Collective fucking blows ass bro).

The way that I discovered Guided by Voices was through a collection of covers by Sean Bonette of AJJ. I've for sure written about this release before, so I won't go deep into it, but it's a collection of lo-fi versions of his favourite songs from skate videos. It's great stuff and has stayed in constant rotation for me since its release.

http://quoteunquoterecords.com/qur076.htm

Among the songs he does is "Motor Away". Even though I knew a couple of the other songs, "Motor Away" had an immediate impact and I got that lightness in your chest and slight shiver when a song shoots right to your chest. I looked up the original right away and was shocked to find a trebly and fuzzy song that was in the middle of a 28-track album of 90-second songs. This was not what I expected Guided by Voices to be at all. I thought they were a, like, 6-part band from Scotland who used glockenspiel and shit, not a rough rock band from Ohio who ferociously put out songs.

I tend to really love bands who focus on output rather than meticulously crafting records. I think it stems from Bomb the Music Industry!'s early output, when Jeff Rosenstock was making everything himself on a laptop and putting out an album per year, having a deep impact on me as a teenager and that informing the way I look at all music now. When somebody has each song be just the execution of one idea and not fussing over it, it screams DIY to me in the most encouraging way. Rather than reading it as "the song isn't finished", which I guess some (I'm looking at you Duffer) could, I see it as valuing the process over the product. The art lies in all of us trying to do it and putting it out there. It's why I'm head over heels for Tony Molina right now.

What I find great about bands like GBV and BtMI! is that when the songs hit they really hit. The idea behind the song is so simple and complete that it doesn't need anything else, and that is beautiful. "Motor Away" is basically just two chords for most of the song, with simple guitar leads over that. The lyrics are just poetic enough to stir up images and ideas in you, without getting up their ass. A perfect song.

When I discovered Guided by Voices and "Motor Away", I was living in Kitchener. I had just started writing my thesis and Beat Noir was starting to work on Sovereignties. Rebecca and I were just past the one-year mark in our relationship and that was becoming more obviously one of the most important things to ever happen to me. I was living with Mark, Colin, Duff, Erik, and Jeff still, but commuting to school where I was on my own. I was becoming more independent and still doing some important thinking about who I was.

When I listen to "Motor Away", I see myself sitting on my bed in Kitchener with the door open and the song playing. Everyone else is home, but I'm doing my own thing in my room for the moment because I have school tomorrow. Maybe the seeds of me moving to Guelph and then back to Toronto, moving in with Rebecca, finishing my thesis and starting at the gallery are there and that's why "Come on, speed on" hit me so hard.

How Many Horror Movies We Sat Through

I listened to a podcast where one pro wrestler I like interviewed another pro wrestler I like.

The one mentioned he contributed to a song by Kimya Dawson, so I read the Wikipedia entry on her.

The article said she was friends with Paul Baribeau.

Thought about how my friends listened to him a lot in university.

Asked a friend where to start with his music.

Watched a video of him playing on a couch.

Put on his record and tried to start looking for jobs.

Ended up staring into the air and listening instead.

Thought about you and the tough times you've gone through. Thought about the night we had like in the song.

I've seen you since then and I think it was better for you.

Know that you're a little better now, but I still worry a lot.

Never Say Goodbye

Something about I, Musical Genius that is interesting to me is that I'm able to interact with past versions of myself by looking at what I was writing on the internet. In addition to the many awful posts that exist in the archive, there's also a pile of drafts that sit in the platform and haven't materialized into anything. As much as there's many swings and misses from when I was trying to process breakups online, most of these drafts didn't even make that cut.

One of the things that comes up a bunch in the drafts, that I may have mentioned on IMU in the past, was a series called Under the Radar in which I would talk about bands I thought were underappreciated. How did I not name that name was corny and hackneyed as fuck?! The drafts are all from September 2013, so my only excuse is that I was wired on coffee in my office at Guelph and trying to come up with ideas to write about to get my chops back up as I entered academia again. Folks, it was a moment of weakness and I will never use a title that bad ever again, promise!

