So I’ve been way too busy to update this as often as I’d like, especially since I like to at least make an attempt to make it sound like I understand how the English language works when I write here. Well anyway, here’s a few things that make life worth living.
The new album by The Copyrights, “Learn The Hard Way,” has been burrowing it’s way into my head for the last week or so. It has an important mark of a great album in that as soon as it ends I immediately want to start it at the beginning and listen to it again. Whenever I aim to listen to one track I always end up listening to the rest of the album because I can’t bring myself to turn it off. To the untrained ear it sounds like more of the same from our favorite pop punk gang members, but some part of me wants to convince those ears that it has a different feel to it than “Make Sound” I think it feels more like “Mutiny Pop” except with better songs. Every song, from start to finish, brings it and reminds you that pop punk doesn’t have to sound tired, it can be fresh and fun, loud and in your face. The release of this album has pretty much consolidated that I’m going to drive home in April to see them, Teenage Bottlerocket and The Unlovables at the Cake Shop. Now that The Copyrights have a whole new batch of songs I absolutely need to see live I can’t wait until the next time they come around.
Top Tracks: Second Hearse Same as the First, She Turns It Up, Out of Ideas, Charlie Birger Time
This past Friday I went to go see “Be Kind Rewind” which was totally good. It was weird. Not just the kind of weird I was expecting walking into the theatre to see a Michel Gondry movie, a totally new kind of weird. It had the crazy visuals that make you think about the way you look at things and it had the things that aren’t quite real enough to make sense, but Michel Gondry’s crazy French brain apparently thinks everyone in Passaic, New Jersey is slightly retarded. I’m used to Jack Black acting like an idiot, which is at least a constant I know I can depend on, but Mos Def thought he was a slow child of 11 years, and all of these townsfolk a) were for some reasons renting VHS tapes of Rush Hour 2 in 2008 and b) didn’t possess any kind of logic. No one in the movie acted like a real person, and it took a minute to get used to, but it didn’t take away from my overall enjoyment of the movie. Such a ridiculous plot wouldn’t hold with normal people, so I guess you could call it a brilliant directing decision. The movie was worth watching just for all of the Sweded movies, and on top of that it was a pretty great, heart-warming movie about how great movies are.
This week I received my Steinway’s Pizza Pack, which I think I wrote about a while back when I ordered it. It’s Alive! Records is the best. Putting aside the fact that they sent me 6 great pop songs on weird brown swirly vinyl, I got a t-shit, a magnet, a poster and a CD-R with the songs on it all packed into a tiny Steinways pizza box, for 10 fucking dollars. As for the record itself, it’s what you expect from The Steinways, awesome, fun short pop punk songs about girls (in some cases in Portuguese) and they’re all awesome, my favorite is probably Twenty Year Old Virgin (even though I really hate that title) which might be one of my favorite Steinways songs ever. It’s Alive! will be stealing some more of my money in the coming weeks when they put out the last Copyrights album “Make Sound” on green vinyl. I’m going to need to pick one of those up.
School work has been absolutely destroying me for the last 3 weeks or so. I’ve never done so much work in my life, I just hope it’s enough to make it worth it. This week should be a break of sorts, I have no tests and only 1 or 2 homework assignments that I know of thus far. Maybe I can finally get around to finishing Bioshock, Mass Effect or Phantom Hourglass. Or I could start getting into Assassin’s Creed, or I could finish reading the Poincaré Conjecture or The Luck of the Bodkins. Basically the options are endless. My life could be a bottomless pit of solitary enjoyment if I dropped out of college.
