The Punk Experiment

In the old Switch days (2004 I guess), punk always stayed in the no-go zone on the bottom floor and we stayed up top on the metal floor. Any punk songs played upstairs would draw the ire of some of our group. Back then I think Brodie and Crag were very strict in their music tastes and since, they've really loosened up. In Crag's case, probably for the worst. Several different sources have come together in the past week or so and the time is right to give punk (or as Crag would say "punk metal") some airplay on Radio Pat.

After missing Trial Kennedy and realising I hadn't listened to enough Karnivool to need to see them either, I decided to go back and listen to the tunes I stole off Brodie's PC months ago. I'd been delaying it as I had other music and a bunch of podcasts to catch up to. I liked quite a bit of the stuff: Story of the Year and Trial Kennedy in particular.

One week before that, I'd been listening to a bunch of random songs of Will's and among other songs, Motion City Soundtrack's The Future Freaks Me Out got my attention. I went on LimeWire later and downloaded the next highest song on the list, My Favourite Accident, which is even more awesome. Turns out it was on the Burnout 3: Takedown video game soundtrack that I'd played and loved a year or so ago. I went back to Burnout 3 yesterday and did some sleuthing for more punk leads to download. A lot of recently big names in punk/emo that I recognised were there: My Chemical Romance, The Used, Yellowcard, Funeral For A Friend and New Found Glory among them so it looks like a solid base.

I remember checking out a couple of punk songs on the advice of Dan from Pizza Den back when we both worked there, as he was always pumping it up. Apart from that, I haven't really discussed it much. I can't be the only one who's interested in expanding their musical knowledge a little. Plus there could be some interesting bass riffs.

There's no definitive conclusion to the experiment just yet and it's safe to say there'll be hits and misses no matter what I listen to. My main criticisms of punk were that the songs sounded like one another after a few tracks into the album (which I'm addressing by taking it a track at a time) and the singers were generally too whiny for my liking (which is more of an emo thing I guess anyway). Both of these took a little adjustment, but I found that a lot of punk bands are close to metal (or nu-metal) and others are poppy like a quirky indie band, so there is common ground that I can relate to. I guess a few bands I already listened to like Lostprophets, Jimmy Eat World or Gyroscope could be loosely lumped into the new yellow punk/emo section of JB too, so maybe I wasn't so far away after all.

Sorry if you're bored with music and sport, feel free to request a discussion topic if you're interested in my two cents on something a little more varied.