Ahead on Differential

_{Photo by Monkeytime}

Friends, I am thrilled to announce that the legends over at Cactus Press will be publishing Mondo Tomorrow, my second official-ass collection of poems. It's way bigger than the last one, and you'll be able to get your mitts on it later this year.

Mondo Tomorrow is made up of mostly science fiction-tinged poems I've written over the last five years about, among other things, hermits, old tech reborn, new tech malfunctioning, alien pornography, movie logic, various forms of transportation, and, inevitably, baseball. Also there's something subtitled “an intergalactic love song in five parts” (iykyk). To paraphrase the Talking Heads, it's more poems about dreams and transit.

I had a blast writing these, and I hope you’ll have a blast reading them. The second I know when and how you can buy one, I'll post about it here.

A billion thanks to Devon Gallant and Willow Loveday Little for taking on this project. I can't wait for y'all to see these in print.

A is for Accent Open Mic. If I don’t plug the scene, who will? Man, I swear I only just started co-hosting this local twice-a-month reading series, but I’ve been on the mic calling up local literary stalwarts and game first-timers for about three years now. 2026 will be Accent’s seventh year, and it promises to be our biggest yet as we settle into our cool new home on St. Hubert, just off the Blue Line. I’ll just go ahead and quote my last post: if you stick around long enough, people will figure you’ve always been there. Shout out to Devon Gallant for trusting the likes of me with the reins of this operation.

B is for Blank Check with Griffin and David. I listen to a bunch of podcasts—some would say too many podcasts—but only a hallowed few are anticipated with as much fervour as the new episode of Blank Check. Griffin Newman and David Sims are nuts for this stuff; the minutiae of box office returns, Oscars ephemera, the trajectory of Hollywood careers, the trivia of film culture. They’re also just entertaining podcasters; they’re a delight whether they pop up on film-centric shows like The Big Picture or something more comedic like Doughboys. Their show’s gimmick is they go through a filmmaker’s work one title at a time, and this year alone, they covered the Coen brothers, Amy Heckerling, and the early works of Steven Spielberg (1971-93). Their back catalogue contains further riches.

C is for Cameron Walker, best known by his nom de YouTubeur, struthless. Cam’s a real interesting dude (writer, illustrator, twelve-stepper), and his specific mix of creativity, candour, DIY spirit, and weapons-grade Aussie chill is riveting. I love the way he puts videos together; they’ve always had a strong handmade feel to them, but over the last year or so, they’ve gotten more psychedelic and collage-like, with lots of Adam Curtis-y repurposed footage. Also I completely jacked the idea for this blog post from his most recent video; sorry, mate.

D is for dream pop. At one point during the fall, I told a friend of mine that I wanted to write poems that elicited the same feeling in people that dream pop elicits in me; swirly, romantic, gauzy. I listened to a shitload of Slowdive this year and concluded that my quest was a noble one. I discovered that dream pop shook hands with shoegaze a lot. I listened to Airiel’s Molten Young Lovers and concluded that there was nothing on there as good as “In Your Room,” but “Sharron Apple” comes pretty close. I learned that there was a band out there who nailed the assignment when they named themselves LSD and the Search for God.

E is for Emma Harner. This was my flukiest discovery of the year. Harner, a young singer/songwriter from Nebraska, was a guest on Matt Sweeney’s Guitar Moves, where she broke down the beating, bloody Midwest emo heart of her specific set of, well, guitar moves. Here we have a musician who shreds like a math rocker and sings like Neko Case. She only has one EP to her name, but if anything of what I just said appeals to you, get on the bandwagon and buy all the stock you can. Play “Do It” and “Yes Man” until you make converts.

F is for Fool Time. It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of Jon Bois’s work, from his sprawling speculative sci-fi hyperfiction to his long-form documentary work on the history of snake-bitten sports franchises to his extended comic excursions into late-capitalist absurdity. His latest opus is typically Boisian in its mix of scope and silliness, telling the story of the people responsible for installing the first transatlantic telegraph wire through the lens of the thoroughly unmissed ‘90s sitcom Home Improvement, casting 19th-century scientists and titans of industry as either Tims (stubborn, boorish) or Als (capable, knowledgeable). The story would be engrossing without this admittedly strange throughline, but part of Bois’s project is demonstrating that history is made up of similarly strange echoes. The “Storm” segment from Part 3 is one of Bois’s best setpieces.

G is for Geese. In which rock and roll saves itself. So yes, I thought Getting Killed kicked major ass, shocker. But it’s been really fun and invigorating to watch this band meet the moment with an album that starts the way it does, with a singer who sings the way Cameron Winter sings, with their entire future in front of them. “Taxes” is as immortal as first singles get. I think these 11 songs can change you. Then again, my brain is broken a specific way where an Instagram Reel of Snoopy skating on a pond in slow motion set to “Au Pays du Cocaine” made me tear up, so what do I know?

H is for Hundreds of Beavers. This was the first movie I watched in 2025, the first Blu-ray I bought in 2025, and a legit grassroots cult phenomenon. This is a 2022 silent slapstick comedy about a fur trapper built on a foundation of Looney Tunes gags and video-game logic. The titular beavers are played by people in mascot suits. Lead actor Ryland Brickson Cole Tews looks exactly like the kind of guy you would cast in a parody of macho survivalist fare like The Revenant and The Edge, but with great comic timing. It’s just about the funniest thing I saw this year.

I is for Inoreader. I know why the real heads follow this blog: for the RSS reader app recommendations. At some point this year, my prior RSS reader spewed a bunch of surveillance state A.I. vomit all over itself, and I was in the market for something new. Inoreader came highly recommended, and I’ve been happy with it since. If Google had a lick of sense, it’d bring back Google Reader, which I still miss to this day. Here’s a sub-recommendation: filling an RSS reader full of blogs and websites you love to read will make the internet more bearable, I promise. And I’m just some dumbass; Cory Doctorow, the namer and shamer of enshittification, is way smarter than me, and he agrees.

