Hey Starbucks!

Know what I hate about you? (This is, of course, outside of the really obvious bullshit including mass scale green-washing, overpricing, hours of operation, terrible taste in music, terrible taste in coffee, and bullshit WiFi connection)

I hate how you parade all of your bullshit in front of us VIA store displays that take up all the space in the middle of all your stores (note I said "store", not "cafe", you loser yuppie fuckwads. Not falling for it)

Starbucks, go fuck yourself. Everyone else, go try a real cafe. It's cheaper, tastes better, and you wont want to shower immediately afterward.

Deerhunter - Halcyon Digest (album review)

When I first listened to Halcyon Digest, I didn't like it at all. Why? Because the album is painfully simple on first listen - I thought they were being lazy. Instead of focusing heavily on the atmosphere that gave past releases a hazy, shoegaze feel, Deerhunter have decided to rely almost entirely on their post-punk influence and pop hooks. That kind-of pissed me off at first, sure, but I knew well enough to give it another chance, and I'm glad I did; Halcyon Digest is a seemingly simple album - about the memories and inspirations that shape us - that gets more complex and rewarding every time you listen to it.

The album constantly references memories from the band members pasts. And they aren't just singing about their influences from the past, they're sounding like them too. "Don't Cry" sounds like Bradford relating to youth about his own past via a throwback to 1950's pop acts. "Coronado" – with saxophone used about as tastefully as it could be – brings on vibes like David Bowie used to. On "Desire Lines", Lockett Pundt (one of two songs he sings lead on, a first for Deerhunter) sings about reclaiming his youthful resiliance, a song which features the kind of kraut-rock inspired jamming that made Microcastle/Weird Era Cont the winners they were.

Singing about the past doesn't mean they always sound like it though; songs like "Helicopter", "Earthquake", and closer "He Would Have Laughed" sound like an amalgmated progression from Bradford's Atlas Sound and Lockett's Lotus Plaza camps, carving out sounds that are as unique as they are ethereal; accoustic guitar gently drifts in and out of the background on "Earthquake", crashing drums slowly blur into "Helicopter", and "He Would Have Laughed" is a sprawling procession of layered instruments coming and going around a simple melody and a gently repeated guitar part. Plenty ethereal.

Deerhunter have made an album packed with catchy hooks, which means the drawn-out (but wonderful) jams of past releases are now few and far between (we've got "Desire Lines", but it's not quite the same as "Nothing Ever Happened"). And while that is dissapointing, this album isn't about them treading the same musical ground again; it's a celebration of the road traveled.

Liars - Sisterworld (album review ver. 2)

I wrote up a review of this album a couple months ago, but was unsatisfied with it, so this is the second version.
_____________________
Sisterworld came out back in April, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. But the thing is, I thoroughly enjoyed it because I'm already a 'foaming at the mouth' type Liars fan. The album is far from their best - I'd say it's my least favourite. But on the other hand, My Bloody Valentine's album Isn't Anything is my least favourite of theirs, and it's fucking incredible. So what does that make Sisterworld? Relatively, it's the worst album from a band that produces near perfect albums; so it's kind-of a letdown when you've been rabidly watching Liars crank out 4 amazing albums in a row, but it's not bad.

Liars have always been excellent at creating both rhythmically exciting songs from strange noises and slow rhythm free ambient transitions, or even just pure noise with abandon, but here they lose something. Where ambient transitions on They Were Wrong So We Drowned felt like they had purpose, tracks on Sisterworld like 'Goodnight Everything' are bland, predictable, and almost all atmosphere. Rhythmic banging for 3 minutes following cryptic lyrics about witches and blood, while never really making literal sense, just seemed right in the past, whereas here they use a solid structure (almost pop...?) within their songwriting - even with the fucking noise it seems – and now it feels like they're making ambient-esque tracks because we all expected it. As an example, 'I Still Can See An Outside World' comes across as a track that undoubtedly sounded great when they wrote it, but definitely needs a 'see the forest for the trees approach'. It's slow, which is fine, and it sounds 'cool', but it's barely interesting, relying far too heavily on atmospherics. Same goes for cuts like 'Drop Dead', 'Goodnight Everything', and closer 'Too Much, Too Much'. They're not bad songs, they're just all atmosphere, all fluff.

Scattered around these tracks is what could have been an excellent EP, instead of a 'good enough' LP. Scissor is a goddamned rousing song that creeps under your skin - I'm getting shivers just thinking about it as I type – using horns where guitars could have been. Drip has the kind of dissonant off-kilter rhythm and melodies that they perfected on Drums Not Dead. The Overachievers is one of the biggest surprises, just because it's almost completely cut-time punk, with a drumbeat like Iggy Pop's lust for life. The real standout track would have to be Proud Evolution; It's clever, singable (chant-able?), and when I saw them play in Vancouver it turned the entire venue into a dance party.

Liars are an amazing band, with an obviously huge amount of talent and a solid ear. While they haven't made another groundbreaking album like past efforts, they have made a good album, one that just hovers in limbo where fans love it and newbies might pan it. I hope the newbies at least give it a chance.

