Swearin'

Y'know what I'm fucking sick of? 

Self-deprecating. Yeah yeah, no one reads this blog and my writing is inconsistent and my sense of humor is annoying and whatever the fuck else. Who the fuck cares? You? I seem to insist that "you" don't exist fairly often (which, on a realistic note, is fairly true), so probably not. I, however, know exactly why I throw up these self-deprecating veils, and it's not just to be relatable and irreverent: it's because I've been socialized to believe much of this about myself and am afraid of not covering my ass with a tungsten diaper of self-awareness and pre-emptive assessment. By asserting that "hey, I KNOW my writing sucks lol" I'm safeguarding myself from any potential criticism, spoken or not. Fuck that shit. I'm done getting down on myself for my perceived falterings when no one else is even remotely inclined to feel as strongly as I do. POSITIVITY, MOTHERFUCKER.

This post is about Swearin', one of my favorite bands of the past couple years:

I was getting all dong-stoked on writing up some huge, multi-installment excavation of ye moldye oldey forgotten/severely underrated pop-punk heroes of yore (ie Buford, Cletus, Zoinks!, Apocalypse Hoboken, Cigaretteman, etc...), but then, while browsing punknews with my brain turned off, I noticed an article detailing the imminent (November 5th) release of the second Swearin' full length. This year has produced enough amazing releases by bands I love to flood the observable universe, with new stuff from RVIVR, Laura Stevenson & The Cans, Direct Hit!, The World Is A Beautiful Place And I Am No Longer Afraid To Die, Big Eyes, Rumspringer, Carcass, The Slow Death and a jillion more, but I really didn't expect anything new from Swearin' considering it's only been, like, what? a year? since the self-titled dropped. This troupe is industrious and coincidentally me-pandering as the dickens, so I figured it was high time to rescue this post from two months rotting in the queue. 

And hey, this is great because writing anything that doesn't have a negligible degree of separation from P.S. Eliot is an embarrassing, pointless waste of time according to the majority of my posts

After playing together for about a typical Progerian lifespan in The Ackleys and P.S. Eliot, sisters Katie and Alison split off to oof wait no 

After playing together for a good portion of their lives as The Ackleys and P.S. Eliot, really-really-similar-looking-or-maybe-identical? twins Katie and Alison split off to pursue main projects without one another for the first time. Katie went on to placing her solo bedroom project Waxahatchee at the top of her 'to do' list, while Alison and Kyle from Big Soda went off to construct a golden calf to 90's cuddlecore ie Dear Marje (I promise I didn't just invent that term). Following Moses' decidedly non-twee-friendly return, however, the two instated Swearin' as the one true god.

(ugh)

Because the internet is a terrible, attention span shattering place and I wasn't at the stage in my life yet where I was challenging that shit, when I first heard the What A Dump demo in very early 2012, I just sorta nodded in approval and let it get deeply lost in the Autobahn carwreck that was my priorities list of Music To Get Into. I actually didn't even give it another shot until, like, 3 weeks ago (and way after I caught genital rigor mortis over the self-tilted LP) (...), but it is just as great as I remembered.

I didn't realize this had a physical release, but there it is on a dead format you can buy with ironicbucks from Stupid Bag Records' page. The demo's a fantastic, 6 song affair with early versions of both "Kenosha" and an inferior, awkwardly-slow-once-you've-heard-the-LP-version of "Crashing". The remaining four tracks are exclusive to the tape (ha HA why) as far as I know, but are fucking excellent across the board, with a great, raw production style similar to the LP, just slightly lacking in fullness but with more vocal muffling. For their brevity, these tracks are incredibly memorable, with the infectious crescendo of "Snag", the beautiful vocal melody of the otherwise noisy "Subterranean", and the title track's incisive lyrics on street harassment. I particularly like this line:

I will holler and I will shake/ but I could never retaliate/ in a manner that would equate/ your wrong with my hate

While I've always loved Katie's lyrics, her vast, bookworm-ish expanse of vocabulary can be a little difficult to take in, and thus, lighter on emotional impact when a thesaurus isn't at hand. It could be seen as fairly arbitrary to compare the two, but because I view twins as simply the same person twice, I think I prefer Alison's. At the very least, they make me feel less intellectually knuckledrag-y, but they also coast along nicely on their own merits, with a blend of snark and cleverly phrased earnesty I really love.

...and then here's this, the REAL GOODS. THE SHIT YOU WANT. YEAH. 

I was actually about to write "Swearin' was the best LP of 2012", but then I remembered that I hadn't objectively weighed the value of every recorded piece of music through instating an absurdly complex meritocracy that year. Not since '03, at least, in which 15 year old me determined that Korn's Take A Look In The Mirror was fine enough to demand entry into the realm of Public Domain. 

I don't know why I haven't described the way the band sounds yet, but I think it Pitchfork or one of those smarmy review sites said it best when they referred to them as an amalgam of noisy, Henry's Dress-style pop (think Bust 'Em Green-era) and Superchunk-y indie rock through a pop-punk filter with unisex vocals. They may've also used the words "paean" and "tremulous" as unironic descriptive terms. What's important, though, is that this album is an awesome, nearly flawless collection of songs with one of the most perfectly fitting production styles I've ever heard. I know people bandy about the term "lo-fi" a lot when describing this record, but that seems completely misleading to me. Sure, there's a lot of fuzz and grit here, but there's no point where any of this becomes a hindrance or finds any instrument burying the others. If anything, it lends a tremendous amount of power to the songs, and nowhere gets it harder than the closing track, "Movie Star", which showcases the band at their most dynamic. Think You're Living All Over Me rather than Vampire On Titus or some other hissy, 4-track-under-a-mattress quality shit.

Another seemingly majority opinion I'm gonna PUBLICLY DISAGREE WITH because I'm extremely controversial, is how misandry barely has any weight against a patriarchal backdrop, because let me tell you something, mister, the  Kyle's vocals are regarded as an okay, but ultimately unnecessary counterpoint to Alison's. imho, this isn't even about balancing out: Kyle's vocals are just as distinct and vital to the band's overall sound as Alison's, especially on tracks like "Crashing 2.0: Appropriate Speed Version" and the softer approach taken on the surprisingly beautiful, unfortunately relatable sadmagic of "Empty Head". He kinda reminds me of a more frantic, younger John Sampson, too, which is a plus. In other words, this isn't Lauren vs. Mike's sloppy, barely coherent rambling on The Measure [SA]'s Historical Fiction. Maybe that's not really a conversation outside of my own head, though.

I could probably namedrop nearly every track on here, from the great fade-in introduction, "1" to the aforementioned closer, but I'll refrain because no one in the universe likes reading track by track reviews. This album is fantastic, and if you need convincing before you dive in, look up the tracks "Hundreds And Thousands" (which has a perfectly placed swell of guitar noise in the build-up chorus), "Movie Star" (my favorite), and the comparatively cutesy "Just".  

Which brings us to this:

I srsly can't wait for this, especially since I have a strong feeling that these guys can totally one-up their debut. Give the new tracks a listen here and here. I haven't really given them enough time to sink in yet, but they sound great, and the production is even thicker and heavier this time around.

Like John Goodman. 

some exciting newish shit

I was really planning on keeping this blog's production rate at 2 posts per week, but, ugh, I dunno, life's been pretty difficult and smelly lately and my free time has been going primarily into keeping myself sane as I string together days between one therapist appointment and the next. On top of that, being homeless, desperately trying to self-employ, and putting together a comic has made music more of spectator sport for me recently, but I both love writing and establishing an online brand (Contraceptron™) too much not to attempt a few sporadic updates in the meantime. 
The following's just a bunch of newer shit I've been pretty excited about lately, but am too FGSHSGASGAJDGAJDA right now to really cover in much detail. I think people like truncated snippets of untrustworthy opinion, though, so that's great.