J is for Jesse Lonergan. This is the second-flukiest discovery for me this year. The cover of Lonergan’s 2020 post-apocalyptic graphic novel Hedra stopped me dead in my tracks when I first saw it in a book store nearby. ⁠The isometric type of the title. The schematic symmetry. The head-film sci-fi trappings. The total absence of dialogue. Beautiful, abstracted visual storytelling, yes please. It scratched the part of my brain that loves Moebius, Heavy Metal magazine, and all those album covers Roger Dean drew. I want to sink my teeth into last year’s Drome as soon as I am able.

K is for Kleon, Austin. This dude just loves making shit and sharing shit, and it’s always interesting. I came across his work, specifically the totemic Steal Like an Artist, ages ago, but at this point, he’s just a cool guy with good taste and good ideas who lives with his wife and kids in Texas. Part four of his Steal Like an Artist trilogy, Don’t Call It Art, comes out in June, and I can’t wait to tear through it. I have jacked so many ideas from the man I owe him at least a beer and a sandwich at a restaurant of his choosing.

L is for letters. Inspired by the great Rachel Syme and her fantastic book on the subject, I decided to commit to writing a bunch of letters to friends, family, and in one case, a total stranger who has become a penpal. I type these letters up with my glittery burnt-orange Underwood 310 I paid for with Scrabble winnings, using fancy, fuzzy paper Steph bought me for my birthday. Nothing beats getting a letter in the mail from someone you care about. The only issue is that now I have a months-long backlog of replies to send out. This is a problem worth having.

M is for Men I Trust. It’s also for Montréal, where the band is based, and where I live. I fucking love this band. They’re my favourite local band. This year, they’ve spoiled me rotten by releasing not one, but two great albums’ worth of smooth, sophisticated indie pop. I could listen to Emma Proulx sing the STM map. Jessy Caron is kind of a hot-shit guitar player (the solo on “Seven” is the best yacht-rock guitar solo of the century). I need to ask Dragos Chiriac about his favourite synth patches. One more banger and they’ll join the Five Album Club.

N is for newsletters. Newsletters: they’re like blog posts, but for your inbox! Or your RSS feed (see the entry for the letter I) as the case may be. Here’s a bunch of newsletters I like. The Reveal, written by Keith Phipps and Scott Tobias, formerly of The Dissolve and The A.V. Club. The aforementioned Austin Kleon. The also aforementioned Blank Check’s Check Book. Channel 6, from 50% of the Shutdown Fullcast. Read Max. The hatingest haters on the island, the funny and incisive Discordia Review. Walt Hickey’s legendary Numlock News. Rusty Foster’s just as legendary Today in Tabs. Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World features great writing from Mr. O’Neil and a strong rotating supporting cast. The SPIN Magazine methadone of Anthony Cougar Miccio. Kyle Chayka’s One Thing. For the gym rats and aspirant gym rats: Casey Johnston’s She’s a Beast.

O is for One Battle After Another. Paul Thomas Anderson, one of the best to ever do it, brings us a shaggy $150 million action comedy about a stoner doofus who has to shake off the haze of weed smoke long enough to call upon his training (i.e. his past as a member of a militant revolutionary cell) to save his daughter from the clutches of a sentient fascist pec muscle. Also basically everyone involved is more qualified than him, including his kid; hilarity ensues. There’s a chase scene in this that gave me the same feeling as taking a hill too fast in a small car (complimentary). It is wild that this movie exists.

P is for The Pit: A Plateau Periodical. Chloe and Mariana saw it fit to publish a review of cinematic cyberpunk classic Burst City and a handful of poems across a couple of their issues this year. A bunch of my friends (and other cool and interesting people who are not my friends yet) can be found in their archives. Yeah, this is extremely local, but hey, I’m a citizen of my city, and sometimes things I like don’t really leave the island (although I did send a commemorative Pit matchbook to my Swedish penpal; could this be the first toppled domino that leads to a big European break?). If you want a piece of The Pit, you’ve got to come here.

Q is for quitting. It may surprise you to know that I had to stretch to find something for the Q slot. So I’ll say this: early January is the time for resolutions to oneself to get smarter, stronger, “better,” what have you. I’m going to offer a little bit of counter-programming here. That thing you’ve been doing regularly that is nominally good for you but makes you fucking miserable? Just quit. You’re under no obligation to do a damn thing. There’s no dishonour in quitting something that sucks ass or is boring or just isn’t worth the squeeze. You get one shot at this, and you’re better off spending it doing something that nurtures enthusiasm. This is your permission slip.

R is for The Rewatchables. This is the “dudes rock” entry. If you’re the kind of person who says “man, they sure don’t make ‘em like they used to” after watching a perfectly competent studio drama for adults from 1997, you’ll get a kick out of this show. Bill Simmons isn’t exactly Ben Mankiewicz (nor does he profess to be), but he surrounds himself with a strong supporting cast of Ringer regulars (Sean Fennessey! Chris Ryan!) and special guests (Cameron Crowe was just on to talk about Hal Ashby’s Shampoo) for avuncular bull sessions covering the cable canon.

S is for Sinners. The most fun I had at the movies all year. An imaginative, sexy, crowd-pleasing genre blockbuster with awesome music, a half-dozen or so great performances, and strong thematic depth (man, vampires truly are the Swiss Army knife of metaphors; religion, cultural appropriation, conformity, sexual mores, etc). Ryan Coogler has many gifts as a filmmaker but his most unheralded strength is imbuing his films with a strong sense of place; you can practically smell the liquor wafting off the screen.

T is for Teenage Engineering. This one’s kind of aspirational: I’ve been thinking about acquiring some noisemakers to join my beat-up acoustic guitar and my Stylophone and the free DAW I downloaded last week (I will only admit to the amount of time I spent trying to replicate Mark Sandman’s bass tone in Cakewalk under threat of grievous bodily harm). These Swedes make sleek synths and samplers and assorted audio equipment, but for our purposes, they make the Pocket Operator series. That PO-33 looks fun as hell to mess with. I’ve seen people do crazy things with these machines on YouTube.

U is for Used book/record stores. A PSA: if you’re thinking of giving away your collection of records or CDs or tapes or DVDs or Blu-rays in the name of minimalism, don’t⁠. You will regret it. Ask me how I know. Anyways, I spent most of 2025 buying physical media, because a CD pressing from 1993 will still play on my thrifted stereo during the nastiest Cloudflare outing, and I don’t have to polish Daniel Ek’s boots with my tongue for the privilege of listening to it. Shout out to Cheap Thrills. Shout out to Encore Books and Records. Shout out to Librairie Phoenix. Shout out to l’Échange. Shout out to the Word. Shout out to Aux 33 Tours. Shout out to that shop in front of the entrance of the BAnQ. Hell, shout out to the Value Villages in the suburbs.

