Dustin Hates Music

via Amazon I have a much more complicated relationship with this record than necessary. I've gone back and forth on whether I like it or not, though most of my indecision has less to do with the music itself and a lot to do with the emotions and memories I have associated with this particular album. Let me back up: I absolutely loved I Am the Movie . At the time when I bought it, it was Motion City Soundtrack's only commercially available LP and I still hadn't fully grasped the idea that I could use the internet to buy or download literally anything (to clarify: this was 2004 and I had already used the internet to buy or download plenty of things, but using it as my first resource to get things still hadn't become an everyday thing), so even though I was aware that the band's early releases existed I was content with listening only to this one album over and over. Then I got to see Motion City Soundtrack on the 2005 Epitaph tour (alongside Matchbook Romance a...

I used to really like Screeching Weasel. Wait, that's not entirely accurate. I used to really like the following Screeching Weasel records. Boogadaboogadaboogada , My Brain Hurts , Anthem for a New Tomorrow , and, to a lesser extent, Wiggle  and Kill the Musicians . I enjoyed songs here and there from their other records, but overall I think that I thought I liked them a lot more than I actually did. Because of that, I was excited to buy one of the clearance bundles sold by Asian Man Records when Weasel and the label parted ways (I don't know what went down, but the important part here is that after they decided to no longer work together, Asian Man started cleaning house and sold bundles that included shirts, koozies, and both CD and LP copies of Phase 3 , Invasion USA , The Brain That Wouldn't Die , and  These Ones Are Bitter .) The bundle wasn't as exciting as I thought it was going to be, but that is partially because Mike Park had miscalculated how many of each...

via Amazon I've mentioned already that my first Reel Big Fish album was Cheer Up , and I feel like that opened my mind up to the idea that their later albums were listenable (or at least through  We're Not Happy 'Til You're Not Happy ). However, and I think this has happened to almost everyone who has gotten really into Reel Big Fish, I went through a period when I thought that this album, Why Do They Rock So Hard?  was my all-time favorite album by them. Everything Sucks  was championed by the underground scene, Turn the Radio Off  was the well-known one with the big singles, so obviously Why Do They Rock So Hard  was the underdog that was secretly their best. At least that's how I thought of it. I got this album in the summer of 2004. I ordered it through some kind of mail-order club. I don't remember if it was Columbia House or some equivalent service, but I do remember that I got it alongside Sublime's self-titled, the Beastie Boys' Licensed to...

via Amazon To further prove the idea that I was a very impressionable teenager, and how that's influenced me to this very day, let me take you back to a day in the summer of 2003 when I was at camp: one night I was hanging around my cabin and listening to one of the counselors go through another's CD collection and more or less criticizing every single one (being the snarky music asshole was kind of his thing). I don't actually remember most of the albums mentioned that night, but I do remember that he was infuriated by seeing a copy of  Load , and when he got to Songs for the Deaf  by Queens of the Stone Age his reaction was "What the fuck? How do you own this album but you're missing fucking Rated R , easily the greatest Queens of the Stone Age album?" (two things: 1) I'm paraphrasing what he said, but most of those words were uttered in some order, and 2) You have to remember that this was in 2003 so the QotSA discography was rather small at the tim...

via Discogs 100% transparency here: I don't think I've ever listened to Why We Fight  in full until right now, for the purposes of discussing this album for this blog. I know that I came across it somewhere on the internet after I had bought Volcano  and I was excited by the idea of downloading it because it was an unknown album by an unknown band. Then I burned a copy of it just to make sure I never lost these tracks. Listening to it now... well, I can see why I don't remember listening to it. I can't say that I've ever been completely sold on Gatsby's American Dream- I know that I really liked that they would drop references to anything from literature to video games to movies, and conceptually I think they had some good ideas but I don't think those ideas ever really translated well into the music. There's definitely hints of what was to come on later albums like Volcano  and their self-titled album, but overall Why We Fight  isn't all that ...

via Amazon When I was 14, I so desperately wanted to be a punk rocker. I'm no psychiatrist (despite my grandfather's attempts at trying to talk me into it), but I sometimes wonder if the concept of rebellion called to me after spending my formative years practicing karate- I had a rigid training schedule and around the time I quit was about a year after I got really into the whole "punk rock" thing. Or maybe I just really liked the music- I don't know. I was 14 and impressionable, and something about punk rock spoke out to me. So of course Rancid was the ideal band for me at the time. By the end of my freshman year of high school, I had already gone through my major Green Day phase (as I've said before: I spent the summer of 2002 listening to literally nothing but Green Day's discography), and I had started listening to the Ramones, but I wanted more. With no punk role models in my life, I turned to the internet and naturally I discovered Rancid. Pre...

