Library

Hi, I'd like to plug a special show we're doing this Friday in Toronto, because we are especially excited about it. In like a serious way, not in the way we tell you before we play in like Seattle or Tacoma, where we just tell you we're excited because it would be weird for us to have come all that way to play (like from San Fransisco, that morning) and for you to have paid that much money to see us (atleast $25) and not both agree that we were all excited for the event to be happening, but mostly you are thinking about what TV shows you are missing, and we're mostly succumbing to those thoughts usually crammed into the very back of our heads (atleast they are when we're in like Shoreditch or Williamsburg or Pittsfield or Saskatoon or Hunan Province) about really how old we are and where all our friends from highschool are doing right now, and how big their houses in Burlington are. But anyhow, you don't need to worry about any of that stuff on Friday, because when you come up to one of us and we tell you that we're excited about the show, we'll really mean it. I've been telling people that IRL all week, and if you know me (you don't) you know how weird THAT is.

On Friday we're playing at the Toronto Reference Library, which is the main library in Toronto - you can't take books out from there mostly (reference...) but you can take movies out on DVD, and it's also where we get most of our album artwork from - I wouldn't tell anyone that for years, but now that our record covers only feature pictures of us, I'm free to be cool now. Go to the reference library to design your art. The show is early enough that you could just stop by near closing time and then stick around for the show.

It starts at 8pm...the first band is our friends in $100, who are great. It's literally exciting to be playing with them. We play at 9pm sharp.

There are a few other things you should know about this show, but I've got to scram to practice asap so I'm just going to put the rest of the appealing parts of this show in bullet form:
-this library is really big, we play on the ground floor atrium, which is like one of the coolest indoor spaces in Toronto (that's a picture of a bit of it right up top there)
-it's free
-it's super early, so you can bring your parents and young babies
-Toronto has the most comprehensive library system in North America, and this is our main branch
-books are cool
-solid microfiche section
-we are probably going to play Year of the Ox
-etc.

Maybe get an early dinner and come a tad early to line up for a minute? Facebook says that 690 people are coming, and it's not that you have to buy a ticket or anything, but you probably want to make sure you get in?

Will

It's a common story to be a teenager, and make your cultural transition, but not really change. It's an especially common thing when you decide to be a punk, or a hardcore kid. In many ways, the punk and hardcore thing is a parallel world - the look is a bit different, the music is kind of harder, but generally people think and act like they did before their lifestyle changed. The common complaint where we're from is that there are a lot of "jocks" in hardcore bands. It's something I'm sure cuts across every subculture - it's easy to change the way you look and the kind of music you listen to, but it's hard to change the way you are inside, how you relate to life, and treat other people. That's why it always seems weird when we'll meet a punk kid who is training to become a cop - it's weird, but it really isn't, because for the most part what we're involved in for most people is just something they are doing while they are young, and don't have the intention of taking any sort of lesson from being punk. Which is fine too.

I had a really normal upbringing - I played baseball and hockey, collected hockey cards, sometimes thought about what it mean to be nice to people, but mostly had a non-proliferation pact with life - I didn't throw life any curve-balls, and it life didn't throw any back at me. I became a punk because I liked the way it sounded, not because I grew up on the streets, so there was no great urgency in the gradual lifestyle choices I was starting to make. When you start listening to hardcore, if you do it for long enough, there's a few decisions you'll inevitably come up against - being vegetarian and being straight edge. It often doesn't really go much further than that. After that, it depends on the people you have around you to help you consider breaking things down even more, and confronting the larger issues.

When I was still only listening to Youth Of Today and the first Victory Style CD, me and a friend started to volunteer at Who's Emma, an important place that's been mentioned here a few times. It was here where we started to come up against some of the greater issues and questions in life and to really start to understand what it meant to be part of a real progressive subculture. We met anarchists, homeless people, natives, womens rights activists, old people, anti-psych activists, unionists, gay people, people that listened to different types of music, people that wanted to destroy all technology. But most importantly, we met people that were able to incorporate a bit of everything into cohesive and impressive personalities, and we could sense that it was those people who were demonstrating how life was meant to be lived, and that it was those types of people you talked about when you said stuff like "Community leader".

Will Munro was one of those people, and he died today. I met Will in 1998 or 1999 at Who's Emma. He was a straight edge punk who was also gay, which blew my mind. He carried with him such a grinning confidence that I didn't have to wonder for even a second if being straight edge but also gay was something that made sense. He listened to hardcore music like me, but also dance and electro music, which is something I didn't understand. Over the course a summer , I'd gone from someone who only wanted to listen and talk about punk bands to hanging out at like the first 10 Vaseline's, Will's gay disco parties. To me, Will was one of the people who most helped break down in my mind those internal divisions it's so easy to give in to. I've always felt like Toronto was the perfect place for us to grow and develop as a band, because there is such a blurring of these lines, because of people like Will. RIP.

CAGLARRY

Hi - we're happy to announce that this year we helped to curate a stage at Sled Island in Calgary, with out new friend Zak Pashak, who is also apparently running for mayor or judge or alderman or something there. Basically we sent him a list of 100 bands we liked and he some how managed to get all our favourites together on two stages for a night that promises to be pure Western-Canadian mayhem.

This is the 2nd time we'll have played Sled Island, and maybe our third time playing Calgary. We once vowed never to tour Canada - 10 years later I'm sitting in a hotel room in Regina Saskatchewan (which I didn't even have to look up in order to spell correctly) writing programming notes for our festival stage in Alberta. Anyways the first time we did Sled Island we were pumped because they put us up in a suite hotel room (not "sweet", although it kind of was) and we basically got to wander around the city for the weekend - to that hot dog place, to the Tim Hortons, to the other Tim Hortons, and all the other great stuff in Calgary that we saw. We spent most of day one playing soccer with the band Basketball (read that carefully) in the back of the park where the main stage was, and destroyed them.

Then we played a show and Damian lodged a piece of glass from a broken pint glass that he had to go to the hospital after the show, and the glass is still lodged in his head (I'm not kidding). The next night we played at the Legion upstairs and even though the show was awesome and we made friends with all the opening bands, we were still kind of bummed because downstairs this band The Dodo's were opening up for Broken Social Scene, and our sentiment was mostly along the lines of "who the fuck are The Dodos", but we were able to cut through our mad jealousy and had a great time. The next time we came through town we played downstairs and smoked the room. And we got rushed through a crowd Beatles-style into an empty Tubby Dog (the hot dog place I was talking about earlier) to eat in peace while a throng of mad Calgarians tried to break through the windows like zombies to get their hot dogs. On the way home we flew WestJet which has cable Tv - I watched "The Day After Tommorow" which features a plane-crash scene (almost).

So like I said, Calgary is a great city and we love Sled Island.
SATURDAY JULY 3rd CALGARY ONTARIO I MEAN CALGARY ALBERTA
SLED ISLAND FESTIVAL @ The Legion

FUCKED UP
THE GZA
NO AGE
WHITE LUNG

other bands wil be playing upstairs, probably wondering "who the fuck is No Age".

We're also playing the mainstage on Friday, but I don't know when.

YOTO

Hi, this 12" will be coming out someday on the label MERGE so look for that.