V is for Les Voyeurs de vues. If I were feeling reductive, I would call this the Queb Blank Check. But Yannick Belzil and Alex Rose transcend that description with a format that’s more freewheeling (each host runs down their week in movie watching before comparing notes on two “movies of the week”) and a lived-in, intimate atmosphere; they frequently record at a bar, their banter soundtracked by whatever’s playing over the PA that night. Sometimes they get interrupted by curious patrons. The whole enterprise feels like eavesdropping on a great post-screening conversation. Call it podcast vérité.

W is for Wilco, who narrowly won the title of “band I chainsmoked to the filter the most in 2025” away from another W band, Ween. It wasn’t just the music I chainsmoked; it was Jeff Tweedy’s three books, Jeff Tweedy’s triple album from this year, live bootlegs on YouTube, podcast interviews, niche Instagram accounts, just a lot of ancillary material in addition to the mainline stuff. Steph even bought my a remastered version of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot for Christmas. Speaking of Christmas…

X is for Xmas. Another stretch, I know. Bear with me, we’re almost done. Every Christmas, I feel a little bad for how spoiled I am. My sister got me a sweet pair of Grado headphones. My mom got me a Polaroid Flip. In addition to the copy of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Steph got me a snazzy mechanical keyboard that’s modelled after the Nintendo Famicom; it comes with these two chunky buttons that you can program macros to; I made it so they type em-dashes and en-dashes.

Y is for Yacht Rock, not so much the genre but the ongoing projects of the creators of the 2005 web series. 2025 saw the welcome return of Beyond Yacht Rock (now Beyond Yacht Rock 2000), a celebration of arbitrary genres of the host’s devisal (recent examples include Glum [glam rock bummers] and Hobbit Metal [metal about Hobbits]), and the continuing saga of The Yacht or Nyacht Podcast, a comedic quixotic quest to catalogue and taxonomize the various West Coast sounds of the 1970s and 1980s. RIP Billion Dollar Record Club, a format I actually quite liked.

Z is for Zyzzyva. This is the Scrabble entry on the list; Zyzzyva is the industry-standard study tool for pros and noobs alike. 2025 was my second full year of tournament play. I played in 11 tournaments, won one, and gained three whole rating points (my 4-11 crashout in Belleville in February really did a number on my rating). But I’m on the doorstep of quadruple digits, I’m still being coached by a national champion, and with any luck, I’ll be rated as a strong intermediate by this time next year.

Here's to 2026!

