January 2021 Roundup

Posted: 31 January 2021

Books

Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories - Thomas Mann

I’m going to try to write about these stories seperately because they’re all hefty, but first, some general notes. This translation kinda sucks and feels very dated and stiff with some really weird sentence structures, you can instantly tell that it was originally written in German.

Death in Venice

I imagine this is what Lolita is like, having never read Lolita. There’s something interesting and reminiscent of Mann’s contemporary, Hermann Hesse, in the way philosophy is mixed into the text. I found the first half of the story and it’s focus on creative output interesting and engaging as an artist, and the progression from inspiration to obsession really sharp and poignant. I didn’t pick up on this while reading it but after reading the next story in the collection, Tonio Kroger, I noticed how self-referential Mann is in his stories and how he really puts a lot of effort into layering the events in his stories. I’m used to a lot of French/Russian novels from an earlier generation than this just having a ton of description of all the chairs and curtains and how everyone was dressed and such more to describe who they are and characterize them, where it seems like with Mann, every description serves a thematic purpose. These are really well written stories!!!

Tonio Kroger

Halfway through this I thought that the writing had an air of death in it and expected tragedy for poor Tonio. This was originally published just two years after Freud’s interpretation of Dreams - I wonder if there was a collective subconscious interest in unprocessed childhood trauma floating around. There are a couple of studies that show that men either never get over break-ups, or that they take a truly incredible amount of time to move on - I don’t know how good the science is there, but that’s what this story brought to mind. We carry our past injuries around like children, permanently shaped by them, perpetually ready to return to and relive them over and over at the drop of a hat, hoping for better and simultaneously knowing that things will go exactly as they did before. Thematically kind of interesting to compare to Death in Venice - Tonio’s muse is the trauma he suffered in his unrequited love, Aschenbach’s muse is the object of the unrequited love.

Mario and the Magician

Mann has a really bizarre fixation on children in his stories, with the adultsin this story constantly mentioning how tired the children are or how much they loved the magic show. I don’t really understand why this story is framed this way. I do like Germans writing about weird magical circuses, the feeling of death in this one comes to pass, but the story in this one didn’t fit together for me. The characters all get such sparse screen time. This story is somewhere between Something Wicked This Way Comes and The Master and Margarita.

Disorder and Early Sorrow

Haha what is going on with Mann and all of his stories somehow centering around children! This one feels like it’s supposed to be a satire and funny but the translation is very dry and bad. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of unbelievably brief glimpses into everyday emotions and feelings of serenity.

The Blood of the Walsungs

This one isn’t about children but it’s not very good. At this point I really can’t help but wonder how much of this is the translation and how much is just Mann’s writing - class seems like a huge topic for him but he doesn’t really say anything interesting about it in any of his stories. I don’t get it. His other favorite topic, passion, is very clumsy in this story. Also this story is supposedly about his wife’s family? Damn!!!

Music

GUNK - Gradual Shove

I really like this album. Really easy to listen to in the background, really interesting if you pay attention, feels familiar and new and exciting all at the same time. Some shoegaze vibes, some dream pop, some Unwound-y sounds all coming together in a great package with a lot of variety and interesting musical decisions that work well.

The Promise Ring - Nothing Feels Good

Ha!!!! I thought this band sounded very Cap’n Jazzy and looked into it and their guitarist is from Cap’n Jazz!!!!! In any event, good stuff, if you like Cap’n Jazz you’ll like this band - a little less raw, a little more refined, but similar vibes and similar energy.

Dads - American Radass (This Is Improtant)

Well executed but doesn’t really stand out, to me, imo imo. It definitely improves as it goes and is nice to just have on, but I can’t say much more about it than that.

Dads - I’ll Be The Tornado

Back with a more mature and developed sound, this album is a lot better than American Radass!!! Fake Knees is a great song and when the album really kicks off for me, but the songs are all really interesting and sound great. The instruments have a lot of room and do a lot of the speaking and they do it well. The album slows back down towards the end and becomes almost a concept album, with tracks feeling like clear continuations of prior tracks, the entire album exploring one relationship, ups and downs with a persistent doubt in the background tying it all together until it ends.

