Liner Notes (June 19th, 2020)
In this week’s newsletter, I look at the music, movies, tv shows, and books I enjoyed this week while also sharing some articles and other things I found interesting. There’s also a playlist of ten songs I liked and a shocking admission about tonight’s pizza toppings. This week’s supporter Q&A post can be found here.
Six Things
Today is Juneteenth, and I thought this piece in The New Yorker, and this one in The Atlantic were very good and worth your time.
This week’s article was all about heading back to 2007 and taking a look at the albums out that year and re-ranking my favorites. 2007 was an interesting year because it kind of feels like my transition away from pop-punk music. That Yellowcard album and The Starting Line, to me, signal a passing of the guard. And while there would be great pop-punk albums to come, the genre as a whole and the next group of bands never quite did it for me in the same way.
On the website this week I fixed up some ad issues in the forums, and I once again can’t stress enough how much better the experience is on the website without ads when you become a supporting member. It feels like a night and day change. Speaking of supporting member perks, I also added a new one in the forum where members can choose new post per page options. Now, if you’d like to see 55 or 65 posts per page, you can. I like having a lot of posts per page when I’m viewing the forum because then you’re not hitting “next” as often, but I like having the ability to keep it smaller if I’m on a lousy cell network and don’t want to load a page full of tweets or images as well. I’m currently going with the 55 posts per page on my own devices.
I got a lot of feedback about the podcast mention in last week’s newsletter and am giving all of this a lot of thought. The “Daily Update” podcast from Stratechery was mentioned by many as something they liked, and that’s something I’m thinking about as well. Wheels are turning, even if I’m not certain what I’ll be doing quite yet.
While it appears my stupid country has basically given up on trying to protect people from dying from COVID–19, I just want to, once again, say: please stay safe out there, wear a mask!, and just because our government is full of idiots doesn’t mean the virus just went away. This is all so unnecessary, virtually every other country did better, and will have long term consequences we can’t even fathom yet.
I’ve been loving these images for wallpapers lately. I’ve been using them on all my devices.
In Case You Missed It
Music Thoughts
Today sees the release of the new Phoebe Bridgers album, Punisher, and I can’t recommend it enough. Finally having it in high quality (I was listening to a 128kbps stream all these weeks) has made me appreciate it even more than my lofty comments in thefirst impressions. I think it’s a songwriting tour de force from a generational talent. She’s so damn good at what she does, and I haven’t been hit by lyrics like this since Noah Gundersen’s Ledges. I think about this part in “I Know the End” all the time:
Windows down, heater on
Big bolts of lightning hanging low
Over the coast, everyone’s convinced
It’s a government drone or an alien spaceship
Either way, we’re not alone
I’ll find a new place to be from
A haunted house with a picket fence
To float around and ghost my friends
No, I’m not afraid to disappear
The billboard said ‘The End Is Near’
I turned around, there was nothing there
Yeah, I guess the end is here.
Today also sees the release of the new album from New Found Glory but I haven’t spent much time with this one since it leaked a few months ago. I try to look past the lyrics, but I struggle each time. It seems quite a few people are having a lot of fun with it, so that’s good. I’m still hung-up on my two favorite albums from this band in years, Coming Home and Makes Me Sick, basically getting retconned right after their release.
I spent some time listening to The Aces’ new album this week. It’s not due out until July, and I’m suffering through another low-quality advance stream. I liked their first album quite a bit, but I think this is a pretty substantial step up from that. It has a more confident feel to it and leans less on sounding too much like HAIM. It’s a little long, but it’s good and is going to get quite a few summer spins.
I’m working on putting together my “mid-year” list (we will run this the second week of July on the website), and so this week I revisited that Hayley Williams album while I wait for my boxset to arrive (still really great) and once again gave LAUV and Dua Lipa a listen as well (also both great). I’m trying to figure out placement for everything, and I think I know what my top 5 looks like right now, with a good feeling it’s going to shift before the end of the year. I’m going to give a little more weight to what I’ve spun most of the year so far and try and avoid too much recency bias.
Protest the Hero also dropped a new album today and I was pretty shocked how much I was digging this. Not usually my kind of thing, but it’s working for me.
Acceptance returned with the new single “Cold Air” and I’m so glad we still have this band in our lives. They’re just really fucking good. That bridge, chefs kiss.
I’m going to go give the new Phantom Planet a spin after I finish up this newsletter, and then check out the new Bob Dylan.
Entertainment Thoughts
With Hannah still gone this past week, I was on the lookout for a new TV show I could watch that I wouldn’t have to immediately re-watch when she came back because it was just too good (see: Dark and Normal People). This is the justification I am using for now bingeing most of the first season of ELITE. It’s basically Spanish Gossip Girl with a murder mystery and more sex. It’s also impossibly addicting, and the subtitles keep me off my phone and glued to every second of this ridiculous show. The OC, but with somehow more drama and nudity?! I have these other shows queued up I want to watch (Love, Victor and Love Life), and with Hannah coming home on Sunday — and Dark’s return on the horizon — it looks like I’ll just have to watch three more episodes of ELITE tonight.
I enjoyed The Half of It on Netflix. One of the better Netflix original movies. Heartwarming and well done.
I wanted to like Troop Zero more than I did. It was alright, but I kept thinking it could be or would be more.
I have used up every single spot on my holds list at the library and am waiting for so many books; this includes classics I’ve never read from Joseph Heller and Virginia Wolff to more junk food for the mind novels as well. I preface with that because all the ones that keep coming up first for checkout are all murder mystery/hidden past/people go missing novels. I feel like I can solve any cold case and tell you the secret lives of every character in any one of these novels just by reading the first chapter now. This week I read Two Can Keep a Secret which felt like a great CW teenage miniseries in book form and then All The Missing Girls, which had an interesting gimmick of jumping forward two weeks in the story and then telling it backward day by day. I liked the book while hating the lead character, which is rare. Usually, if I don’t like the main character, especially in a novel told in the first person, I’m out on it as a whole. But I did enjoy this one, even if it wasn’t quite as thriller-y as I expected. Next up is Run Away.
Random and Personal Stuff
I haven’t made enough people angry with me this week, so here it goes: I’m putting pineapple on my pizza tonight. Yep, along with some pepperoni and jalapenos. It’s Pizza Friday, and there’s no one here to stop me.
I’ve only tangentially been watching the latest dust-up with Apple and Developers and that whole “Hey” thing over the past few days. With everything else going on in the world right now, this is just not something I have the mental energy for. All I’ll say is that I’ve noticed which tech bloggers and podcasters have Tweeted or Re-Tweeted way more angry posts about this than they did Black Lives Matter and police brutality.
Ten Songs
Here are ten songs that I listened to and loved this week. Some may be new, some may be old, but they all found their way into my life during the past seven days.
Phoebe Bridgers - Chinese Satellite
Acceptance - Cold Air
PVRIS - Gimme a Minute
The Naked and Famous - Bury Us
Bad Cop / Bad Cop - Community
Protest the Hero - The Migrant Mother
Hayley Williams - Sugar on the Rim
Phantom Planet - BALISONG
New Found Glory - Slipping Away
Phoebe Bridgers - I Know the End
This playlist is available on Spotify and Apple Music.
Community Watch
The trending and popular threads in our community this week include:
The most liked post in our forums last week was this one by MysteryKnight in the “General Politics Discussion VII” thread.
I hope everyone has a great weekend.
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Previous editions of Liner Notes can be found here.