(also, more "sleeping on couches homeless" than "crack rock steady homeless" this time)

One of the vocalists has a dramatic alterna-bombast voice and the other sounds kinda like the dude from Charlie Brown Gets A Valentine fused with the guy from Barenaked Ladies. But hey! The catch is that this somehow isn't like being forced to eat a diaper at gunpoint. Instead, it's a surprisingly adventurous spin on the standard pop-punk modus operandi/limited musicianship. I mean, lyrically there's the standard themes of ennui, nostalgia, drinking, growing pains, etc. (sometimes delivered in a particularly cringe inducing tactlessness), but across the board on the band's debut LP from 2011, Idle Ages, is a lot of attention to detail, mid-song riff/arrangement reinvention, and other "hey! listen to that!" shit I love finding in pop-punk bands. It's kinda like turning over a bunch of rocks like you're looking for salamanders but they're pop-punk bands and maybe under them you'll find riffs and songwriting styles that haven't overpopulated an area and destroyed the ecosystem. 
I was about to be all, like, "I can't think of aaaannnnyyy other band that sounds like these guys" but then I realized they actually sound like a more technical, interesting, Midtown with shittier vocals. I don't think that's the best recommendation ever but hey, maybe they'll break up and form an hilariously douchey dance pop band. YEAH!
But really, go look up the songs "Seventeen" and "Architecture" on youtube 'cause blogger won't let me embed them for some reason. Or that grotesque triple music video for "Architecture", "With Honours", and "Living In The Future Of Feelings". Also "honours" because Canada.

If I had a pound of body weight for every time I unsuccessfully attempted to get into The Measure [SA], I would be a horrifying, partially formed skeleton monstrosity with a thin layer of flesh colored latex stretched over it. Or maybe I have brittle, hollow bird bones.
But, like, it'd be a big number of chances. Just not... necessarily enough to substantiate a grown man's body. 
I don't know, fuck you. 
At this point I'm pretty sure it was the guy vocalist's sloppy, raspy bullshit (Historical Fiction), the cheese filling ("How To Steal A Million" = #1 danish), and the general songwriting inconsistency that curbed their appeal for me, but fuck did it take a while to throw in that towel. Oh, and the occasional scoop of cutesy, Plan-It-X-y bullshit. If you're wondering why the theme of "flogging shit I don't like endlessly and then writing about it" has become a recurring element here, well, I dunno as far as writing about it goes, but it usually has to do with the pedigree of the band members or something dumb like really liking Lauren's husky vocals, all coarse and wizened from channeling the cry of the downtrodden & disenfranchised. I wanna hang out with her in our matching self titled-era American Steel t-shirts and read bell hooks and Bakunin in a fair trade organic cafe/bookstore and unpack the word "consent".
...
Apparently The Measure [SA] broke up/completed their mission on Earth sometime in 2011, following shortly after, Lauren started up Worriers with a rotating cast of musicians I have no idea about. I think Mikey Erg is involved now, though? If so, that's pretty radcakes, but it doesn't really sound like his drumming on the song above. Either way, the band sounds great and I'm genuinely excited that they're about to drop an LP on the almost untouchable Don Giovanni Records. 
TAKE A LOOK.
Dig the cover art way hxc as well as the P.S. Eliot vibe I get from the first half of the song. I know, I have to drag P.S. Eliot into everything, but it's definitely a compliment. On top of that, the song is great and DOES sound like Mikey Erg's involved, this time. Can't wait to hear the full length.

everything can go take a difficult shit times 4ever

FUCK.

 

But let's take a closer, more MS Paint enunciated look:

LOOK AT THAT SHIT.
I HAD NO IDEA THIS WAS HAPPENING UNTIL LAST NIGHT.
Let me be totally serious in this here sentence: had I known about this shit a week or so earlier, I would literally have dropped eVeRyThInG - including financial frugality AND several other significant prior engagements - to be there on the 15th. You know? You know the Broadways reformed once in 2011 in California for the 15th anniversary of Asian Man Records? They did, and I fucking missed it and was and am sad. I know this sounds like an obnoxious overstatement for comedic value, but I AM CRINGE-INDUCINGLY EARNEST AS OFF WITH THEIR HEADS RIGHT NOW. Think about it: if your FAVORITE BAND EVER - one that embarrassingly-to-admit-honestly changed the course of your life - decided to reform after 13 years of corpsey-ness, and you missed it even though you weren't engaged in anything committal at the time of said reunion, wouldn't you wanna pull your hair out, too? How about if they reformed AFUCKINGGAIN and played even closer to your homestate? Shit is balls.

BUT WAIT.

In fucking Bushwick, NYC. An hour away from my house. I had no idea this was going on, either. My other favorite band ever.

NOOSE?
Y/N?

Okay, that definitely is overstated for comedic value but fuck you.

things that are better than i thought part 2

My butt has been famously sore regarding The Lawrence Arms for a while now (ie YEAH, MORE LIKE THE BORENCE ARMS and such), but yesterday, whilst staining the deck by headphones and moonlight, I stumbled upon a truth so shocking it BLEW MY MIND and I DIED. Namely that Oh Calcutta!, the band's 5th full length from 2006 is actually really good.
You see, due to the band's pedigree, I've given the first 4 LPs and EP collection an absurd amount of attention, which is patently weird/unhealthy considering how much I hate almost every song they've ever recorded. My partner has actually expressed concern regarding this, which seems pretty apt considering most people don't endlessly obsess over things they don't care for, but dammit, half of The Broadways make up this band. My hope had been that I was simply looking at TLA in the shadow of a behemoth (my favorite album, Broken Star), and that once I shook off this unfair comparison, I'd be able to cherish the band on their own unique, beautiful merits.
Unfortunately, clarity-of-opinion came when I beheld a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was "Lousy Songwriting", and "falling asleep" followed with him. A Guided Tour Of Chicago and Ghost Stories are just dull, half-written sub-Broadways-isms, and Apathy And Exhaustion and The Greatest Story Ever Told are a bunch of overproduced, riffless wisps alternating between half-memorable Brendan tracks and thousands of soggy, nearly identical McCaughan ballads. The auto-tune on Chris' vocals not only makes those albums sound like soft, flappy penises, but penises so soft they are frequently mistaken for liquids. Seriously, listen to "Your Gravest Words" and "Brickwall Views" back to back and tell me they're not fucking identical.
Needless to say, the hard work didn't really pay off. There are a few really great tracks floating around in the Ambien fog, and the lyrics are a particularly impressive mesh of literary and pop-culture references (see: The Greatest Story Ever Told), but hey, it'd be even more impressive if that same amount of effort was put into writing actual melodies and interesting arrangements.

I never bothered with Oh! Calcutta! based on this backdrop essentially, which is kinda funny seeing as the opening number, "The Devil's Taking Names", is one of my favorite songs of theirs. A few tracks in and I was incredibly surprised to not find myself unconscious in the paint tray, lungs slowly filling with wood stain (or some other, smarmy exaggeration like that). I'm going to have to assume that the intermediate period between TGSET and O!C! is to blame here, during which Brendan started the fairly straightforward punk rock band, The Falcon, and Chris finally decided against his strict adherence to the Wesley Willis school of songcraft. Oh! Calcutta! features the band eliminating the obvious binary of song-styles by actually collaborating more apparently on writing and vocal duties, resulting in an incredibly solid 12 tracks of high-paced melodic punk rock with great hooks and a kind of urgency the band never employed before. Brendan's never sounded fiercer, and sheds a lot of the punk-caricature cadence of his vocals, while Chris apparently concluded that using autotune on a punk album might be a little too hilarious for words, and started singing in the off-key, folky register he would later employ on his Sundowner project.
I've read that a lot of people saw this as a throwback to the band's first two records, but this really doesn't sound anything like the half-assed Midwest pop-punk that populated either LP. Essentially, this sounds like The Falcon if they had the kind of chemistry that comes with playing together for a decade.
I definitely need to let this album sink in a bit more, but I am honestly pretty excited by them for once. That's something I sorta figured would never happen unless the band slowly replaced all three members or stopped writing music entirely.
God I love when bands I hate suddenly become good and then go on hiatus for 7 years.

aussie grind: a bastion of awesome pt 1

"...and now time for something completely different", I quoted unironically to you in early High School with my zAnY sense of humor, pony tail and chauvinistic approach to female relations.

