#and no one else will get my emo mexican songs references

[ecstarry]

jarty but it starts with james showing pnxdx songs to barty i just know barty would be obsessed with narcisita por excelencia and he comes back to james asking for more emo mexican songs like wait until barty listens to molotov omfg lives were changed

[im-fatally-yours]

30 questions

tagged by my main comadre @mandoinevarro who writes some of the best and spiciest Mando porn and has the best memes on deck 💕😂

1. Name/Nickname: Karla despite every gringo’s attempt to call me Kayla

2. Gender: Female

3. Star sign: Libra

4. Height: 5’4

5. Time: 7:14

6. Birthday: October 9

7. Favorite bands: Damn, I’m really about to expose my old emo ass, but oh well 🤷🏻‍♀️. The Cure, Arcade Fire, Alkaline Trio, Rilo Kiley, Portishead, The Internet, Muse and lots more I can’t think of right now

8. Favorite solo artists: Eternally obsessed with SZA at all times period. Grew up on Selena (ya know the queen of cumbia herself and the only Selena that matters here) but currently in love with Meg Thee Stallion, H.E.R. and anything that Florence Welsh does

9. Song stuck in your head: Cosmic Love by Florence and the Machine

10. Last movie: Batman Returns seemed appropriate last night while wrapping presents last night

11. Last show: Mindhunter, a bitch loves murder shows

12. When I did create this blog: February this year but I had other blogs before that are deleted.

13. What I post: Horror and Halloween shit, Star Wars and Mandalorian shit as the description says. Oh and selfies 🤷🏻‍♀️

14. Last thing I googled: recipe for Seafood Stuffed shells😂😂 my fat ass is planning my Christmas dinner

15. Other blogs: this is my only active one, had a couple of other ones that i had deleted back in like 2010? (yikes)

16. Do i get asks: Rarely, but when i do its almost always disappointingly regarding a dick 😂😂😂

17. Why i chose my url: its a reference to my favorite Alkaline Trio song

18. Following: Not a lot, I’m picky

19. Followers: Enough for me lol

20. Average hours of sleep: I need 8 hours or this sleepy bitch becomes a literal monster

21. Lucky number: I really like even numbers so I guess most even numbers

22. Instruments: I think its best for all if i leave the music to musicians

23. What I’m wearing: a horror movie t-shirt and leggings, v on brand for me

24. Dream job: i would love to do make up professionally

25. Dream trip: France, but more specifically the French Riviera so i can drink and eat my weight in wine, bread and cheese. Although right now, I would kill just to visit my fam in Juárez and Querétaro

26. Favorite food: Pasta and Seafood hence the holiday meal plan googling. Also i could eat fried chicken every day of my life

27. Nationality: Mexican

28. Favorite song: Hit Different by SZA until the new album drops. Also The Suburbs by Arcade Fire. The entire Disintegration album the Cure is forever on replay

29. Last book: a collection of short stories by Stephen King called Night Shift

30. Top 3 fictional universes I wanna live in: if I was a bad ass definitely Star Wars but since I’m not Adventure Time seems pretty dope universe to live in 🤷🏻‍♀️😂😂

Tagging @steeeeeeeviebb, @rae-gar-targaryen @nymphonet , @horror-heks, @gadgetfl0w and anyone else who like to do it 💕

[fightpicker]

INTERVIEW: Moral Straightjacket

The early flushings of this blog led to a furious listening-to of so much stuff that I briefly stopped acknowledging my own strictures of just UK and Europe-based stuff. Fortunately and thankfully this lassitude led me to listening to MORAL STRAIGHTJACKET.

You can listen to (and read what I felt about) I’ll Be Your Rainbow by clicking on this hyperlink. From their record I sensed there might be something going on in their lives that was coming out in the music somehow, so I emailed the band and asked them for an interview. These are the results.

FIGHTPICKER: It feels like place is particularly important for MS. There are frequent references to Irvine, 'Evergreen' doubles I guess as the state and the colour, the song titles on the S/T EP - what is the significance of this?

JOHN: We both came out of hardcore, and I think hardcore tends to idealize place in a vaguely Romantic way, whether it's in a sort of regional pride or as a sort of "I hate this small town I group in" way. Irvine is big, clearly. It's where we went to school and just has a real feeling to it. "A cultural cul-de-sac" is what a friend of mine once called it. I can honestly say moving to that city was one of the best decisions I made in my entire life, and I wouldn't trade the years I spent there for anything, the good and the bad. I think Lucas would agree with me that I really felt like I grew up and went through a lot of the most important experiences of my life there. I moved away and on, but I kept places in my lyrics, moving on to Russia, in particular, since it's a place I travel to for a field work and really is just an amazing, powerful place. Churchill once called it "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma."

