Oh dear, you've found the secret slime cave lair of Enforcer @ Draggian Universe where they put their awful little thoughts. Get out while you can. Established June 2024 as somewhere to put my angsty thoughts about how Falling In Reverse sucks other than the void and annoying my friends.
Enter at your own risk; this is where I put spur of the moment random nonsense, angst, and opinions to get them out of my brain. When I say slime, I mean slime. And possibly full on possession. There will be no content warnings.
The 50 most recent thoughts are being shown. A curated selection of old thoughts I thought were useful, funny, and/or interesting can be found here.
Someone put a "voice activated" sticker above a crosswalk button. Which is not voice activated. Why would you graffiti that. It's not art. It's not political statement. It's not funny. It's not even advertising, it's just lying about accessibility!
Song of the day: Escape the Fate - Feral
In Lingo Legend Canadian French, speakers are "haute-parleurs", which is basically a literal translation of "loudspeakers". In France French, they are apparently "enceintes"... Which is a word I have heard before, but as an adjective meaning "pregnant". Huh?
I also guess that appetizers are called canapés because you're supposed to eat them on the couch?
The monologue complained about me using the term "put out" to describe FIR's releasing output or lack thereof. I pointed out that not only is it a semantically standard way of describing an artist releasing something, it is also the most accurate metaphor I can think of. Special interests are physical needs. You can't ignore them, they don't respond to reason, and if yours isn't doing anything or you've exhausted it, it goes beyond mere boredom or disappointment.
The family friendly version of special interests is being in love with a concept. I have not been "in love" with Falling In Reverse since it betrayed me at the start of 2024. However, I have physical needs that it is the only thing that can reasonably fulfill -- no matter how hard I try, substitutes don't do it for me in the same way. So I'm stuck with FIR, but I've exhausted what it's able to do and it isn't putting out to give me anything new! So I have to forcibly extract joy out of it by myself and get really fucking weird with it because FIR isn't DOING anything and won't COME TO THE BEDROOM SO I CAN BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF IT.
fuck intellectual masturbation, we only have disgusting, violent intellectual hate-sex here.
it's probably for the best that my interest in physical sex is solely abstract.
I've never applied a specific political or philosophical label to myself because (a) I don't think that "be nice to people and try to get people who are abusing their power to hurt others to stop" should be considered an ideology at all as opposed to a baseline and (b) no ideological system works in every situation. There's always the undercurrent of "whatever works", and ideals only work in an ideal world. A self-sufficient commune sounds great until there's someone in your community who needs prescription drugs or disability aids you can't safely make, or nobody has the skills and equipment to purify water or make buildings and roads that won't collapse.
I guess if I had to pick a specific philosophical word, I'm pragmatic over other things, but pure pragmatism can rapidly turn into being an asshole with the excuse of "maximizing theoretical happiness" or "well, it works for me", so some amount of attachment to justice and kindness is required to not be a problem for everyone else.
I was thinking about job interviews and accidentally summarized my entire moral philosophy.
I will always pick being good over lawful when they conflict, and consider maintaining one's own survival and happiness as long as you aren't hurting others to be "good". I acknowledge that being honest doesn't necessarily work if you are being externally screwed out of the "legit" path, but I still don't like lying because "it's okay to lie if you think it's better for you" is evil if applied as a general principle.
Lawful < good < survival
Generally speaking, maintaining basic social etiquette (don't hurt anybody, keep your promises, clean up after yourself, don't take stuff that isn't yours without permission) leads to a better experience for everybody. You should be nice whenever possible and try not to actively impede other people's success, including following social codes that aren't hurting others.
You are morally obligated to resist laws that are hurting others within your means, but doing what you have to in order to survive takes priority over all else. Not everything is worth fighting over and all forms of resistance are valid. You can't help anyone if you're dead and the only difference between martyrdom and suicide is the press coverage. Try to help people (or at least don't willfully hurt or deceive others) when you have the means to do so.
Hurting or deceiving others is OK if there is no better option for your own survival or to protect others, but not solely for your benefit. (E.g. you can and should lie to ICE agents, and in a trolley problem, pull the lever, but you shouldn't lie or kill people just because they have something you want. You can steal food or winter clothing if you have to, because the real evil is paywalling those things, but taking frivolities because you don't want to pay for them is just being a dick. In all cases, hurting people should be a last resort if no other option is viable and you're still accountable for any harm you may have caused and cleaning up after yourself.)
I guess in D&D terms, Neutral Good is the closest? I think I'm too pragmatic to be clearly lawful or chaotic, and I don't have strong opinions on the concept of if social codes themselves should exist. It depends on who's making them, and some amount of organization is required to make sure people get fed and housed. I'd like to think that I care enough about justice and helping people to not be True Neutral, since I think TN is roughly "I don't care about anything except my own and my loved ones' well-being", although I do prioritize myself on grounds of "can't help anyone if I'm dead", and because not prioritizing my own survival leads to suicidal ideation in the form of "throw yourself in the path of the trolley" / "can't enable capitalism or emit carbon if you're dead, and being alive is net harmful". I refuse to enable that, because if applied to anyone but me that's ecofascism and suicidal people aren't good at not being assholes.
I completed the Lingo Legend farm storyline. I guess I can keep trying to breed cool looking Naala and get to max level? I have some French workbooks but I think in order to be effective they need to be paired with actual conversation.
J’ai besoin d’aller au bibliotech…
They should hire me to be the new Ronnie because I’m cuter, know more about Falling In Reverse, am probably a better vocalist at this point, and have better taste in tattoos, and I even also hate FIR fans and have the joints and back of a middle aged man. (Which we all know is vital to the experience.)
really fucking envy folks whose special interests with gender and nonhuman ID correlations don't suck. I want to do my ronniecore DIYLF-personified the promise FIR made and didn't keep bullshit without ronnie or ronnie fans is that so difficult?
searched up escape the fate and falling in reverse tagged characters on art fight...unsure what I expected. it was fine in 2024 but my relationship with the ronald was also a lot different.
bookmarked two Craig dogs but as for the others, we have:
someone who's 15. absolutely not. I am okay with talking about shared interests with minors in public settings, but I don't initiate Ronnie Nonsense with anyone under 18 at this point. I don't think there's a way to talk about that which is appropriate. also said person is also openly in love with Max which fair but uh that makes me even less comfortable with theoretically engaging with you about Ronnie and Max bullshit (especially since I am also not NOT in love with young Max).
somebody who has a character that is explicitly intended to be a sona for Ronnie IRL, including being the right age, knowing about the gambling, and being tagged with his real name...that uses she/her. let's not misgender real people even if they suck and we are also making them pokemon. Also, I've seen way too many FIR fans declare that Ronnie is a woman to justify why he's fine actually. Even if it's intended to make fun of him it's still gross. I really hope there aren't any other characters tagged "Ronnie Radke". I don't want to know. Also, you're playing with fire re: the rules by explicitly tying the sparkledog to a real person with a last name as opposed to conceptual EtF / FIR juices.
Also, in 2024, I attacked literally every character tagged with EtF or FIR at once, and nobody revenged or wanted to be my friend.
I just want art of my DIYLF weirdos from people who actually know something about the source material...
Some Miscellaneous Reminders:
Most people living in the US are not there by choice. They're there because their parents lived there, like the population of anywhere else.
Leaving the country is not viable for most people: even if you aren't flying, it's expensive and takes a lot of paperwork and prep time, let alone finding a job / study program / place to live if you don't have friends or family in the destination country. (Which most people don't.)