REPETITOR - Prazan prostor među nama koji može i da ne postoji

Somewhere between hardcore and noise, interspersed with stoner-y riffs. There’s a language barrier preventing me from being able to really engage with any of the lyrical content, but rhythmically the songs are all really similar and it was hard to pay attention. I like them most when they lean into the stoner riffs, but on the whole I don’t really like the guitar tones. The last two songs, which are nothing like the rest of the album, were probably my favorite, Danima in particular. Overall not for me though.

Jeff Rosenstock - NO DREAM

Great great great great great. Fun and energetic and makes you miss high school and feel a sad nostaliga for parties you’ve been to as an adult. State Line and f a m e back to back are excellent. There’s a lot of compositional talent in here too! The songs all sound really distinct and develop in exciting and artful ways. Amazing work. I’ve been listening to it on repeat for the past two days.

Dua Lipa - Future Nostalgia

Don’t Start Now is an incredible song, the rest is kinda bland with some exceptions - the songs that lean into groovy disco stuff work really well (Don’t Start Now, Levitating). It’s pop! It knows it’s job and does it well.

the bird and the bee - s/t

A very nostalgic album for me. I stumbled into it in high school when I was just starting to “get into” music and I liked it then and I like it now. It’s easy to listen to and minimal and meaningful.

Sonic Youth - Goo

Oozes into your brain and stays there for the rest of your life. Sonic Youth are a band in a league of their own, nothing anyone has done before or since has come close to sounding as simultaneously abrasive and catchy as they sounded. Goo is my favorite album of theirs. The songs skip and dance and move around and take you with them through car crashes and billboards and burning buildings.

Spraynard - Funtitled

Reminiscent of 00’s pop punk! High energy throughout, great punky emo. I think the really loud bass and excellent drums really seal the deal. Great gang vocals too :).

Beach Bums - Years

I don’t like this at all. There’s nothing cohesive about the album, it jumps from genre to genre between tracks, I have no idea what you’re supposed to get out of listening to it when it’s not really trying to tell you anything. Keepaneyeout is a really cool track but this isn’t an album. I looked them up and I guess no genre is their whole deal??? But is that something anyone really wants? It seems entirely self indulgent. There’s nothing here for a listener.

Spraynard - The Mark Tom and Patrick Show

I don’t like this at all, stopped listening halfway thru. The instruments are really boring, the songs all kinda sound the same, there isn’t really much here. I went back to listen to Funtitled again after listening to the first 5 songs on this because it was hard to accept that these were put out by the same band!!!! Funtitled is still really good! And this album is not. I looked it up and I guess this is a collection album - for collectors only!!! That’s my take. Nobody else should want this.

Sunny Day Real Estate - How It Feels To Be Something On

I listened to this after seeing them mentioned somewhere with the context “listen to them right now” and. They’re about what I thought. I’ve heard some of their songs before and don’t remember liking them much and on proper listen, I don’t like them much. It’s different from a lot of other emo, it’s almost closer to a band like tooL or A Perfect Circle, some kind of slow proggy alt rock. The vocalist does not work for me at all and I can’t really engage with the songs. Pillars is a cool song but the rest… I dunno. The songs are all slow and try to build to something but I don’t think they do it well.

Sunny Day Real Estate - Diary

This is a little better than How It Feels To Be Something On but I still don’t love it. This album’s a little closer to post-punk, but the guitar tones are really alt-rock-y/proggy/grungy and I just don’t think they work well. I think 9 is a really good song and some of the other songs on this album start to get somewhere but it just doesn’t quite click. Not for me.

Texas Is The Reason - Do You Know Who You Are?

What’s up with these 90’s bands with universal acclaim not really standing the test of time well, at all. The first two tracks just left a bad taste in my mouth immediately. Listening to this right after Sunny Day Real Estate was a mistake. It just sounds dated, I dunno. The entire album feels stuck. It’s really really hard for me to engage with. Very 90’s, very alt rock, very punk, the choruses all sound the same, the guitars all sound the same, whatever.