But yeah, it's a post about Australian goregrind. I don't think I've done that yet.

I know everyone has a story, and they are all united in how uninteresting they are to outsiders, but in short, XTREEM MUSICK was my gateway into the world of not only being an annoying music anthropology guy, but also wielding a riot shield against sexual congress with my peers. For some reason, XL Last Days Of Humanity shirts and greasy, waist length hair don't really aid you in leveling the schoolyard with a nuke of pheromonal supremacy. At this point in my life I'm mostly a pop punk kid (chuck tayz amirite lol), but sometimes, when I go extra-chromosome werewolf, I get nostalgic for the awkward summers of high school where I'd sit and wait by the mailbox for my stack of deplorably illustrated CDs to arrive. There is literally nothing quite like the embarrassment and confusion that pummels your psyche into simple syrup like your mom stumbling upon your stack of Meat Shits and Cock & Ball Torture CDs. That moment was easily the shamefuck moment to fill in for most people's adolescent "getting caught spanking to Naruto X Naruto clones fanfic on the family Dell at midnight" regret stories, and I think it's at least 70% responsible for the chronic distant, "deep pain stare" I carry today.
Anywheyprotein, for my sweet money, the best grind scenes the world ever blessed us with weren't in the UK or US, but 2000's era Australia and the Czech Republic. While the latter boasts a cray number of super innovative, boundary pushing bands (fucking srsly, my mind still boggles over that shit), Australia seems content with just getting high and writing songs with titles like "Fuck... I Just Copped A Beer Glass To The Head!!", thus allowing everyone to win.

Here's the general M.O. of Oz grind bands I've discovered via observation & talking to lots of band members on the Teufel's Tomb forum back in the mid-2000's:
1.) write a bunch of really catchy, addictive songs that aren't typically pushing the envelope but just crazy solid and lots of fun to jig to
2.) don't take your self seriously. like, at all
3.) wait so long to record anything new that your fanbase gets passed onto their children (unless you're TDEBN)
4.) get fucked over by your label/producer/primary source of income that floats the Anti-Lucrative Boat Of Creating Goregrind

Now that that's established, let's take a look at some of the bigger bands out there. But not Blood Duster.
Blood Duster sucks. 

The Day Everything Became Nothing

Having grown up in the interbutt helmed explosion of information technologies, I owe many tons of shit to a handful of e-personae. In fact, if it weren't for certain cults of personality, I probably wouldn't know shit from other, different shit, musically speaking. Seeing as I can trace many of my fixations to precise individuals, I think I'll publicize this to forever halt the temptation to act as a self-conscious blogbaby/bastion of wisdom & experience-type:
Andy Radin's history lesson on scholarly approval and unveiling of emo's glory days gave me an un-embarrassing (relatively) emotional outlet for my teenage angst, Mitch Clem introduced me to pop-punk as something much richer than a mainstream 2000's farce, and Dave Lang's weekly jives on the avant-garde made the entire underground seem less paralyzingly vast and impenetrable. Prior to any of this, though, was my stumbling upon Teufel's Tomb - a currently defunct metal review site full of assholes joking about how stupid the music they loved was. It was here I gained not only a love for the most neanderthalic of genres (death metal, grindcore, goregrind, etc) but through their laxness, dodged the grotesque bullet of becoming an IMN (internet metal nerd), forever battling the plebs for taste supremacy. 
TDEBN's debut, Le Mort, was thoroughly praised by two of the writers I trusted most, and being brand new to goregrind, everything about it intrigued me endlessly. What kind of goregrind album didn't feature some dismal rotten.com cover or a logo written in squiggly bullshit? 
I grabbed up a copy pretty shortly after without even sampling it since I'm loose cannon who lives on the edge, and to this day it remains one of the absolute densest, grimiest albums I've ever heard. The production turns this already down-tuned crusher into a quivering, in-the-red, spine-kaleidoscopingly heavy mass of pit riffage to destroy bedrooms to, and the songwriting is top notch across the board. Consisting of members of Fuck...I'm Dead and Blood Duster, TDEBN sound pretty much exactly like neither band, and deliver a ridiculous goregrind anvil full of thick, chundering grooves, catchy off-time riffs, and an absurdly low pitch shifted growl in the Last Days Of Humanity vein.
While I completely love this album, none of the band's other material packs quite the same grisly punch as the debut, but if you need a source of bowel herniation, this is your band.

LONGEST HIATUS: Only 3 years between Brutal and their split with Cliteater. Where's another LP, though?

Captain Cleanoff

This didn't actually drop until years after I moved on from my strictly metallic/grind/gore phase, but holy dix was it worth the wait. Prior to this, the Cap'n had put out a single track since 2001's awesome self-titled mCD, so shuffering and shmiling (suffice) to say, I had long given up on the band by the time their first full length was released in 2008. Fortunately I was able to tear myself out of a strictly folk punk/noise rock phase to hear this, because for what it's worth, this is one of the absolute best pure grindcore releases since Terrorizer's World Downfall. Except srs. If there's one thing I've listened to way too fucking much of, it's grindcore/gore - from the classics through the newer schools and the most bedroom entrenched of bands - so I should at least be able to feign some sort of credibility here.
YEAH INTERNET PERSONALITY.
The production is a crusty, warm, mid-range that perfectly accents the razor-sharp, old-school riffage without burying their cadence, the vocals are a frantic mess of inhuman screeches and Lord Worm-esque gutturals, and yet somehow the whole package is catchy as [some airborne illness]. I'm always impressed by bands who can flourish and write excellent songs in a such a confining genre without pushing the stylistic envelope too much, and these guys certainly have that down pat. There's just that difficult-to-define "it" component here that makes this band not only stand out, but rank up with there with the best - past and present. I know this might sound hyperbolic as my ass is fine, but I dunno, I've had 5 years to change my mind, and so far still ranks up there with From Enslavement To Obliteration, Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses, Reek Of Putrefaction, and Misery Index. YEAH I SAID IT.

LONGEST HIATUS: A whole 6 years between the self-titled mCD and Symphonies Of Slackness

Super Fun Happy Slide

Named after some forgettable detail from a "Treehouse Of Horror" Simpsons episode, and paired with the infamous x-ray blowjob pic and a logo that may as well have been in comic sans, Super Fun Happy Slide stepped out onto the scene off an elevator of class. The "band" kicked up around 2004 as a the solo project of current drummer Brad, let loose the Super Fun Happy Demo, an hilarious 12 minutes of goofy samples, catchy mid-high paced grinding fun, and hilarious songtitles such as "The Day Everything Became Something" and "Regurgitation Of Giblet Like Chunks Of Pathologically Perverse Gore". Pretty shortly after, college football star Brad recruited a few more members to release the Rehearsal Demo in 2005, and with a stylistic shift towards tighter, speedier early-Napalm Death grind, thus began the descent into inactivity.
Okay that's not totally true. I'm sure the band kept touring and writing. It's sort of hard to tell with all these bands, though, seeing as I'm in 'Murka and they're all the way down in the land down under. I wonder how much they collectively hate Crocodile Dundee.
Oh but yeah they wouldn't release anything else 'til 2012.
Anyway, being captivated early on by their silly humor and catchy high paced grinding AKTION led me to chat with Nik on the Teufel's Tomb forums, and after much shit-shooting and such, he asked me to do some art for them. I quickly obliged and did an admittedly-too-detailed piece illustrating the track "Placenta On The Dance Floor" (which you can see here if you promise not to look at anything else) for a shirt design in exchange for an advanced copy of their brand new CD. Boring story possibly less boring (and shorter), the site crashed pretty shortly after, taking the forum with it and all contact I had with the band, thus eliminating the contract.
The Undislodgeable Nugget Scenario didn't see the light of day for years after that, but as far as I'm concerned, was worth the wait. If you like raw, blasting, straight-forward grindcore with tons of catchy riffs, the band has a new album slated for release later this year, too.
So expect it in 2016, I guess.

