I’m sure you, like myself, have occasionally looked back at a song, band, or haircut from your teens and thought “Oh god. What was I thinking?”

This is not one of those times, though I thought it would be. The band: The Distorted Penguins. The Song: Anarchy Waltz. This track, thought to be long dead, was resurrected by a mythical mix CD that suddenly came to light in the shuffle of shlepping off to Wisconsin.

I’m not sure how I know of The Distorted Penguins. I’m debating whether or not they hit the tiny little venue in Butler, Pennsylvania that was once called Apparitions Food Court (and is now called a denture office). Apparitions was a little food court with a party room that quickly became the punk hang out for the under 18 crowd. Those were heady days, however, and the haze of watermelon and whipped cream somehow prevents me from recalling with any certainty who I did or did not see there. Alas, my connection to the Distorted Penguins will forever be a mystery.

That does not mean it should be a mystery to you. Go to their Myspace here, listen to Anarchy Waltz, and pretend you’re 15. It’ll be awesome, I promise.

This might be the quintessential simple local band song ever. The saxophone is simple; i could probably break out my sax from the 3rd grade and figure it out by the end of the evening. The way they use the sax to punctuate the beat, though, is captivating.

The Hey Hey’s and Oi Oi’s, of course, get me going every time I hear the song, and I almost seem to remember being crammed into a small foul smelling room, pumping my fist along with the song, until my memory falls away to reveal I’m just in my apartment.

The lyrics are great too. “What you call expression they call moral decay”? Brilliant, and not in an angsty 15 year old sort of way. It’s simple, applicable, and non-drammaticised. I could probably break it out in an argument and get away with it.

The song is a simple style of pop punk and ska, but it doesn’t have that generic fell I’m used to when it comes to local punk bands.

Another fun aspect of this song is that you can replace “Waltz” with just about any one syllable word. Driving home from work, we spotted a shopping cart turned over on the side of the road. Dave goes “Anarchy Cart! Oi oi oi oi” and now it applies to almost every cart we see. Also cropped up: “Anarchy Dog”, “Anarchy Stove” and by far the scariest, “Anarchy Car”.

It falls in line with an illustrious list of songs I alter consistently for shits and giggles, but the rest of the list will have to wait until later.

What to drink with Anarchy Waltz?
Lemonade with Rum. Have strong enough lemonade, and no one will realize you’re drinking underage…until you pass out under a table. Which never happened to me. Honest.

Back in the day, you could occasionally find me at Warped Tour. While the endless booths selling crap were annoying, the people largely obnoxious, and half of the bands mediocre or infuriating (or both), occasionally there would be someone on the ticket that really made me want to go.

One such year, it was Flogging Molly and Lars Frederiksen and the Bastards.

Everyone else on the ticket, though seemed to be straight up emo garbage.

(By the way, please don’t start sending me hate mail about how bands likeFugazi are the true emo, and calling shitty whiny bands emo is incorrect and offensive towards the precursors of the genre that supposedly didn’t suck. I’ve heard the argument before, perused the archives of ‘true emo’, and while it wasn’t horrible, it wasn’t fantastic enough to make me champion the ‘true emo’ cause.)

Anyway, because I was young and different (weren’t we all), I felt the world needed to know that I was not at Warped Tour for the emo music. To make sure everyone knew this, I wore a plain black tank top, with a bright orange patch safety-pinned to the top of it. The patch said “Emo Sucks.”

I got a lot of feed back on my choice of attire. Some people high-fived me. Some people whined at me. Some people scoffed and said rude comments.

But the best was when someone stopped me as I was walking past their band’s merch booth. They said they loved my shirt, and insisted I take one of their CDs for free. After catching back up with my friends, I checked out the CD case. I can’t remember the name of the band, but I swear to congress one of their tracks was called “My Tears Fall Like Rain”.

I chuckled the rest of the day. I did listen to the CD later to ensure the track wasn’t ironically named. It wasn’t.

fin.

