Grant’s Incredible List of Incredibly Predictable Things, Happenings and, you know, Stuff:
- When porn actors grunt and say in a foreign-y voice, “That is booty-ful”
- 99% of movies
- Instrumental music
- Each and every conversation I’ve ever had with my wife
- The look on a stranger’s face when I ask if I can have their cheesepaper
- The inability of many copy editors to worry about anything save headlines and photo placement
- The way most instrumental bands build and recede over and over
- The amateur flow of articles that are supposed to be fresh and creative but end up being impossible to follow and just plain stupid
- Pressing the button on a drinking fountain and stooping down so the tiny pin-prick trickle at least touches my lips
- Listening to a Patton Oswalt comedy routine and soiling myself
- The way many instrumental bands abuse keyboards/synths
- The way the hot water in my faucet goes from ICE-COLD to SINGEING-HOT in .0000000000000001 seconds
- The way columnists always use one-sentence paragraphs
- The way The Octopus Project’s past albums have aroused but not ‘wow’ed me
- The way my friends always get dumped when their girlfriends get back from their ‘soul-searching trip to Europe’
- Finding a pinch of lint at the top of my buttcrack
Grant’s Incredible List of Incredibly Unpredictable Things, Happenings, and, you know, Stuff:
- The fluctuation of my weight, from flabby to less flabby then back to flabby again
- How much I love East Coast pizza (which may or may not affect the preceding entry)
- How much I love East Coast donuts (ditto)
- The fact that, with strident new albums from The Octopus Project and Black Moth Super Rainbow (not to mention the so-so album these bands made together this year), instrumental rock is back with bigger abs and a tighter ass
- The intensity of my Christmas-light-hanging addiction from year to year
- The next money-making scheme my buddy Isaac will pitch to me
- Listening to Hello, Avalanche over and over and still failing to remember anything about it, then listening again as though it were a fresh experience
- The number of bill collectors I’m going to have to stiff each month
- The amount of regret I feel for bringing a child into such an F-ed up world
- The degree to which I bounce back from feelings of regret when my little baby girl smiles up at me when she hears me play certain guitar chords
- The way the synths of Hello, Avalanche weave in and out of each other like fighter pilots at an air show
- The number of readers that will write in complaining that I didn’t really talk about music much in this review
- The way this review ends without warning
1. Snow Tip Cap Mountain
2. Truck
3. Bees Bein' Strugglin'
4. An Evening With Rthrtha
5. Black Blizzard/Red Umbrella
6. Upmann
7. Mmaj
8. I Saw the Bright Shinies
9. Ghost Moves
10. Vanishing Lessons
11. Exploding Snowhorse
12. Loud Murmuring
13. Queen