Pretty much all of the bands that I chose for the project were ska bands where I was the only listener I knew of among my friends.* I guess some people would say "Wow, glad you dodged that bullet!", but TBH, I still like all of the bands I chose, even if I don't listen and relate to some of them as much as I used to. Anyways, one of the bands was The Impossibles, and all of this was the intro for the following.

*Turns out I ended up finishing one, on The Stereo, in October 2013. Funny that the only one I did was on the only non-ska band, right?!



The Impossibles are now more of a signpost for true power pop heads to me than anything else. There will be times when the discography still appeals to me, but for the most part I find that I don't turn to ska-punk music from the late-90s as readily. I still love all of it, but it's so nostalgic for me and the more I age, the less I want to indulge nostalgic feelings. They can be a bit of a trap that keeps you living in the past and not moving on from things. There's proper ways to go about it, of course, but having all your main interests be nostalgic is a little poisonous, is what I'm saying.

That all being said, whenever I hear someone from a band mention that they love The Impossibles (and loving The Stereo often goes along with that), my ears perk up and I become way more interested. In fact, what kind of inspired me to come back to this post was Barry Johnson from Joyce Manor mentioning in an interview that he loves the Impossibles and that was why he got Rory Phillips to produce Million Dollars to Kill Me.* They never ascended to the top of the genre in the way that a Mighty Mighty BossTones or Reel Big Fish did, so they occupy this interesting space for me, as an invested ska fan in 2019, of having been around and put out lots of material and having toured, but not being a band that most punks know, in my experience.

*Bud, there's a huge fucking Rory stink (especially Three Hundred by the Stereo) all over that album. I love it.

I guess, what I'm interested in is why does the discography hold weight with people nearly 20 years later? Why does this album still kick around and allow the band to do reunion shows, while pretty much all of their contemporaries from the late-90s don't get the same treatment? People aren't exactly knocking down the door to demand Animal Chin and Hippos reunions.

My theory is that it's because the Impossibles' music (and especially the contributions from Rory Phillips, who went on do similar work in the Stereo) is indebted to a certain tradition of pop-rock songwriting that gives their music more staying power than some others. Most of the verses on Anthology are fairly standard fast ska-punk, but they build around that with huge chorus hooks and distorted intros that elevate the songs from being just "genre". There's nuance in the way the songs' parts flow into each other that for me recalls power-pop of the early 80's or album-oriented rock. Knowingly copping the tricks of hook-centric rock bands is an easy way to beef up your music, and the Impossibles were smart to do it in a genre where most other bands didn't focus on song-writing. This was further emphasized on their farewell album Return, which was entirely power-pop with no ska.

I think one of the first bands to really pastiche that late-70s and early-80s style of writing rock songs was Weezer, who did it perfectly on Blue and also managed to work the idea of bringing back that music into their lyrics (especially "Buddy Holly" and "In the Garage"). So much so, that now a band trying to put big overdriven riffs, catchy chorus melodies and guitar solos in their songs is now just referred to as "Weezer influence". That type of thing has gotten fairly common today, but I think that the Impossibles were one of the first to start doing it and the fact that they did so in a genre with pretty narrow sonic parameters, ska, is commendable.

As a musician, it's hard to stretch ska out and make it work in a variety of ways. A band like Reel Big Fish, who for better or for worse are a mainstay of the genre, hasn't changed its sound at all since its formation. The same can even be said of better ska bands, like the Slackers, who stick to a 1st-wave/reggae formula because it works and they can live in the subtleties and nuance.

When ska-punk bands are more song-writing focused than, for lack of a better term, "playing ska-focused", they inevitably move towards albums that downplay upstokes and dance-y parts in favour of better songs as a whole. Less Than Jake did this on Borders and Boundaries and Bomb the Music Industry! did this on Get Warmer. It's a jump that you need to make if you are part of the weird niche of loving ska, but also loving song songs. I guess that I just wish more people respected the Impossibles for making that jump.