LONGEST HIATUS: A punishing 7 year gap between Rehearsal Demo and The Undislodgeable Nugget Scenario. I'm pretty sure the latter was recorded 3 years earlier than it was released, too.

Fuck...I'm Dead

 

 
BREAKING NEWS: Did you know that Fuck...I'm Dead changed their name along with their logo way back in 2009? They must've said FUCK OFF, ELLIPSES - AND TAKE YOUR IMPLIED PAUSE ELSEWHERE and are apparently now just Fuck I'm Dead. I find myself in compliance with this decision because I don't think I've ever said their name aloud with the brief pause included, which was doing a great disservice to their artistic vision. I bring this up because going it's somehow never struck me in all these years how fucking stupid all of these bands' names are. Maybe there's an unspoken contest in Australia to one-up the clownliness of their contemporaries?
That aside, Fuck...I'm Dead (since I've not yet heard their new, grammatically truncated material and am, thus, unable to comment) is surprisingly, a LOT less dopey and mindless than their name might entail (let alone the song titles). Their debut full length, the 5-minutes-in-Photoshop 1.0-illustrated Bring On The Dead, is a blazing fast 21-track assault of some of the tightest, most, uh, musical grind you're likely to stumble upon. "Twist Of Death" kicks things off with one of the best samples ever sampled (which has remained a joke in my friend group for years) before "caving in your head for a raging 23 minutes with an unholy blend of melody, grind, groove, and aggression" as some metal review guy might say. It's pretty incredible how memorable these tracks are for their speed and brevity, but I suppose this sort of genre doesn't often inspire the most technically skillful of musicians to participate.
I'm going to assume this album's about as difficult to come by as, well, almost everything else I listed here, but c'mon, who actually BUYS MUSIC anymore? Either way, seat yourself down for a listen. It's honestly one of the best, most original grind albums I can think of.

LONGEST HIATUS: 9 ridiculous years between the split with Engorged and last year's Another Gory Mess. The fuck, u guys.
Intense Hammer Rage

Ok so this band is admittedly a hard sell. While they fall in line with standard goregrind principles like "record everything so it sounds like a bunch of gunky diesel engines struggling to turn over" and "be super gross and offensive because you probably like horror movies", Intense Hammer Rage actually take it a step further than this. In fact, so much so that their Avagoyamugs CD from 2001 was confiscated by Australian authorities on it's way to Razorback Records in Kentucky, their houses were raided, and the band was collectively fined thousands of aussiebucks. This is probably because the production makes the guitar sound like a bunch of mud shivering rhythmically. Also the lyrics on here hit clownshoes levels of disturbing. See, while goregrind typically tackles all sorts of important issues like eating people, stringing together random multisyllabic words from pathology journals, accounts of atrocious buttpain-fueled misogyny, and corking dead people, pedophilia has always been sort of No Man's Land.

Some of my best friends are pedophiles
I like to watch them, I like their style
Some day I might be a pedophile
I practice, I perform on drunk midgets
Hone my skill with donger and with digits
Nearly ready for someones kid
I'll hunt one down, do you know where yours is?

Excerpts like this (as well as the samples from South Park and Dogma) pretty clearly point to these guys as tongue-in-cheek motherfuckers, but there's not really a lot of leeway to be granted when you're writing songs about this sort of thing. Particularly in the eyes of the Australian authorities, I guess.
Beyond being the least SFW band in the world, IHR are an incredibly bizarre, original goregrind/brutal death metal unit with easily the sickest three-pronged vocal attack I've ever heard (srs). Having once been a vocalist for a death/grind band, I have literally no clue they're producing half of these sounds, but apparently it's without the aid of a pitch shifter. On top of that, the fills are crazy and the riffing is surprisingly technical without being a lot of feverish foreskin tugging. If you're interested, their first full length, Devogrindporngorecoreaphile, is my favorite release of theirs, and probz the only release of the band you'll ever find, seeing as it was re-released on a split with Drogheda a few years back. 

LONGEST HIATUS: Finally, the craziest gap of all - it's been TWELVE FUCKING YEARS since Avagoyamugs came out, and these guys aren't even split-up! They just updated their BigCartel, as a matter of FAQ.

UPDATE: Apparently all of their albums have been re-released and you can pick them up on their BigCartel account. The new cover to Avagoyamugs is a nice touch.

Okay, so there's some crop-cream right there. If you take to this like an entitled rainbow kid to a bumfeed, I was going to point you to No Escape Records, but then I remembered that they've been corpsey for the past 5 years. Prior to that, though, they were the equivalent of the Czech Republic's hit factory, Bizarre Leprous Productions - a primarily regional heap of the best bands in the entire scene. In the wake, though, it seems that Blastasfuk's picking up the rad Oz-core slack, so get on that.
Here's a list of additional sweeties to pick up, though, if you need some help sifting out the diamonds: Vaginal Carnage, Roskopp, Agents Of Abhorrence, Doubled Over, Garbage Guts, Undinism, The Kill, & Die Pigeon Die. I've never been too big on Warsore or Blood Duster, personally, but they're also pretty huge names in the scene, too.

Did I miss any new, awesome bands? I've been sorta out of the loop for a few years, so if anyone wants to throw some recommendations at me, I'd really appreciate it. 

Menzingers bring the bottom lip biting action

"Wouldn't it be just a chuckle riot if I totally denounced everything I said here in a future review of the band? Ho HO."
- me in the review of The Menzingers' Chamberlain Waits you totally read

I've written a [hilariously oblique unit]'s worth of reviews since I entered the "blogosphere" back in 2009, and tbh, I'm pretty impressed that I almost uniformly agree with every summation I've published to date. I mean, sure, the writing itself may curdle milk and cause me to cringe so hard the muscle tension collapses my skull, but hey! that consistency! It might sound fucking bonkers to be proud of myself for continuing to agree with myself, but consistently & publicly opining on new/new-to-me music for the sake of generating fresh content is actually pretty difficult. I don't know about you, but I don't naturally osmose a banquet of acerbic, articulate stances and commentary solely from spinning an LP a few times - that shit gets sorted out on the "compose post" screen, mostly.

Weirdly enough, the only post I completely don't get anymore is that review of The Menzingers' debut, A Lesson In The Abuse Of Information Technology. I mean, if you read it, you don't really get spattered by the strings of saliva launching out of the corners of my frothy, hype-spewing mouth, but I was definitely a little tumescent in the genitals over it. Minor tumescence. But then I'm pretty sure that - for whatever reason - I immediately lost interest in it entirely the exact second I hit "publish". Maybe through some insane improbability tied in with quantum mechanics or something. I mean, it doesn't suck the peen/amount fellatio with something degrading, but it sounds about as emotionally resonant (when not boring) to me as if they were playing unaccompanied scales at this point.
CONCLUSION: It's Clash-y, phlegmy pop-punk/punk rock with a few folk numbers, sterile production and groundbreaking, iconic, plastic brain melting social commentary courtesy of the10th grader-discovering-CrimethInc artwork.

