Do you feel lucky, PUNKS?

Yesterday’s Ring “Punx Not Dead... It's Just Sleeping”

Sam: The way PUNK JUNE Fridays shook out, I only got one measly pick this month. Why even have a podcast? I had a great list of options, and I think we landed on the best possible one, but this was the first song I thought of until Josiah informed me the “Punx” spelling disqualified it. I accepted, because what is a theme without rules. But what is a newsletter for if not digging up an alt-country ode to THE PUNK LIFESTYLE and also BUSINESS from Montreal’s premiere ALT-COUNTRY PUNKS. Yesterday’s Ring is just the Sainte Catherines in cowboy hats and at some point in my grim critical past I claimed that I liked them more, but the Sainte Catherines wrote one of the all-time great FEST PUNK albums and they have three guitarists so who am I kidding. But Yesterday’s Ring have always had some major jams, and this is the jammiest of them all. Is there a (probably derisive) term for this exact type of song? Here’s another one I think is basically perfect and it’s not even about being a punk businessman.

Josiah: For fuck’s sake. I decided that I would actually click on whatever Sam puts in here and listen to it, and I’m already really upset about that internal rule. I’m just too moral just to half-ass it. I’m just too much of a good person. Kinda nice banjo riff, TBH. Vocals are a bit much for me but there’s some nice twinkly leads. But mostly I’m hung up on the art… why does it look like some HMV discount bin shit no one’s ever actually listened to? It looks like a Glasvegas CD single or a band that signed to Last Gang for 2 Factor-funded LPs and disappeared without anyone ever noticing. Damn I bet Sam loves this chorus.
 

Cheap Perfume “No Men”

Sam: To me the ideal deployment of this style of garage rock is for funny sloganeering purposes and this is extremely that. The moment I realized this song really rocked was the “and you can suck my dick in hell, biiiiiiiiitch” line, which is delivered to absolute snotty perfection. And I appreciate that the song makes a point to counterbalance the glibness with an equally hooky reminder that they are simply shitting on exclusively cis men.

Josiah: It’s funny how the line that Sam pointed out could just as easily be a mosh call for a brutally corny deathcore band beloved by people who go to board game cafes. This song is not really hitting the spot for me. But maybe it’s because I’m a cis man. Fuck!!!
 

Ep. 85 - Scientific Benefits of Humor ft. Humor the Clown

Josiah: The righteous indignation we have about the pod that we talk about on the pod this week has always been something I’ve felt regarding my friends’ projects. Maybe it’s sheer arrogance, but since I was a teen I’ve been angry that my friends aren’t famous. And I feel that way about It’s a Beautiful Day in the Gulch as a 35-year-old man. Miles and Alex have created something uncanny and sublime with their show that sees them go outside to talk about the internet. As with most great things, the latest Gulch started with a post. Here, Miles recontextualized photographs of a Bloomington clown to make it look like he was arrested for his signs. The Gulch lore runs deep, but the long and short of it is that Miles and Alex eventually got in touch with the clown (whose name is Humor) and met him to discuss life, comedy, cynicism and so much more on their handy Zoom recorder. They met, for some reason, in a cemetery — specifically Hoagy Carmichael’s grave. The episode offers plenty of key moments as Miles and Alex wander around the graveyard in search of Humor (where they, as always, discuss this year’s cicada harvest), Alex shares another wonderfully concise poem (which is even better in comparison to Humor’s pretentiously long prose) and then the windswept awkwardness carries the conversation as they open up to the hardcore centrist clown (with shockingly Gen. X taste in comedy) in a graveyard in the middle of the day. This is the kind of show that deserves to be everyone’s favourite, but it’s even better that it’s a secret cult classic.

Sam: I really appreciate Josiah listening to everything I included here but I'm not going to listen to an entire podcast. Is that because I'm the mean one? I will say that Josiah's love for Gulch is so real and pure that I find it genuinely touching. He talks about it all the time. Maybe I'm jealous? Does he talk about me like that when I'm not around? Unfortunately, I think I know the answer.
 

Parents (1989)

Josiah: Now that I’m almost out of the music-writer game, I gotta admit that I’m mostly either scrolling in silence or getting into predictable middle-aged hypebeast things like listening to Bladee or putting on mid-2000s Wilco albums while I do the dishes. But that’s far too embarrassing to talk about here. Instead let me tell you about this wonderful horror movie we watched recently. It’s directed by Bob Balaban, who certainly injects some of his Christopher Guest dryness into the flick, but this is mostly a nasty body horror film with plenty of split diopter cinematography and jaw-dropping mid-century modern interiors. Randy Quaid is the star, but he’s almost impossibly subtle. It looks like it would be zany, but this movie is surprisingly unnerving and masterfully shot.

Sam: Again, I guess I'm the dick for not watching an entire movie. Unless Randy Quaid is for real cancelled, I love the RQ journey. Compared to his obvious loser brother, Randy is all about keeping it real and making tons of trashy movies in Canada where a consistent arts funding scam is to attach a faded American star to your otherwise unremarkable movie as a way to demonstrate to our various funding bodies that your shitty movie will find an audience, which it never does. This is what our taxes pay for. Good on Randy for fleecing Canadians like the rubes we are.