The “this review would be more relevant if not for my mis-spent youth” theatre presents

AFI’s Crash Love, Interscope, sometime in September (Wikipedia says the 29th, so whatever). It was a long time ago, but I’ve been busy. Sue me.

Before you complain about how emo/sold out/no longer relevant AFI is, let me tell you something. Generations of children have done the coming of age thing listening to AFI. Back in the 90s and early 2000s, tons of kids told their parents to fuck off while skating Girl’s not Grey(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8d5WlUR1T3k) did drugs while rocking out to Days of the Pheonix(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SulKPvLiwkE)nd cried about their breakups with what would now-be-considered-emo-but-back-then-just-angsty-girls while consoled byDeath of Seasons (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1r5rfjcmXI). Now, Brussky might not have actually done some of these things, but he certainly knows people who did. Who cares though, the important point is that a generation of perfectly normal people grew up listening to at least three AFI albums, with maybe a throwback to I Wanna Mohawk (But Mom Won’t Let Me (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0JExKjjQc8). And while their younger brothers and sisters, eagerly looking up for life advice, probably didn’t get a chance to partake in all this awesome counter-culture rebellion, AFI would be there when they too grew up with decemberunderground.

Yes, producing one album every two or three years or so, AFI has done a perfectly good job of inspiring new and exciting fashion trends and countless make out sessions behind closed doors with people of the opposite sex who ‘get it’. Of course they sold out – that was the whole point. You can’t possibly remain relevant to both the post-Britney and post-Miley generations without changing some stuff around, like the particular brand of mascara you use, or the amount of MTV-ready songs you write. There was a slight problem though- when we were growing up, AFI’s horror-punk didn’t suck. Their later emo-punk did. That was okay too, since that was a generation which got used to mediocrity when they were growing up. I mean, they went through their early teenage years watching OC-spinoffs during George Bush’s presidency.  Shitty emo music is a perfectly appropriate soundtrack to that sort of upbringing.

What might surprise some people about the latest album is that, one it’s a lot less emo than some of the other ones, and two, it’s also a lot less terrible. Now, there might be some association where point two is dependent on point one, but that’s for a futurearticle (review theatre’s “this article would be a lot better received if emo music didn’t suck so much” is a working title).  Now, this still doesn’t recapture the pure anarchy of earlier AFI albums, but that might not be such a bad thing. After all, Brussky really don’t want a mohawk that much anymore.Mdicate (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFAm82qPKiA) is a pretty decent single, with the traditional bass-driven power guitar, strong lyrics and the building vocal intermission associated with the AFI songs of yore. Incidentally, one of the reasons that Miss Murder (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLQkyaHK0Zs) sucked so much is because it departed from this forumla. The songs on Crash Love are a lot less angsty – still plenty of that to go around, this isn’t a band known for it’s rainbows and sunshine approach to music. At the same time, they’ve recaptured the enrgy of earlier albums, in terms of the song style and composition. AFI has always been strong in the lyrical department (again, revisit why Miss Murder sucked compared to the older stuff) and a couple of the songs, including Okay, I Feel Better Now (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_LocbsCtxE)and (sadly, special edition only) We’ve got the Knife (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Di_ebUQPRtc) are powerful and energetic, largely thanks to Davey Havok’s ability to draw every last ounce of dramatic pause from the lyrics. The sound quality is probably a lot closer to pop-punk than anything else – grown-up pop punk without the emo-melancholy feel but still dark enough to avoid any AFI soundtrack’d romantic comedies. Now that I’ve said this, some idiot will make one in the next year or so and shut me right up.  The album does suffer from a bit of bloat; the release version clocks in at 12 tracks, but the (much more complete) iTunes pre-order edition bumps this up to a grand total of 18. Maybe 6 of these are really worthwhile iPod mix contenders, but this is not to suggest that you cannot listen to the entire album a couple of times straight without feeling like you need to go have a stiff drink (as was the case with decemberunderground). Or smother a kitten (as was the case with uhh.. also decemberunderground). Sentiments like that exaplain why  Brussky can’t have nice things anymore.

Edit: WordPress apparently hates it when you add html code directly to text, so I can’t href youtube links directly into text. Clickable things are a lot more awesome than putting paranthesis with long links everywhere, so I’ll see if I can get it working before I write anything else.