Chamberlain Waits was a pretty big step up from the debut and the stronger follow-up EP, Hold On Dodge, and traded in much of their grating, braying sing-scream vocals, gang choruses, and other orgcore sundries for stronger melodicism, songs that don't lose their zing after 10 listens, and lyrical clarity via less mucilaginous cadences. I was about to say something all smarmy and shit like "remember that quote at the top? LEMME FULFILL THAT PROPHECY LIKE AW YEAH" but then I relistened to the album and realized that, while flawed, it's still pretty solid. The real enemy here, though, is the fact that I (again) never ever feel like giving it a full spin. Sure, trax like "Times Tables", "Male Call", and "I Was Born" are all super solid tunes (mostly "Times Tables", which is fantastic), and even though there are only 3 weak tracks, nothing about this album beckons me back for more than the tri-monthly "I guess I could put that on" spin. Nice stuff, but yeah.
CONCLUSION: It's Clash-y, slightly less congested, alternative rock-influenced pop-punk with warm production and nostalgic artwork that brings a tear to the band members' collective eye.

And all of this boring backstory bullshit brings us here:

'Cause it seems The Menzingers are just too deep for me to qualify (big_dog.jpeg), you might wanna take this with a grain of my ass, but I'm pretty sure I actually love this album. Like, as a whole album, and with a lasting love as deep and real as Steve Albini's annoying, "edgy" opinions on everything.  Prior to fully embracing it, though, I'd been on an untouchable, super-posi, LYF IZ WUT U MAKE IT kick from March up to June, all up in this shit like "Latterman isn't very boring" and "I'm going to take steps to improve my life because I'm worth it - L'Oreal". Of course, having spent most of my life in crushing depression, I'm still prone to relapses, and that's both where the last few months of potential posts and this album come in.
This may not make sense to a lot of you well-adjusted, non-damaged types, but when your vitality is near-constantly snuffed by the sheer weight of simply being awake, you tend to get nostalgic whenever you relapse back into sadness after long spells of feeling functional. I had been enjoying the shit out of this album for a few months prior to the moment it finally "clicked", and a heap of existential, stress-cigarette pain proved to be the key.
Over the past few days leading up to our glorious alignment of souls, my being was slowly crushed into a little frowny diamond by trigger after trigger, and the fibers of my whole new Patti Labelle attitude started to fray considerably. Finally, a pot-luck/party featuring an unfortunate meet-up of my recent ex-partner and a farm intern I'd become involved with drove the final nail into my coffin of Good Times, and as I drove home that night alone, reunited with the nostalgic shades of despair I'd been in the throes of my whole life, I put this on at a whim and it draped an army blanket over my throbbing psyche.

On The Impossible Past is essentially where the transitional leanings of Chamberlain Waits were heading: the sound is less raucous, with greater reliance on space and melody to make an impact rather than the aforementioned orgcore cliches, and while a largely a lyric-focused release, the melodies have never been stronger. On top of that, the fairly consistent mid-tempo approach makes this one far more appealing for a wider variety of moods, but the anthemic power per square inch is still prevalent as ever. As the title suggests, this album is beautifully caught up in a nostalgic sense of sadness and reverence for the past, and I for three (ha HA! DEFYING EXPECTATIONS) am pretty weak kneed over trite shit like that. Maybe you could tell, though.
Like all prior Menzingers albums, this one has a few weak links, but for whatever reason, it sticks with me far more as a whole than anything they've ever done. I'm uncertain whether the songwriting is split Alkaline Trio/Tegan & Sara-style, but I'm going to assume as much considering nearly every great song on here is fronted by Greg and every underwhelming one is Tom. Either Tom's simply a lesser songwriter, or he drew the short straw consistently, because while "Sculptors And Vandals" is a great track - a highlight, even - "Ava House" and "Freedom Bridge" are both pretty clumsy and lack the hooks necessary to justify their weird anti-climax and non-building repetitiveness, respectively.

Greg's tracks, on the other hand, are uniformly fantastic, from the simple, addictively sparse opener, "Good Things", to the fist-clenching balladry of "Gates",  the mid-song reinvention of "I Can't Seem To Tell"'s central riff, and the best song the band's ever written, "Mexican Guitars". Also particularly interesting is the quasi-cover of Leonard Cohen's "Chelsea Hotel No. 2" from New Skin For The Old Ceremony, entitled "Sun Hotel". If you track down (or youtube) the demo version released on the acoustic cassette, On The Possible Past, you can hear the track evolve from what was essentially a tributary, fairly straight cover with altered lyrics to an entirely separate, full band-performed entity. Unfortunately it's not about Greg ouija board-ing Janis Joplin's ghost into existence for fellatio purposes, though.

I suppose I need to mention the lyrics, though, considering I spent a whole paragraph rambling about the way they affected me in my time of deep, young, important-looking anguish. While there's no cohesive storyline overarching this album, the theme is prevalently backwards-in-time-looking, and recalls minute, but ever-important details of (relatively) hard living and great, fleeting beauty. I know that sounds like every navel gazing pop-punk unit's M.O. in today's climate, but The Menzingers have that something that separates the unpretentious, relatable prose of Dear Landlord and American Steel from the regurgitated nothingness of your Elways and Arms Alofts. For the most part, these are all colorfully illustrated snapshots of grief, significant faces, old friends and the like, and while, admittedly, I could see this sort of sentimentality causing some of you more jaded fucks to cringe, I love lines like this:

It's not hard to fall for a waitress
When you both smoke
Smoke the same cigarettes
You'll get seated as diners or lovers
You'll get the check as friends for the better
You'll carve your names into the Paupack Cliffs
Just read them when you get old enough to know
that happiness is just a moment

 and

Well I sat and thought about you
On the long ride back to Philly
From the way that you'd wear your hair
To the way that you'd laugh when you drank too much
Before the plug was pulled, the fires burned out
And all the parties grew bored
You waited tables
I waited for your shift breaks

And Gin and Casey
Used to dance inside of me
And I bet I sound like a broken record
Every time I open my mouth
I want to wander around the city with you again
Like when you waited tables
And I waited for your shift breaks

 This is the kind of stuff that simultaneously inspires me and makes me wonder if I'm doing myself a disservice by idealizing nostalgia and sadness so heartily. I can't say I'm feeling much remorse though, considering how fist pumpingly anthemic this kind of sentimentality is. Sweet anguish riffage, too.

CONCLUSION: It's still Clash-y, but also a nostalgic, beautifully emoted (albeit Greg's warble can seem a bit overstated sometimes), pop-punk/punk rock/alt-rock hybrid with tons of memorable moments and strong enough songwriting and overall flair to keep me hooked. There are weaker moments, but even those are worth listening to, for once. No "Alpha Kappa Falls Off A Toilet"s or whatever. For once, I really doubt I'll be retracting any praise I've heaped on this band. But MAN! WoUlDn'T iT bE wAcKy If ThE nExT tImE, I ngsjdhssd3r3r

So yeah, check this out.

music and drinks and stuff

So I'll level with you: I've dranketh a few beers.

You know, the funny thing about sex dreams is that they're almost always frustrating. Sure, when you're young and utterly inexperienced it's like "hey, whoa there that was" and revel in the untimely amazingness of this blooming frontier. But then, sadly, you get old and jaded it becomes just an annoying middle-of-the-night thing you don't wanna bother with when it jars you awake.
THE POINT, though, IS THAT wait I dunno. I feel like I'm supposed to be writing some shit about music, right? I still do that, don't I? Even though no one reads it?
But anyway, sex dreams. When sleeping next to a strictly platonic friend, they're somewhat uninvited. On the other hand, here's what happened: I was hanging out in a bizarre, impossibly lit, labyrinthine mess of a building complex with a friend I see yearly, and blah blah blah we ended up in a dining hall far too schmaltzy to be ever contain the people I was imagining (crusties in suits aerating wine in crystal chalices) and one of them begins relaying to me a sexual encounter with a young musician I've had a crush on 4ever. Sweet guy that he is, he initiates a flashback sequence to illustrate said hook-up, and anoints me to star as the roll of him making tender love to [name withheld because common decency] with great gusto and subliminal detail. The moral of the story is hell yeah and high five, brain.

