Retractatus

The thing about a retractable belt stanchion, in an airport, in a movie theater, in a shopping mall, is that it isn’t stopping anyone. You can go under, over, and around. You can just unhook the thing...

flaminghydra.com

I suppose that I will always feel like a novice hardcore fan. At shows I tend to be just fine being a human crash pad at the edge of the pit rather than an active mosher. I tend to like metalcore to emphasize the metal over the core. I think modern Turnstile is pretty good, actually.

doublebinary.neocities.org

Danello, The Sad Surfer III is a return to form and a refinement of purpose. The core tropes of mid-60s rock and roll are fused with fuzzy 90s alternative music and whimsically dark lyrics. This isn’t pure Weezer-worship (though there is a lot of Weezer influence here). There’s a hint of Jeff Rosenstock at play here, especially with the way Dan seems not to care at all about stressing the right syllable when he’s singing. There’s also a bit of McCartney’s tendency for ironic “granny music” to pop in, as in the samba section of “Outlaw”, the big Disney bridge on “Skimboard”, or the entirety of “Lounge Away”. The songs are goofy and childlike without being immature or purely comic.

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I bought Double Infinity by Big Thief, Near-Death Travel Services by Deadguy, and a used copy of Red Yellow Blue by Born Ruffians at Tunes in Hoboken with my sister (one of these albums is not like the others). A lot of reviews of Double Infinity will reference its well-received predecessor, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You. That album released during a period of my life where I was fully checked out of "mainstream indie", so Double Infinity is actually the first Big Thief album I've ever listened to.

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This isn't the first CD I ever owned; that honor would go to Leave This Town by Daughtry. Nor would it be the first CD I ever bought for myself, but Grand by Matt and Kim was the first CD that I ever tried to buy. I walked into Scotti's records with my mother one day in 2010 looking for this, and came out with a copy of LP4 by Ratatat and a promise from the clerk that they'd call me back once they got another copy of Grand from their distributor. My childhood best friend had shown me the music video for "Daylight" on his dad's computer in fifth grade and it was the first music that I'd ever listened to that didn't belong to my parents or 106.7 Lite FM. I know most people in the scene have (or fabricate) origin stories about some video on Headbangers' Ball or a cool older brother who hipped them to underground music. I started with playful, childlike vodka commercial music made by Brooklyn's horniest hipster couple.

doublebinary.neocities.org

This is one of a handful of albums to which I know every word, every harmony. There are no skippable songs. It's all good, all the way through, and often tips over into great. 36 minutes well spent every time.

doublebinary.neocities.org

On Danello, The Sad Surfer, the album cover is the titular artist's depiction of a man falling off a surfboard. It's crude, it gets the point across, but it's beautiful. I love the way that the short red brushstrokes create a sun that's not just one blob against a creamy sky, the long brushstrokes various colors of the ocean. Nothing's just one thing and there's plenty of negative space. It's not even a scan, it's a photo of the painting. It's charmingly human. On Danello, The Sad Surfer II, the album cover is a grainy photograph of Dan staring directly at the camera. He's sitting at his dinner table. The picture is color-corrected to look like a blued photo from the 80s that's been exposed to the sun. A thin border of white space frames a full, desaturated, fuzzy picture. The new aesthetic draped over everything, obscuring a man who is looking right at us, as if to say something, but you can't quite make it out through the distorted picture.

doublebinary.neocities.org

I’m surprised it took this long to buy this record. I got it from Scotti’s closing sale (RIP) about two years ago, but it’s been on my iPod practically since it came out. This is one of those records that I knew like the back of my hand - or so I thought. The experience of listening to it on good speakers is completely different than listening to it on cheap headphones between classes. I borrowed it from my middle school English teacher in exchange for letting him borrow my copy of Grand by Matt & Kim.

doublebinary.neocities.org

A disclaimer. I paid Skye Holden $33.11 to scratch the commentary from the Sean Burke/Dominic Roussel goalie fight on a song called "Hey There Sports Fans" by my old band called Goalie Fight. The album is called On Ice! and I still have too many copies of it in my apartment.