It's Hard to See in Those Murky Waters

Winter exhibitions are over and now I have a three-week break before our fundraising gala, after which I'll have another three-week break until our next exhibitions open. That's a wrap on Toronto. With so much time off, I'll be busy packing for the move, culling things we don't need anymore and packing the things we do. Times of transition are rarely ever as well-defined as this one, so it seems a little strange, but I think it's also a good thing. More so than ever before, the break will have to be busy and productive, but I don't foresee that being a problem this time around. Here's some things that I'm currently enjoying during this time of transition.

Barry is currently my favourite show on TV. It's a dark dramedy created by and starring Bill Hader about an Iraq war vet who is now a hitman but also trying to make it as an actor. As ridiculous as that description sounds, the show gets real as fuck. The supporting cast is wonderful, but it's really the Hader show as he shows off an intensity I don't think many people expected from him. The second season did that impossible thing of making a big jump but staying good. Amazing stuff.

I wouldn't classify myself as a "gamer", but there a couple of video games that have stuck with me and made an impression on me throughout my life. One of those games is the Dynasty Warriors series, in which you fight as Han-era Chinese warlords. The game is based on the Chinese novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of China's "Four Classical Novels". The mythology surrounding the story, which toes the line between history and fiction, has always fascinated me and drawn me into the story and this year I decided to read it. It was a very fulfilling experience.



I saw Big Nothing while they toured their debut 7" during the summer of 2017. The band made a huge impression on me at the show, so I've been anticipating further material since then. They recently put out a full-length and it's great stuff. A little fuzzy and dreamy in a 90s alt sort of way, but everything still building towards big poppy choruses. I also really love the songs where Liz Parsons sings lead. It would be wonderful if every pop-punk band was this good instead of being derivative horse shit.



I've seen Fury one time, when the opened for Power Trip and Sheer Mag in May 2018 (fuckin' huge gig bud). While tuning between songs, the singer spoke about how big of impression the music of Gord Downie (recently deceased at the time) had made on him. A couple of songs later, he recited a poem of Downie's as stage banter and I don't think many people in the crowd realized what it was. This obviously turned me into an instant fan, in addition to them play the exact type of vaguely-Youth Crew-ish, vaguely Snapcase-ish hardcore that I crave. They put out a new album this May and it fucking rocks ass.


Do you ever mean to check out a band for ages because you know that you'll like the band based on their name and album name? And then the guitarist appears on your favourite podcast and you realize he's a similar personality to you and that reminds you that you still need to check out his band because you'll almost definitely like it? And then you do and you realize you like Wild Side?

Lastly, I have a secret album that will be released by an Ontario band later this year. They've been playing songs off it for the last year-ish and I've been patiently waiting for what was sure to be another release that is heads and shoulders above everything else everyone is putting out in this province. It's absolutely wonderful and already shot right up to the top of my 2019 releases. It's crazy to think of what your friends are capable of.

Liberties, Vol 14

A new Liberties? Bud, I'm feelin' crazy and had to build one around the new Fury record, which is wonderful.

There's A Lot of Things I Want That I Can't Have, and to be Honest, the Older I Get, the More Pissed Off I Am About it.

This weekend, I will be volunteering at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, as I've done each of the last four Mother's Day weekends. This means that this coming Friday will be the last shift I work during our current exhibition season, leaving less than ten (the real number is still unknown, but for sure less than ten) shifts at my current job.

Over the last year or so, there's been a lot of false endings at the place, where there was a good chance I would leave, but ultimately ended up staying put. This time, the change is set in stone because of the big move at the end of June. I can't work here while living in Montreal.

Some people would get wistful leaving a place they've worked that long, but I can't say that I am at all. Maybe there was a bit of that once I left the office last year, but certainly not now. Being at the same place and following the same procedures every day has gotten beyond monotonous and I think I've been sleepwalking through the motions for months now.

This type of boredom crept up on me and I was fully snared in its trap before I even realized it. The idea of having a job where you do nothing and have limited responsibilities is appealing, but this type of existence also bleed into the other parts of my life and it feels like I didn't do anything for the last year.

This is, of course, completely untrue, as I spent the better part of that time applying to and finalizing my school for the future, and then organizing all the logistics that come with a shift that big. Still though, I can't shake the feeling in my gut that I need to break away from where I am right now (professionally that is, I will always love you Toronto) to spur myself into news ways of thinking, new experiences, and some much-needed uncertainty.