Dag Nasty - Can I Say

Very cool hardcore, reminiscent of Minor Threat (they share a guitarist!). On that note, said guitarist, Brian Baker, gets more room in Dag Nasty, and I think it works. He pulls out some really thrashy sounds and they fit perfectly. The yin to Slayer’s Undisputed Attitude yang. Great album.

At The Drive In - Relationship Of Command

Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez are geniuses. At it’s best, Relationship of Command is a shining star of musical achivement. The first four tracks rule, and Rolodex Propaganda is fantastic. Besides those, though, the songs are a little slower and more self-indulgent, starting with Invalid Litter Dept. and Mannequin Republic, which don’t work nearly as well for me.

Heart to Gold - Comp

Cool little punky emo album that starts off strong and is really consistent. It would be nice to see them experiment a bit more and push their comfort zones.

Pictures of Vernon - Pictures of Vernon

Indie-rock emo that’s just a little bit too slow and roomy, just a little bit too incohesive.

Chinese Football - Chinese Football

Math-y post-rock-y emo out of Wuhan. Not my favorite kind of music but they know what they’re doing and they do it well. I don’t know what it is about post-rock - the songs are all too long, there’s not a lot to focus on in any given moment, none of it seems very consequential - but I don’t get it.

Stirling Says - Balboa

The fuzzy guitars and crashing cymbals you always knew you wanted. A little rough around the edges but really excellent sounds and tones, great energy, just what I like to hear. Like a more punk Ovlov, an angrier LVL UP, continuing in the tradition of Dinosaur Jr. They really are just a combination of things I love: sludgy guitars, solos, party punk sensibilities. Can’t help but wonder what the deal is with these bands that absolutely ruled, released 2 albums, and vanished off the face of the earth is. Stirling Says have no online presence! Their bandcamp page links to a defunct myspace page. They’re not even that old! This was recorded in 2008!!!!!

Stirling Says - Avalanche

More lo-fi and not as neat sounding as Balboa. The crunch and munch are still appreciated but the recording washes everything together and it’s not as fun to listen to as their first release. I’m going to use the rest of this space to further discuss their lack of online presence. One of the members of this band is ex-Funeral Diner, which is cool, even though I would’ve never really guessed (very different sounding bands!). They’re listed at the top of the Funeral Diner wiki as an associated act, except it’s misspelled - the wiki calls them “Sterling Says”, which makes it even harder to find anything about them online. (I fixed this - my first time editing anything on Wikipedia. Wow). I think their complete lack of presence besides for myspace is what throws me off - I guess there was an intermediate period before every band became very online where myspace was really THE spot for bands. It just seems like they are more recent than that. There’s a youtube video of them playing live, and a music video!!! I think what’s weird for me is just that I’m getting kind of used to googling a band’s name and seeing like. An interview. Some reference to them existing online. But that’s not the case with these guys, and it’s a little sad! They rocked.

Free Throw - Those Days Are Gone

Album covers of suburban and rural houses set the mood really well. An underrated part of enjoying an album! Here we have a purple haze settled over a few suburban looking houses - maybe a ranch? Maybe there’s a railway in front of them, which is why there’s a fence? A highway? There’s a mountain in the back - a frontier, the unknown, peaks and vistas. The album has room to breathe and live and the music stares off into the distance, punctuated with bursts of anger and frustration - isolation bubbling and frothing amidst the calm countryside. Relentless, however, in it’s complaints: how much can really be wrong? There’s an immaturity, a lack of control over circumstance and an unwillingness to accept responsibility. A very cool first album with a lot of room to grow.

Free Throw - Bear Your Mind

Continuing from my thoughts about Those Days Are Gone: Room to grow and turn into The Decemberists or who even cares. What is this.