Within the past few months, I found myself graduating from college, moving across country, and adopting a dog. While the last one is arguably the most awesome of the three, all of them left me scrambling for free time and internet access, in that order.

Things are settling down, though, which leaves me time to go back to resurrecting music. See, my anthropology degree is coming in handy already.

First on the block is a little ditty that has seriously ensnared my soul. Paul Simon’s You Can Call Me Al. It’s probably the combination of those fake synthesizer horns and the back up humming/chanting that emphasizes certain words and phrases throughout the verses that really does it. Regardless of the reasons, this song snatched a large portion of my attention span and whisked it away. The lyrics, while doubtlessly cryptic, are entertaining, and I now find myself occasionally mumbling “don’t want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard”.

The music video only further cemented my love of this song. The concept is so simple, but well executed. Chevy Chase joins Paul Simon in a room, and starts singing at the beginning of the song, confusing Paul Simon, who spends the rest of the music video looking bored and sullen. Chevy Chase, of course, nails his performance. Go watch it.

Eddie Money with Take Me Home Tonight comes in second place for soul stealing. The way the synthesizer tiptoes through the verses and then falls away to let the chorus erupt is perfect. It really makes you want to jump around and dance, which works out well for me, since I live on the first floor of my apartment complex. At least now all my neighbors question my sanity, which might come in handy later. Being a fan of my Complete Top Billboard Hits of the 1960s set makes me enjoy Ronnie’s vocals in the song, too. She’s amazing.

This is another dynamite music video. Also simple, but way more rock n’ roll. You can tell Eddie is having a great time rocking out by himself on that stadium stage, and Ronnie, despite however old she may have been when this was filmed, embodies bad girl femininity. I love it.

Next up to the chopping block is a song that has stolen my soul a couple times over the years, but it can get so infuriatingly stuck in my head that I always go to great lengths to oust it, despite potential psychiatric of physical pain involved. Then, like an Alzheimer’s patient, four months later, I say, why haven’t I heard that song lately? I really like that song. And the cycle of pain continues.

Patty Smyth/Scandal’s The Warrior is the song in question. You’re right, the song makes no sense. At all. No matter who I consult, no one can help me piece together the right pieces that would make this song make sense. Regardless, the beat is alluring, and being able to scream both “I am the warrior” and “Bang Bang!” while doing 70 miles per hour down the highway, without looking like you pose a danger to those around you, is pretty amazing.

This music video gets credit for creativity, but I really want to know what’s up with the complex theatrical and stupid 80s music videos. I thought the Bonnie Tyler music video took the cake, but this one might come out on top. At the beginning of Patty Smyth’s music video I think “Oh, warrior, I get it. She’s the heroine, he’s the bad heart breaker guy.” That image fits just up until 6 seconds into the song when those two people dressed up in blue fairy/bird/fish suits make an entrance. Then all hell breaks loose. I know when I ballet fight someone, I generally wear fishing nets all over me.

One super plus in this video is that Patty Smyth is adorable. The way she struts and dances makes me want to give her a hug. Her face paint looks good, too. I think it blows Ziggy Stardust out of the water, but that might be because she doesn’t look like a corpse.

What to pair these songs with alcoholically speaking?
A root beer shot. Fill a shot glass with root beer schnapps, light it on fire, and drop it into a mug of beer. drink heartily and quickly, lest the beverage end up everywhere except in your stomach.

Some sort of comparison to my sanity could probably be made here, but I think I’ll refrain.

Not long ago, i was sitting at work when suddenly there was music coming from the computer behind me. I was okay with that…

… But not for very long.

In case you haven’t picked up on this fact yet: I really like music. This basically means I’m okay with most everything. That’s not to be confused with the type who doesn’t really care about music and therefore likes it all. No, mine is the type who so enjoys and appreciates music that they find value and worth in sometimes the most unlikely songs.

Such a talent can only be pushed so far, however, and I find that more often than not it is my peers that manage to push my musical appreciation past reasonable limits.