Two months of hot Toronto weather. A couple of engagements in that time. Packing up a whole life. Let's rock.

Yeah Yo

I promised another post about my future ages ago, didn't I? I've been caught up in a couple of other things and, as usual, the idea of writing an update post on IMU slipped from my mind.

The reasons for neglecting that writing is explicitly tied to the writing though. I've been meaning to write about moving to Montreal, but more important than that is tackling the very real tasks related to that move. I need to be in a constant state of passively looking for apartments, taking care of small registration tasks at Concordia, and trying to make plans with my friends before I leave. If can believe it, those are all above "hash out a blog", but just barely.

Now that I'm here typing out, that leaves us with "telling people how you feel about the future" and there's no easy answer to that. Watch, as I work through ideas!

I think it's fair to say that I am primarily excited about beginning a PhD at Concordia University in Montreal. I've loved all the time I've spent in the city and I'm sure that living there won't be a difficult transition. There will still be all the things I need and love (public transit, good food, music, art) and some new things, the most obvious being that everything will be in French. This new setting for my life will be easy enough that I won't die, but also different enough that I'll be forced to change and grow. That's good.

For example: Live Blue Jays Baseball only two times. Man!

Most important, from a personal perspective, is that since I finished my MA, all my work has felt like I've been keeping my brain warm for when I went back to school. Graduate studies and teaching is what I do best, what gives me the most fulfillment, and is where I have the most to offer other people. I am so happy to return to it and also glad that Concordia has so far given me the impression that it is the right place to do this.

I'm also stressed. I hate moving. I know that everyone hates moving, since they've told me so when we speak about me moving, but the point stands. It gives me anxiety and I mostly shut down and get irritable while I'm doing it. The furthest I've moved before is an hour and a half now. Now I'm moving 5 and a half away. It's going to weigh on me. Lord is it ever going to weigh on me.

I'm scared about the move too. Like I said, the furthest I've moved in the past is an hour and a half, from Scarborough to Kitchener. This will be my first time living outside of Ontario and even my first time really out of the Greater Toronto Area. I know that I'll be able to do it, but it is daunting. The scariest thing about not living in Ontario is that I don't know what to expect about a lot of things. I guess I need to live in that uncertainty. Right?

I'm going to end on a music note, since that's what IMU has traditionally done. This year has been relatively light on new music for me, but Masked Intruder put out a new record and I've found it pleasantly surprising. I've never been huge on the band, but the new record sounds much different and hits a sweet spot between early power pop (like the Rubinoos) and late 70s/early 80s album-oriented rock, which is to say that there are hooks upon hooks that occasionally delve into some wonderfully cheesiness. There's a way bigger emphasis on vocal melodies, which is much easier said than done, and I always appreciate bands making that effort. The album isn't world-changing, and I could easily see it being one I forget about in 6 months, but at the moment it's a solid listen and a great surprise to see the band trying to mix it up in what they do.

Blacktop Manhattan Closed Reilly's

I've had this post ready in the chamber for a while, but didn't really know what to do with it. I think it came out way too nostalgic and sappy, when I intended it to be funnier and more self-aware. It started as a small idea with the title, but it turned into something else once I started writing it. Now that I've finished it, I can't say that I have any desire to go back and re-configure it to make it into something, but it's also big enough and took enough time that it doesn't feel right to completely delete it. The nice thing about IMU is that I can take these types of posts and let them live here. Nothing has to be complete and shiny here, it can just be a real-ish representation of my creative process.

Here's a thing about a band my friends were in in high school. Please know that I do not have the emotional investment in this band that the piece makes it sound like, but also know that Blacktop is one of the funniest and best things ever. That's a strange balance, I know.

***

One of the most exciting times of being a teenager was when my friends and I finally got around to starting our own bands in high school. We had logged our requisite hours of learning "Smells Like
Teen Spirit" and "Dammit" on guitar and were now ready to show those around us what we had. The dreams you have of playing in front of an arena when you're young immediately become a little bit realer once you've seen people you know take that crucial first step: Starting a real band that plays its own songs.