1. Rabbit rabbit.
2. I had a rough time at a recent Scrabble tournament in Gatineau (1-5, -414, last in my division, 31 rating points lost), which bruised my already-fragile confidence in my playing abilities. Josh says that six games of Scrabble in one day is not an accurate metric in assessing one’s current skill level. Easy for a national champion to say, difficult to internalize when the only tournaments you play in are one-days. He might have a point; I’m over .500 in multiday play in the last 12 months. I’m choosing not to include the March tournament at a fancy cabin in rural Ontario in that count because I played and lost four games against a different national champion, though they were way closer than anyone would have predicted. For whatever reason, I feel like the game is something that’s happening to me and not something I have an impact on. I feel like words I used to know are dribbling out from my ears to make room for new words I’m trying to learn 50 at a time. I don’t play enough. When I do, wins never feel mine the way losses do. But I keep taking lessons from Josh, because I have deluded myself into thinking that being good at this game is within my grasp. We’ll see how Belleville goes in a couple of weeks. It’s a multiday.
3. I would never in a quadrillion years describe myself as part of the “lit scene,” but even a cursory glance at my comings and goings would make a liar out of me. The open mic I co-host is old enough to be in grade school, which is geriatric in poetry reading event years. I still think of myself as adjacent to the event even though, again, patently not true. There’s a significant part of me that still thinks of my hosting duties as “just helping out.” I’m a supporting player in the scene; it’s something that’s happening to me rather than something I’m helping to make happen. Such falsehoods! My oldest poetry friends in this city, like it or not, are not just poets themselves, but editors, curators, publishers. Hell, I’ve been in their publications. I’m knee-deep in it. If you stick around long enough, people will figure you’ve always been there.
4. Book #2 is definitely happening. Real heads know. It’s a greatest hits of the last four years of farting around and trying to make art happen. Honestly, that might be the only way art happens, by farting around. “Playing” might be a less juvenile way of phrasing it. Points of reference for the new book: old tech doing new things, climate anxiety, Makato Shinkai, Interstellar, sci-fi to rip bong hits to, and a little band from Champaign, Illinois called Hum. I mean, all space-y, post-y rock bands, really, but Hum in particular. When I was putting my first chapbook together, I joked that the poems were a way to map out my own imagination, and that’s still true. Right now, I’m trying to evoke a feeling, and it’s the feeling I get when I watch 5 Centimetres Per Second or listen to Slowdive’s Souvlaki or plug “compilation of last pitches from perfect games” into YouTube. It’s slow and cinematic and winsome and romantic and wells up inside you. It’s fuzzy and diffuse but, because it’s poetry, is rendered in precise language. It’s a corner worth painting myself into.
5. Everything cool happens on Saturday nights, which sucks for me, because that’s when I’m wrapping up my work week in the shadows of Downtown Montréal’s stumpy high-rises. It’s by far the worst thing about my job, which is pretty painless as far as soft-handed email jobs go. I’ve been at it for nearly two years and I still can’t explain what I do; the best I’ve come up with is “digital typesetter.” I take the Word document your PR team has drafted up to announce your shiny new widget or widget cleaner or Chief Widget Officer and I apply a little liquid HTML to it to make sure the internet can read it. I don’t think I needed an MA in Film Studies to do this, but hey, I don’t wake up every morning thinking my body could use a few more bullet holes, so I’ll take that as a win. Remember: the winning lottery ticket isn’t the job you love, but the job you don’t hate, and I don’t hate my job.
6. Remember when I used to be a film critic? Back when I was younger and hipper and hungrier? I mean, you never stop being a film critic, you only stop being published. The forms, the formats, even the clichés, they’re stored in my muscle memory like riding a bike or doing a deadlift. What’s gone is the volume; I watched a lot of movies when I was in grad school, not so much anymore. I still have takes but don’t worry about their temperature. I thought One Battle After Another was a fantastic piece of work; I keep thinking about Benicio del Toro’s character, whose secret superpower is his community network. My allergy to the work of Yorgos Lanthimos persists, though it is not strong enough to deter me from seeing his movies. There’s stuff there, but the presentation still keeps me at arm’s length. There continues to be no bad Wes Anderson movies.
7. Sometimes I’ll be brushing my teeth or feeding the cats and a stray though will burrow itself into my brain like a weevil, and invariably, that though is something like “is K-Pop Demon Hunters going to be in the field for the 2025 Movie Bowl? I mean, the top four seeds are probably going to be some combination of Sinners, Weapons, One Battle After Another, and A Minecraft Movie, and it’s a lock for a Best Animated Feature nomination, if not a win, but the year has had tons of great movies… should I watch K-Pop Demon Hunters? Is there ever going to be a 4K Blu-ray of K-Pop Demon Hunters? Am I the type of guy who would own a 4K Blu-ray of K-Pop Demon Hunters? How would I explain K-Pop Demon Hunters to my mom? Not that she’d listen to me, she hasn’t seen something I’ve recommended since she gave a thumbs-down to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”
8. It took me long long enough considering I have every predisposition to have been a fan of this band since high school, but I’ve finally become a Wilco guy. Here is the progression of my Wilco fandom: catching I Am Trying to Break Your Heart on cable in high school, passing familiarity with the well-known cuts from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born through college, seeing them open for Neil Young in 2008 and not recognizing most of the songs in the set (though I remember popping for “Jesus, etc.” and “Heavy Metal Drummer”), long gap, lmao they called their album Star Wars, long gap, devouring Jeff Tweedy’s How to Write One Song during deepest, darkest pandemic because I will devour any book about writing, devouring Tweedy’s memoir Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), getting my ass kicked by the perfect record that is Summerteeth, listening to the “canonical” run between Being There and A Ghost Is Born, reading Tweedy’s third book, watching live shows on YouTube, getting familiar with album cuts from albums I hadn’t listened to yet, starting again with A.M., plugging “what is the best live version of impossible germany” into a search engine, watching Nels Cline guitar rig rundown videos.
9. I’ve been torturing myself with something I’ve dubbed the Future Shelf Project. It’s a combination of best-of-the-year lists, a shopping guide, and a wishlist for music and movies. They are aspirational shelves, movies and albums I own and would like to own, with a hard cap of 25 releases per calendar year. Obviously, there are exceptions. I’ve decided that live albums, compilations, soundtracks, and EPs don’t count against the 25 albums for a given year; documentaries, assorted non-fiction, and shorts don’t count against the 25 movies. It’s the best way I’ve found to counteract the weight of history and the allure of various canons and I’m not entirely sure it works. Every list is aspirational, but these lists might be aspirational in a way that is a deterrent to discovery and novelty. As with most things, a little flexibility in the rules is called for (e.g. releases by the same artist in one year can be condensed into one slot, aka the Steven Soderbergh rule, aka the King Gizzard rule; entries from a box set can be exempt from counting against a year’s total, aka the Mission: Impossible 2 rule). I can’t disregard how meditative it is to make these lists, but that time making lists is time I could better spend watching Yi Yi rather than speculating about it as one of the 25 movies from 2000 on my shelf in potentia.
10. A mostly-complete list of the books I’m currently cycling through: Ubik by Philip K. Dick, The Game by Ken Dryden, Neuromancer by William Gibson, Selected Poems by Kenneth Koch, The Dog of the South by Charles Portis, Vineland by Thomas Pynchon, and The Tower by W. B. Yeats.

Boy oh boy, do I love needlessly involved pop-culture taxonomies. And, as stated before on this blog, I love remembering guys. Part of my affinity for these taxonomies is that they help me make sense of a vast and chaotic pool of information. Also, it's fun to talk about albums and bands (and movies and basically everything else) as if they were athletes. It helps create a meta-story about work I find interesting.

Credit where credit is due: this whole mess has been inspired by the twin remembering-guy behemoths of the MLB Hall of Pretty Good and the NHL Hall of Good. I like what these guys are doing because the superstars don't need further enshrining. What we want to commemorate are people that made us happy through their talent while committing the supposed sin of not being a world-dominant legend. You love Marian Gaborik and Hideki Matsui, I love the Beat (the American band, not the British one) and Matthew Good.

I do want to make a delineation between RRHoPG artists and albums. I think the former is the main draw, underappreciated artists that fall between the cracks of history. But I do want to make room for unheralded albums by bands that, while not S-tier legends, do have some cache in muso circles. So here are my criteria for induction into these hallowed halls:

MAIN HALL (aka the ARTIST WING)

• Artist must have at least three main releases (y'know, album albums)
• Artist must have no bolded main releases¹ on Rate Your Music.
• Artist's highest-rated album cannot exceed 3.60²
• Artist cannot be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as themselves (but can be in as part of a group; Paul McCartney is ineligible for the RRHoPG, but Phil Collins is)

ALBUM WING

• Album must be an officially-released album
• Album must be unbolded on Rate Your Music
• Album must have a rating under 3.60 on RateYourMusic
• Primary artist cannot be enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as themselves

So all of these albums are eligible for the Album Wing, but the artists themselves vary in their eligibility to the Hall. These albums have been selected because they are the albums I have listened to the most (according to my last.fm page) that qualify for the hall. None of these are shocking picks if you know me at all.

And now, onto our first crop of inductees into the Album Wing of my own personal Rock and Roll Hall of Pretty Good.