 

The “this review would matter if the people who cared actually read it” theatre presents

Weezer’s Raditude. Interscope, Nov. 3, 2009.

Here’s the cover art illustration.

Neat photoshopping to get that dog in there!

Okay so the cover art sucks. But, this has a silver lining. It is a hell of a lot better than their previous ideas about cover art, which was basically a snapshot of Rivers Cuomo + other people standing there with a different coloured background behind them. At least the dog is attractive, in the hundred-pounds of domesticated killing potential kind of way.

Now, by the time I actually finished writing this review, a million other uptight music snobs have already chimed into the discussion, largely in part because they get paid to write these things around release time, and I don’t get paid to do… well anything actually. Fuck them. Gainful employment is somewhere fairly low on my list of priorities anyways. Regardless, the only reason I mention this is because of the fact that all of them mention that this Weezer album sounds like it was targeted at the 13-year old boy demographic. Well, yeah. So was every other Weezer album. It’s just that when we were 13, no one minded. Now that we’re at least, like 15 or whatever, and we’ve discovered that all the cool girls like them intellectual bands, we are so over this Weezer shit. This is a band that releases an album every ~2 years like clockwork, and every time they get bashed for making disposable pop-rock sounds. Pattern recognition anyone? It’s what they’ve been doing for their entire career, why are you surprised? What, you don’t think that the Killers know they have the dance track scene covered? As amazing as it would be to have the music industry promote genuine artist development and growth, I don’t look to Weezer to provide that. Because if there’s one thing that Brussky isn’t, it’s disconnected from reality.

In terms of how this album compares to uhh… the other albums, odds are you’ve heard the first single (I Want You To), thought it was catchy and then immediately started wondering what the hell you were doing shopping at Abercrombie. This album fits the mold of every other Weezer album: there’s the two or so catchy made-for-MTV singles, six or so loud songs with power-guitar-riffs and stuff about not really much of anything, and the expected couple of slow emo-esque-but-also-with-power-guitar songs about heartbreak or something. Now, the catchy songs are pretty catchy, the filler crap in the middle is pretty bad and the slow songs are a little worse than average.  I Want You To is refreshing if only because it tries to capture the indie spirit of legitimate bands like Death Cab for Cutie or Tegan and Sara. Their other single, I’m Your Daddy, which you hopefully haven’t heard yet, is a white-kid tribute to rap music set over a beat so filthy that better-than-anybody-rapper (http://img.slate.com/media/59/the%20best%20rapper%20alive.asf) Lil Wayne is scared. And by scared I mean shaking his head in disgust. They borrowed from Lady Gaga’s Poker Face. That’s all I’ll say.  This is actually surprising, because almost every song either has the same indie-backdrop + meaningless whining by Cuomo about something that doesn’t matter or…Bollywood themes. Yes, Bollywood. Sometimes Weezer tries something new. This is probably my best argument for why no one should ever ask them to. Love is the Answer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD_53jRElEY) is an example of what happens when a very formulaic band tries to grow musically.

Hopefully you didn’t sit through more than a minute or two of that, but I think that it’s about that time of day when I suggest that  we ought to leave Weezer alone and let them do their thing and appeal to the early teen demographic by doing the same pop-rock that they’ve been doing for the past 15 years.  Because if they ever decide to diverge from that, going through shopping malls will be an increasingly difficult exercise in avoiding every single Abercombie, Hollister and AE store.

 

The “this review would be more relevant if I woke up before noon” theatre reviews: the Edge morning show

Disclaimer: I have morning class three times a week. If you think that I bother to listen to 102.1’s morning show during the other two days of the week, for research purposes, you clearly don’t know me. Here, let me share some of myself with you, so that you will not repeat this mistake in the future – mornings are an awful time of day, and are best spent sleeping. There is absolutely no redeeming quality to mornings. No, not even lazy morning sex.  You can have categorically superior, well-rested lazy-afternoon sex, and then go out for a nice evening, and then go have some perfectly good late-night sex and then sleep in until past noon. Now that you’ve been thoroughly convinced by my amazing argument, you, intelligent and inquisitive reader, will immediately move on to your next objection: “if mornings and everything about them sucks, why bother writing about it?”. Good question.