Societal collapse would not kill the people you are mad at. They would just leave. Who it would kill would include and not be limited to anyone reliant on social services, anyone who needs prescription drugs or disability aids, anyone who boils / freezes / starves to death due to infrastructure failure, and anyone considered "undesirable" by gun-toting assholes looking forward to societal collapse so they can murder without consequences. This includes most people folks who think "the US should collapse for the good of everyone else" is a progressive take claim to want to protect. Even if you don't have any friends or loved ones in the US, or can rationalize people deserving to die because of where they live (as discussed, probably not by choice and most people can't reasonably leave), collapse with no transition plan would result in mass suffering and also wouldn't solve anything.
People can not control their race, gender, or where they're from. If it would be a dick move to say "you are incapable of ever benefiting the world because you're from here and have this skin color" about one demographic, it is also a dick move to say about anyone else.
If it would be horrible to say "everyone in this country should die for the good of people I like" or "millions of civilians should die because their leader is bad" about one place, that also applies to any other. Even if you're from there and justifiably bitter. Any time you are saying that millions of people should die or that a demographic is inherently evil (yes, I have seen this in regards to "Anglo-Americans") over something they can't control, you are not helping.
Whether you realize it or not, by saying that the US should collapse, you are saying that you don't care about the lives of everyone who doesn't have the privilege to leave or live "off grid", or who relies on social infrastructure to survive. Who are the same people those in power want you to not care about, so...
Probably won't be updating the site for a while. I don't have Internet in the new place except on my phone.
maybe if I get a custom domain I might change hosts, but I (a) don't see a good reason to pay for a domain and (b) I'd rather not have a WHOIS until I have a legal address that's not in the US.
Nekoweb's effort to be cute and wholesome makes me extremely uncomfortable, I despise Discord, and I don't like their site boxes or editor.
feels like all my mutuals are moving off of Neocities...the problem with self-hosting is that it requires a computer I can keep constantly on and internet connected, and that isn't really in the cards right now.
don't use your real name if you can avoid it, set your robots.txt, and add some poisoning to things you don't edit regularly, but remember, the best way to preserve your data is to make data no one cares about. Your own OCs or personal blog are about the most "data no one cares about" it gets. So don't worry too much.
Church sign: "faith is like a rubber band; it must be stretched."
Stretching rubber bands reduces their strength, and if you stretch them too far they snap.
Song of the day: My Chemical Romance - Demolition Lovers. Idk what I was doing in my dream last night but it was playing on loop.
The lights on that dance floor start very quickly flashing white every 10 seconds or so, which gave me a headache after less than 5 minutes so I had to flee to the side room. Someone who looked vaguely alternative was in the side room so we talked for a bit. I don't actually have much of anything in common with them culturally; they were dressing to match their friend. Whom I talked with outside for a bit about tattoos and such, and then they both went back in after the friend had started ignoring me.
My roommate who invited me went to check on me, so I expressed that I wanted to leave because I had a headache and she dropped me off. I did attempt to talk to someone. It turned out that they were presenting false indicators. Their friend is perhaps aligned with me, but the environment did not allow for much discussion.
It was nice of her to invite me, and the existence of a bar that has open booking for DJ nights is useful information. If I am the one supplying the playlist, I can wear my ear protectors and sunglasses (which also works for the image) and request they not do the white flashing. Every other part of the light cycle is fine.
My housemate invited me to a queer dance party tonight. I don't know what I'm going to do with myself -- emo nights are interesting because I can judge the setlist, but I don't "dance". However, while trying to determine if this bar had food, I did find a very useful bit of information: they have a booking form which explicitly singles out DJ nights, so maybe all the work I put into my emo night business proposal can go into something!
It would be cool to DJ an emo night once, just to say I did it. I accepted, and planned for, losing money at least the first time, since the initial interest check would be free -- making it a recurring event comes once I know how many people are likely to show up. The Drug In Me Is You's 15th anniversary is July 26th, so that seems like a good date to aim for, perhaps. (I'm not going to advertise it as a Fuck Ronnie Radke party; I don't think that would work. But, like, as an arbitrary date this summer.)
There have been more days thus far in June that have been raining than not (and it has NEVER been water park temperature outside yet. in the apartment, maybe), and I've applied for every job in my immediate area other than food service none of which have emailed back, but perhaps if I send in this form and start plotting for late July (and see how terrible the price tag looks), at least some part of my hot emo boy summer can proceed according to plan.
CD Stack #7: Agnostic Front - Last Warning (Relativity Records, 1993)
Method of acquisition: Pawn shop
Agnostic Front is an American hardcore punk band from New York City, who blatantly copy-pasted the search engine description on their website from Wikipedia. Apparently they're considered a major influence on New York hardcore, which is the origin of most of what we associate with hardcore punk today (including and not limited to the style of moshing and the name "hardcore"), and one of the earliest hardcore bands to incorporate metal influences. They're still active, so I could see them if I wanted to go to Montreal for Warped, which I don't.
My feelings about both pure thrash metal and pure hardcore punk are that they don't have enough going on to be interesting to listen to if you're not fighting in the pit (this is basically why emo and post-hardcore exist, and how metalcore gradually diverged), so it'll be interesting to see if an early crossover of those is more than the sum of its parts.
I do appreciate that this album has more songs on it than many of the pure hardcore and more "core" early metalcore albums I've acquired, so you get a more standard album length. It feels like a bit of a rip-off to pay album price for only 20 minutes of music even if it's technically 10 or 12 tracks, and would be all the more so if I were paying full price in the 90s. It seems that in this case, it's making itself the length of one standard album by being two albums -- the first half is a live recording of presumably new (as of 1993) tracks, and the second half is a re-release of a 1983 7-inch. I also like the graphic design on the album cover.
"If you show up 10 minutes late to a hardcore show, you've missed half of the set. If you show up 10 minutes late to a sludge metal show, they're still on the first song." -- Unknown
Apparently the recorded show was an AIDS benefit concert, which is pretty cool. Note that because this album is a live recording, some of the songs have concert intros in their CD track versions. While these are historically fascinating, for playlist / shuffle use, you may want to use Audacity or something to edit out the intros for a more seamless experience. I like DarkAudacity because the UI is more streamlined.
Tracks I liked:
Undertow
Your Mistake
One Voice
United Blood (Track 5 -- There are two tracks with the same name.)
Public Assistance / Over The Edge (two songs combined into one track)
Crucified
Toxic Shock
All around, I think this is an excellent album from a historically significant band that's worth a listen for any metalcore or hardcore fan. At least the first half -- the second half is historically interesting, but there's not that much you can say about or really vibe with in a song that's less than 30 seconds long.
Despite being upwards of 30 years old at this point, it's cool to see the established setup we associate with hardcore nowadays and even some solid metalcore elements, and its themes still resonate since they did a good job of keeping terminology applicable. I wouldn't guess that this was from 1993 if it got presented to me in the wild. Compare Boysetsfire, Bury Your Dead, and early Most Precious Blood. I'm going to be assessing the rest of Agnostic Front's output.
CD Stack #6: Antiseen - Here To Ruin Your Groove (Death Train Music, 1996)
Method of acquisition: Pawn shop
Stream (YouTube)
This band is described as punk rock with country or "Southern" elements. Apparently they've been known historically for both violent special effects and getting into actual physical fights on stage, and they've had several affiliations with professional wrestling.