One day, you'll look back on this band and laugh at how many silly cliches they performed, like dedicating songs to their 10th grade girlfriends or playing simple guitar solos behind their heads, and the songs will seem hilarious in hindsight, even though you thought they were so cool at the time. 15 years later, no one will think about the band or ever mention it, but 15 years later you can still say that the band was the first one.

It didn't take long for Blacktop Manhattan to occupy a central role in the lives of all of its members and their friends. Funnily enough, I didn't even hear about the band from its members, who were close friends of mine, but from other friends who had been at one of their shows. "Our friends play in a real band now!" Their legend grew from there, I guess. Blacktop's shows were a premier social event. All of your friends would be there and someone would definitely have beer and weed. You would definitely meet at least five new people through mutual friends, including girls. You would immediately get the rub from the band because you knew them. On top of the social benefits, it was also a fun thing to do because you would get to watch your friends' band play and when you are a teenager at a concert, actual quality of performance means next to nothing. Damien is playing a guitar with a Bad Religion sticker onstage? That fucking rules. One person would always do a Nestea plunge off the stage and be carried around by 5 or 6 people. A concert! This is the best! On top of all that, there would also always be at least one other high school band on the show who was so bad that they will stick in your mind until the day you die. Teen Stranger! Broken Home! The Thundernuts!

Blacktop shows were a monthly pilgrimage for teenagers where we gathered at Victoria Park Station to head to the FunHouse or the El Mocambo or Club Rockit or the Opera House as a huge group. More so than house parties or dances, this is what my friends did. For a couple of shows, a friend and I designated ourselves as "merch guys" and sold the band's copyright infringing Pulp Fiction t-shirts and some pins that I had shoddily designed on Microsoft Paint.

I can't tell you how long Blacktop were a band, but it couldn't have been much longer than a year and was definitely less than two. After they broke up, the members formed two new bands, which also broke a begat new bands after that. The family tree began to include more and more members and started to intersect in new ways, but Blacktop Manhattan was definitely the thickest part of the trunk, right near the bottom.

After Blacktop and a post-BM band had broken up, Damien, who had played guitar in both, uploaded the band's songs on the website Newgrounds' audio portal. Since Damien was an active user, another user had found them and included them as playable songs in a online Flash game he had made called Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe 2. Online teens are noted for their verbosity, after all. The game was a simplified version of Guitar Hero when the latter was at the height of its cultural influence. Just like getting your song in Guitar Hero could vault you into millions of t-shirt sales at HMV or Spencer's Gift, "Hollywise" being the first song in SCGMD2 immediately vaulted Blacktop Manhattan into an internet legacy that none of the members could ever have expected.

Teens from all over the world began to leave comments on Blacktop's abandoned MySpace page saying "Please come play in Texas!" Teenaged girls would add me on the site simply because I was in Blacktop's "Top 8". Things snowballed from there. One day we found a video on Youtube that was a stationary picture of my friends in 10th grade set to "Hollywise". The video itself was weird enough, but even stranger was that it had 50000 views. We hadn't even made it! We later found even more of these videos, all with the same picture, likely pilfered from MySpace, and all featuring "Hollywise". Then we found a video of a pre-teen boy demonstrating how to play "Hollywise" on acoustic guitar, but not playing any correct notes. Just playing random parts of the guitar along to the song! Before long, we found videos of tiny teen boys covering "Hollywise" in their school's gymnasium. It was so strange and unbelievable that it eventually became the most plausible thing. Of course Blacktop Manhattan had turned into a viral sensation. What else would have happened?

The group of friends in Blacktop Manhattan's orbit separated but didn't split up after high school. Some of us went away to university, some of us stayed in Scarborough, some of us started working.
Near the end of my first year at school, Pat and I got a Facebook invitation to the Blacktop Manhattan reunion show at Reilly's, a venue north of Dundas on Yonge, across from the strip club Zanzibar. The band had a good sense of humour about their status as a viral phenomenon and thought it would be fun to bring everyone together to relish it. This happened in the golden age of Facebook event pages, in which many people would post on the page's "wall" in anticipation of the event taking place. Our friends went crazy and acted as if Guns 'n Roses then-yet-to-be-released album Chinese Democracy was finally coming out. Blacktop purposefully booked the metal band that Teen Stranger had turned into to open. It was perfect.

