I wonder what will become of the Bright Eyes dates. Are those going to be cancelled at this point?
As a New Englander, I really can't imagine any shows happening at maximum capacity in the fall either way. The House of Blues especially is among the biggest GA venues, and the thought of that many bodies packed into a building shoulder to shoulder already makes me uneasy.
Workout culture in all shapes or forms has always been a draw toward men (and women) with a toxic alpha complex, which is why I've always been better served to just do my own thing with a set of headphones on to drown out the conversations overheard there. The pandemic really highlighted just how right-leaning people at the gym are, though, seeing how vehemently anti-mask many were, vigilant to keep gyms open and absolutely losing their shit because they were closed. I love the gym, but it's so very difficult to meet anyone who shares common values within that scene where I live, although judging by the comments here, there's a lot of people here who lift.
I would be curious to see the cholesterol levels on his annual checkup with that kind of diet. A lot of bodybuilders experience heart health issues later on in life, some even keeling over dead in their 50s-60s due to years of protein-heavy, high-cholesterol eating lifestyles. I've been lifting heavily 5x a week plus a day of cardio since college, and even so, I get elevated cholesterol readings on a diet of lean meats (mostly chicken) and fish/tuna, superfood vegetables, clean carbs/whole grains, and low-fat dairy (Greek yogurt especially.) I stay away from red meat as much as I can.
I'm no nutritionist or medical expert, but I kind of think these plans should come with an advisory attached seeing that it's not necessarily clear how much of this is absurdist or reality (and even if it's real, I'd be really hesitant recommending that anyone use this as a diet plan.)
I hear you on this one. When you are a liberal muscular guy who listens to indie and heavy music on a dating app in New England, the kind of people you want to meet just see the muscles and think you're some dumb superficial jock who couldn't possibly have any depth to their interests, while the people who are drawn to you physically think you're weird as fuck once you start telling them about what you do in your free time beyond working out.
As another person down further pointed out, the person pictured isn't Adam, but rather Tony Wolski, also now of Genghis Tron:
https://newnoisemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/tony-wolski-1024x651.jpg
Dan Ozzi did an interview with "Adam Vallely" on his Substack a couple of days ago as well where similarly tried to insist he was the fit guy in the above pictures. I'm pretty sure part of the act is that the writers have to be in on their experiment as well. Additionally, something else they do is create burner accounts to leave comments about them on Twitter, on their YouTube videos, and even right here you will see quite a few profiles have zero history beyond the one comment on this post.
The Adam Vallely on Twitter and Instagram doesn't look a thing like the Adam Vallely in these pictures, for what it's worth. The guy in the pictures above fits the narrative of looking like someone who spends a lot of time working out, and plus he's a commercially appealing handsome hipster bro. If you look up Vallely's Twitter and Instagrams, which reference the Armed, he looks a bit more awkward and nerdy, and people will reply to the posts showing the other guy being like, "Looking good, Adam!"
https://f4.bcbits.com/img/0017664956_20.jpg
On repeated listen, it actually hits. The trajectory reminds me of how I thought "Royals" was fine, but "Team" was the one that made me pay attention to Lorde.
The production really is what gives it its legs, and I think for a songwriter her age, she writes really well, but I think overall after living through Lorde, Lana, Phoebe, Billie, Soccer Mommy, Clairo, and folklore/evermore, sad girl music is not very interesting to me anymore (although I think on a mainstream level, it's arguably at its most popular.)
I don't anticipate any of the bigger festivals being able to deliver exciting lineups this year. There's probably a lot of artists who aren't willing to commit to playing until they have more certainty behind how it's all going to go down. The lower lines look like they've been a struggle to fill in as well. Coachella reportedly opting out of 2021 makes me think they weren't too happy with what they could provide (atop of festival saturation during September/October) so they took the year off.
Another thing I'll be interested in is seeing the affects the pandemic has had on people's desire to go festivals plus ticket sales. There's obviously going to be those people who will run out to any festival regardless of lineup quality because they've not been able to all year, but in talking to a friend of mine who used to be a Bonnaroo diehard, we sort of feel like the pandemic made us realize that we're not as much interest in festivals anymore. The year off made us appreciate doing other things in our free time.
Something that might be helpful in understanding is the perspective of the author. You're relationship with emo began in the '90s where as the writer here was only born at the turn of the millennium and has probably been listening to and thinking about it for the last 5 or so years of their life. That's not in any way a dismissal to the writer's thoughts whatsoever, but you have to remind yourself that the younger era of emo listeners has a very a different opinion on it is than some dude in his early 40s who was there from its starting point.
Not to be that person who gets toiled up in semantics, but I never really thought of them as an emo band. Post-hardcore or hardcore felt more appropriate, but it's like saying that everything post-hardcore is by default emo. The overlap in listeners is there, but I wouldn't say bands like Title Fight, Touche Amore or Thursday are emo even if their lyrics are emotional.
I'll stop myself there, because the end of the day, the what is and what is not emo discourse is truly a thing of hell.
You're forcing me to say critical things about this music, which I didn't want to do, but your comment about older people doing this just because it's pop-punk is a huge generalization that I take exception to, so here we go...
I can't speak for everyone else around my age demo, but this particular style of pop-punk is a very familiar and reductive sounding style of pop-punk from the early 2000s that was never very original, complex, or challenging to begin with, which is not to say that simpler song structures cannot be challenging. As I grew out of the Warped Tour scene as a teenager, I came to realize bands that sounded like this were a dime a dozen out there, though, and part of the reason it worked so well on winning audiences over was because of that general sound. It's no different that how bro country pop is all over country radio. Listening to this, I think of the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus and Simple Plan where the riffs were big and chunky, and the breakdowns were overblown with overproduced studio work. Switch out the vocals and lyrical content with just about any other pop-punk band that sounds like this, and there's not much differentiating them. I think music like this is not very mature.
Pop-punk created by young people is not bad nor is it something older listeners must hastily dismiss. Early Paramore and Joyce Manor are both great examples of that, but that's because when you play their early albums, you can hear them taking a sound that's familiar and carving out their own things with it, and that often comes down to tone, texture, and a frontperson whose lyrics could only be sung by them and no one else.
If we're talking about current pop-punk bands that excite me, Pinkshift delivers on all fronts.
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