For some inexplicable reason, the CD I have came with two copies of the liner notes, so I guess I could keep a scan even if I decide to trade in the disc? The booklet unfolds to a comic-styled mini poster of the band, which is cute, but I'm a little concerned about the coupling of Confederate flag and gun imagery. I'm willing to give them a good-faith chance, though, since using the symbolism of bigots and fascists against them in order to rob it of its power is an established theme in punk...which has also been used as a cover for actual bigots and fascists, and it's hard to tell without external context whether a given usage is ironic or not. They've claimed to be "apolitical", but apparently one of their members ran for office as a Libertarian in 2000, which doesn't make me optimistic. One person on Reddit says that they were scared about going to a concert, being a self-described "queer redneck", but that the band members were nice to them, which is mildly reassuring.
I'm not seeing anything that clearly suggests that they're racists -- an interview from 2020 has one of their members attesting known fuckwad Ted Nugent as an influence, but in the sense of guitar styling, and also mentions that they're intentionally playing up how Southern they are to a parodic level. The gun and Confederate flag imagery, especially on an album from the 90s, could be self-parody of What People Think Southerners Do rather than an actual statement of support, or a non-critically examined expression of where they're from. I'm going to assume good faith when going into this album, until and unless it gives me a reason not to. Also, a CD that I got at a pawn shop for a dollar 30 years after its release isn't exactly supporting them.
Statement of bias that I'm from Memphis, went to college in Atlanta, and the kind of archetypical Southernism this band / the "cowpunk" genre is parodizing has been a thorn in my side my whole life. Also, the kinds of people who use this kind of imagery unironically are who forced me to leave the US in 2025, so I'm going to try my best to interpret this in good faith and discuss it as art, but I haven't liked "Southern rock" bands before due to them rubbing me the wrong way from personal experience.
Also, they have an adorable website which is easier to navigate and find relevant info on than most modern band websites and isn't a front for Ticketmaster or a Shopify store, so I can respect that if nothing else. And their name is a shortening of "anti-scene", because as discussed, "scene" is just a shorthand for "music scene" and has been used especially in punk spaces since the 1980s. There was never a distinct subculture called that.
The guitar work and mixing on this album is pretty good. Somewhat like Jack Boot & The Oppressors from the same stack, it's non-hardcore punk rock but with more metallic guitar production. It would be better if this guy wasn't talking over it. For one, it's a little too close to straight bro-country to clearly be a PARODY of aggressive Southernism rather than actually just being that. For two, I don't like the vocal deliveries. They're at their best when they're trying to be 80s thrash metal or doing short pseudo-hardcore vocal snippets. For three, the lyrics are on the nose even by punk rock standards.
Tracks I think show the band at their best:
Spare Change
Self-Induced Lobotomy
O.D. For Me
Justifiable Homicide
This should not be read as a value judgment about "redneck" culture or Southern accents, because that can just become classism very fast. I've got a personal distaste because folks who like appropriating "redneck" imagery have regularly been condescending and mean to me my entire life, even before they voted to kill my entire demographic. I personally don't like Southern rock stylistically, and find the imagery it uses uncomfortable due to past experience, but that doesn't mean that it's not a culturally valid part of and influence on the rock-adjacent scene.
You still shouldn't do this on account of it being hostile to people with print disabilities, but if you find it aesthetically pleasing to replace letters with numbers, why not make a custom font that does that for you? That way you don't have to find and replace, and it won't be hostile to screen readers or translators.
I wish that Waja breed had a different name (especially since the game is set in Lunaria, which is not Earth), because I can't exactly say "I just don't like Africans" out of context.
oh, he's canonically poly. cute. I still dislike him because of fanfic I wrote in 2013 about him being a misogynist.
he does sort of vaguely remind me of ronnie expression-wise and i'm not sure why
CD Stack #5: Paramore - Riot
Method of acquisition: Record store at mall
I bought this with the last stack of CDs, but kinda forgot about it. I got it because while I got disrupted in my plans by getting illegally evicted, I had a fantasy upon moving to an actual city (and still kinda do, but I think I need to become a regular at a bar first) of becoming an Emo Night DJ, and therefore, wanted to get some notable canon albums on CD so I had tracks that were 100% unambiguously legal.
I'm not that big of a fan of Paramore -- I'm familiar with their relevant tracks, they were one of the bands offered up to me in 2019 (and I have a specific memory of pulling up Paramore Radio on Pandora while working on a history paper at the library in high school), and I respect that Misery Business is iconic, but they're ultimately too poppy for my tastes. Still, this is a CD that I'm glad to have given its significance. I already knew about half of it from my algorithmic days.
It's an excellent work of somewhat emo-vibe-toned pop, but it doesn't really have that much in the way of post-hardcore or otherwise punk / metal elements. I enjoyed it all throughout, but a good half of that was nostalgia from before I had tastes. I don't really think I'd add these songs to a playlist outside of emo night setlists.
Tracks I liked:
For A Pessimist, I'm Pretty Optimistic (new to me)
Hallelujah (new to me)
Misery Business
Let The Flames Begin (new to me)
Crushcrushcrush
Fences
Riot (new to me)
CD Stack #4: High On Fire - The Art Of Self-Defense (Tee Pee Records, 2001)
Method of acquisition: Pawn shop
This band is described as sludge and stoner metal, so I'm not sure how likely I am to like them: I don't generally like slower metal flavors, nor am I confident in the coherence and quality of something that was intended to be listened to while "chemically enhanced". Still, it's metal of some sort and it was a dollar and that's all I really needed to buy it. Sludge metal is documented as having some hardcore punk influences, but that seems to mostly be in lyrical themes and aggression rather than speed, and I just find it hard to vibe with slow songs. I like slime, but it's gotta be vibrating at higher intensities, like Oobleck on a speaker.
I listened to this album while arranging some graphics (the Neopets backgrounds will be sorted by theme in the near future) as background noise, and no tracks stood out to me such that they stopped being background noise. They kinda blurred together, as a lot of pure thrash metal does for me.
CD Stack #3: Flo Rida - Wild Ones (Atlantic Records, 2012)
Method of acquisition: Thrift store
This is a pure inner-child nostalgia trip for me -- I have the utmost respect for rap as poetry, and legitimately enjoy reading lyrics (I took an excellent dual enrollment African-American Literature class in high school which included rap / hip-hop in the poetry unit and is a substantial influence on my personal poetry / lyric writing to this day), but I don't find pure hip hop production all that interesting to listen to.
However, I adore rap / metal and electronic hybrids when done well, and this particular "crunk" era of pop / dance / rap hybrids hits my exact niche of what hybrid production I like. It's like the rap interludes in Eurodance and rave music, except with better flow. It also Nightcores incredibly well. It's got issues with misogyny, but that's the case for pretty much all pop in this era including female artists; specifically singling out rap-based work as problematic is mostly just racism.
I know that I Cry, Wild Ones (fuck Sia), and Run are all incredibly fun, although Run I didn't discover until my Nightcore era because it didn't make it onto pop radio.
...the tracks that are fun are still fun, but the rest of it is kind of disappointing, to be honest. It's definitely fun, but outside of my 3 favorite tracks (honorable mention to Good Feeling) it gives me the same feeling as deadmau5, albeit having lyrics: this is designed to be background noise at a club that you aren't supposed to pay attention to. Which is a shame because the production and mixing can be quite good when it wants to.
RRverse Award Show WIP segment > https://rentry.co/5hw3shiq
Last night, an award show segment popped into my head in Ronnie's voice, starting with the phrase "snuggling with the homies" and expanding from there. The original plan was that the old EtF guys would stick around and get shouts out in Ronnie's adorable acceptance speech. That is not what ended up happening.
