This band would be a lot better if they were Christian, but that's true of everyone

This week from Sam and Josiah

When I was still at Exclaim!, I used to write the annual “worst album covers of the year” post, which is probably the hardest I’ve worked on anything in my life. Which is surprising because I am not-so-secretly a workaholic, especially when it comes to cataloguing and pointing out things that suck. I would spend multiple December days scrolling through an entire database of album covers from the entire year prior, making a massive list then paring it down again and again, having internal debates about whether something was bad on purpose (thus disqualified) or just plain bad. It was really fun, but I probably would have been stumped by this new Sebastian Bach album cover. Is it bad? Why is it so good? Why does it look like perfect outsider art, with equal parts Henry Darger, DeviantArt, and the kind of uncannily human messiness that looks like AI but cannot be created by AI?

Knocked Loose “Suffocate” (feat. Poppy)

Sam: Yo has anyone ever heard of this band KNOCKED LOOSE??? This shit is CRAZY!!! As a YouTuber who has predictably been the demographic bullseye for Poppy since day one and also an old guy who lifts weights on and off enough to be steeped in Knocked Loose gym playlists, I was probably going to put this in the newsletter whether I liked it or not. Unsurprisingly, I think it’s sick as hell, but I’m also so excited to make Josiah talk about both on the record (this a legal document). Somewhat surprisingly, he only really started tweeting about Knocked Loose last year? But he’s making up for it now (he just tweeted an hour before I wrote this). Anyway this is exactly what you think it will be and that rocks, if you’re me.

Jos: Man those early Poppy videos were so interesting, but then when it turned out that the director maybe actually had allegedly been insanely evil, it stopped being interesting. It’s so weird how no one can actually just play a persona of being evil, but instead they just actually are. I saw Poppy play her nu-metal opening for someone in concert, and I can’t possibly fathom what it was? I never leave my house. It was in a stadium. And it was pretty bad. Did she play before Our Lady Peace at the Smashing Pumpkins show? Good lord, yep. Okay fine I’ll listen to Knocked Loose. I think I kinda liked them when I heard 30 seconds of it a few years ago. I’m noticing this has the horror movie “all the credits” at the front schtick. Hardcore really is going the way of horror movies, where there’s too many absolute dorks involved so it’s less fun. Hahaha the guitars. This is like, pornographically heavy. It’s kinda cute. I saw people talking about a reggaeton part. I’m not sure if they mean this Poppy breakdown. Okay the other breakdown came in, it’s so funny and heavy. This isn’t bad at all, but this band would be a lot better if they were Christian. Then again, that’s true of everyone. That’s kinda the whole point. 

Heavy Temple “Extreme Indifference to Life”

Sam: Skimming this music video almost made me switch things up here, but I stand by being stoked on this. With the neverending gloom of dogshit-ass Toronto April enveloping my soul, I have been on a doom-adjacent kick lately, unsettling the dog with a full day of Elder and Earthless. I put this on initially because the art looked cool and was rewarded with more stinky groovy riffs to bother Coop with. And maybe Josiah??

Jos: Heavy Temple is such a perfect name for some shitty doom band that Sam would like. Unlike Knocked Loose’s performatively heavy guitar, why do people from the subgenre “doom” have such middling blue rock tones. This isn’t heavy at all. It sounds like The Trews or some other hockey rock type stuff. I’m imagining Sam grooving out to this on his deck, wearing knock off Raybans and bopping his head in between “making calls.”

Slimesito “Designer Drugz” (prod. Evilgiane)

Jos: There’s a new Bladee mixtape that is so unbelievably good, but I’ve given up on showing Bladee to Sam. Plus, Drain Gang stuff is so overexposed at this point that I give it 3 more months before Sam finds it and gets into it on his own. Meanwhile, I feel like I’m kinda late to the game on Surf Gang, the rap collective helmed by producer Evilgiane. He’s the brain behind my favourite Earl Sweatshirt song “Making the Band (Danity Kane),” and he also put out a great mixtape called #HEAVENSGATE VOL. 1 in January. There’s a new mixtape coming next week called Evilslime, and this song from it is sick as all hell. 

Sam: It’s true, I’m going to be so into this in a few weeks. But for now, what do all these words mean? They’re undeniably cool words. Obviously this is great. This beat rocks. I feel like I’m getting dizzy from the repetition. Like my tummy feels weird. Maybe this is how I get into all this Josiah stuff (also I see all the cybergrind people I follow tweeting about it, too, which is a more valuable cosign to me). 

Claire Rousay “Head”

Jos: It’s hard to overstate just how obsessed we would have both been with Claire Rousay on the pod, she literally checks all the boxes: born in Manitoba, makes emo-adjacent pop music but using field recordings and other deliciously pretentious techniques, and I can’t think of a third thing for my list but you get the idea. Her album sentiment was unofficially touted as the “actually good album” that came out the same day as Tortured Poets Department by the music discoursers, who are really working overtime to try and annoy me into not enjoying music this year. But I can’t resist Claire Rousay. When those drums kick in, I just know Sam’s gonna lose his shit. The whole album’s really good (save for, perhaps, some of the spoken word, depending on your tolerance for spoken word).

Sam: Wow dude for real you nailed it, this feels so “pod-coded” (that’s over as a phrase right) it’s making me nostalgic for a year ago. I can hear my own voice over this doing exactly what Josiah said, making a react face that no one can see but I am still ashamed of. I just started listening to the album and I’m not wholly down with the spoken word but that’s on me. Okay good this song started I am back on board. Amazing.

blink-182 ONE MORE TIME… but the mix sounds good (Full Album)

Jos: We’re coming up on a year since our live pods, and then a year since we (I) ended the pod, which really does feel like so much longer ago. Now that I just sit in hours and hours of meetings where I am half-listening for my name, so I can unmute and go “sure, just ping me,” I am somehow spending even more time on social media. And that means looking at Reddit sometimes. But specifically just the blink-182 subreddit. Yes, I don’t listen to blink, but I still read that shit. And the one thing that’s great about blink is they always fuck everything up so badly that they leave little projects for their fans to fix. Like the production of ONE MORE TIME…, which was so insanely overblown that someone named “chamilochampeon2007” remixed the entire thing to make it sound better. And it does sound better. I listened to the first song and noticed it sounded better and went “huh” quietly out loud to myself, then closed the tab. To think at one point this would have been a life-changing discovery….

Sam: Putting this on made me realize that I have never once returned to this album since we wrote about it here. And I remember liking a few songs! It’s very funny to me that Blink went from feeling like an obviously huge thing that still felt like a quasi-niche thing to be as into as we all were, to a thing that was just too big to be fun anymore. Josiah got over it first but not wanting to spend hundreds of dollars on a stadium show made it clear the dream was dead. What a wild few years we all had together. This does sound better though. 

Happy belated birthday Colson!!!