Grade - And Such Is Progress

We start with a slow twinkle, early post-rock grooves, and immediately before settling in, smash headfirst into shouts and screaming. The music is abrasive, but comfortable, the choruses are hypnotic, and there’s something warm and familiar here. Some of the songs veer into thrashy territory, some of the songs sound like modest mouse, then they have a cover of Ziggy Stardust, which always makes me think of Semi-Charmed Life by Third Eye Blind. A little of everything mixed into a cohesive and familiar taste.

batta - Game Over / MY ENDROLL / eternal

This compilation is way too long!!! That aside, very cool high energy Japanese rock. They have a song used in the opening to some season of JoJo, a series I could never really get into, and I think it’s interesting how much cooler anime opening and ending songs are than a lot of western TV shows. Get more rock and roll in there!!! I just googled “best tv show opening title sequences” and these are cool openings but none of them rock. It’s all slow music and spooky, pensive montages. One of the first songs I ever tried to find online was “Run Around” by Jasan Radford - a song I had never heard in person, despite it being some Digimon related song, when I was something like 10 years old. Let’s get the fun rock openings back into the mainstream.

Time Spent Driving - Just Enough Bright

Really inoffensive alt-rock that isn’t very interesting! And I can imagine the songs being good! The Reason I Stay, for example, has all the right pieces! I can hear how it could sound really good! The dynamics are just all wrong and the instruments all sound like they’re playing in separate rooms. Very unfortunate. I stopped listening to this one halfway through.

Small Brown Bike - Dead Reckoning

This band’s so sick. Melodic hardcore, this album leans a little more into the hardcore, but it sounds great. Really cool, chuggy guitar parts and great drums with the vocals fitting in just right. Their jagged edges start to hurt a little as the album progresses but it’s great regardless.

Small Brown Bike - Our Own Wars

Less refined and less predictable than Dead Reckoning, a little pointier but also a little more fun to listen to. To reiterate: This band is so sick.

Anything is Everything - Things I Wrote When […]

Slightly conservative (formulaic) punk/emo bringing a lot of vim and enthusiasm. The autotune (maybe it’s just the production on the vocals? They sound like there’s a weird effect on them) is also kinda out of control and the songs should be all be maybe a minute shorter but the foundation is there and it’d be nice to see them find the direction they want to take their music and really push it and experiment.

Brazilian Girls - New York City

Somewhere between Moondog’s chanting and percussion and The Strokes’ nightlife, Brazilian Girls wander the streets of New York and capture the grey autumn skies and silent desolation of the outside world and the vibrant life found inside each decrepit building.

Michael Cera Palin - I Don’t Know How to Explain It

I thought this album was decent until “If It Makes You Happy,” one of the most offensive songs I have heard in my life, which soured me on the entire band.

I Hate Sex - Circle Thinking

Very cool

Indian Summer - Giving Birth to Thunder

I want to like this album more than I do. Woolworm/Angry Son is a foundational song - you can hear reverbations of it in other music from the era (Don Martin 3’s transistor) and in basically all post-rock that has come since. They seem kind of one-track, though: every song is some variation of staticky radio vocals and quiet guitars alternating with a loud screamy chorus. Within this redundant song structure though, there’s a lot of technical proficiency. Indian Summer are too much for casual listening, but there’s a lot of gold in the muck, if you’re willing to get dirty.

Yaphet Kotto - The Killer Was in the Government Blankets LP

As part of my high school commute I took a ferry and listened to music on an iPod. I don’t know if they still make iPods. I had a flip phone at the time. I can’t remember when I got my first smart phone. I remember the two flip phones I had through my high school years pretty vividly, one was a black Motorola Razr and one was a brown one I don’t remember the specifics of. It was probably also a Motorola. Before I had my own cell phone in high school I used my grandma’s Nokia, and it was gigantic. I would keep it in my back pocket and sit on it all the time, and I’m sure that wasn’t very good for the phone. This band reminds me of listening to The Locust on the ferry on the way to school and on the way back, although they’re not really like The Locust. This band’s really good.

Yaphet Kotto - We Bury Our Dead Alive

A startling, unexpected splash, something has fallen overboard, but it’s not clear what. It is lost forever.

Funeral for a Friend - Casually Dressed […]

There’s a popular Russian story called “Чиполлино” (Chipollino, a translation of an Italian story) about an onion boy who adventures to rescue his friends and loved ones from cruel opression by an authoritarian government led by a lemon and a tomato. I don’t remember much about it, but as a young lad in Ukraine I had a beautiful illustrated children’s book of it which I loved to leaf through. This album is a bitter onion boy who would never stand up against injustice. Funeral for a Friend see their cherry friend and stomp on his glasses. They sell their father out to the government for a nickel and brag about it. Why? Why do they hurt those around them? They do this to be left alone to write bland, inoffensive alt-rock for the radio.