image via Amazon As someone who doesn't listen to a whole lot of Nirvana, I would say that it's weird that I own this compilation, but at the same time it makes all the sense in the world that it made its way into my collection. Due to being born in 1988, I was only 3 when Nevermind  came out as a circumstance of time, I kind of missed the boat on Nirvana when they were around. Flashforward to 2002 when I got my new discman and started forming my own tastes in music. I was obviously aware of Nirvana's legacy, but they were a band whose discography I didn't dive into much at the time (in my defense, I spent that summer listening to nothing but Green Day) (I had also only been listening to music on my own for two years). Then "You Know You're Right" was released and my interest was piqued. Like I said, I was just beginning to develop my own musical tastes and unreleased recordings was a new concept to me. I didn't understand how a band as big as Ni...

image via Amazon . I remember when AFI released Sing the Sorrow  and hit it huge, one of my "fun facts" to pull out in a conversation about them was that AFI used to be a hardcore punk band. (There was a reason I didn't get invited to a lot of parties in high school.) I only knew a handful of songs that I had found using Kazaa (I hadn't quite made my way to Limewire yet) but that didn't stop me from acting like I was some kind of big fan of their old stuff, and I'm sure I was overly smug about it every time- making it sound as if I believed anyone who didn't know was a poser. (Now that I think about it, there's probably a reason why I still don't get invited to a lot of parties to this day.) What I don't remember, however, is when I finally went out and bought a copy of Answer That and Stay Fashionable . It was likely some point during the second half of my sophomore year of high school, and I'm 90% sure that I bought it at the Best B...

image via Amazon The internet doesn't need another think piece about how great of an album  Something to Write Home About  is nearly twenty years after its release. At this point I think everyone already has an opinion on it and I'm not going to be able to sway anyone to think differently. And in the unlikely event that someone reading this hasn't listened to The Get Up Kids before, I can guarantee you that you'll find more convincing posts by better writers elsewhere. To be honest, I don't remember where I got this album from. It was likely either Amazon or Interpunk, but 2004 was a different time and it easily could have been another online distributor that no longer exists. Two things I do remember about getting Something to Write Home About : being really excited because I had just started exploring 90's emo bands, and my then-girlfriend listening to a few songs and saying she didn't care for it much. It's funny to see what types of memories st...

Here it is, my third and final mix of my favorite songs from 2017 (For now anyway). Whereas the first mix was mostly energetic songs about feeling beaten down or not being good enough, and the second mix was primarily mid-tempo or acoustic songs about feeling beaten down or missing people and places, this one kind of breaks that narrative, and is all over the place. Sure, I start this mix with Kamikaze Girls' "I Don't Want to Be Sad Forever" which sets a bit of a downer tone. Then chorus of Cayetana's "Too Old for This" describes how I felt for essentially the entire month of September, and then again in December (for the uninitiated, the chorus is "I don't want to think about this or you anymore"), and of course, "Leaving" by Freya Wilcox is a real doozy. But this mix also has some of the heaviest songs in terms of pure sound and aggression (PEARS, Limp Wrist, and Direct Hit! all in a row), to the point where I wasn't s...

As promised, here is the second of my three playlists that make up my favorite songs of 2017. Overall this one is more mellow in tone, with a lot of the songs either being based around acoustic guitars or slower tempos. I feel like 2017 was the year that I finally began to expand outside of my comfort zone in terms of allowing myself to fall in love with more music of varying degrees of loudness. (I say that, but then I look at the artists here and realize I've been a fan of The Menzingers, Lemuria, and AJJ for nearly a decade, and I've been following Dave Hause ever since I saw The Loved Ones open for RIse Against back in 2005). Anyway, this playlist, which I've titled I Faked It Every Time , is still mellow in comparison to the first one. You can check it out below.

Not content with writing 20 individual entries for my favorite albums of last year, I decided to spend new year's day making a playlist of some of my favorite songs that were on my favorite albums, as well as a few that were on albums that didn't make the cut. (Also, it's freezing outside so I was going to spend the day inside regardless.) As my list of songs grew, I realized I needed to make some cuts. I know that in this age of digital streaming, long playlists are common and it's not that big of a deal, but I personally don't like playlists that run on for too long. When it comes to making personalized mixes, I like to stay within 12 to 15 songs and I make it a point to never run over an hour (in 2017 I made at least two mixes that didn't follow either of those guidelines, but I've been known to bend the rules here and there). And since I don't actually know who reads this blog, this playlist is primarily for myself- making it the ultimate persona...