Which brings us to the music albums full of songs you hear:

Waxahatchee is the singer-songwriter name (and recently, full band title) of Katie Crutchfield, previously of The Ackleys, P.S. And The Eliot Tones and sIhshjaksjka. Okay, so I may have mentioned this before, but P.S. Eliot's first LP, Introverted Romance In Our Troubled Minds is one of my favorite albums ever. Like, probably number two on the list between The Broadways' Broken Star and Band's Album. Prior to Katie's debut with Waxahatchee, I'd already become familiar with the bedroom tapes she recorded under the Guided By Voices-referencing title King Everything, so I felt somewhat prepared for what was about to drop.
HOW DEVASTATINGLY WRONG I WAS.
But no I kinda was prepared. That said, both the split with (bleah) Chris "The Clavicle" Clavin and the LP American Weekend are quite a bit darker than any of her previous outings, with a crackling ambiance brought on by the cassette-found-in-an-attic recording quality.

“to anyone who had woke up and realized their identity is blurry, has had to clumsily get to know themselves, has hit a bottom, has felt self-deprecating and vagrant, and to anyone who has ridden out a shitstorm.”

This summation - which she prefaced American Weekend with - seems to shed some Litebright pegs on why this album hits me like a truck. SEE, I've been in all these stupid places a lot, and perhaps so much so that nearly all of these songs move me to tears every time I hear them (which has proven inconvenient). The sparse, nostalgic production and wordy, beautifully articulate lyrics set to such a raw performance are incredible, and tracks like "Luminary Blake", "Bathtub", and "Grass Stain" may actually dethrone a good deal of my favorite P.S Eliot songs for their pure emotional resonance. SRS BIZ, HERE. God I'm tired.
Since this release, Katie's gone on to record with a full band under the same name (which I wrote about who cares fuck you), and while that album is similarly fantastic, the aesthete here kills me. I imagine it's the backdrop of her career that primarily enticed me to giving this a chance, but this is a total stand alone. Pick up a copy at Don Giovanni Records and stuff. Tell 'em some blog asshole sent 'ya!

Also, and irrelevantly:

I've actually been keeping an ear more on the avant-garde side of the pretentiousness spectrum lately, but here's my impression of me writing about that sort of stuff after a zillion year break spent word pooping about Blink 182 or whatever the fuck it is I write about now:

"This is liek 3 hours of plinkety plink piano shit. I dunno if it's all performed or written by Aki Takahashi 'cause there's all these names on the front but it's some good shit, brah [tokes on a marijuana cigarette of weed]. I think it's considered "modern composition" but there's defz an Indeterminacy bend or maybe it's Serialism? I dunno. I have a hard time identifying parameters on that sort of malarky with all it's "tone rows" and "equal pitch weight and frequency" and Schoenburger and fries stuff. REC'D HARD!"

Several days later, and far more sober:

There is remarkably little information online about this album, but from what I can tell, this is a triple LP from 1973 of Takahashi performing her own interpretations on the works of her Japanese contemporaries (Joji Yuasa, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Toru Takemitsu, etc) on the first two discs, and a number of well-known European composers on the third (Iannis Xenakis, Pierre Boulez, Stockhausen, etc). Admittedly I've only really dabbled in the classical and modern composer realms, since the "academic" side of the avant-garde has never held a great deal of interest for me. After listening to this, I doubt I'll be losing my shit to some John Cage anytime soon, but this kind of thing does generate a weird experience.
Piano Space is an extremely minimalistic, dark and abstract work performed entirely through uncomfortable clusters of notes, silence, and some vocal improv. There's always been something extremely disquieting and morbidly fascinating to me about utter abstraction - in music or otherwise - and this definitely nails the head on the hit. I doubt I'll be listening to this a great deal, but stuff like this, Don Cherry and John Applegate's Human Music, Chamberpot's s/t, and other formless free improv units are things I like to visit the same way as I do with French New Wave horror films and other brutally disturbing, humorless bunk like that: more as an experience than something to put on repeat.

Okay yeah, so I might actually be less trite talking about this stuff drunk.

The Wonder Years: NONE MORE POP PUNK

It's hard to believe that a bunch of months back I actually made a point here of praising The Wonder Years' lyrics. After getting all "juiced up" (gross) on the idea of finally giving the mainstream's streamlining of pop-punk another chance, I made the grave error of giving their 3 LPs a few listens. All I can surmise now is that "Came Out Swinging" is not only the anomaly of their catalog, but one the size of a galaxy. I mean, if you can overlook that line about being "this generation's Morgan Spurlock", I'd even go as far as to say that they're pretty poignant and relatable. But then, holy shit lol, there's literally everything else the band's ever written. I'm finding it really, really funny that I threw a bunch of olde schoole pop-punkers under the bus in favor of these guys, because currently, I can't think of a single band that sounds MORE like a pop-punk/white middle class youth caricature. Seriously, if you can point me to a band that can out-whiny20somethingbetabro the lyrics of Dan "Soupy" Campbell, I'd be seriously mInDbLoWn to smithereens.
Look at this shit:

"My Last Semester" from The Upsides

I'm not sad anymore, I'm just tired of this place.
The weight of the world be okay if it would pick a shoulder to lean on
So I could stand up straight.

I'm not sad anymore, I'm just tired of this place.
The homophobic bullshit that's somehow okay
Just because you didn't mean it that way.

I can't take anymore of all the scum in this place.
Shitty dudes with tribal tattoos all around,
Lining up cheap beer and roofies for a party at their place.
Trying to convince freshmen they're somebody
By spending all of their parents' money on kegstands
And Matt says I don't fit in.

All this mallrat goth shit is killing me.
Thought that would end with high school at least.
But there are still kids and Matt says
"College hit those dudes like a ton of bricks."

So they're calling it blasphemy,
A fucking catastrophe
For saying it's a stupid choice to make.
But this place just brings misery.
I hate what it does to me.
I fight, but I can't escape the way that I don't fit in with any of this.
And I don't think we're the same.

I'm fucking losing my head trying to understand this.
Kids outside with guitars hoping for someone to notice.
No one wants to hear your sappy bullshit.

All these fake-tan girls laughing at art school kids
Getting lots in return for being substance-less.
You're too caught in semantics to see it,
But you're no fucking different.

So they're calling it blasphemy,
A fucking catastrophe
For saying it's a stupid choice to make.
But this place just brings misery.
I hate what it does to me.
I fight, but I can't escape the way that I don't fit in with any of this.
And I don't think we're the same.

No.

I'm not sad anymore, I'm just waiting.
It's two more months 'til I'm done with this.
And I don't make sense to anyone but my best friends.
And I don't fit in anywhere but the back of the van.

When I first heard this song, I was actually flummoxed (to use an hilarious word) enough to immediately look up the lyrics. "Surely there's gotta be more irony here than I'm hearing?" But there wasn't. There was less. And look, I get it - growing up white, middle class, and culturally alienated and community-free often leads kids to aggrandizing their perceived differences, their zAnY sense of humor, and self-mythologizing as tragic heroes. I should know since I was the weeniest weeny at 14-18. But you know, there's a point where the whole "earnest, GENUINE, 'nice guy' who can't get a break vs. literally everyone in the world who's too shallow/2 MAINSTREEM/too (insert any given excuse)/not deep enuff" perspective is sort of embarrassing and you NEED to start calling yourself out and healing instead. Specifically, before you find yourself in your mid 20's and having written a zillion whiny songs about how special your sadness is.
I realize between this and the Off With Their Heads post I've been kinda ragging on sad dudes purty hard, but come the fuck on - the "weight of the world" quip regarding the PRIVILEGE OF PURSUING HIGHER EDUCATION and the High School hierarchy criticism is some truly sheltered, obnoxious laughfodder. 

