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.
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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:

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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.

Wolf Parade - Expo 86 (Music review)

Wolf Parade started off with a bang, just like any new relationship. We've all been there: You start dating someone, and it's like you've fallen in love for the first time. There's bells in the air, you constantly feel like you have the energy to climb a mountain, you want to sing, you want to dance, seriously, you're Tom Cruise on a couch.

That's how I felt five years ago when I first heard Wolf Parade, yet here, at the release of their third album, I'm about to tell you why I'm bored with them now; a brief retrospective...

Let's start by laying it out on the table that Apologies to the Queen Mary was, arguably, the best album of 2005, right? It had energy, it had melodies, it had awesome lyrics, good slow songs, good faster songs, you could dance to it, you could cry to it, you could fuck to it, you could probably fold it into a pretty decent hat (I guess), if you had thousands of copies you could probably build a chair out of it or wallpaper your bathroom. As far as I was concerned, it was so good you could listen to it as a meal replacement. Fuckin' thing made life better in 2005.

Wolf Parade released At Mt Zoomer in 2008 to lukewarm reviews, because all in all it was a lukewarm album. While their first album had all the bells and whistles of a band fully committed to their sound, At Mt Zoomer felt like a twenty-something stuck in a committed relationship they didn't want to be in; running around town filling up on frivolous melodies that aren't ever going to call you back, not even for a booty call. Not a bad album, but it sure wasn't great start to finish.

Bands like Interpol, Sigur Ros, The Strokes, and Wilco have all made missteps with their most recent albums, but their older ones are so good that everyone is willing to give the new ones a chance. According to interviews on Pitchfork with various band members, we're all still listening to Wolf Parade with good reason; Expo 86 is supposed to be “more fun”, with songs that are “really dense” and “carry a lot more energy”. Well cudos to them, this album is arguably all of those things. Unfortunately, it's not enough to keep the album from being really boring, and ends up being lamer than At Mt Zoomer.

Expo 86 is strange, because it's a boring album that – to it's credit - does a couple of things really, really well: First of all, there are some strong melodies here. I guess that's a pretty vague statement – you could probably argue that Weezer's new album had some strong melodies on it, shitty as they are – but parts of these songs really stick out and bury themselves in your brain. The other thing this album does well is in capturing the live feel of this band, something that was missing from their sophomore effort. According to Spencer Krug, Expo 86 was recorded live off the floor with minimal overdubbing.

So as a result the songs feel energetic, natural, and more upbeat, and that's good right? Oddly, it's this live feel that also creates the albums greatest downfall; The songs feel like the kind of long-winded jam sessions you or your friends have when they're drunk on a friday, each one running a minute or two (or three) longer than they need to. I'm not exaggerating when I say 'each one' – every single track is bloated, and far too long for it's own good (and in a lot of cases, really poorly mixed and leveled). “Cloud Shadow on the Mountain” starts off the disc well enough with a driving drumbeat and a half decent melody, but after a long-winded and lazy mid-section with careless guitar melodies and predictable drum breakdowns - for almost two minutes no less - you're left wondering if they spent any time at all refining their structure. The same issue pops up in the albums strongest tracks, “Little Golden Age” and “Pobody's Nerfect” - both have strong leading melodies ruined by far too much noodling. All in all, this turns into an incredibly boring 50+ minute long album that could have been a great 30 minute long album.

So it's not completely terrible - like I said, there are some really strong melodies here - “Little Golden Age” and “Palm Road” have taken turns being stuck in my head (not a sign of good songwriting, but at least it's something). Still, this isn't an album that's going to last longer than a couple weeks on even the biggest Wolf Parade fan's playlist. I managed to listen to Expo 86 seven times in the last week - purely to be fair writing this - and seeing as how I'm listening to a leaked version, there's always the chance that I'm listening to something that wasn't finished. Then again, with songwriting this lazy maybe they just don't know when to finish a song anymore.

Pyramid Schematic (rant)

Supernova makes me fucking sick. Promoters are supposed to be out there, doing their job. They're supposed to book gigs at venues, put up posters... Exposure, that's the promoters job. Rather than doing their fucking job properly, Supernova get a bunch of kids to run around town selling tickets, making money for them. They have to do little to no promotion of any kind. In the end, bands don't get paid, but some unnamed judge decides which one did the best job and gives them maybe a day of recording time, which might cost 300$. They claim that booking 10 bands brings in 10 bands worth of friends, except nobody sticks around for longer than an hour. Supernova shows are a good way to play a set in front of your friends, something you can do yourself at a party.

If you're going to run around town trying to get money from your friends and family, you might as well call up Vector and start selling knives door to door. Nobody wants to sell knives door to door.

Deftones - Diamond Eyes (music review)

Nu metal bands saturated the end of the 90's with all the worst parts of the 90's: angst towards some vague offender, hatred for oneself, useless dj's, unnecessary use of lame white guys rapping, blah blah blah. I could go on; this isn't anything new for anyone who remembers the 90's.

Anyways, amongst all the new shit rock, all the Limp Bizkits and Nickelbacks and Korns, there were the Deftones. And the Deftones really are a strange breed: straightforward enough to please the retards who listened to Durst (admittedly, myself included), melodic, even clever enough to get the attention of reputable critics, and catchy enough to get some decent mainstream play. But with screaming.

The most amazing part about this band, especially when you consider the scene they came up in, is that they're still going strong; the shelf life on most of those shit bands they were associated with was maybe 7 years, tops. But not only are they on their sixth release, Diamond Eyes, they wrote and set aside a whole other album in the last two years. That effort was to be called Eros.