doublebinary.neocities.org

I just want to say as an aside: basically every song on this album has a guitar solo. I mean a real, shreddy guitar solo, not just a glorified counterpoint or extension on top of the riff. They all kick ass.

doublebinary.neocities.org

There's been a wave of online ska that's happier, gayer, and more organ-centric that calls itself "new tone". This isn't that, but it's more than just eight white dads with tattoos playing ska and smoking legal weed. The Hempsteadys are physical, visceral. Grounded. I discovered the Hempsteadys when looking up Connecticut-based bands, saw the music video for "Still Life With Woodpecker", and was hooked. It's a nearly-perfect heartland rock song, coming off a great ska record that I have on vinyl. I was a little worried about On The Undercard, to be honest. Their non-album single, "Golden Tooth", felt low-effort and flat. I wanted them to lean into the things that the other ska bands weren't doing, blending ska, surf, and pre-landfill indie rock.

doublebinary.neocities.org

Like many, my first experience with Anamanaguchi was with the Scott Pilgrim vs The World game soundtrack. I didn't have the cultural context to know how much they were ripping off foundational easycore as much as they were Nintendo soundtracks. I didn't even know which Nintendo soundtracks they were ripping off (Mega Man and Kirby, mostly). I thought they were the coolest thing in the world for a few months and then promptly forgot all about them until I saw Anthony Fantano's glowing review of [USA] in 2019. I'll review that album in full another time, but safe to say, I was shocked at how much they sounded like a completely different band. They'd grown beyond a strictly instrumental NES & Gameboy aesthetic with minimal live drums and guitars, turning towards psychedelic bubblegum pop, progressive house, and even vocaloid, almost obscuring their initial chiptune sound entirely. "Where did this change come from," I asked myself?

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Pittsburgh, City Paper is BACK!

You thought we were dead and gone, didn’t you? So did I. But to be honest, only very, very briefly. When it was announced over New Year’s that Pittsburgh City Paper was shuttering, it took no time at ...

pghcitypaper.com

There's been a wave of online ska that's happier, gayer, and more organ-centric that calls itself "new tone". This isn't that, but it's more than just eight white dads with tattoos playing ska and smoking legal weed. The Hempsteadys are physical, visceral. Grounded. I discovered the Hempsteadys when looking up Connecticut-based bands, saw the music video for "Still Life With Woodpecker", and was hooked. It's a nearly-perfect heartland rock song, coming off a great ska record that I have on vinyl. I was a little worried about On The Undercard, to be honest. Their non-album single, "Golden Tooth", felt low-effort and flat. I wanted them to lean into the things that the other ska bands weren't doing, blending ska, surf, and pre-landfill indie rock.

doublebinary.neocities.org

50 DAYS AT ILIAM channel early 2000s metalcore heat on their self-recorded debut demo - IDIOTEQ.com

You know that feeling — the one where a riff kicks in and you're immediately back in 2004, watching some band from New Jersey tear through a VFW basement? 50

idioteq.com

I bought this from the merch table of Mr. Mt. Oriander, Keith Latinen, after seeing his set as a member of Parting. Latinen, better known as a former member of Empire! Empire! I Was A Lonely Estate, didn't have any Parting CDs, and I knew I was going to fill up on vinyl at Jerry's and at the Mr. Roboto Punk Rock Flea Market in Pittsburgh later that week, so I grabbed the only CD that was available at the table.

doublebinary.neocities.org

I'm publishing this article on the 20th anniversary of the release of Donuts, by J Dilla. If you want to read a piece celebrating the legacy that James Dewitt Yancey left behind in its entirety, go elsewhere, but here's an abridged version of Dilla's story: Detroit rapper-producer mastered the AKAI MPC sampler, collaborated with the greatest artists on the edge of the Black underground music scene in the late 90s and early 00s, died young of autoimmune disease. Legend says that he produced at least some of these tracks while fighting lupus in a Los Angeles hospital. The more boring truth is that he was probably using Pro Tools and the album was sequenced, the tracks named, and possibly some of the beats were produced by Peanut Butter Wolf and Jeff Jank. Again, there's some really good, click-supported journalists who've written better pieces than I ever could, so let's just knuckle down and taste some pastries.

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