Max, I feel kinda bad for how I write him, since he doesn't cut a very good figure on account of being freshly broken up with. This story will fix that with his heart to heart with Arlo. I think this is textually accurate for Monte. He's the only person I know of who's initiated beef with Ronnie...to which RONNIE stopped responding because he was too pathetic. He's also generally agreed to be the actual inciting incident behind the "fuck Ronnie Radke" story with Craig, in that he was hyping him up.
And then started sniping at Ronnie, Craig, his fans, and everybody else after he got kicked out. Whilst being totally irrelevant even within Escape the Fate and basically having no one willing to work with him except his brother and his wife. I'd feel sorry for him if not for how he's a lot more connected to reality than Ronnie and doesn't give the same mostly closeted dysphoria by volume vibes. He's just a dick.
The name change may be a bit anachronistic, since he's credited as Monte in the DIYLF liner notes, but we also have interviews from 2007 where he calls himself Bryan and I can't resist the "who the hell is Bryan?" joke since I had that confusion.
Omar left in OTL shortly after DIYLF was released, did one solo EP, and then vanished off the face of the earth in 2013. I'm not entirely sure what he really did in regards to DIYLF, to be honest. He's absent due to a lack of information.
CD Stack #2: Jack Boot & The Oppressors - Defecate On The Masses (Thr333 Records, 2000)
Method of acquisition: Pawn shop
Technically, this CD is not COMPLETELY nonexistent online. However, it is the single least documented CD I have ever purchased. (Even the other totally absent ones had Discogs.)
Startpage, Bing, Ecosia, Brave, and DuckDuckGo all found absolutely nothing for either the album name or band name, because they're not as willing to cite random Facebook posts or make shit up. Google found two Facebook posts that are unambiguously referring to the band, and a general punk rock aggregator the chatbot almost certainly hallucinated a connection to -- there's no way that a Facebook page made in 2013 posting about current concerts was writing about a band whose only release was a self-published CD in 2000.
If this band existed contemporarily with the Facebook page, they would have at some point had personal social media, mentions in local news, terribly written Medium articles, or performed at a venue to get logged by concert databases. Pretty much nothing whose year of release starts with a 2 can completely dodge all documentation. It's a little weird that a CD from 2000 isn't on Discogs or anything, to be honest.
It seems that Google was conflating The Obnoxious Boot with the two Facebook posts that do exist -- someone showing off a CD they found, and a concert poster from 1999 with 3 enthusiastic comments in French. Searching for the label and album name also turns up the one Facebook post with no response, which obviously means that this label is "very underground" but beloved in the Montreal stoner rock community and they DEFINITELY have other artists; this one is just the "best known".
If I had to guess, given the "obscure music" post being labeled as from 2026, this is probably the person who sold the CD to the pawn / collectibles store where I found it.
One of the trademark "AI" tells is that anything that could be interpreted as cultural heritage will be described as relevant and beloved, even if it demonstrably isn't. I don't think this will go away, seeing as the purpose of bullshit generators and what they're ultimately trained from is mostly ad copy and fanfic. Interpolating significance whether or not it exists is practically what the Internet runs on.
There are no web URLs in the liner notes. Reverse image searching a photo of the CD just turned up "uh, that sure is a CD" and reading the text, and "it's probably punk based on the name", which I already knew from being a sapient being with a vague understanding of the concept of punk rock and that nobody other than someone punk or hardcore adjacent would name an album that.
Original post links:
Obscure and Rare Music, and other shit
Montreal Concert Poster Archives
On one hand, all art deserves to be preserved and documented. On the other, I almost admire the continued persistence of things that are pretty much entirely unknown to the Internet, and demonstration that bullshit generator output is only as good as its constituent data at BEST.
However, the metaphysical sacredness of something the all-powerful algorithms know nothing about is less important than preserving and making stuff available to future interested parties, because lack of accessible data is what misinformation and ultimately, harm feeds off of.
I've been reading Baby Blues again for reasons you don't need to know about, and one strip I liked had Zoe explaining that "if someone went to the trouble of writing a book, the least I can do is read it".
Someone made this CD with the aim that people would listen to and share it, and history left them behind. I have the opportunity to, in some tiny sector of the web, remedy that. And if it's bad, analytically break down why it's bad and put it in context.
so yeah, that's my philosophical statement about the limits of technology and the nature of preservation and creativity as human communication, based on something entitled "defecate on the masses" whose cover art I'm not convinced isn't a photo of actual shit.
I don't think that even the version of me who made the text file -> spreadsheet in 2022 and decided to start looking at the CDs at McKay's for names they vaguely recognized and/or metallic fonts, let alone 2019 or 2016 me, would think I'd ever get to a point that said would be something I not only am willing to listen to, but spent money on and actively researched, and am kinda looking forward to just because I may be the first person to hear these songs (except whoever that was on Facebook) in 20+ years.
It's a lot better than I was expecting it to be, to be honest, given the combo of the name, cover art, and total lack of any documentation, even a Reddit post saying "anyone remember them?" or the equivalent in French.
The structure is non-hardcore melodic-but-intentionally-simple punk rock, but the vocals and instrumentation are somewhat closer to 80s / 90s thrash metal. I do think there's some hardcore influence and I'd generally call it "punk with metal instrumentation and vocals", but I wouldn't necessarily call it "metalcore" since it's a lot less hardcore and more melodic than contemporary metalcore would have been as of 2000 and it doesn't have the trademark fast, clipped drumbeats or breakdowns. I'm not sure what a better word for it than "metalcore" would be, though.
Some songs have some interesting grungy crunch -- one of the two Facebook posts calls it stoner rock, so maybe that's where that comes from? Said is most noticeable on Get The Reamer. I can't say there's much that's especially remarkable about it, but it's pretty good overall and no one deserves to be forgotten. Check out my Web Archive upload. The entire album is 25 minutes long, so it won't overstay its welcome.
Tracks I liked:
Hellooo!
Nausea Pie
Shit Your Head
Kill This One
Vex (probably favorite overall)
A Smart Grave (most hardcore)
June CD Stack #1: Katy Perry - Teenage Dream (Capitol Records, 2010-12 -- original release 2010, Complete Confection 2012. Complete Confection is what I have.)
Method of acquisition: Thrift store
-cross-posting to /music_other and /etf_fir because I end up talking about TDIMIY a lot-
Here are 3 unrelated fun facts about this album.
Alternative Press backs up a December 2010 - April 2011 production timeframe, but Alternative Press also thinks that Mandy Murders being at a concert once means Craig definitely dated her, and I heavily doubt that Ronnie fucked off to Florida to record an album FIVE DAYS after he got out of jail. So, if the AltPress / I Can Explain recording dates are true, the 2024 UK tour prison release date can't be. If Ronnie got out of prison in December 2010, I can maybe buy that it was ANNOUNCED that TDIMIY would exist on December 20th, but not that recording started then. Ronnie also has plenty of contemporary trauma narratives about being so crippled with anxiety after getting out of prison that he couldn't leave the house, which doesn't align well with spending 2 months in the studio. He could also be lying about that, though.
With prison narratives, we're limited to primary accounts -- digging too far into a real human being's trauma just to determine what specific month an album was recorded in feels wrong, and no one except Ronnie really knows the details anyway. I just wish he were internally consistent. Anyway, I think the fact that the current thing calling itself Ronnie wouldn't be secure enough in its masculinity to admit to listening to Katy Perry is the core problem with Falling In Reverse. Of course, I'm barely secure enough in my masculinity to write about this album and it probably isn't getting into the CD grid (mostly due to Ms. Perry being naked on one of the lenticular sides of the cover, and the lenticular effect being unable to scan well).