The Early November - The Mother, The Mechanic […]

PART 1 The vocalist is doing something muted, something subtle… but still meaningful… wow… I guess their entire deal is that the vocalist never really belts it out. Never lets loose. There are some backing vocals that are really shouty that sound really good, but that’s not what this band is about. You can tell this because the background vocals are mixed to be really quiet. So the shouting in the background is really far away - trying to say “HEY! ARTHUR ENDERS!!! TRY SHOUTING!!!!” And he listens to this advice on some songs, such as “Decoration - Rock Version”, and it’s great. Try making all the songs “Rock Version” next time instead of writing ballads, you doofus.

PART 2 On and on the waves of the sea strike, the night goes turbulently, and we awake to the squawking of seagulls and gray, gloomy skies. Days of this, redundant, over and over, gray and squawking, until one day a ray of light breaks through and things just feel SO good. And they feel good for the first half of this album, before we decide to sing another one hundred ballads, lamenting and disappointed until we end on a fun one with 1000 times a day.

PART 3 I’m a sucker for concept albums. This is reminiscent of The Good Life’s Album of the Year, very Tim Kasher-y. I like that it’s trying to do something sincere, although it comes off kind of corny in its sincerity and musical-type orchestration. I like that it exists but I don’t see myself listening to it ever again.

Rookie Card - For Ryan, Fall Songs, A House That Sat Silent […], Lonely Nights […]

The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
__ I read The Waste Land, or excerpts? In high school and I don’t remember much about it at all. Maybe it’s about war. I don’t think this band is as good as The Waste Land, but For Ryan is a good release. It’s more like an art project than a band. The songs are a good length. The samples and funky sounds are cool. I like that it almost becomes rave music at some point. The scratchy recording quality is intimate, welcoming. This band exist in a cave and you are there listening to their music with them. The nymphs are departed. Super Mario 65 is a really good track. April is the cruelest month.

Camp Trash - Downsizing

I brushed my teeth and I’m going to bed. There are many different brands and varieties of toothpastes, and as far as I can tell, they’re almost all the same. Crest have a banner about their response to Covid-19 and Colgate have a banner on their research into oral care products and Covid-19. There are two main types of toothpaste, as far as I can tell: Sodium Fluoride, and Stannous Fluoride. I don’t understand why Sodium Fluoride is even an option, Stannous seems to do everything it does (anti-cavity) and more (anti-gingivitis, prevents tooth decay). When you look at the active ingredients on toothpaste boxes, it’s almost always just one of those two, even though there are hundreds of brands belonging to the various companies. It’s all the same stuff. Except that one is just outright better than the other! And there’s no way to tell from just looking at the marketing, you have to look at the ingredients. I don’t know what’s going on with these organic toothpastes that don’t have fluoride in them, I don’t think they do anything. Most Tom’s toothpaste (just picking on them because I think they’re the best known organix type brand) is just Sodium Fluoride with other stuff to class it up. But the non-fluoride options??? Complete waste of time!!! Just brush your teeth with water. Fill your mouth with salt and charcoal powder and brush that around. I’m sure it does something, but I don’t think that’s exactly what toothpaste is for.

Oil pulling is also an interesting idea but it takes a really long time and it’s easy to get caught up in the minutea of what kind of oil to use. Cold pressed sesame seemed like the best option when I last checked. It basically does the same thing as mouthwash, except it takes twenty minutes to do, and instead of mouthwash, you use oil. Another article I’m reading now is saying that sesame oil has omega 6 fats and those are pro-inflammatory, and coconut oil (which seems like a big con by the coconut industry, to me) has lauric acid which is antimicrobial. It’s also probably good for your jaws to swish oil around in your mouth for 20 minutes a day. I’m not going to keep going off on tangents here but now I’m thinking about how the way you breathe can change the shape of your head and face (jaw included), and how it’s important to breathe through your nose. By combining good breathing practice, stannous fluoride toothpaste, and oil pulling… this triple threat is sure to reshape the skull of anybody suffering from a malaise into a mighty skull, full of bright, pointy teeth.