Wavves - King of the Beach (album review)

Oh Nathan Williams, I'm fucking jealous of you man. You're younger than I am by a few years, and you've already recorded an album in your bedroom at your parents house, toured said album, had a drug induced 'meltdown' onstage – actually less of a meltdown and more of a kid with a guitar being a kid with a guitar - and fought one of the Black Lips; just a few of the things I was hoping to accomplish at this stage in my life. Not everybody sees these accomplishments as accolades however, and there's a considerable public and media escalated backlash against the guy as a person. So with all of this activity in the public, what's the best thing the Wavves frontman can do? Probably play guitar really loud, sing even louder, hire Jay Reatards rhythm section to beat the shit out of their instruments, and then just hammer it into everyone's head that all you want to do is have fun at the fucking beach. And what's so wrong with that? Fuck it, I wish I was at the beach right now. In the short period of time that he's been active as Wavves he has not only alienated people with his behaviour, he's divided the music community with his over-use of the gain knob and repetitious melodies. Here, he's proving the naysayers wrong by bringing out a sarcasm and new-found confidence that wasn't wholly present on the previous album, being more liberal with his use of gain, and kicking the songwriting up a notch.

So let's start off with the idea that King of the Beach is packed with happy-go-lucky 'I just drank a 40 and grabbed my skateboard' melodies that would fit right in with people who aim to do just that. The self titled track is literally about feeling like a king on the beach, capping it off with a chorus of “you're never gonna stop me”. Next-up, Super Soaker gets kind of angsty, but by the time Idiot comes on he's laughing it off, “I'm not supposed to be a kid / but I'm an idiot / I'd say I'm sorry / but it wouldn't mean shit.” It sounds negative on paper, but he fires the lines off with an attitude that keeps it feeling too upbeat and sarcastic to be heavy; maintaining a positive mood that carry's over the entire album.

That positive mood comes in a few flavours here. While on the last release the standout tracks were the ones where Williams had tackled the cut-time pop-punk vibe with swagger (yeah, fucking swagger), here even the tracks that would have been a noise mess - like 'goth girls' on the last album – are replaced by refined reverb-y pop happiness. It's the type of shit that would fit in perfectly on a newer Raveonettes album. When Will You Come, while not the strongest of tracks on the album, plays homage to the old Spector / Beach Boys big-slow drumbeat (it almost feels like a rite of musical passage for borrowing so much from them). Baseball Cards feels like some sort of blissful drug induced nostalgia of a childhood love that only he ever had, but at the same time it's something we've all experienced. He sings “I don't wanna walk outside” over and over again, and while he does cap it off with “without you” at the end of the song, it's almost unnecessary; we already knew.

I don't care which side of the Wavves hate train you're on; if you already love Wavves, cool, you already know this album pretty much capped off your summer perfectly, you know what's up. However, to the people who hate, the people who fail to acknowledge the gain knob as a lifestyle choice: it's only a matter of time.

For posterity for myself because I'm exhausted

So we went into the HIVE tonight for some recording with Tanis. Arrived at about 8. The idea was to record our song Give It All To You, maybe one more random one, and then maybe dub some synth stuff over previous tracks.

It's 4:24 am, and we've just completed our 40th overdub on Give It All To You. Shit is layered, I got to play two different kinds of pump organs, there's backwards delayed guitar samples from Dan (who is sitting in front of me with his hair brushed into a greasy as fuck mullet right now), Elliot and Cory played some strange drum stuff, everyone sang something. At one point I was having a hard time singing because there were so many vocals layered that I thought I was at a singalong with Charlotte Diamond and Raffi. I have to work at 10am for 8 hours and then bus downtown as fast as I can to a gig... Cigarettes and coffee and T3's and beer. I'm feeling brain-dead. We just determined that You Rob Me needs to sound 'fat and dirty, like KFC'. That's gonna fucking rule.

I'm going to get breakfast and coffee, tons of it, and fuck going to sleep. I want to get laid, or jerk off and play playstation. Either way, but it's pretty obvious what's going to end up happening.

Fuck I don't know what else I can ramble about. I think that's it.

I'm now a vet

I was talking to my roommates the other day about the kinds of things you're not supposed to feed our dogs. I came up with, what I think, is a pretty sound general rule: Dogs aren't allowed to eat anything with lots of sugar, or mayonnaise.

Evolution in a Hyundai Pony on a diet of weed and bottle rockets

I was stoned in my car (my only car, which lasted a month and a half) with my best friend a few years ago, and came up with my own theory of evolution:

-------------------------------------------------------

Ok so, back in the day, and when I say that I mean like billions of years ago, life was just little cells in a pool of water right? And they were all a-sexual, which means they grow and grow until they make up enough mass to divide into two complete life forms, and then they repeat.

So on one level this is a-sexual reproduction, but on another, it's inbreeding. Think about it, it's two complete life forms made from one kind of DNA right? That's exactly the same as nailing your sister.

Ok so eventually the cells found a way to fuck each other instead of being all gay and a-sexual, and over time they developed their own sexes. Like magic, don't argue, it's science magic. Big picture time, you've got all these cells that developed from the same original cell and now they're starting to fuck each other: actual inbreeding.

But somehow these cells turned into frogs and fish and bears and people. All from brother/sister/hermaphrodite cells getting it on. Hence, inbreeding must not always lead to complete retardation.

Think about how human intelligence is steadily rising? Could it be because we've become selective about our inbreeding and the inbred have become so diluted and varied that the original inbreeding just cancelled itself out?

Obviously the exact opposite could be argued. Look at the Bush family: Bush Sr. Is a reasonably intelligent man (for a republican born in Texas), but look at his offspring? Bush Jr can barely speak english, and his other son is named Jeb which is just fucking stupid. This argument is cancelled because obviously Sr Bush must have had an affair behind his wifes back with his own mother.

At some point I went on to compare inbreeding humans to the evolution of frogs. I don't exactly know how that works out, but there it is.

And that's evolution in my head while I'm stoned. Fuckin' eh.