So, it's a pop album from 2010 with absolutely nothing to do with anything scenemo-adjacent musically, but one of historical significance to me and that has some weird crossovers with my other interests. I figured that was worth 3.99 CAD. I'm listening to it at 1.2x speed for a proper Nightcore-like experience.
I don't think Hollywood Undead ever did Punk Goes Pop, and they're not secure enough in their masculinity to be able to do it well, but they should have done a cover of California Gurls. Inspired by how I was autopiloting and almost accidentally titled it California Dreaming while inputting the data for this CD rip.
Tracks I liked:
If I were in the music video manipulation industry, you could do a pretty good Ronnie / Max shipping video with either Circle The Drain or The One That Got Away, and I have to wonder if that went through Ronnie's head when he declared this as an influence on TDIMIY. Wide Awake could also totally be one of the whinier TDIMIY songs. Ronnie-boy missed his opportunity to not do some tribute to his influences on Punk Goes Pop; he could have rocked this.
This might take the record for "most discussion of TDIMIY in an unrelated album review", in part because there's not much I can say about it otherwise. It's a girly-pop album from 2010. If I didn't have personal nostalgia for it there wouldn't be much to say about it, since it doesn't have the club / hip-hop hybrid production I like.
moral of the story is that I gotta canonize DIYLF-Ronnie's cartoon robot bedsheets because that's adorable (in the tagline for the photo attesting the matching tattoos -- hadn't really read it before because the text is so damned blurry)
ronnie escape the fate had cartoon robot bedsheets. "I have robot sheets, and I dream about robots."
that's so fucking cute I need to officially include that in the RRverse. also, getting matching neck tats is definitely something straight guys do with their straight guy friends.
that is all. i've shown this column screenshot before but hadn't read it in detail because the text is so blurry.
Also, this does seem to attest Mandy Murders, but I'm not changing the research paper conclusion that she and Ronnie probably didn't date until we get a better source -- no other DIYLF or otherwise documents say anything about a relationship, and the timeline still makes no sense. And we know Ronnie likes lying about women soooo...
This tangent was prompted by Katy Perry btdubstep.
...this could totally be by Max about Ronnie. I'm seeing the canonical TDIMIY resemblance, but not in the direction he wants.
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/katyperry/circlethedrain.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8YtfKujeGU
honestly, so could The One That Got Away, narrated by either of them, including the matching tattoos being canon.
People do not object to "typing quirks" because of cringe culture. People object to them because they actively make your text harder to read and are blatantly hostile to screen readers or anyone with print disabilities. You are not a webcomic character. Replacing letters with numbers does not make you more interesting. Leet speak is a valid art form when used sparingly for emphasis. However, just like you shouldn't write all your messages in all caps or as glitter GIFs, you shouldn't apply a "typing quirk" to everything you write. If you must, please provide a toggle for translation.
If your website exists solely for yourself, or if you're only using typing quirks in private servers, fine. But you're communicating, whether you realize it or not, that folks who are disabled in such a way that they can't read your text are not welcome in your online social sphere. I don't expect perfect accessibility from personal websites -- it's yours, you can do what you want with it, and websites built to contain nothing that could possibly be a problem for anyone are boring -- but you can at least try to not be actively hostile? You shouldn't use a typing quirk or flashy graphics on your landing page. Once people have been informed that they're going to encounter that sort of thing and can leave before they run into it, then you can do what you want.
I like some leet speak and blinkies in moderation, but those things can physically hurt people and even if that sector of the population is tiny, you don't know who's gonna be on your website. If you have a website, that is a public venture. You can still do what you want and use aesthetic elements you like, but just be considerate. You wouldn't shine bright lights in somebody's face if they waved at you on the street, even if you and your friends like going to raves.
Anyway, if you write all your dialogue in leet speak, 1 @/\/\ 🚫 741|<1[\] 2 U. (I am not talking to you.)
You shouldn't bring a gun to a gun fight because then you'll be in a gun fight. -- xkcd
Upon sleeping on it, I have concluded that maybe the blogger who sent me spiraling last night after a long session of self-harm via bigotry-themed Wikipedia drama is just an asshole with no understanding of reality.
Problem with guns for "self-defense" is that BEST case scenario, it turns violent encounters into contests of who can kill / permanently disable the other party first. If you shoot someone for what you perceive as threatening you but they weren't armed with a gun themselves, whoops, you're getting in trouble for murder!
Much more likely, you never need to use it but its presence makes it more plausible that you'll end up killing yourself or someone else due to accident or suicidal impulse. Having a gun in the house is basically the number 1 predictor of successful suicide attempts -- I understand the concern on some level, but it isn't necessarily going to make you any safer. If you're freaking out enough that you're considering buying a weapon specifically to kill human beings, you're probably likely to be a hazard to yourself or others, even if you do the responsible thing and take a class which you should.
And, like, "Everybody's fucked and degenerate so you should learn how to kill people" is not helping, no matter how queer and neurodivergent you are. Neither is using the term "cancel culture" in 2026, or "trans people brought this on themselves by being too focused on woke identity politics so should go back to a strictly medical model". I won't tell you who this person is to keep you on your toes, but they're whose blog I ran into by way of Wikipedia last night and are very visibly trans and support unions and all that.
(And yes, they're nonbinary, and yet think that "only medically diagnosable dysphoria is valid" is constructive and that people who don't pass deserve to be misgendered because ~presentation~ is what matters.)
...also, like, it is well established that "self defense" is a racially and otherwise loaded concept. If you're more marginalized than the person you just shot, you're liable to potentially face punishments arguably worse than death for yourself, your neighborhood, and your loved ones, even if you HAD a valid reason to go straight for the lethal option! Self-defense does not necessarily apply as a legal defense for everybody, and anyone talking about intersectionality should know that.
The person you're most likely to hurt buying a gun due to paranoia is yourself. It doesn't matter if said paranoia is correct. If you get charged and publicized to the gun fandom as the they/them who murdered a good American boy for protecting women, who benefits from that? Sure, you may have saved yourself in that one encounter, but is that really going to prevent more deaths?
The same train of thought of "the best thing that could happen is for the US to collapse even if there is no plan for a transition, because fuck all my loved ones and everybody else who can't leave" (yes, same person) should also correspond to "if I get murdered, the only person who dies is me. That's better than my getting punished for 'self-defense' harming everyone in my community if something goes wrong.", but evidently MCR was right: everybody wants to change the world, if you think fantasizing about mass murder is changing the world, but no one wants to die.
My opinion on guns is that they should be treated like other dangerous tools and professions: you should need training on how to use them safely in order to buy one, they need to be inaccessible to unauthorized parties, and the more powerful the weapon, the more training you need.
If you need a license and strict management of your tools to give people tattoos but not to kill them, something is dreadfully wrong. Unlike other tools, guns have no purpose other than killing living things. You can't use them for aesthetic enhancements, transportation or home improvement.
Any political stance that summarizes to "thousands of people (or more) dying would be good, actually" is not progressive.
Also, it probably wouldn't work, because everybody powerful enough to be the problem would just run off to somewhere else. The people most likely to be hurt by collapse are folks who can't escape, who aren't the ones driving state function.
any website can be used as a vector for emotional self-harm if you're creative enough
every entry on my site blocker plugin was written in blood
this post was brought to you by the past 6 hours i've spent on wikipedia metapages and people's political doom takes by way of them. i don't even edit wikipedia.
I'm very confident that modern Ronnie wouldn't be secure enough in his masculinity to describe his intended style as "Underoath or Norma Jean with Katy Perry choruses", which just tells you how much we've lost.
