Watching Movies Alone with crumbsroom

There aren't a lot of recent rock groups that I like.


In fact, it's depressing that this group is now reissuing ther work as "10th Anniversy" editions. Wait, wasn't that basically yesterday?

I only have a short paragraph I wrote on the film saved. Fortunately though, I screenshotted a bunch of discussions on Corrie before the site went down and I happened to save a discussion I had with Takoma on the film.

Spoilers for Upstream Color ahead:

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Local Toronto music break. Deep cutzz version!

One of my favorites since I was, sheesh, 13 or 14? (Which was 34-35 years ago!)

People do that?!

Well, 10 years for a band is an extremely long time. There are some of these lifelong bands we see but for most even a period of 5 or 6 uninterrupted years is a rarity, right? Hell The Beatles barely lasted 10 years.

Not people with any integrity.

A lot of these new bands still sound the same after 10 years though. But, quite honestly, I think the past decade has been the driest in my lifetime. The talent is surely out there, but the economics of the industry are broken.

Is this a new group emulating the 80s or an actual forgotten 80s indie?

They were just local nobodies from the late 70's, early 80's. I think all they ever released were a couple of self produced cassettes. Had no idea they were on YouTube, because they were really more a rumor than an actual band. I'd never even heard them until last night. I'm not terribly in love with the vocals, but there is something going on with the band that I kind of like. There are little inspired moments littered all through it.

I like Tame Impala well enough, but they are also a band that is ingrained with memories of my dork manager (who constantly would play them at previous job) that kind of handicap any listening experience that I have with them. That guy ruined a lot of bands for me.

They sound about that time - Psychedelic Furs, Echo and the Bunnymen, maybe The Jam. Definitely better than Tragically Hip.

I like their earlier stuff before they got very into digital gloss. I kinda hate the vocal style though, just the nasal monotony of them. But I'm a sucker for big fuzz.

I don't know about bands in general, but with Metal groups, I've found that, while there are obviously some big ones that don't stick together very long, most of them still end up lingering in the scene for years, or even decades after they've exhausted most of their creative inspiration, and stopped creating essential records, instead mostly just coasting off of the legacy of their early works; in other words, there's more Metallicas out there than Emperors, a band who wisely went their seperate ways once the members started drifting apart artistically, after four genre-defining records and less than a decade together (and even then, some of the bands who "quit" early still end up reforming and putting out new music years later, like At The Gates):

Supposedly Peter Buck and Mike Mills were fans of the band in the very early touring days of REM, and would pall around with them when in Toronto. There seemed to be some resentment later amongst members of TWaFoC that their more succesful friends lifted some of their musical ideas. Personally, I don't hear beyond the occasional little touches, but they were definitely an anomaly in Canadian music at the time.



I mostly know about them because I'm a fan of a band I've mentioned before called The Lawn, which were only slightly more well known in Toronto, and were composed of mostly the same line up. Having worked with the slide guitarist, he was such an astonishing wealth of musical knowledge (he made me free like some kind of kindergarten drop out, in the best of ways) that I had to track down the kind of music he made and was ultimately pretty impressed. There was probably a brief time where the most played songs in my house were his "Shady Street" and "Beluga" (both pretty much impossible to find, even on the internet)


When it comes to this guy, to this day there is probably no other person in my life more influential in making me disregard the silly notions as protecting the purity of genre, or really even acknowledging it. Music is music. Beautiful touches can be found in anything, depending on how committed the musicians are at getting something interesting down on tape, and not if they play the type of music that your 'supposed' to be listening to. It such an obviously profound way to look at things, and can just as obviously be applied to all manner of art. Thanks Gord!


And, yes, these guys are hands down a million times more interesting than the meat and potatoes of Tragically Hip, and band whose success is very dependant on how much they feel like the kind of band you might find playing in your local bar one night. But who somehow feel urgently like home, almost entirely because of the lead singer, and lyrics that seem to understand Canadian identity only second to Neil Young. Another Gord to thank, it seems. Too many Gords down here.

I find a lot of great music. I just don't find a lot of it on the radio.

Here is a link to my review, in case it sparks some discussion...

Upstream Color

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I don't know much of what has been going on in the underground of music the last decade, but there are a couple of superstars that have emerged that I 'believe' in. Kendrick Lamar, Frank Ocean, Lana Del Ray I think are just as good as the hype. And while I haven't been completely bowled over by any over Earl Sweatshirts albums as of yet (as I admittedly had expected to be) I will still buy anything he releases.


And, even though they emerged early in the oughts, I think Deerhunter is kind of my lifer band these days. They have the exact kind of pop instincts undercut by dissonance and anger and weirdness that makes them very special to me.

A lot of people don't understand the current economics of the industry. For example, it has nothing to do with radio.