How stacked and/or traumatizing was 2024? Enough so that when Dan suggested a sort of odds-and-sods and other unmentionables from last year I was quick on the FB chat in the affirmative!

As previously, we hope your upcoming 50 46 weeks or so remain completely unfucked!

We’ve got QR codes attached to playlists! We’ve got the skills which don’t pay our bills but elevate the game in other ways both tangible and intangible! #bogmonstermusic

We ain’t done much, but what we’ve done’s alright! #bogmonstermusic

These Aussie rockers just narrowly missed being one of my favorite albums of the year with their third full length Cartoon Darkness, but I had to mention them due to how much this new release impressed me compared to their previous albums. I did enjoy their prior releases but this record feels like they found that “extra gear” as they say in that sportsy sort of stuff and their songs, while still as rockin and raunchy and snotty as ever, just have that extra little bit of depth this time around that comes with years in the rock and roll trenches. Vocalist Amy is still a snotty and in your face as ever but the riffs are more than just three chord stompers exclusively, with some groovy psych rock tempos mixed in and probably my standout favorite single song by an artist who I otherwise like and enjoy but have never been as wow wow wowed about like I have about “Chewing Gum”, one of the lead singles off this record that takes more of a Rolling Stones-type pace that get your head nodding along while still maintaining that snotty edge that is one of their trademarks. Australia has produced some pretty great bands over the past few years, between these folks, Viagra Boys, The Chats (and Speed on the more hardcore side) and Amyl and The Sniffers have been at the forefront of that wave with this album being my favorite release of theirs and a runner up for favorites of the year (that also features straight up one of my favorite songs of the year in Chewing Gum)

I had to shout out at least one local (local-ish) release from 2024, specifically the debut 7”EP by Charlottetown PEI’s Cell Deth on Sewercide Records, titled Catholic Guilt. The band are made up of a gaggle of Island hardcore punk all-stars whose resumes include bands like Uncle, Antibodies, Piercing Damage and Coy (as well as vocalist Story’s many solo and collaborative efforts on the folkier side of things) and they rip out six blazing fast hardcore punk ragers in just over as many minutes on this rad little slab of wax. Story was probably one of the first people I met during my first ever visit to Halifax and and a former band mate of mine from back in the 00’s so it’s awesome to see her new band put out this great record, as well as touring all over Atlantic Canada and making appearances as festivals in larger cities like Montreal in the past couple of years that they have been making music together. The music is fast and pissed off straight ahead punk rock with angry shouted vocals and lyrics that mix politics with meditations on getting older in counterculture. It’s one of those records that bleeds raw sincerity and the kind of thing that just feeds my soul in a sad scary irony poisoned world, especially knowing that it was made by folks I have known for decades in some cases who are totally legit musicians cranking out great punk tunes on top of being awesome awe-inspiring people. Definitely my favorite Atlantic Canada release of the year.

This was an older album I finally made a point of acquiring a physical copy of in 2024, for one very important reason. Main Source’s sole full length – 1991’s Breaking Atoms might not be one of the canonical top tier albums of the Golden Age of hip hop, but it’s still so damn good and of historical import due to featuring Nas’ first ever wide released recording with his verse on Live At The BBQ. Main Source were made up of Queens NY rapper/producer Large Professor and Toronto-born DJ/producers Kid Kutt and Sir Scratch, which meant they checked off enough boxes under the CRTC’s Canadian Content regulations to get a pretty high rotation of video play on Much Music at the time, leading 15 year old me to fall in love with their music as a result. The main reason I bring this album up and was inspired in late 2024 to finally pick up a copy of this album on vinyl is that it had come to my attention (via some posts my legendary producer and A&R guy Dante Ross) that it was no longer on streaming services at all. I know I am guilty of listening to much more of my music mpby those sorts of means than through physical media but lately i have been trying to make sur that I have physical copies of albums that mean a lot to me, and this is one that definitely holds a lot of sentimental value to me after it being in such heavy rotation in my early teens and the historical significance of Nas’ first appearance so of course I had to make sure make this one of my top physical media acquisitions of last year.