This day, the musical onslaught started with somethings reminiscent of Evanescence with heavier influences of hardcore and whiny new-wave emo, but with a less talented lead singer. (That wasn’t so much of a compliment towards Evanescence as it was a dig at both bands, by the way.)

I sucked it up. I didn’t want to seem overly rude by putting on headphones. I’m a professional music-a-holic. I can deal with one teansie little song that I don’t care for, right?

Well, dealing with one undesirable song is a doable sacrifice. Of course it didn’t end there. The next song was by a different band, but the music still sounded like a horrible mix of shitty whiny new-wave emo and hardcore. The vocalists still made me want to punch them in the face.

But forward through the day I plodded, trying not to show my frustration with the stream of music I was cruelly being subjected to. I had no clue who any of the bands were, just that I thought unconsciousness would be preferable to listening to any of them anymore

And then…my coworker left the room. I quickly stole over to her computer. I had to know what garbage I was listening to!

Pandora was the facilitator of my doom. Very rarely have I cursed Pandora, but I fear that day was one of them.

The station in question? Paramore. The current band driving me to homicidal rages? Taking Back Sunday.

I shuddered, whimpered, pleaded to the musical gods for mercy, and crawled back to my desk.

No mercy was forthcoming. Before my coworker returned, Pandora vindictively sent a Yellowcard song my way. I think it was a sign that the musical gods were busy. Technology was in charge.

I’d almost like to say I sucked it up and dealt with it. Internally went to my musical happy place and made it through the next few hours without constant pain. But that would be a lie.

Rather, I spent a considerable amount of time internally debating whether or not putting on my headphones would be considered extremely rude. Then, I contemplated bashing my head off of the desk until unconsciousness had been reached, but Jacob suggested that perhaps it may be less rude to just break out the headphones.

When it was all over and done, I just ended up whining a lot.

Is there a moral to this story? Not really, although I do feel vindicated in my tastes. On a double blind test, I still hated whiny emo shit. No one can tell me I’m just hating it because I’m biased anymore.

I personally feel that fast music ought to be paired with fast lyrics. This is why I hate Paramore. It takes them 10 seconds to spit out one word while the music is rushing behind them. Either make fast music, or slow music. Ballad type vocals set to hardcore music will lead me to homicidal tendencies in 5 seconds flat.

If I were to think of a drink that matches the music I was hearing that fateful day, I would have to say either a very poorly mixed drink, or a horrible cup of coffee.

[/rant]

Well, I fail and spent the evening sampling vino with friends instead of browsing music by monitor-light… It was such a tough choice.

I know next to nothing of Italian wines (if there isn’t a pinot noir/burgundy on the menu I get disoriented very fast), but thankfully the waiter had some excellent suggestions that left the table satisfied and buzzed… My receipt says that we purchased Malvasia and Ripassa -whether those are types of wine or the manufacturers is still up for discussion since I don’t speak Italian and the bottles weren’t very good at hand gestures to help me out. Either way, excellent suggestions and kudos to the staff at Girasole (even if the attendant/presumed owner started out as a bit of a prick) for a magnificent meal that left me incapable of assembling any manner of legitimate review for the evening.

I love blaming food for my shortcomings.

Hopefully I’ll do better tomorrow!(?)

No reviews today because coding kept me occupied way longer than I had expected, and then my mother called for tech support… So yeah. Time was swallowed up. It’s probably for the better anyway because my music palate was more or less shat upon when, on my bike-ride home, I was exposed to the somewhat-less-than-dulcet tones of gospel rap wafting out of “Teenfest” a few blocks from my house.

Longest red light ever.

It took an immediate infusion of beer to keep me from bringing harm to myself. I respect the mission of the Teenfest organizers and the way they are targeting their demographic, however I am a firm believer that when God instructed man to make a joyful noise he did not consider rap to be the vehicle of that joy. If you must use it for preaching then please be my guest, but do so in a more insulated environment… Say one of the various churches surrounding the park. Blaring it all over creation not only raises the probability of inducing seizures in some individuals, but also is likely to cause stunted growth and early mortality in flora across the park.