The Clientele, God Save the Clientele (2007) Well this is hardly surprising. I've written at length on this very blog about my love for the Clientele, but never about this album in particular. It's their first album as a quartet, with newly-hired utility player Mel Draisey providing violin, keys, and background vocals. This is also their Americana album, recorded in Nashville with producer Mark Nevers from Lambchop, and featuring an assist from Wilco's Pat Sansone. This album is classic Clientele, dreamy and autumnal and lightly psychedelic, augmented with winsome country trappings. The steel guitar is already the saddest and most beautiful sounding instrument on the planet; in a Clientele song, it makes the melancholy weapons-grade. Artist's Hall of Pretty Good eligibility status: Ineligible (Suburban Light is a bolded album)

FM-84, Atlas (2016) Are you a lo-fi girl or a synthwave boy? I know which one Colin Bennett is. The Scottish producer is firmly the latter, making music as sharp and alluring as the neon sunset on the cover of his sole full-length as FM-84. The knock against synthwave is that it can often feel like hollow nostalgia, a collection of 80s signifiers that coldly snap to grid. But Bennett is also a designer by trade; he knows how to infuse what could be empty pastiche with real warmth and soul. Enter featured player (and since 2018, official band member) Ollie Wride, an English singer who injects the vocal numbers here with real juice. I cannot adequately express to you how much I love “Don't Want to Change Your Mind.” It's one of the great songs of our young century. Artist's Hall of Pretty Good eligibility status: Ineligible (only one album released)

Kiwi Jr., Cooler Returns (2021) “Man, Derek is talking about Kiwi Jr. again?!” Yes, god dammit, and I'll keep talking about them until they replace the faces on the 5, the 10, the 20, and the 50 with those of the four dudes in this band. Head Kiwi Jeremy Gaudet is one of my favourite active lyricists, and not just because we seem to like a bunch of the same movies. I love the way these guys put songs together; I love the detail in the stories they tell, I love the way their guitars sound, I love the brightness and the tunefulness. If I ever make my ill-fated mumblecore comedy about a scene of local Letterboxd obsessives, you bet your ass I'm putting “Waiting in Line” under the closing credits. Artist's Hall of Pretty Good eligibility status: Eligible!

The Rural Alberta Advantage, Departing (2011) There's a lot of Pitchfork-core that's going to end up in this hall of fame. Most indie-rock sickos who were around during the aughts might point to the RAA's first album, 2008's Hometowns, as HoPG-worthy, but for my money, it's the wearier, less-heralded follow-up that merits inclusion here. This is a sad, spare, wintry album, Americana (Canadiana?) trudging through knee-deep snow, hoping no part of it will succumb to hypothermia. Paul Banwatt is a beast of a drummer, a one-man jungle wrecking crew propelling these aching tunes into uncharted rhythmic territory. This is what makes the Rural Alberta Advantage unique. Artist's Hall of Pretty Good eligibility status: Eligible!

Tycho, Awake (2011) This is the second electronica-ish album on this list whose main creative force is a designer by trade. Tycho is the nom de downtempo of Scott Hansen, who is better known in the kerning-and-CMYK spaces as ISO50 (here's some fun Derek lore: I was super into this thing called Layer Tennis, where designers would trade images back and forth and iterate on design ideas; Hansen participated in 2016, and other key Derek people who were involved include Aaron Draplin, Austin Kleon, and Jason Kottke). Hansen has a style he returns to—hazy, melodic downtempo—but other Tycho album has the effect on me that Awake does. This albums sounds like waking up too early and walking bleary-eyed on a beach as the Sun slowly makes its presence felt. Artist's Hall of Pretty Good eligibility status: Eligible!

Who are your first-ballot Rock and Roll Hall of Pretty Good artists and albums? I'm always on the lookout for cool stuff off the beaten path.

¹ In RYM-speak, this just means that an album can't be part of the X highest-rated albums on the website. At time of writing, I believe the threshold for a bold album is being in the top 7500 all-time. If all your albums are outside of that, you're eligible! And why this website? Well, it's got a big, passionate userbase and it's as good a sample of crowdsourced opinions as I can find.

² Why 3.60? I dunno, feels about right.

#music

According to the keepers of the world's most arcane knowledge over at This Might Be a Wiki, the most hardcore of hardcore They Might Be Giants fans (and I know they're hardcore because only the most hardcore fans edit wikis about the objects of their obsession) have collectively voted “Doctor Worm” as the eight-best song in the venerable Brooklyn band's vast, vast catalog. It is one of the non-live tracks on the group's 1998 mostly-live album Severe Tire Damage and appears on the first disc of the 2002 compilation Dial-A-Song: 20 Years of They Might Be Giants, a two-disc set that is one of the first pieces of music I bought with my own money, and thus is of great importance in Derek Lore (to give you a sense of where my head was at, I think I bought Ween's 2003 record Quebec during the same transaction). That's how long I've been in love with the work of the two Johns. I've loved this band almost as long as I've loved any band.

I was pleasantly surprised to see TMBG pop up in my YouTube feed playing live at Seattle's iconic KEXP, the Platonic ideal of an independent radio station. The set list was “short” (45 minutes is still a hell of a lot of music for one of these) but, naturally, eclectic, mixing recent songs with a pair of stone-cold classics: “Ana Ng” (from 1988's Lincoln, their finest hour, and according to the sickos of This Might Be a Wiki, the second-best song TMBG ever cut), and the aforementioned “Doctor Worm.” I love “Doctor Worm,” it's a near perfect introduction to They Might Be Giants' whole deal: punchy but askew indie pop, casually surreal in a way us lifers can take for granted sometimes. I have heard this song hundreds of times. Even I was not ready for how hard this version of the song goes. The first time I listened to it, the horns hit me like a Mack truck on fire. Those horns dropkicked me out of a tenth-storey window onto a plush bed of winning indie pop melodies. It's nice to be surprised by something we think is familiar to us.

#music

Prelude

“Do you think I can become an expert-level player by the time I turn 40?”

Josh and I are sitting at a picnic table in the park, where we're about to play a consultation game. I'm paying him for Scrabble lessons; maybe there are cooler or wiser ways to spend whatever meager dosh is left over from paying rent and student loans, but it's my money, so there. I ask because I'm already 37, and because I have convinced myself that I can be really good at this game, this game that I find not only fun, but challenging and beautiful in its strange little way. There are a ton of things I could be good at, but I already have all these god damn words rattling around in my head.

“Yeah. Why not?”