Eros was supposed to be them experimenting with a new sound, taking the band in a new direction. Chino is quoted as saying he wanted it to sound as “weird as possible without alienating people”. Chi Cheng, their bassist, was hospitalized with a coma after his bus crashed on Novermber 8th of 2008, and a few months later they put Eros on hiatus and started working on Diamond Eyes. They say the two things are unrelated, but for an album that wasn't written because their bassist is in a coma, it sure as hell sounds like a band trying to relax because their bassist is in a fucking coma.

First of all, look at the history of bands that try experimenting with new material. Radiohead damn near broke up during the Kid A sessions because they argued over creative directions and were unsure of themselves. Likewise with Pink Floyd, arguing over creative direction in the 80's causes the band to break up. I'm not saying the Deftones were on their way to splitting up; I'm not even saying they were arguing. I'm saying that moving in a new direction often causes stress of some kind, and if your bassist is in the hospital, the last thing I'd imagine you wanting to do is something even remotely stressful.

So, my whole point is that Diamond Eyes is a through and through typical Deftones album, because that's what they needed to make right now. Nothing weird, nothing out of the ordinary, no extensive long odd instrumentals with strange talking in the background about anal-sex or whatever, no really oddly placed electronic parts. Just a collection of standard Deftones style songs. The really heavy track (CMND/CTRL and Rocket Skates), the quiet or more melodic one (Beauty School and Sextape), the obvious soon-to-be-fan-favourite and live-show-closer (976-EVIL, I hope). Just your bread and butter Deftones.

And that's not so much a bad thing. It sounds like the band just wanted to get an album out. They didn't like the approach they took to Saturday Night Wrist, a process that has been described as being 'Piece by piece', which to me sounds like a focus on multi-tracking (which is not that much fun for this kind of band). It sounds like a band in the studio engaging their hobby, and committing it to recording. This might as well have been what they did before, or after, going bowling on a Wednesday night.

“Hey guys, want to get together? Wife's busy, I've got nothin to do, what say we grab some brews, bowl a couple games, maybe write a whole fucking album?”
“Yeah sure man, why not, lets just churn out a whole fucking album like we usually do.”

Thankfully, 'how they usually do' sounds pretty fucking good.

So by all means, the album isn't groundbreaking, it's just a great album. Because it's a great album, it attests to how fucking well these guys get along, and how on top of their shit they are. They don't lose a member and decide break up. They don't lose a member and then completely lose their shit. They don't use the opportunity to do some monumental tribute to their lost bassist; across the 5 listens I've put in, I can't really pick out any solid Chi references.

To sum it all up, Deftones are still that band that should have sucked but didn't, and they're still putting out good albums that are worthy of purchase. When your friends are reminiscing about how shitty their taste in music was circa 1999, you can still toss in “but Deftones are still pretty rad...”, you get some weird looks at first until everyone remembers, “oh yeah...” Or maybe you're taking some cute girl out to a Vampire Weekend show, and she's complaining about her friends going to the dive bars for metal bands, complaining about metal as a whole. You nod your head to agree, but then remember, “oh fuck, Deftones.” I don't advise telling her that.

I fucking love the Deftones, I might talk her ear off all night about how Diamond Eyes is a good album. I might be going to sleep alone... But the point still stands.

More from CRWR 1100

These were the notes I took during a creative writing class...
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Metaphor. Saying one thing is another unlike thing. Does not use “like” or “as” as a comparison. Not a simile.

I know this!

My friend is a hippie festival. There's lots of nice art, and you feel like you're really proving something while you're stoned, but at some point you have to shower and go to work.

He's a modern day Rod Stewart. Just keeps singing other peoples music, wearing younger peoples haircuts, and nobody has the guts to tell him brunettes are in style.

Something random

I had a course in creative writing which I dropped this semester. I didn't like my teacher, essentially that was my reason, maybe it's not a great reason. Anyways, I did get some little pieces of writing done.

This is a short little piece from that class. She asked us to write about our first kiss. Rather than describe it in detail, I wrote about a conversation I had with a friend of mine two years after my first kiss, as we were talking about how I was dating that girl again.

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We were about 3 beers in each, and she wanted to kiss me. It had been built up so much, I couldn't believe it had taken this long to happen, so I moved my mouth the way I thought I was supposed to and we kissed. Then, she said those horrid words you'd hope to never hear: “um, what are you doing?”

Colby started laughing at me hysterically “You didn't know how to kiss? Are you kidding?” I really need to pick and choose my conversations with this guy, he's kind-of a dick for someone I call my best friend.

“That was our relationship round one back in grade 8 man” I blurted. “We only dated for like a week!” He was still going on and making all sorts of comments, bowling over his lanky frame from the laughter. I had to get the words out quickly to stop him.

“Now.. hey man,” I stammered to silence him. “NOW, dude shut the fuck up..” he stopped enough for me to get a word in, “I'm dating her again two years later, and I have no idea what she was talking about! Every other girl I've dated since has told me I'm a great kisser.”

Pure cheese. There was a pause, and then he burst out laughing again, blurting out something like “yeah right man...”
I continued, “it's always gone really well..” I stopped... I started to feel like I needed to assert myself. “In fact, y'know what, I don't even know why I'm dating her again.”
I felt bad about this comment because I really did like her... maybe more as a friend, but I knew the other kids would tease me for dating her.