Also, TDIMIY is closer to the inverse, or the intended to be derogatory but ultimately accurate "pop with loud guitars" description I've seen -- it's much closer to a poppier structure just with metal tuned guitar and occasional solos and screaming, because Ronnie openly dislikes hardcore and metal. I suspect the only reason he is vaguely metal adjacent is that it's the only thing his dad would accept, and by extension, that his desperate attempts to lie to himself that he's straight does. His earliest work before he had anything to prove to himself is straight Blink-182 esque pop punk.
He gets to do a boy band parody in 2013 with Survive This, back when parodizing One Direction was the trendy thing to do, and while he does do some ironic-contrast screaming, he's (a) really good at it and (b) clearly having fun. (Wrong Direction - Hey You.)
The only reason DIYLF is as post-hardcore / metalcore as it is, I suspect, is that Max is openly a metal fan and has been since day 1, and possibly them being one of MCR's small beans.
Ronnie is a pop punk guy who screams sometimes. Craig and Max are actually metal, as are most of the rest of the EtF / FIR guys.
You can check TDIMIY or FIR's Wikipedia page for the 2011 interview where he namedrops Katy Perry as inspiration. It's also in I Can Explain. I don't feel like linking it right now.
I can envision Ronnie's dad raising him on rock / metal on grounds that every other kind of music is gay. Even before converting to hardcore born-again evangelicalism, it seems like the kind of thing an 80s-90s biker (derogatory) would do.
The fact that baby Ronnie was raised on metal, but gravitated towards pop punk and Eminem (and I suspect Limp Bizkit even if he doesn't admit it; the resemblance is uncanny and the timing is perfect for someone to have been an edgy 15-year-old) is canon; his dad's motive is not but from what we know about him...(and how he definitely knows, just like everyone including Ronnie does...)
I can still only envision his dad gifting him the framed Freddy Mercury poster after Popular Monster (2019) platinumed as "congratulations; I know you're gay." Even if some music "journalist' did compare PM2019 to Queen for some reason (and should have lost their music reviewing license, but it doesn't work that way...), Ronnie's dad was sentient enough in the 80s to know better.
I always find it amusing when there's a crop of CDs at a donation-accepting place that were clearly provided by the same person. In this case, said crop is pop from 2011-2012.
CDs I picked up today:
Flo Rida - Wild Ones
Katy Perry - Teenage Dream
LMFAO - Sorry For Party Rocking
You could make an argument that LMFAO and Flo Rida are scene-adjacent -- LMFAO, like Kesha, is one of the bands who affected more of a "rock star" than pop image, and both are supplying the "crunk" part of crunkcore's influences -- just add screaming, hence why Punk Goes Pop works so well. Ronnie namedrops Katy Perry as an influence on TDIMIY, which good for him for being secure enough in his masculinity to admit that.
This is not why I purchased the 3 CDs that were located. Call it healing the inner child, who conveniently discovered Nightcore around the time of the 2014-15 scene crash when pop stopped doing the more aggressive / electronic club pop stuff they liked.
They should make some good spacers between the more punk / hardcore stuff from yesterday, even if they aren't exactly mission relevant. Nostalgia, like all intoxicating substances, is poisonous, and this era of pop (and by extension crunkcore) is HELLA misogynistic and bad at consent. But, like, childhood imprinting aside, I honestly like that sort of thing stylistically and aesthetically.
even with modern looking back tastes, 2008-13 or so is the best era for pop at least with the sort or thing I like. I like the electronic / rap hybridized club-type stuff, before modern EDM made it boring again. That's also where we get more of the rock influenced aesthetic and behavioral elements, and maximal sparkle.
I am not a "revival" because (a) stop telling everyone I'm dead and (b) I have always been the best approximation of scenemo I can be with the resources available to me, including my pop tastes. I wouldn't consider contemporary club-type pop to actually be meaningfully (scen)emo given the lack of post-hardcore elements, but it is in conversation with it and there's definitely some influence both ways especially with the more absurd and aggressive folks e.g. Kesha and LMFAO.
Of course, now I have two albums (well, JLY I scanned and then sent to the library) whose covers are just pictures of someone's belly and crotch region. At least LMFAO has a thematic connection to said which Just Like You lacks. I'm trying to decide if the resemblance is intentional or not -- Ronnie did listen to pop in 2012, and anyone in North America who was sentient and not living under a rock was aware of Party Rock Anthem, but Just Like You lacks Fashionably Late's crunkcore / electronic elements and is trying to be more "mature" (by Ronnie standards) so if it is intentional, I have no idea why.
Or it's possible they're both just crass and misogynistic.I can't say that Just Like You has any thematic reason to be making an intentional reference, but the timing is such that it could. Or maybe that's just ambient 2012 nonsense. (Keeping in mind that Ronnie has been about 3 years out of date from the rest of his scene since TDIMIY. Just Like You came out in 2015.)
I think I'm leaning on "they're both just crass and misogynistic", since when Ronnie does make references, he's a lot more obvious. Like, blatant plagiarism that he badly drew his face tattoo onto obvious.
Also, Party Rock Anthem is way more fun than anything Ronnie has ever done. LMFAO's rap delivery is also way better. It still isn't "good", mind you, but it at least works for what they are trying to do and they are capable of more than one tone of voice.
I don't mind being a hoe as long as I'm a MAN hoe. (Xe said while being essentially ace.)
CD Stack #17: Falling Up - Crashings (BEC Recordings, 2004)
Method of acquisition: Thrift store
I got this CD at the thrift store because it was a dollar, and I thought their name was funny. Wikipedia calls them some sort of electronic-hybrid alternative rock; other sources claim nu metal elements but apparently they got weird, experimental, and much lighter later on. It seems this is their most punk / metal toned album, so they probably aren't looking into further. Apparently they reformed in 2024 under a new name. Various online sources also call them Christian, which worries me a bit. Looking at the liner notes, every song on this album has a corresponding Bible verse but they don't seem to have overtly preachy lyrics.
They're a lot like Thousand Foot Krutch, but somewhat lighter since they don't have the angsty grunge elements. Loosely compare LikeWolves and of all bands, Max Ronnie's-boyfriend Escape the Fate's temper tantrum Natural Born Killers, but without their post-hardcore elements, for the overall hybrid production vibes.
If you like the Nightcore / AMV canon of light post-grunge and parent-acceptable Christian (with varying degrees of noticeability) rock, you'll probably like this. Be aware that they are a little bit more noticeably Christian than some of their peers because they actually namedrop Jesus. They are better at rapping than many nu metal hybrids, though. Apparently their later albums become both poppier and weirder, so aren't really mission relevant to me, and the Christianity gets more overt.
Tracks that are worth checking out:
Symmetry
Broken Heart
The Gathering (musically, could do without the blatant Jesus-dropping)
Jacksonfive
CD Stack #16: Lankmar - Self-Titled (Tox Records, 1995)
Method of acquisition: Thrift store
I've discussed how much I dislike MetalArchives, but they're the only source on this band. However, what is there is pretty thin on the ground: they're metal of some sort, they're from Montreal, and this is their only released album. If you're wondering why I bought this, other than the baseline of "metal of some sort and probably worth 3 dollars to check out", refer to the title of track #3.
It's definitely thrash metal. Pleasant enough to listen through, but I can't say any tracks particularly stood out to me. I'm glad that I could get it properly archived and documented online.