Scrabble isn't like chess. It's not the kind of thing where mastery is contingent upon an early start (though it obviously doesn't hurt, see people like Mack Meller or Joey Mallick or Jackson Smylie, or hell, even Josh). I've opted to take the 1999-2001 Stefan Fatsis road to experthood, though I don't have the benefit of PTO, a packed tournament schedule, or being single. I haven't even been able to attend the Montréal Scrabble Club since I've started my new job, on account of my late evening schedule. No, if I'm going to make the arduous trek from an ELO rating of ~900 to one of 1700 by the distant, far-flung year 2028, I'm going to have to grind, but not so much that I'll get sick of this game. So I've taken steps, which include the lessons in the park.

My “regimen,” as it were, is to study sevens and eights and fours and fives not until I'm blue in the face, but while commuting and zoning out in front of the YouTube video essay du jour. I'm also trying to play upwards of four 15-minute games against either BetterBot or STEEBot on Woogles.io. I try to play the right thing in the right spot, and mostly succeed; if I play in the right place but play the wrong word, I'll take it. If I don't know the bingo, it's okay. I'm not an expert (yet), so I'm not berating myself like one.

I. BEILKU?

Ah, the “-like” words. “Like” is one of those versatile suffixes that could conceivably get tacked on any noun in existence and make sense. “Ladderlike slats of light” is a nice little image that would be at home in a poem or essay, but LADDERLIKE* would get challenged off every tournament Scrabble board on the face of the planet. It's one of the perils of logophilic creativity in Scrabble: just because you see and use a word every days doesn't mean you get to play it, at least not yet.[1] The only thing more aggravating that words are the rules that govern them. The Scrabble dictionary is less a dictionary and more a rulebook, and the rules say there are only 88 words ending in “-like” that are playable in NWL, with an additional 24 fanciful “-like” word in the international Collins lexicon; my ORBLIKE# silhouette is not appreciated at home, you see.

I should note that the games I play against the Woogles bots are all void challenge, which is to say illegal words, or phonies, can't hit the board. If I try to play a word that isn't in the dictionary, I get an error message instead of a lost turn. This helps me be a little more creative with my plays.

Man, those back hooks on AD are pretty appetizing, that's where I'd score the most, especially if that K can hit that double-letter square. There's the obvious S hook, but I'm not finding anything. Like, like... BUsLIKE? “The lineman's frame was buslike.” Can't hurt to try, especially in void challenge.

No dice. BUSLIKE* is a phony.

I switch the S to a D. BUdLIKE? There are tons of offbeat botany words in the wild. Survey says?

Number one answer! 87 points. Thank you, Richard Dawson.

I'm ahead by 77 with 19 tiles in the bag when the clock runs out. I don't feel too bad about it going down in the books as a loss.

II. AAEISZ??

Ask any Scrabble player and they will tell you that there can indeed be too much of a good thing when it comes to the beloved blanks. Players of all skill levels speak of “blank blindness,” where your cup runneth over so much you risk drowning. A rack with two blanks is where perception and time go to die.

The instant the second blank appears on my rack, I thing “man, I must have something.” The I in ANERGIAS (which I played earlier, thank you very much) looks like a good spot. I lay down ZES after it, hoping to find something that ends in “-izes.” I shuffle and shuffle and piss away nearly two minutes of clock. I chuck a Hail Mary: AgAt(I)ZES for 80 points.

It stays on the board. I am thrilled with myself. I end up losing this game on time too. The engine says it's only the seventh-best play in the position (it likes Zo(O)S at H12 for 66 points, keeping the juicy AAE? leave). I don't care about what the engine has to say. I am still thrilled with myself. I am getting better at this, and the feeling is intoxicating.

Though I could stand to get a little faster.

[1] To wit, in one of my first club games back in 2023, I played, with the confidence of a man who knew what he was doing, the online-brainrot pronoun WHOMST*.

#scrabble

Here's the recipe.

First, get a DAW, that's a digital audio workstation. If you're in the Mac ecosystem even a little bit, congratulations, GarageBand is right there; the iPhone you had three iPhones ago is as good a drum machine as you can get. If you're on a Windows machine, Reaper will probably get you where you need to be. What I'm saying is that you're going to need a way to manipulate sound. You're going to want to get cool sample libraries; you probably don't have the yearly income to have a jam room full of Moogs and Mellotrons and vintage Soviet synthesizers and Eastern European rhythm boxes, but you can buy their recordings and feed them into your DAW. There's a small archipelago of drum machines ready to be programmed in your browser window, some of them based on tech that's been the backbone of pop music for what I'm wagering has been your entire life. If you're really committed to this project, you can get a MIDI keyboard (your regular computer keyboard will do in a pinch), but all the gear in the world won't be able to replace the key element of your project. If you set out to create the next great eccojam, you need a golden flip. You need a worthy sample.

The backbone of vaporwave is the sample, the disfigurement and recontextualization of a pre-existing piece of music. This isn't a new idea. It didn't come out of nowhere; specifically, the germ of what would become vaporwave's core moveset likely comes out of Houston rap, thank you DJ Screw. There's a lot of literature about the headier side of vaporwave, about its use as a vector for anticapitalist critique (see the work of James Ferraro) and its progressive collapse into empty signifiers and aesthetic choices as the world burns to the ground around it. But in all its guises, vaporwave is, in a sense, about The Past, where the detritus that marked an amorphous Then gets twisted into oblong shapes in the Now, because memory and creativity are distortion fields. When something is powerful but loves shortcuts, like, say, one's memory, details get blurred, sounds start to smudge and smear. At its best, or at least its most effective, vaporwave captures the sound of trying and failing to remember something you've forgotten. You know that something used to occupy this space, and you can still see the shape of it, but the act of trying to remember sends your thinking into a labyrinth of locked grooves.