In case you were wondering,
I'm twenty three and avoiding the bar scene,
Lycra pants, and designer jeans.
In case you were wondering,
I'm staying in.
I won't smell like cheap perfume or cigarettes tonight.

And every word that I said got drowned out
by a dance remix of a pop song I don't care about.
In case you forgot how bad I've been down,
just ask around 'cause you know this town loves to run its mouth.

I thought the heat I was feeling was radiating off vocalist guy's intensely pained and smoldering butt, somehow scorched on the master tapes like the shroud of Turin, but then I realized it was the warmth of witnessing a truly fierce, revolutionary individual who isn't afraid to not like/do things.

I don’t have roses in the closet
But I’ve got pictures in a drawer
It’s everything left in me
Not to stare at them anymore.
I walked upstairs and shaved my beard.
I felt like I was holding sadness here

(I was holding sadness here)

Sadbeard of the seas that "rly mean something". I guess this is the frowny beta male version of the women's post-break up haircut stereotype?
So yeah, maybe I'm just being mean 'cause I used to be this kinda narcissistic 2 U NEEK individual, and the self-loathing is in temporal retrograde, but there will be time for written apologies to no one later on.
I was about to write something like "I really can't think of any other band whose lyrics distract me from enjoying the music as much as this" but then I remembered Mixtapes is still a band:

I don't think this song really requires any attempts at witty commentary, but Jesus and The Christ Tones is "I haven't changed at all which is something that I'm proud of" a line to cringe it up with.

NEXT TIME: Content.

new Lemuria track is radcakes / old Aye Nako track remains radcakes

Hey sorry but it's another one of these dinky 'new shit' plug posts. I'm working on a couple bigger ones as we speak, so... or "you speak", presumably. See, I'm dying of lung cancer, so it's been sorta hard to talk for the past couple days. All this coughing up chunks of my pulmonary alveoli takes a lot out of you. I think that's how lung cancer works.
Alright no but I actually am sick.
SICK OF BLOGGING THAT IS HA HAAAKkh  qw

I am xHxCx excited about this. Ever since they opened for P.S. Eliot's last show in 2011 (the emotional moment of my life thus far), I've been actively watching the kettle, waiting for new material to drop. Aye Nako's 2010 demo's been covered somewhere in the dimmer beginnings of this blog, but if you don't want to backtrack as bad as I don't, imagine a pop-punkier Superchunk with Go Sailor-esque vocals and the kind of hooks that bury themselves in your subconscious like emotional trauma in your formative years. When I saw just now that they'd released a new track from their upcoming LP due out next month, I uncontrollably peed everywhere in excitement (as my nature dictates), but promptly clammed up urethra-wise 'cause it was just a re-recording of "Molasses". Come on you jerks, we've all listened to "Molasses" a jillion times already. That said, the track sounds fantastic, and while there's no real overhaul in it's performance (aside an acoustic guitar augmentation), the production sounds thick 'n' clean and perfectly suited to the band's style.
If you're an established fan, click here for a great mix of glee and mild disappointment. On Pitchfork's site, weirdly enough. I guess they are stationed in Bwooklyn, tho.

Slightly less exciting (but not by much) is Lemuria's first single from their upcoming LP, The Distance Is So Big. I also wrote about Lemuria before here, but to sum it up, I pretty much loved everything the band released up to and (somewhat) including Get Better (emphasis on their split with Kind Of Like Spitting) but was really disappointed by Pebble. I don't really wanna get into that album here, but shrimply putt, it's kind of an overlong mess with some really, really shitty hooks, muffly production, and the feeling the band recently came out of a K-hole. This track seems to dispel all of deepest, Lemuria-related fears, though, and sees the band return to the crispy production that suits them and get hella sad-pumped while pushing their sound into new territory. The sweet pop hooks blending with the jaunty, proggy angularity of the riffz and structure remind me why I sweated these guys so hard in the first place. Can't wait to hear the whole thing.

Also, did anyone else notice that the artwork for Pebble is now a total trendbreaker? Was that album a diversion or what?

new Laura Stevenson streaming

YESSSSSSSssssssuhhhh.

I wrote about this briefly a few weeks ago (right here, in fact), but I come bearing good nudes: the album's been graciously released in a stream for the whole interbutt to hear. Unfortunately, it's only on Spotify right now, so you'll have to download the program first, but that wasn't much of an obstacle for my voracious, diseased need to listen to this. That said, because I hate sitting in front of the computer for long stretches, I've not really flogged it enough to formulate an opinion on it yet, so the write-up will have to wait until the two of us can be alone in candlelight. All I can say is that it sounds fantastic so far, and I get the inkling that this one will be my favorite item in Laura Stevenson's already awesome catalogue by the end of the year.

Check it out here

&

Pre-order a copy here

In conclusion, the word "here" is a magical portal into the Laura Stevenson dimension.

things that are better than I thought part 1

Man, does life suck a lot less when your chipped molar isn't in the death throes of infection and ready to pop like a corn kernel ;) #rootcanals #ada #dentist #conebeamcomputerizedtomography #smh

If the jump in page views and traffic is any indication, covering current stuff is a lot more lucrative (in the pat-on-the-back sense) than being another 24 year old conveying the "Jawbreaker ROOLZ" message to a supersaturated interbutt-browsing populous. I'm not saying that I'm done plugging non-current shit just for the attention, it's just that I've been feeling way more into THE NAO lately, which has never really been the case. Checking out new music has proven to be way more opportunistic and fun in a lot of ways, seeing as they still play and produce new tuneage, and for the moment, I am all about that shit. Moreover, every time I think about the fact that I'll probably never get to see Discount, The Broadways, and Boris The Sprinkler play in my lifetime it makes me very upset.
SO COME, JOIN ME AS WE MARCH INTO THE POP P0NX FUTURE:

I really, really like Joyce Manor. I unashamedly believe the hype, and I would kiss all up on their faces and shit to display the deep bond I've formed with their creative execration. In figgety-fact, their self-titled LP - despite dropping less than 2 years ago - has quickly crawled way up on my Favorite Album Totem Pole, and sits pretty comfortably alongside such lusty entities as The Weakerthans' Fallow, Common Rider's Last Wave Rockers, and American Steel's s/t in terms of pure enjoyability. It's especially satisfying considering I only picked them up on a whim, and while it's not a mInDbLoWiNg reinvention of the pop-punk wheel, it IS a crazy solid, nearly flawless bit of eyewatering angstmagic I could easily spin til' infinity. If songs like "Beach Community" and "Famous Friend" wanna remain anchored to my psyche like cathartic, fist-pumping tumors forever, I think I'll be alright with that.
But this post isn't about the seepia tinted olden days of the self-titled (seeing as I've always thought it was radcakes), although maybe it should be. See, I came into this post thinking you'd be fully aware of my rabid fandom already, but as it turns out, I never even finished that earlier Joyce Manor post or have ever had any readers. Regardless, frowns were frowned and harsh words were exchanged betwixt me and last year's followup LP, Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired. I'm not gonna quote any of it (because it seems sorta dumb and buttmad), but essentially I was like: "shit's underwhelming, brah. it's too short and unlike the s/t". I stood by this after a few dozen listens following this un-posted post, too, but time has a way of making stools of us all. And well, yeah, it is way too short for a "full length" - like, "come on, you assholes" short - and pretty unlike the s/t, but you could generally do a lot worse than not repeating yourself and only writing 11 minutes of new material.