CD Stack #15: 21st Century Arabia (Compilation, EMI Music, 2000)
Method of acquisition: Used CD store
This is a compilation of Arabic-language new wave and dance music. I know nothing about those genres and don't speak Arabic, so there's little I can say about this. I bought it because it had cute Y2K graphics and was completely nonexistent online, so I figured archiving it was worth a dollar. I'm listening to it because hey, why not? I might as well get my money's worth.
CD Stack #14: Sum 41 - Heaven X Hell (Rise Records, 2024)
Method of acquisition: Used CD store
Sum 41 is a huge Canadian band described as various flavors of punk and metal, but mostly a pop-punk / metal hybrid. They may or may not be some sort of hardcore or metalcore depending on who you ask. This album is their final release before breaking up in 2025, and it's also two albums: the first disc (Heaven) is more pop punk based; the second (Hell) is more metal.
This is personally interesting to me because if we believe I Can Explain, that's also what The Drug In Me Is You was originally going to be. In practice, the entire timeframe of that album is a mess and the TDIMIY2 concept is only documented in I Can Explain, so who knows if that ever made it out of being a twinkle in Ronnie's eye. (Long story short: the album being recorded in December 2010 and Ronnie getting out of prison on his birthday in '10 are both in FIR folklore but can't both be true.)
Also, I saw someone on Art Fight while hitlist hunting last week who had a Sum 41 stamp in their bio along with several for Falling In Reverse. (I commented on their profile, of course, and grabbed the FIR graphics for personal use.)
Heaven is standard 90s-style pop punk which you will like if you like that sort of thing. Compare Green Day, and things trying to sound like Green Day. It's at its best where it has some faster / more vaguely hardcore-like production, at which point it resembles lighter tracks from Hawthorne Heights and maybe Just Like You-era poppy FIR. (The latter also describes the lyrical sensibilities, albeit less egotistical. This is not a compliment.)
The lighter clean vocals are a bit weak, as is the production on slower songs. Radio Silence and Dopamine are the worst tracks due to said. Really, it's at its best when the songs are less than 3 minutes long. Otherwise, they overstay their welcome -- they hit my typical problem with pop punk where without hardcore or metal influence, there's little going on.
To be honest, I don't see much difference between Heaven and Hell save that the latter has more guitar solos and metallic distortion, and some sporadic attempts at "harsh" vocals. The structure is still pop punk. It reminds me a lot of Senses Fail and early Falling In Reverse, and to a lesser extent the less emo tracks from Hawthorne Heights and Atreyu. The FIR resemblance in vocal style and lyrics sticks around, which may not be a positive trait depending on who you ask.
I generally enjoyed it, but acknowledge that as alternative metal goes and even as a metal / vaguely-punk hybrid, it's pretty lackluster. Again, it's a lot like early Falling In Reverse: it makes up for generic lyrics and weak "harsh" vocal delivery (there's very little screaming in this, but it attempts some aggressive cleans in bridges) by having excellent instrumentation and mixing.
The TDIMIY style scratches a particular itch in my brain, but I wouldn't describe it as "good" at what it's trying to be -- it's just that it misses its goals in a way that becomes itself enjoyable. If you want to see what TDIMIY (and probably this) wants to be and isn't landing on, refer to Get Scared, DRUGS, early Atreyu, and/or The Used. Still, I will never object to another slime-free Ronnie substitute, although this one doesn't get the same arrogant RSD vibes since their lyrical themes are more genre-standard. Same excellent guitar solos, though.
I'd recommend Hell for FIR-like hybrid fans, and pop punk fans who want a little more edge and interesting guitar work, but not for metal-focused folks. Heaven you can skip unless you're into 90s dime-a-dozen pop punk. Sum 41 has been added to the Like FIR With Less Nonsense list, and I'll probably look into the rest of their work.
Tracks I especially liked:
Future Primitive (Heaven)
Bad Mistake (Heaven)
I Don't Need Anyone (Hell) -- probably the most FIR-like
Over The Edge (Hell)
You Wanted War (Hell) -- best guitar solo on the album
It's All Me (Hell) -- probably the heaviest. You Wanted War and It's All Me are the two most metalcore-like tracks.
Hell is worth a listen as a full album if you like FIR and their ilk; I enjoyed it all the way through.
god I'm so fucking sick of the word "dopamine" in pop-cultural context. when it isn't being used to be ableist (stop using the term "iPad kid" or similar!), it's so clear that "I know one neuroscience word for Impulsive Chemical" and that is NOT WHAT IT DOES or at least not all of it
CD Stack #13: Seaweed - Weak (Caroline Records, 1992)
Method of acquisition: Pawn shop
This album is referred to as punk and grunge by Wikipedia, but allegedly the band took on some emo and post-hardcore influences later. Which, since this is happening in the 90s, emo and post-hardcore aren't meaningfully different things from each other or necessarily from baseline hardcore. As of 1992, nothing anyone cared about was referred to as "emo" and you'd probably only know the difference between alleged "emotional hardcore" bands (who would call you homophobic slurs if you called them "emo"; genre gatekeeping and emo-bashing are and always have been prejudice with extra steps) and their regular hardcore counterparts if you looked at the liner notes.
Anyway, I'm not expecting emo influence here because Seaweed was on the wrong side of the country for anything anyone would eventually call emo to exist in 1992, but it'll be interesting to see where the "punk" and "grunge" parts intersect -- I can see it accidentally landing on something emo-like on grounds of combining punk or post-hardcore structure with grunge crunchiness and angst, and I'm wondering if that's why they got called "emo" by journalistic sources rather than any intentional subcultural alignment. Early bands are always interesting because they showcase that genre gatekeeping is a made up concept -- everyone was crossing over with everything they could get their hands on if we're talking about foundational bands, because the rules weren't set yet and never existed to begin with.
To clarify my stance, though, based on substantial historical and musical research via things other than social media: Genres are inherently fluid, but emo is a fundamentally music and performance-based concept and subculture. If what you are doing does not have punk or metal(core) elements and a degree of dark theatricality, you're just playing dress-up. Wearing black and breakup songs long predate any "emo" musical tradition, so are not sufficient on their own. It's like how an artist may wear a biker-inspired outfit for a music video, but that doesn't actually make them a biker. This is how I feel about TX2 and most "emo revival / emo rap" bands.
Also, neither "scene" ("The scene" is a shorthand for "the music scene" in punk and alternative spaces going back to at least the 80s. This is how contemporary artists, fans, and graphics use it, and it's interchangeably called emo before becoming an "aesthetic" and getting bastardized out of all musical relevance post-2014 crash. No notable "scene" bands from what I can tell, even the electronic / crunkcore ones, are anything but straight emo / metalcore aesthetically), "screamo" (used as a generic term for "emo-influenced music with screaming" including post-hardcore hybrids at least as early as 2002), nor "Midwest emo" (light alternative rock without post-hardcore influences is not emo, and I've seen plenty of bands called this that are neither emo nor Midwestern) are historically real. This concludes my blasphemous scientific findings.
If you would like to complain about this, fuck off. I'm just saying what I've observed from my assessments and research into said. I don't care if you call yourself, bands you like, or your OCs any of those things; I just think it's important for folks who fancy themselves as Edgemasters to put the music they like into historical context. Otherwise, it's way too easy for harmful ideas and misinformation to spread, especially for music and subcultures linked to marginalized communities.
The closest comparison I can make from the spreadsheet is Split Chain, but with faster and more upbeat punk production. Most songs are less than 3 minutes and quite fast, but it's not hardcore; it doesn't have the fast and compressed drumbeats or screaming. It's got the same grungy crunch, but with punkier vocals and guitar work. I can see how this has some emo syncretism; it reminds me of some of the similar 90s skater punk bands that are sometimes credited as emo progenitors. I'll probably look into the rest of Seaweed's output, especially since it's pretty small.
