Dustin Hates Music

Here's a fact about me: Every time that I am aware of a Reel Big Fish show in New York City, I attend it. It doesn't really matter what else is going on- if they're playing nearby and I know about it (and thanks to constant spam emails from various concert venues and online ticket vendors, I almost always know), I'm there. Every time. Here's another fact about me: I don't listen to Reel Big Fish's albums anymore. I just can't do it. A stray song might pop up on shuffle and I can make it through, but putting on a whole album is just too much for me. I don't think that lot of it has aged well, and if I'm going to find myself listening to a 90's ska punk band, I prefer to listen to bands that take it a bit more seriously. Even for this entry it's been difficult for me to sit down and listen to the whole album in a single sitting. Which is funny, because I don't even think it's that bad. But before I dive into that, one more story...

I forgot that I even owned this one. I have nothing personal against The Vines, but they really knew how to fall off of everyone's radars. Did you know that they've released six studio albums? And that their sixth album was a double album released just three years ago? Or that they have a seventh album in the works? And finally, did you even know they were still together? I'd just assumed the answer to all of those questions was a firm "no." But less about what the band is doing now, and let me focus on what they've done in the past. Like most people my age, I enjoyed Highly Evolved  when it first came out because it, along with White Blood Cells , Is This It? , and Veni, Vidi, Vicious , were all the rage. The garage rock revival was in full swing, and being young and impressionable I held on tightly. A few years later when Winning Days  was released, I bought it because I felt a loyalty to the band (I also got Room on Fire  and Elephant  upon their releases...

I sure own a lot of pop punk albums. I got this one as a part of a sale that The Hextalls were having right around the time of this album's release: four of their studio albums on CD and a shirt. I was never a huge fan of them, but it seemed like a pretty good deal for a band that I kind of liked. The Hextalls are a weird band for me to try to dissect. Bands like this don't seem to be writing music for the prestige or wide-spread mainstream recognition. They're writing music for fun- which can still be picked apart by critics but it doesn't feel right to me to take a critical look at songs like "Welcome to Pooville" or "I Bought You a Singing Toilet" under the same lens that I might use for a song like The Gaslight Anthem's "Get Hurt" or something like "Hands Down" by Dashboard Confessional. When it comes to pop punk bands that write these jokey kinds of songs, it feels like they really just need to write fun songs that ca...

I thought I would have more time before this one came up, but I guess the loosely structured algorithm I'm using to select the next CD in my collection had other ideas. If I'm being honest, I only bought this album because a kid I didn't even consider a friend recommended it. And he was friends with a girl that I liked at the time, and I wanted her to think that I liked the people that she liked. I was dumb in high school. I listened to this album in full maybe five times. Maybe. I remember telling the kid who recommended it that I thought it was good, but there's almost no way that I could have said that convincingly. I'm not even sure if he actually liked it, or if it was just because "Bat County" was still a semi-big single and he knew he liked that song. For the purposes of this entry, I've been re-listening to this album and.... well, I think it's best if I use a Parks and Recreation quote to sum up my feelings about this album: "...

What an interesting first album for this project! Let's go. I'm going to start off by saying that I bought this CD second-hand on Amazon during my sophomore year of college. I had already listened to it plenty by the time I bought it (thanks, internet), but there was someone selling a used copy that had been signed by Joe Queer himself and it was just under $10 (though if my order history on Amazon is to be believed, after shipping & handling the total came out $10.48). So that's how a physical copy came into my possession. As far as the music goes, I feel pretty conflicted about The Queers in general. I always have since I started listening to them in high school. I know a lot of people in general, punks or otherwise, give blink-182 a lot of shit for writing sugary pop hooks and making dick jokes- a totally fair criticism and I say that as someone who enjoys blink-182. I've always found it weird then, that punks would give The Queers a pass despite doing essent...

It's true: I have some terrible taste in music. Kind of. I've come to terms with it. Mostly. Anyway, this blog is all about the music I collected throughout middle school, high school, and college. Some of it is great, and some of it is pure garbage. Some of it I still currently listen to 10+ years later, and some of it I haven't thought about in years. The stuff I still listen to isn't necessarily the great stuff, and similarly the stuff I haven't touched isn't necessarily the crap. Two and a half things directly led to the creation of this blog: 1. Going through my CD collection and realizing how much my tastes have changed while also staying exactly the same since I was 13. 2. My desire to start writing about music again (in spite of the fact that I did it for years and never learned how to either build an audience nor learned how to make any money off of it) 2.5. My desire to create some kind of content and my self loathing finding a middle ground ...