While the self-titled was a fairly straightforward, smoothly flowing set of 9 songs in 18 minutes, OATIWSGT is a pretty big overhaul, and a gutsy one at that. Here, the distortion's been turned down from "BZZZZ" to "bzzz", the hooks are floating on the surface like they're suffering from nutrient malabsorbtion, and the variation from track to track hits me more like a punked-out Guided By Voices than a fresh spin on Bay Area fare. Looking at it critically, it's not really any wonder this put a lot of people (including me) off so hard; there's very little grit here comparatively, but in it's place, some fuzzed out acoustic numbers, a lot of crooning by way of a prevalent Smiths/New Order bend, and a fucking cover of "Video Killed The Radio Star". Yeah. I know it sounds gnarly, but somehow, despite all this, the songwriting here is still impossibly addictive and listenable as it was on Joyce Manor. Seriously. I have no idea if this was a calculated risk or a genuine, collective "I don't give a fuck", but it really doesn't matter when all of it grows on you like athlete's foot in the locker dimension. Pretend that wasn't stupid plox.
To assure yew, this still sounds unmistakably like Joyce Manor. Yeah, Barry Johnson's cut most of the shrieking desperation from his voice to become a less hilarious Morrissey, and there's a song performed with an 80's 2 THE MAX drum machine and little else, but beneath it all is still that creamy Jawbreaker-ish center the lot of us will spank it to ad infinitum. Tracks like "Violent Inside" and "If I Needed You There" simultaneously rekindle olde p0nx magick while pushing the band's boundaries, but the utterly skeletal brevity of "Drainage" and "I'm Always Tired" are what make me really drool over this. Clocking in a little under/over a minute each, the pair remind me of all those moments where I'd find a beautiful, gutwrenching little chunk of music plaguing my subconscious and later (usually much later) find it to be a 30 second, recorded-under-a-snowbank quality Guided By Voices song I'd previously thought nothing of. While "Drainage" brings the somber, bottom lip biting goodness with just a ragged acoustic guitar and a few piano plunks, it's "I'm Always Tired" that really, really gets me. I feel like I've written these lyrics a zillion times:


I’m always tired.
I’m always at least half asleep.
Blemish and state how I don’t feel great now.
I don’t hang out in her hair.
I don’t wonder if she cares.
I lay awake now, I entertain my plans
To one day miraculously be talkative and likable,
To wake up as someone else, someone I know is inside of me,
Just waiting to be put to use by something much more sharp than us.
They pry out every fucking piece and still they’re coming around again.

To close: Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired turned out to be a hugely satisfying release, especially considering how disappointed I was by it at first. This is a fucking awesome album, and a great addition to their catalog. I don't think it could stand alone as well as their self-titled by any means, but it's at least on par with that album's "compulsive listenability", as some rock critic dude probably said. I know that's not an original thought. I don't know if I could recommend you pay LP prices for 7" length album, but if flipping over the record every five minutes floats your salad, you couldn't do much better than this.
The sole complaint I have still floats around the "waaah it's too short" universe, but lettuce be specific: the "Video Killed The Radio Star" cover is over 2 minutes long. I realize the original is only about 45 seconds longer, but context is important here. While the band completely DID make the song their own (much like their awesome cover of "Midnight Service At The Mutter Museum"), and I totally applaud their unfuckgiveable attitude, maybe it wasn't such a hot idea to waste 1/6th of a 13 minute "album" on a cover of the worst song in the entire universe.

Oh, and while I can't embed this for some reason, totally give this a look.

OWTH being so un-posi :(

Here's me being super relevant and on top of the sceeene pt. 2:

Off With Their Heads are a band I've claimed pop-punk allegiance to (DEFEND REAL POP-PUNK STAY TROO LOL PIZZA) since they released Hospitals in 2008, but I think at this particular junction, my heart's not in the right place to give the greater portion of a shit about their freshly hatched 3rd LP, Home.
If you're unfamiliar with OWTH, they're sad. Alternately, fairly angry. Moreover, they've been floating around since 2002, and after shifting out of their initial phase of keyboard-heavy, power-poppy punk, they toughened up, cranked the distortion, and became the crunchy, beardsy pop-punk misery unit making the rounds at punknews to this day.
I should probably stress the "misery" part. The lyrics this band employs run the gamut from "relatable but like come on dude" to "ha ha ha... holy shit" levels of self-loathing, regret, despair, and general fucked-up'edness. It's certainly a load of cathartic fun, or at least was, but somewhere around the release of the band's 2nd LP, In Desolation, the irony-heavy cornerstone of their sound started to slip out of place a smidgen in favor of "artistic growth". Essentially, where the band would once pair heavy, melodic, poppy songs to comically desperate lyrics in a way that was ironic and fun, was now a tendency towards slightly more po-faced songwriting. Throwing in a more serious tone and some power balladry isn't necessarily a bad thing (and I def like lots of 'deep srs artist' bands) but it sort of IS when your lyrics float around this universe:

I'm confused, i'm confused I know i need help, and that's why i'm turning to you
I'm having trouble dealing with loss and coming to terms with the fact 
that it cost me my whole life by running away 
I am unable to deal with the pain 
trying to find someone else i can blame 
It's obvious the only one to blame is me, is me

I mean, that's some uncomfortably honest self-loathing stuff, there. Like one of those super icky moments where your 'pretty good' but not 'super close' friend who always seems like they totally "have their shit together" pulls a 180 and pukes decades of impenetrable negativity all over you, then gets all embarrassed, wipes their eyes and resumes their usual posturing like they didn't just reveal their personality was mostly a mask for deep pain.
But hey, listen to how fun that song is!

See? It's like the lyrics aren't a disturbingly colossal overshare from someone hovering around their 30s when that sweet lead comes in at the end. I'm probably being super harsh here, and I don't doubt the authenticity of these words, but jesus christ dude, you think these issues might stem from somewhere other than your apparent inarguable worthlessness? But that's enough of my incredibly perceptive armchair psychology, take a lisssen to the new lead off single from Home and tell me you aren't scared that something has changed for the worst:

On top of the video seeming really unintentionally laughable (which is kind of an anomaly seeing as there's another video from this album featuring a magical snowman transformation), the tragic back-up vocals and the gloomy chord progression in the chorus make me cringe - something I don't ever recall doing when listening to this band in the past, regardless of how tactless their lyrics were. And holy shit are the lyrics in "Nightlife" embarrassingly blunt. In Desolation had dodgy little bits and pieces throughout that hinted at the band's desire to mature and expand upon their basin of acceptable sounds, but Home is pretty rife with them, and not always in a particularly good way.
To clarify, I'm not saying "omg wtf u guys stick wit what teh fans want" or anything like that (srsly), it's just that I find myself not truly digging their slight shift in a more crooning direction, and honestly, I think my excessive snickering at these songs might be a sign that I've "outgrown" these guys (for lack of a better term). There are some solid songs on here for sure, but after spinning this about a dozen times, I think I might just be a little too self-assured and stable at this point to really get much out of the world's most thematically depressing band toning down their songwriting irony.

If you were a fan of everything they've released to date, I'd definitely recommend checking it out, even though I can't get behind it hxc. If you're new to the band, though, definitely start somewhere around the Hospitals/From The Bottom neighborhood and go from there. I know I didn't make it seem like it, but they're a really sweet band with a ton of great songs, and a sick live unit to boot. Oh, and incongruously, I actually sort of like "Don't Make Me Go". I mean, it's a perfect distillation of every change I just grumped about, but I'm a loose cannon with no allegiances. Also, make sure to check out their family tree if you dig that gritty, bass heavy pop-punk everyone at punknews.org slaps it to like the fading memory of their last meaningful sexual encounter. Ha ha. I'm so irreverent. What does that even mean