A big difference between the reunion show and the ones we had gone to high school was that now almost all of us were 19 and getting alcohol was significantly easier. In addition to the usual cast of characters at the show, there was another generation of kids, between a year and four younger than us, who came out because they had heard of Blacktop as the "cool" band when they were starting high school. Much like us when we were attending the real Blacktop shows, this was an elite social event for them. They were all wasted.

The show was a perfect party. The band was super sloppy because they had only rehearsed several times in advance of it. They played every song they had ever performed, even the stupid one-off ones, and indulged in silly things like dualing guitar and slap bass solos in a funk song that they had for some reason. It was a ridiculous and bad show, but that was exactly what everyone wanted. Blacktop Manhattan wasn't a good band by any measure and realistically, the reunion show performance was probably not that far off from how they had sounded in their prime. Everyone was drunk and had a ball.

Blacktop booked and ran the show themselves. Quinn's parents ran the door and security and let everyone in. After the band played, the crowd lingered in the venue and slowly spilled out onto the street. The wave of younger kids, all much drunker than they had probably ever been, wreaked havoc on the venue, wrecking the banister on the staircase and climbing all over things, undoubtedly doing permanent damage to Reilly's.

This briefly turned into a serious scene. The owner of the venue was pissed that this many drunk underage people had been let into the show and done so much damage to everything. Word filtered out, through a drunk and broken telephone, that he had told the band that he would never book another all-ages show at Reilly's ever again. To risk the actual structure of the venue was too big of a gamble.

Reilly's did indeed stop having all-ages show. Not long after that, the venue closed permanently. By my logic, the success and health of the venue depended on the fact that they regularly hosted all-ages show featuring local bands, so it followed that Blacktop Manhattan's reunion show was the reason it closed. I have no idea if that's actually why, and Reilly's' online footprint is scarce, so I will never know for sure and will instead continue believing in the myth of the first real band that my friends ever formed and is much more famous than anything I have or ever will do.

And She's Got One of the Best All-Time Laughs in the History of All-Time Laughs, She Laughs with Her Entire Body

Since I consider IMU to be the definitive document of my life, I feel it's important to write about important things that happen to me and the big changes I go through. I've accepted an offer to begin a PhD at Concordia in September! I think I should access my emo side (as if I have another side) and write a full post about that, but now I want to revive an old IMU classic and document this time in my life in a series of High Fidelity Top 5s.

Top 5 Things I Will Miss About The Annex
5. Wiener's Home Hardware.
4. Living by Bathurst (the 'Thurst) Station.
3. Korean food.
2. Christie Pits
1. Being able to see the CN Tower from Borden Street.

Top 5 2019 Records I Can't Wait For
5. Whatever Daniel Romano's 2 new records will be.
4. Vince Staples
3. Crying?????
2. Baggage
1. Oso Oso

Top 5 Post-1992 Steven Segal Movies
5. Fire Down Below
4. Half Past Dead
3. Under Siege 2
2. On Deadly Ground
1. Exit Wounds

Top 5 Bench Players on the 2019 Raptors
5. Patrick McCaw
4. Norm Powell
3. Chris Boucher
2. Fred Van Vleet
1. OG Anunoby

Top 5 Things That Will Happen During the 2019 Baseball Season
5. Clay Bucholz getting traded for a A piece that won't turn into anything.
4. Bryce Harper hitting 50 bombs in Philly.
3. Mike Trout leading the Angels to the playoffs and winning a series.
2. Yasiel Puig and Joey Votto becoming best friends.
1. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. getting called up and winning American League Rookie of the Year.

Top 5 Things I Can't Wait to do in Montreal
5. Eat a smoked meat sandwich every day and get high cholesterol.
4. Learn.
3. Become a better French speaker.
2. Go to see the Jays each year at Olympic Stadium.
1. Start a nice new life with Rebecca and our two bobos.