Pianos Become the Teeth - Old Pride

A pestilence foretold by a swarm of bees. From Wikipedia: In an interview with Hearwax, Kyle Durfey commented on writing dark lyrics, stating “I feel like most of us and most bands we are into tend to write about darker things. It’s hard to write when you’re happy. This doesn’t mean we aren’t happy as people.” Doesn’t it though? This isn’t Sisyphus we’re talking about here. One mustn’t imagine Kafka happy. This is a good interview (or maybe not? But everyone in it comes across as sincere, there doesn’t seem to be an agenda, just someone who loves this band’s music and the band members coming across as very decent people who care about their music). I had to dig it up on the internet archive, the website hearwaxmedia.com looks like it was active between July 2008 and December 2015 and was totally defunct by 2018. The link on Wikipedia was put there in 2010, and I updated it earlier today. 2010 was still in the myspace and early facebook years of music. I wonder if bands would want to talk to me if I just reached out with (or even without) lists of questions, gonzo reporting style. Maybe we could set up calls and hang out.

Gray Matter - Thog

Sailing at my friend Ben’s camp in 2012 or 2013 sparked incredible joy in me. I remember it fondly. I had a weird allergeic reaction at the time to a steroid that was prescribed to me for poison ivy, and it was giving me a bunch of hives all over my back. We kayaked and jet skied and I couldn’t quite find my balance on a (wakeboard? boogieboard?) and got a little beat up tubing but sailing… sailing really stuck with me. I’ve thought about taking classes a few times in the past few years but have not followed through. Maybe once the pandemic ends I will muster up the gas.

Thog is a warm memory and a push forward. Active in the heyday of the DC Hardcore scene, but with a more classic rock and roll sound - I can imagine them all wearing button down shirts while performing. They almost certainly didn’t. The best of the past preserved and presented with the fury of the present. This band rules.

Gray Matter - Food for Thought/Take It Back

I am the Walrus isn’t on the Spotify version of this release, and I’ve Just Seen A Face isn’t on the Spotify version of Thog. There’s no mention of this anywhere on Spotify. Who uploads music to Spotify? A lot of Russian language music is in total disarray. Kino used to only have one album and you had to find other artists with an identical name to get the rest of the discography but the Spotify page seems official now. What about smaller, local bands? Bandcamp artists that don’t have record label releases? I looked it up and two years ago Spotify started letting anyone upload their music for free, where it used to be a service offered by third party proxies. This still doesn’t answer any questions about WHO the person doing the uploading is, particularly in the case of older underground acts that might not have a lot of exposure. Can I go in and upload a bunch of stuff that’s only on youtube? Can I get Breakwater on Spotify?

Blink-182 - Take Off Your Pants and Jacket

Stories of all sorts, and movies in particular, are always snapshots, the greatest hits, the most important moments of whoever or whatever they’re focusing on. It’s easy to get caught up in the wonderful world of media and want to discard your own boring downtime, the in-between time. Life is not a movie. In between the fun moments and the horrible fights there are days, weeks, months of the mundane everyday. And that’s not a bad thing, by any means! But it’s there. And you watch movies and listen to music and think about your own experiences, how there was so much more you wish you did. I have never thought about the time I have spent doing homework, but I am nostalgic for the long nights, the smell of winter, biting autumn cold, train stations, parks and mosquitos, drunk embraces. I am never going to sleep again - I will not even shut my eyes.

JR Ewing - Maelstrom

There was an Indiegogo campaign to fund a documentary about this band three years ago which did not meet any of its targets. The film was being made by two brothers, Paul and Simon Gore. Their last update was two years ago, and it was about merch being shipped out, and as far as I can tell, there has been no new information since. Simon Gore’s personal website is currently down. His last post was in May 2020, half a year ago, and it seems he has just been doing unrelated music production type work since the documentary was announced. The crowdfunding campaign introduction says they were given the entire archive of JR Ewing’s tour and studio footage, and had a truly incredible amount of footage and lined up interviews. The documentary was planned to be released alongside a planned 6 LP reissue of JR Ewing’s discography. It appears that neither the documentary nor the reissue were ever a reality. I’m going to try to reach out to the Gore brothers and see if any of their work is salvageable.