This year I continued slowly dipping my toe back into watching horror movies, a genre that can cover a lot of ground but that I have generally been picky about at the best of times and admittedly squeamish about a lot of the time, but there were a coupl3 of films from 2024 on the scarier side of things that really grabbed my attention. The first was Coralie Fargeat’s campy, blood soaked body-horror fueled satire of Hollywood ageism and misogyny The Substance. I don’t want to spoil the plot too much but I had a great time with the movie in all of its gross-out glory and thought Demi Moore turned in one of her best ever performances as an fading TV star who undertakes a radical anti-aging treatment after being fired by sexist executives. I also really enjoyed Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs, a Satanic Panic inspired atmospheric creepfest with Nicolas Cage going full Cage as the titular Marc Bolan-loving serial killer and Maika Monroe as the young FBI agent who shares an eerie bond of some kind with him. It’s a meditation on generational trauma and abuse, wrapped in a Silence Of The Lambs-esque thriller that takes a definite twist to towards the straight up spooky towards the end. I was also incredibly stoked to get a sequel to one of my all time favorite action movies (Mad Max Fury Road) in Furiosa. It maybe didn’t quite hit the heights of Fury Road but the origin story of that movie’s breakout character Imperator Furiosa was still a post apocalyptic heavy metal thrill ride of a movie. Also holy shit Chris Hemsworth turned out one of my favorite performances of the year as the loudmouthed biker gang leader turned aspiring warlord Lord Dementus, letting his full Aussie accent out howling over the desert winds in pursuit of Anya Taylor Joy’s Furiosa. All three of these movies get strong recommendations for me as my favorites of the year for sure,

Finally, there were a couple of video games I played in 2024 that I wanted to give a shout out to, one newer one that is probably my favorite standalone game of 2024 – Altus Studios’ Metaphor Refantazio and a very notable one from a few years ago that finally got around to – ZA/UM’s absurdist sci fi noir detective role playing game from  2019, Disco Elysium. Metaphor comes from the makers of the Persona series of role playing games that have a pretty rabid fan base on their own, and uses a similar mix of turn-based combat and a calendar-based game progression and social sim party bond building where the protagonist works to unite the many tribes of their magical world and break an ancient curse while drawing their inspiration from a “fantasy novel” written by a mysterious figure. There is also a classic evil guy with designs of world domination through keeping the populace of the fantasy world in fear of a variety of creepy video gamey monsters (whose designs were all drawn from Heironymous Bosch’s visions of Hell. The rest of the game’s visual aesthetic is pretty heavily inspired by anime, and some of the story cut scenes are even presented as straight up anime segments before switching back to the playable game part of things. The story itself is a pretty heavy metaphor (not just in name) for the struggle against fascism and the role that art can play in inspiring social change, and gets pretty heavy handed in that at times but in an endearing, Star Trek TOS kind of way and all in all comes together to be one of my favorite games released last year. I also finally got around to playing Disco Elysium in 2024, after owning it and having it in my backlog of games for over two years and it did not disappoint. It’s a weird but enthralling Twin Peaks-y point and click RPG with a beautifully hand painted art style where your alcoholic amnesiac detective protagonist starts out investigating a murder that seems linked to local labour unrest and then takes a wild turn through cryptids, retired revolutionaries, and a really annoying kid named Cuno. It’s got some really wild systems like how certain dialogue paths in conversation with the game’s NPCs open up points on an interconnected series of ideas that link together to give the protagonist some pretty wild perspectives on the world that influence how how they interact with the rest of the story, and is one of the best story-based (as in there is no combat of any kind in the game, just dialogue and interaction) games I have ever played. It was definitely hyped up to me beforehand, but lived up to that hype for sure and was my favorite game not released in 2024 that I played last year.

In the interests of beating a dead horse into further deadness… of going all in on exactly what I’ve tried before… I’m going with the handwritten notes format!

Taking Dan’s FB communication with me from earlier this week to heart, I’m including some entities outside the bounds of music, or even popular media generally! You have been warned!

TNB-30-notes

We got some prime Canadiana up in here! Deceased even!

Honey and Barry didn’t deserve what happened. The morbidness of it. The personal nature of the crimes. The baffling police response. All of it is so strange and sad. The book and the podcast series on the Toronto Star are both worth checking out.

And then on the other hand… NORM!

You can’t find a better comedian. Or Canadian, for that matter!

In the row up yander, we have The Faint standing in for the discussion on YouTube Music Premium! Digital music for algorithmic times!

Further and/or adjacently, we have Neil Young & Crazy Horse standing in for the discussion on My Own Personal Microsoft Outlook and my personal feelings about it!

And lastly, Dan definitely talked about Living Colour last year! Thanks to the Algorithm and all associated with it!

And what do have here? One of my favorite musicians of all time growing old gracefully and with conviction. Tommy’s standing in here for my nascent sobriety! And the gloriousness of the unfuckedness that tends to follow!