For starters, there are gradients to how bad stuff which happens before noon is. For example, waffles and whipped cream aren’t terrible (though again, far better if consumed after say, 2pm) while 8am exams are probably the worst thing ever. On that note, the Dean Blundell morning show used to be… half-decent. I mean yes, it has the word morning in it, so it loses some points there, but they were sometimes funny and engaging, and I didn’t really mind listening to it. For those who are unfamiliar (because they prefer some other, inferior radio station), don’t live in Toronto, or think that radio is a dying medium (probably is, but so is writing stuff) go here: http://www.edge.ca/DJsandShows/TheDeanBlundellShow.aspx. Now, I’ve been listening to this for at least seven years now, so I can say with confidence – the morning show has lost a lot of its lustre. If my internet radio thing wasn’t programmed to auto-tune every other morning on weekdays, I might not even listen at all anymore.

Let me clarify – it sucks a lot and the only reason that I still put up with it is because I’m so beholden to my technology that I can’t make simple changes in my routine. My first gripe is with the lack of music. At some previous point, Dean, Jason and Todd would talk for a bit, then they’d hit a button or something and some music would play. Then there’d be a commercial or ten. Repeat the process. Recently, the amount of talking has increased by about 211.6% (number unsubstantiated by anything). That’s like, roughly 3 times more talking. Now, even during their best times, I could tolerate Dean and co for maybe 5 minutes at a time before I got bored and either needed to brush my teeth or listen to a song or be told about the latest beer ad campaign (incidentally, I still like the radio because it tells me what the good deals on beer are. I guess TV could also serve this function,but I don’t watch TV anymore, so that counter argument doesn’t apply). Whatever though, I like to talk a lot to. Why deny the boys a chance to actually do something to earn their salaries?

Well, as it so happens, they’re not the ones talking as much anymore. Major problem number two: too many guests. Brussky enjoys when people come to visit him. Hopefully the visitors like it too. Fortunately, however, Brussky doesn’t run a morning show. If he did, he would fucking hate it when random, boring people showed up every week to talk about inane junk to fill time. I have no idea if the Dean Blundell staff is just too lazy to write new material or if they’re trying to run a social outreach programme but really. Their call-in and in-studio guests (the non-famous one at least, everyone loves celebrities) are terrible. No I don’t want to listen to a licensed sex therapist on the air at 8am. I much preferred listening to Todd’s politically incorrect and derogatory advice on that subject, thank you very much. If I actually wanted sex advice for something, I’d open up Google with my morning coffee, and so would you reader, because we’re smart and modern like that. And no, I don’t give a shit about how lame Adrian is, or what Lesbian-Lou is doing or any of the other people. They’re boring. And not funny. And more importantly, they detract from having really dumb people call in for the Wah-happen or What’s Wrong With You segments. Those were great because they were totally unpredictable and, at least some of the time, funny in the ‘you’re really dumb and I’m not, so I’ll laugh’ sort of way. Their actual, scheduled guests aren’t.

My last gripe is actually substantive. The music. It isn’t there any more. Now, the edge has about as good a line-up of music as can be expected. Yes, they play Linkin Park, but it was also the first place I heard the latest Death Cab for Cutie single. So it balances out. Except, I wasn’t listening during the morning show when I heard that. If I had been, I would have gone 20 minutes without hearing a song. Do you know how bad 20 minutes without music on 5 hours of sleep is? Of course you do, because you read my Party Like a Rockstar guide. As a result you know – wake up time requires loud, throbbing music to bother you neighbours with when they’re busy doing mid-afternoon yoga (remember, Rockstars don’t get up before noon). If for some reason you’re getting up before 10 am, this is even more true. When it doesn’t happen and is instead replaced by lot’s of time of people talking, you get mad. Sometimes, I want the commercials to start, just because they have catchy jingles and inspire me to buy stuff I don’t really need. This is sad, in at least 7 different ways.

Now, you might suggest that I just stop listening. Which I would, except for the fact that there is still nothing better to do in the mornings. Yes I could listen to my ipod or something, but it’s fucking 8 am. Do you think I know what music I want to listen to? I have 5 000 options, I want someone to pick for me, and then entertain me with stories of human idiocy. That’s where the morning show comes in. They owe it to me to make 3/5 mornings a week bearable. If nothing else, can they at least give me free tickets to a show or something? I’m not above re-writing reviews for that, just letting you know!