Bird Bone - Тени (Shades)

I had a dream last night that was set in the same place as another dream I had. They had a shared history, this one was a continuation of the older dream I had over a year ago. I didn’t write anything down, maybe I should have, because I’m forgetting all of the specifics. We don’t really understand dreams very well, and they have a lot of overlap with memory, which we don’t understand very well either. There is only a difference between a dream and a memory if someone else shares the memory, if the dream exists outside of any believable reality. Fantastical images our brains conjure.

All this to say, I’m not sure if what I’m about to recall was real or not. It is a mundane childhood memory. But it might be fake. We had one of those toy race car tracks, but it was kind of a piece of junk, because the cars would fly off the track regularly. They couldn’t take the turns at all. And the key bit of information that I want to mention, is I remember some sort of gray wooly mesh (somewhere between a dusty bunny and steel wool) that was somehow involved in this. I can’t remember if it was on the bottom of the cars, which is what my memory tells me, or if it was involved somewhere else, but I remember it having a very unpleasant texture, and feeling like it did not belong on a toy car racetrack.

Guitar Fight from Fooly Cooly - Soak

Instagram really don’t like it when your browse on the web without signing in. If you scroll too far or try to click anything, they throw you a pop up and lock you out of further browsing unless you log in. If you refresh the page after that, you don’t even get to scroll, you just get the pop up. Something about contemporary emo acts and their weird Instagram presences and needing to make a statement all the time as a band is weird to me. Do they not have personal accounts? Do they want to get the message out to more people, and the accounts have more followers? Maybe the bigger question is why this bothers me. There are things more important than the music to these bands? That’s fine. But their songs and lyrics don’t reflect that at all. This isn’t a Yaphet Kotto or even like… Anthrax… that we’re talking about here. These are bands whose songs are all about being angry and being hurt and handling social situations poorly. There’s some sort of mismatch in messaging happening here. What’s a band whose lyrics are about breaking up with your girlfriend and being regretful going to tell me about social justice? This album starts with a mario sample.

Backbrace - bedside manners demo

Two people is the only amount that can reasonably walk around outside and have a normal conversation. As soon as you have a third person involved, someone’s probably going to have to start moving around all the time to accommodate other pedestrians, you wind up walking in weird triangle formations, there’s nothing good about this kind of situation. Three people standing around and talking is fine, and that number scales more or less infinitely. I guess you could manage walking somewhere if everyone is paired off, if there are multiple groups of two, but it seems risky. This equation is flipped on its head if there is manual labor involved, like carrying things or handing them off between people, so I won’t get into that. For plain old walking to places, two people is correct. Or one person, if you’re on the phone.

When we start trying to figure out how many people can reasonably enjoy music together, I think that for acoustic music the answer is a lot higher than for other kinds of music. There are, by virtue of not being electric, fewer potential jigs and jags, so you just get the main idea behind the music without any of the negative externalities. It’s easier to enjoy, but there isn’t as much depth. Sometimes there is. But it’s a different kind of depth.

How complicated SHOULD a demo tape be? How much does the artist want to express in the music? How much do they need to capture in the demo to remember what they want to turn that into? What do they think the most important parts of their music are? There’s something fun about them in the same way a sketchbook might be interesting to leaf through.

Franklin - Go Kid Go

I lived in an illegal sublet in this building for almost a year: https://ny.curbed.com/2014/7/30/10066722/horrible-williamsburg-rental-thinks-people-love-neon-lights. I didn’t want to submit my forms to building management to make the sublet official and they weren’t really on the ball, so I just lived there instead of the guy who moved out. This article complains about the disco lights or whatever but we just had them off most of the time. It wasn’t a big deal. I never thought about them at all. They were nice when we had parties. One of my roommates tried to submit our apartment for some MTV show to film in, and we were in the running. They came to scout the location and liked it. We were going to be set up at a hotel while they filmed. It almost happened, but they couldn’t get their street parking figured out for the days they needed to film, so it fell through. This album’s kinda sloppy.