Fittingly, I can't remember where I first encountered “I Hope You Remember Me,” the sixth track from Heavy Systems, Inc.'s 2020 album Vape Sessions for Alexander. That's a hell of a sentence to read with no context, I apologize. Let me break that down. Just who is Heavy Systems Inc. (or HSI henceforth)? I couldn't tell you, really. Like the umpteen bedroom producers who post their experiments and otherwise for public consumption on YouTube and Soundcloud and such, I can't pinpoint exactly who HSI is. From what I can tell, they are American, but I don't know where they're from; some places say Tampa, some places say San Diego. That's just as well, because what is San Diego if not the Tampa of California, and what is Tampa if not the San Diego of Florida. They draw; their Blogspot is full of digital illustrations. Best I can tell, they've been making music for just over a decade, a lot of it I'd perhaps ignorantly file under drum & bass. There's a breakneck remix of the all-time Ginger Root banger “Loretta” on their Soundcloud nestled between a sprightly D&B number called “Pimp Tight” and a lurching space-disco number spliced with movie dialogue called “Guns Can't Help You Now.” They 100% know their way around a groove, around a flip, around a sample.

If I were the betting type, I'd wager it was the YouTube algorithm that served "I Hope You Remember Me" up to me. YouTube is probably the world's single-largest repository of vaporwave and post-vaporwave, and by post-vaporwave, I mean music that presents itself as its own found-object artifact from the aforementioned nebulous Then. Think Barbershop Simulator, the genre-codifying 2023 effort from producer slowerpace. I like slowerpace's work, especially the design element. I love the attention to detail and clear care taken in designing the album art, in the naming of the tracks. slowerpace's angle is, so far as I can tell, to fill the void left by objects we can't remember, a kind of ontological samizdat with cool grooves. It's a cool design project but I couldn't point to a single flip that stays lodged in my head the way the one in "I Hope You Remember Me" does. It's the difference between isolating a vibe for effect and isolating a hook for effect.

The sample “I Hope You Remember Me” is built around, the sliver of the thing we're trying to remember, is from a song called “Not Me,” the title track from the 1987 album by singer Glenn Medeiros. Wait, who? To be fair, only a very specific kind of music nerd remembers who Glenn Medeiros is, specifically the kind of chart-watching dorks who concern themselves with Billboard Number Ones. He did have his moment in the sun, so to speak, riding a new jack swing beat and a big assist from Bobby Brown to the top of the charts in 1990. He also knocked on the Top 10's door in 1987 with his first single, a cover of George Benson's “Nothing's Gonna Change My Love for You.” But unless you were a turbo-permed European housewife in the late 80s, you probably don't know who Glenn Medeiros is. He is an adult contemporary that-guy, a dependable soft rock bench player. If Richard Marx and Michael Bolton were the Bash Brothers of adult contemporary, Medeiros was, uh... Stan Javier? Rick Honeycutt? Why yes, I did look those up on Baseball Reference; I was barely alive when the Oakland A's were rocking the house. Point is, Glenn Medeiros was a working musician, and the uncut, unabridged story of American popular music can't be written without him, the same way erasing Javier or Honeycutt from those Athletics teams could butterfly-effect that 1989 World Series win away.

“Not Me” is 1987 as hell, built around synthesized chimes and oozing a very 1987 brand of mystique, the kind that wears a silk shirt in chiaroscuro lighting for the bordering-on-avant-garde music video. The parent album's credits are stacked floor to ceiling with session aces on shore leave from the Good Ship Yacht Rock, and the credited songwriters here specifically are Paul Anka (Canada's first pop star and an Ottawa legend, lest we forget) and Deke Rivers, aka Richard fucking Marx. There I go namedropping Richard Marx again. I need to impress upon you just how huge Richard Marx was in 1987: his self-titled debut album went triple-platinum and had four singles crack the top 3, including a Number One single, his first of three. He was the Jose Canseco of the most uncool genre of music on Earth, but the thing with professional songwriters, which Marx was prior to his breakthrough and still is to this day, is they have this shit down to a science. Pair that professionalism and craft with the looping, hypnotic structure of vaporwave, and you have a song (or two songs, I suppose) that I've thought about every day since I first heard it.

“I Hope You Remember Me” isn't a drastic reworking of “Not Me” in terms of sonic manipulation; HSI doesn't warp the track that much or make Medeiros sounds like he's a wailing, melting demon (cf the Chuck Person and death's dynamic shroud records embedded above). The effect is more akin to listening to a CD that has chosen to skip in a few very opportune places. Maybe it's the alchemy of the smooth groove, the deep-cut nature of the sample, the moody song title, and the sense that this was created with one specific person in mind that makes “I Hope You Remember Me” so memorable to me. I can't prove it, but I think the album title gives it away: I want to believe that HSI has a friend named Alexander who likes to chill out and hit the vape, and since it's 2020 and we're in the dog days of COVID, and since one latches onto the small pleasure we can still give ourselves, healthiness be damned, maybe HSI made this album for their friend. Maybe this was a gift, in the figurative sense if not the literal, since it isn't available on HSI's Bandcamp or Soundcloud (though it is on Spotify and YouTube). It feeds into this sense that creative types, like me, like you, like HSI, are all just trying to make something at least one other person likes, whether we're toiling in obscurity or playing arenas. And I guess, in a way, this whole essay is my way of letting one other person know that I like and cherish a thing they've created from the ashes of something else.

#music

1. This video of the Deadlock Podcast riffing on an old WCW show featuring Hulk Hogan's ill-fated pasta restaurant Pastamania made me laugh harder than I have in ages.
2. Sinners. See this on the biggest screen you can. Believe the hype.
3. The chicken cutlet sandwich from Bossa.
4. I've been thinking about the so-called “city boy” look (a Japanese riff on American prep/workwear/streetwear) ever since the algorithm fed me this video by Percia Verlin, which led me to buying this nautical stripe tee from Uniqlo. I have never looked as Gallic as I do when I wear this tee, and it kind of rules.
5. Budget Bytes has been feeding my household for a decade and they keep putting out great, quick, affordable meals for me to try out. This broccoli cheddar orzo is new fave.
6. Balatro has some competition for the Virtual Card Game Timesink Heavyweight Championship as of late in the form of the Zachtronics Solitaire Collection. The Sawayama variant is a novel twist on the moldy oldie we all love, and the kabufuda and tarot versions will melt your brain.
7. Daily five-kilometre walks first thing in the morning.
8. Scrabble is still an ongoing concern, and I've been playing more and more games on the awesome Woogles.io platform against far-flung friends.
9. Happy 20th birthday to Montréal's Grande Bibliothèque, the gift that keeps on giving. Having fun isn't hard, etc etc etc.
10. If you're in town on a first or third Sunday of a given month and are looking for a cool way to kill a couple of hours, swing by the Accent Open Mic and watch some local talent rip it up. If I'm not co-hosting, I'm in the audience.

