Guitar pedal music for guys who don’t know anything about guitar pedals

This week from Sam and Josiah

If Sam’s not gonna put a pic of him doing an Ironman competition with his dog then I guess you have to see whatever is the latest awful bullshit I have created. My desktop is so insane. There are somehow more screenshots and awful inside joke Photoshops than ever before, even though I regularly delete them all and don’t even post half of them. What am I doing with my life?

Here’s some stuff we’re listening to this week.

Courting “Happy Endings”

Sam: This album came out in January but I’m giving myself a pass because I didn’t know this and the plays are relatively low. I remember really enjoying Courting’s Guitar Music a few years ago, but I realize I basically never think about it or return to it. Will their latest be any different? Time will tell but I THINK maybe??? There’s something so British (pejorative) about the way this sounds, but by the time that whimsical outro is happening I’m ready to never eat flavoured food again. 

Jos: Sam’s listening to some Hotline TNT-wave with a hip airbrushed cover, not realizing that there’s so much Sam-adjacent shit in the media right now. Don’t worry, we’ll rectify that in a bit. Okay I wanted to hate on this but the autotune vocals are so charming. This sounds a lot like when Warp signed a post-Strokes band to get on that wave and they flopped. This also seems to be a flop? Less than 700 views in 5 months, and the band even has a Wikipedia? Got to the janky outro. Fuck’s sake mate, I think I have to listen to this album. UPDATE: Never mind, sounds like the Jonas Brothers trying to be Art Brut.

Peeling Flesh “Perc 3000”

Sam: As much as I’d like to, I don’t think I’m cool enough to rebrand as a fulltime cybergrind guy – I just have too much invested in the same black t-shirt at this point to build an entirely new wardrobe from scratch. But maybe it’s time for me to become a dedicated slam guy. Like I could switch all my socials and YouTube channel to be “Slam Sutherland” and review music like this by saying “FUCK I just SHIT MY PANTS that was SO HEAVY” and I think I’d be happy. The other song from this album is also incredibly sick but it doesn’t have record scratching in it so it only gets a link in the body text. 

Jos: I could see that for sure. You just need to start doing steroids and maybe stop doing the dog run sport and find something slightly more buff. I do feel like Slam Sutherland could be a guy who regularly appears on the “Hard Lore” pod, which is something that also makes me glad to not be a podcaster anymore, no disrespect (jk, some). Okay despite your description this is still too tongue in cheek. The problem with the different types of guys you’re trying to be is that there’s too much self-awareness. To become a true meathead, you must turn your head into meat. You must believe that what you’re listening to isn’t funny in any way. This was kinda fun tho.

Japandroids “Chicago”

Jos: Sam is trying out all these new identities because he’s trying to escape the man he really is in the depth of his core. But that’s okay, I know him better than he knows himself, and I’m here to right the course by posting pure Sammy picks. You’d think he’d be popping off about the Year of our Lord when the new Japandroids was announced, and he told me on Gchat that he didn’t even know about it! I think this might be the first Japandroids album I become fully obsessed with. They called the thing Fate and Alcohol. How is that not a fake Japandroids album title I thought up? Not to mention, there is a song called “A Gaslight Anthem” which really has me lost in thought, because it’s equally plausible that it’s a nod to that other piece of shit band or that they’ve never heard of them because they’re too busy hiring LinkedIn photographers to do photoshoots. Okay time to listen to the song, which is named after a place I learned I loved earlier this month, and may now be forced to hate. Why is he singing like the Proclaimers guy? Also I do love that they make guitar pedal music for guys who don’t know anything about guitar pedals. Which is technically me, but still. Time to Google the lyrics. They sing “fate and alcohol” in the song, hell yeah. I think they’re basically just the Rural Alberta Advantage run through a Line 6 amp? Alright I listened to half, more than enough. In the press release one of the sales guys in this band said they were like letting the songs breathe, which just means it's insanely long and nothing happens.

Sam: As someone who hopped right off the Japandroids bandwagon with that boring third album I was prepared to dislike this without much effort and leave Josiah hanging with his dated impression of me. Unfortunately, I immediately liked this. The actual chorus (“We call it like we see it in Chicago”) is incredibly bad and sounds like something a high schooler from a place very far from Chicago would write in an attempt to be regionally anthemic, but almost everything else around it is the exact Japandroids schtick that, at the very least, keeps me coming back to one and a half of their other records. I can so easily picture the blindingly white hordes at every single final Japandroids show ironically bellowing “Goddamn ma’am I’m sweating through my shirt” (because they are not wearing one anymore) so easily it’s like I’ve already experienced it. 

GWAR “I’m Just Ken” (Barbie cover)

Jos: I mean it’s a huge fucking week of our lord if you’re an AV Club guy. For some reason they’re bringing back their YouTube covers series, and they’ve got the most epic freaking return with GWAR covering the Barbie song, an idea that seems 10 years too late despite the song being from, I believe, last year. Of our lord. Anyway I’m definitely not gonna watch this one, I just felt like making Sam feel uncomfortable because I know he has an affinity for this kinda thing. And I miss the guy. I miss razzing his ass. 

Sam: There is something temporally unsettling about the Barbie phenomena, like that tweet from a few weeks ago about how some people wouldn’t have survived that summer or whatever. Was ready to feel either sad or offended based on Josiah’s rude intro, but honestly, this is charming. It’s more obvious here than seeing them live playing actual GWAR songs, but Grodius really has his own thing going and it’s charming without needing to be the identical to Oderus. The lyric changes are exactly as dumb as they need to be which renders this pretty immune from genuine critique. The shredding is honestly sick. I liked this and I’m comfortable with that.

sparkling Caleb “The Grudge” (Pre Nup cover)

Jos: Look, that’s back-to-back sparkling Caleb songs in the coveted fifth spot, but how can I not include his beautiful cover of a song I wrote, complete with a classic “walkin’ around” video that also, if you look closely, reveals his severely injured thumb. To think I was just enjoying the same neighbourhood with him mere weeks ago, before Japandroids ruined Chicago forever. Seriously though it’s hard to explain how nice it feels for someone to do such a beautiful cover of your music. This must be how Ryan Gosling feels about GWAR.

Sam: This is so good and I love this video, but I’m now realizing I’ve never heard a cover of a song I wrote. I have never known the pleasures of a Hughes or a Gosling. There is this YouTube video of some musical theatre students (I assume?) doing one of the songs from my Jaws musical for class (??) but I don’t think it counts. And one time someone wrote a really sweet song about how good we are at partying after we spent a night in Grand Rapids listening to Alanis Morissette but I can only find our own cover of it, which is extremely funny. I think it’s safe to say this is the really nice opposite of that.