blog.tylerball

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The Streets - It Was Supposed To Be So Easy (download link)

This was one of my favourite albums of the middle aughts. Not necessarily one of the best of the decade, but in the running for most honest. Not necessarily honest in premise or production, but in delivery. You feel like one of Mike Skinners best mates hearing a great story of a relationship and a misplaced £1000 told through different moods, melodies and rhythms over a pub table full of empty pints. Always worth another listen.

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Wallace Wakes Up

Spoilers. You can try to cite Wallace’s death as the saddest part of the series, or season one, but for my money there’s nothing more tragic than this scene. This is the only time where we get a sense of a low-level drug dealer’s home life in Bodymore.

I can take the boarded up windows and the state of his oral hygiene, but it’s when 16 year old Wallace is playing father to a handful of loosely related, unnamed kids that I lose it. Something about having to eat juice boxes and Cheetos for breakfast gives me a tight feeling inside my chest.

That’s a lot of money they spent on the Space Station and going after Saddam is all I’ll say.

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Gob was (is?) a band from Vancouver that I totally forgot about. They made some punk in the 90s then switched to pop-punk in the early aughts when everyone was buying Sum 41 records. One of their songs was in a video game or something.

Anyway, this has been one of my favorite punk videos since I saw it about 10 years ago on Much Music. Bastards of Young (fucking Warner), Institutionalized, Rock The Casbah and I Got A Lot round up the top five, in no particular order.

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The Minutemen - History Lesson Part II

There comes a period when you’re going to have to become your own person, pick your own friends. Guys you want to build dreams with. It was a big change in my life when I met D. Boon.

This is an excerpt of We Jam Econo, a documentary about the Minutemen. I wasn’t alive when this band was at it’s peak, but songs like History Lesson Pt. II are timeless. Who couldn’t love a band that put that much emotion into their music. Mike Watt still gets choked up talking about it.

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