#tenthings

Someday I'll be enough of a physical media die-hard that I'll start making tapes the old-fashioned way again. But for now, these will have to do. RIYL: loud trebly guitars, unexpected drum machines, unexpected saxophone, music to sit on your porch to.

A1 Ween, “Did You See Me?” (Shinola, Vol. 1, 2005) A2 Peter Cat Recording Co., “Memory Box” (Bismillah, 2019) A3 Cootie Catcher, “Friend of a Friend” (single, 2024) A4 Liquid Mike, “K2” (Paul Bunyan's Slingshot, 2024) A5 Double Dagger, “No Allies” (MORE, 2009) A6 Metallica, “Master of Puppets” (Master of Puppets, 1986) B1 The Decemberists, “January Hymn” (The King Is Dead, 2011) B2 Cake, “Italian Leather Sofa” (Fashion Nugget, 1996) B3 Pearl & the Oysters, “Side Quest” (Planet Pearl, 2024) B4 Dan Seals, “Bop” (Won't Be Blue Anymore, 1985) B5 Kiwi Jr., “Norma Jean's Jacket” (Cooler Returns, 2021) B6 MJ Lenderman, “You Don't Know the Shape I'm In” (Manning Fireworks, 2024) B7 Neil Young, “Down by the River” (Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, 1969)

#music

The Clientele. Hot off their sprawling comeback album I Am Not There Anymore and a opening slot for another pantheon band of mine (The War on Drugs—at Royal Albert Hall, no less! Of all the shows for me to miss!), these lads had another strong showing this year in my stats, bolstered by the fact that I made a sprawling playlist and accompanying zine for my dear friend Sarah. I leaned heavy on B-sides and assorted ephemera this time around.

Where should I start with them? If you aren't hooked within the first ten seconds of “Since K Got Over Me,” the leadoff track from the band's masterful third album Strange Geometry (2005), I fear this band might not be for you. But if you, like me, love swirling, reverbed-out fingerpicked Stratocaster in your swoony, literary English indie-pop, keep listening to Strange Geometry, then listen to their first two albums, Suburban Light (2000) and The Violet Hour (2002), then pick back up with their fourth album, God Save the Clientele (2006).

The Isley Brothers. Funk-rock godfathers, the ultimate R&B chameleons, Rock and Roll Hall of Famers. These dudes wrote “Shout” in 1959 (which would cement anyone's legendary status, so unkillable is that song) and got Beyoncé to feature on one of their songs in 2022. They have been sampled by Biggie Smalls, the Beastie Boys, and Kendrick Lamar. Ernie Isley's guitar tone is one of the greatest sounds I've ever heard, guitar or otherwise. These guys are legends in the field.

Where should I start with them? I'm partial to the sextet era of the group that starts proper with the totally awesome 3 + 3 (1973), also known as “the one with 'That Lady' on it.” It’s my favourite Isleys albums, but the one I gravitated towards in 2024 was The Heat Is On (1975), which is more groove-oriented. Another Isleys track I had on repeat was “It's Alright With Me,” from The Real Deal (1982), which sees the brothers bringing in an electro influence.

Kiwi Jr. Last year, my friend Ross, who works at a record store in Jolly Ol', sent me a wonderful care package consisting of Kiwi Jr's second and third albums on 12” vinyl. Sometimes my friend spoil me rotten. He sent me the records in part because I've been singing the praises of this band ever since I listened to “Leslie” over and over again in 2019. Jeremy Gaudet is one of my favourite active rock lyricists, and not just because he obviously likes some of the same movies I do.

Where do I start with them? Since the Kiwis only have three albums, I'd recommend just starting with Football Money (2019) and working your way forwards. If you miss college rock like they did it in the 1990s, you'll love Football Money, which is catchy, breezy (10 tracks, 28 minutes), and a total blast to list to. There's a lot of Pavement in their DNA, but they love Guided by Voices and the Kinks, too. Cooler Returns (2021), my favourite Kiwi Jr. album, introduces a broader sonic palette, while Chopper (2022) is stacked floor to ceiling with cool, moody synths.

Peter Cat Recording Co. The few, the proud, the contemporary sophisti-pop bands. I stumbled upon these guys while browsing the album art for 2024 releases on Rate Your Music, which I acknowledge is the most deranged way to find new music to listen to. But the experience isn't unlike browsing the stacks at a record store, where you have little to go on but a genre and a piece of album art. I can't claim this is the most effective way of finding cool music, but it worked this time, because I found a cool band that was able to answer the question “What if Prefab Sprout were from New Delhi?”

Where should I start with them? Beta (2024) is the record that hooked me. The cinematic atmosphere, the long, languid melodies, Suryakant Sawhney's weary croon: at the risk of sounding too abstract, this record has fantastic vibes. The opening avant-chamber waltz “Flowers R. Blooming” is kind of a fakeout, since the album twin centrepieces of “21c” and “Black and White” are brooding dancefloor bangers.

Ween. I've loved these bastards since I was in high school (I once did an oral presentation on “Push th' Little Daisies” in English class), which puts them in the hallowed company of bands like Rush and They Might Be Giants. And let's face facts, Ween is They Might Be Giants for edgelords (I know Ween bristles at being compared to TMBG, but how many prolific genre-hopping alt-rock duos from the Northeast founded in the 80s whose members met in high school can you name—I'm gonna dedicate a blog post to this one day) and now I'm at the point where I'm the kind of sicko who listens to bootlegs. Never mind that, I have preferred bootlegs (check out Central Park 2010/9/17, which closes with the best version of “Doctor Rock” I've ever heard).

Where should I start with them? I'd recommend non-heads start with the excellent White Pepper (2000), Ween's most approachable album in that it has the fewest voice filters and the least off-putting imagery. There's a lot of cool psychedelia and Beatles-y pop, and ends with a three-song run that wouldn't sound out of place on a 70s country rock record. That run includes “Stay Forever,” a song so lovely it fries your brain knowing that these are the same guys who less than a decade earlier recorded a song called “Touch My Tooter.”

#music #tenthings