Tracks I liked:
Stagger
Taxing
Bill
Clean Slate
My #1 beef with French is the adjectives -- from my understanding, Spanish is at least consistent: they go after the noun, no matter what. From what I can tell, whether any given adjective goes before or after the noun in French is completely arbitrary. I've already DONE this unit in the Canadian version (there's a different slang word for "guy" -- "gars" vs. "mec") and I'm still getting questions wrong regularly on grounds of adjective ordering. If there were a rule like "the contents of one's character go before, and appearance goes after" (which is usually the case but not always) that wouldn't bother me, but there's NOTHING. I assume that modern French got infusions from languages that do both orderings and we all have to live with that, or maybe whatever dialects of Gallic Latin it started as weren't consistent.
My other beefs with French are the numbering system and an excessive number of non-pronounced vowels.
CD Stack #12: Latefallen - Bloody Kiss (Early Rising Records, 2008)
Method of acquisition: Thrift store
I'm looking forward to this one because, well, look at it. It clearly wants to be Dying Is Your Latest Fashion, or possibly it wants to be whatever DIYLF wanted to be. When I got this album at the thrift store, the only documentation I could find was r/AskACanadian, that they were in an episode of Degrassi, and a profile on Soundclick containing one single, which is not on this album. Searching now, I'm finding a little more, but not the Soundclick profile.
the only aesthetic difference between this and dying is your latest fashion is that these actually are all definitely guys
What I could find is as follows:
The post from r/AskACanadian. According to this, they have 2 releases: an EP in 2003 and this album in 2008, but both are hard to find because they got removed from streaming. It seems that auto-aggregators may have reversed this, since Bloody Kiss is now on Spotify and Yewchube. They're probably from Toronto and were on an episode of Degrassi. If I had to guess, the band's official accounts ceased to exist, given the music videos' absence. There is a page on Facebook under that name, but it has no profile picture and I couldn't scroll down because I'm not logged in.
A tour in 2007, at which Latefallen accompanied some other notable emo / post-hardcore hybrids including Senses Fail, The Used, and Mr. Sex Cult himself who isn't getting assessed until everybody involved is dead.
The portfolio of a former staff member who did music videos, on which none of the videos are accessible because they got removed from streaming services. This removal is also documented by r/AskACanadian. Reddit also thinks that this guy was the lead singer, but apparently he's doing acoustic stuff now.
The Degrassi Wiki, backing up that one of their songs was on an episode.
This terribly written article from 2016, which thinks that they're some sort of metal, agrees that they're from Toronto, and states that they've been disbanded since at least the time of its writing.
A list of songs used in films from a group of snowmobile athletes (I think), which enthusiastically reviews 3 songs, shows the band's logo, and links to MySpace. Presumably this is the Canadian version of making it onto a skater playlist.
A random post on r/PostHardcore on which some commenter brought up Latefallen as a recommendation for someone who liked Pierce the Veil and Get Scared.
Their SoundClick profile, containing one song that isn't on this album. This is the same logo and also from Toronto, so probably the same band. They tag themselves with "punk", "metal", and "emo".
A list of downloadable MP3s from IDN Music, containing the same track (dated to 2005) as the Soundclick page.
So, from the sources we have, I'm pretty confident this is some sort of post-hardcore / emo / metal hybrid in the DIYLF tradition, so if it's any good, I'll probably really enjoy it. It definitely has the classical historically accurate "scene" aesthetic what with the conflation between feminine beauty and violence and black and red chiaroscuro. Unfortunately, unless that 2003 EP turns up, I'm going to have a hard time finding any more of it, and it seems that the bands they were affiliated with are folks I've already assessed. Which does bode well for their musical merits. Conscience Called In Sick has no documented tracks, no label, no nothing, so I'm not even sure where to go from here. Searching it only turns up the Fall Out Boy song that used the phrase.
I don't think "Conscience Called In Sick" exists, going through the archived website. What is documented, but doesn't seem to survive to be downloadable via Latefallen's own site, MP3s.com, or MySpace (but you could buy it for 6 dollars, which would be useful if we could time travel), is a 3-song demo in 2003 and a self-titled EP in 2005-6. So, open bounty for either of those. The self-titled EP has no surviving cover.
Also on interesting historical notes, Latefallen calls themselves "post-alternative rock" on MySpace, while also being tagged as metal. Their own site's bio uses the same "heavy alternative" wording as Soundclick. All sources point to them being a DIYLF / Senses Fail / The Used / Atreyu-esque post-hardcore / emo / metal hybrid.
I now know the tracklist of their self-titled EP, and at least one song from a demo that didn't make it onto there. These songs are as follows:
Sleep It Off (this is also on Soundclick and IDN. Downloads don't exist, but I can screen record it.)
Not So Useless (was also on Degrassi; got reuploaded to Yewchube.)
Let Me Breathe (was previewable on MySpace at the time, but that didn't get archived.)
Bent (was previewable on MySpace at the time, but that didn't get archived.)
Bottles & Hearts (Also on the album.)
Back In Place (Also on the album.)
Stale (mentioned as part of the demo on their site in 2003, but nowhere else.)
Sometime in between 2005 and 2006, the self-titled EP went from 4 to 6 songs. Not So Useless is also documented as being on Degrassi as early as 2004, so they made it into two episodes: Bloody Kiss on Heart Of Glass and Not So Useless on Back In Black.
Here's the album cover for the 2003 3-song demo. No album cover for the self-titled EP survives. This has exactly 0 reverse image search results via TinEye; Google Images thinks it's a cover from a totally unrelated song that came out 23 years later. Or from Split Chain, who is also completely unrelated but I assessed them because I saw them live so it was weird to encounter in the wild.
This is definitely an emo / post-hardcore / metal hybrid, but it's got a more metal and less "core" in its ancestry and is more predominantly melodic and guitar-focused than many. The vocal layering is also more metal than core; it doesn't do the screaming / melodic layering of many of its conspecifics, for example. There's definitely some post-hardcore / emo hybrid whininess in the main cleans (compare Get Scared, DIYLF, Pierce The Veil), but the overall structure is more alternative metal than post-hardcore or emo.
You'll probably enjoy it if you like DIYLF and its ilk, but I'd compare it more closely to something like Atreyu, Three Days Grace, Violent New Breed after Max leaves vocals, A Smile From The Trenches, or even the lighter work from Escape the Fate with Craig. It's got much more melodic alternative metal in it as opposed to the pop punk infusions of somebody like DIYLF or Get Scared, and most songs don't contain meaningful screaming at all.
Regardless, I quite enjoyed it and would recommend you listen to this album and the 2 non-album tracks we can find. Hopefully the others will turn up, but it's been 20+ years and no one's found them yet who's willing to share.
Tracks I especially liked:
Bloody Kiss
The Fly
Jealouside
Play Dirty
Back In Place
Killing Conversation
Bottles & Hearts
canada did a good job today apparently. go sports!
next game is Mexico vs. Korea who both have really cool logos
I'm vaguely considering going back here for Canada vs. Switzerland just out of curiosity and because it's kinda fun to be watching and have no idea what's going on but be able to recognize that other people are really excited about it. Since it is a national big deal, it feels relevant in a way most sports doesn't.
Theme is 90% by Enforcer; the rest is thoughts.page default. Kick ass, take names, fuck Ronnie Radke (not literally).