LUCAS: Place matters to us a great deal, because as John stated, we’re aged-out hardcore kids, who “Romanticize” place. Irvine, in particular is so important to me (I have the most beautiful love-hate relationship with the city) because it’s where I came of age, where I met my music partner, where I learned about the necessary absurdity of life and love and loss.

John and I are from Southern California, and going to shows meant getting Mexican food afterwards. I think when he visited me last year, and we were trying to figure out the general theme for the new music, we were positively influenced with hopeful nostalgia, and since we both love the early 90s Revelation Records catalogue (a collection which feels like “home” itself for estranged CA punks), we decided to use the “I’ll be your rainbow” lyric from the Into Another song ‘Laughing at Oblivion’ because the original project’s lyrics were heavily concerned with looking at death through a hopeful lens.

But mostly there was a really cool tablecloth on our table, the one on the album art: it was destiny. We titled the songs accordingly, but we didn’t have the time or resources to do the entire rainbow. MSJ is an EP project. John wrote the lyrics for ‘Blue Wizards’ and ‘Evergreen’. I wrote two versions of ‘Blood Orange.’ The scrapped version was inspired by my severe gastrointestinal pain at the time…but then time passed and I felt better. The version you hear is inspired by (back to place) Irvine, as the music itself is almost the same exact song, “12/28/71,” from our 2013 S/T, which was based on a poem I wrote about the origins of the city. I changed the lyrics to mirror the tone of the new songs. Think of it as a surreal love song to everything and nothing, a celebration of destruction and rebuilding, a rainbow after a storm.

FP: trawling through social media footprint of Moral Straightjacket I see references to cities in Orange County, Seattle (Washington as well), Russia - putting this with how it has taken a number of months to put together three tracks for IBYR I'm guessing this is a modern tale of life, jobs, pursuits, families taking over? what is the general 'situation' of the band?

J: I'll let Lucas handle his half of things, but as for my perspective, this band has been there as I've transitioned from a fairly happy, though sexually and romantically frustrated college grad entering graduate school to now a dude in the "all but dissertation" stage of a doctoral program who is about three weeks away from getting married. In the grand scheme of life and all the issues of time and distance, I think MSJ has never been more on the backburner for me - but I'd be lying if I didn't say that IBYR didn't make me more optimistic about and dedicated to our ability to produce something truly beautiful, substantive, and meaningful.

L: MSJ is only a band in a very loose sense. I usually refer to it as a “project,” a definite labor of love, because of those reasons you’ve already suspected: John and I are very busy with life pursuits, and we live more than one thousand miles apart from each other.

We started MSJ in 2012 as college friends with the original intent of mirroring Revolution Summer, Dischord bands. John played guitar and I drummed. Back then we actually had other musicians fill in to play shows —today this is exclusively a studio project.

John soon left California to pursue his Ph.D and I fell into post-grad malaise. I inherited a guitar and learned to play it. John was extremely busy so I started writing all the music. Years passed, but MSJ recorded EPs regularly, at least two a year. In 2014, Matt from ruined smile records (Brisbane, AUS, graciously reached out to us and offered to press Into the Light on vinyl. We ended up doing a cassette instead, and ruined smile has been doing awesome cassettes for all of subsequent releases.

I want to point out that MSJ would never exist as it does without the help of our good friend Eric, from Noise Pollution Studios. He contributed to engineering, production, and instrumentation for most of our previous releases.

FP: is IBYR finished? the titles of the three tracks are suggestive of the titular rainbow so where are the songs for Indigo, Violet, etc?

J: It is finished. At the beginning of the process, there was some vague talk of a fourth track using the color yellow but it never materialized. We basically started IBYR with two ideas: mine was the long-standing desire to write a song about Tolkien's famous "blue wizards" and Lucas' was about some health issues and, if I remember correctly, some orange vomit. Thus: ‘Blood Orange.’

‘Evergreen’ came from my desire to write a song about my visit to Seattle in July 2016 (where Lucas lives and when we initially laid down the tracks), but actually ended up being about Russia, an evergreen country if there ever was one.

L: Yes. Here’s the answer to your: “What’s going on here? Why did three songs take so long to release?”: I moved to Seattle at the beginning of 2015, after having finished MSJ’s first full-length. Eric had contributed so much to the project, and John and I appreciated his ear for mixing our music, so naturally we expected him to mix and master whatever music we happened to record in Seattle.

In July 2016, we recorded three songs, finishing most of the tracking in one day. John went to Russia and I was planning on finishing tacking and sending the rough mixes to Eric. I had a hypothetical three-month timeline for the thing to be completed.

Unfortunately, Eric was confronted with that bastard called Life and he had his hands very full. But I really wanted Eric to mix the project, so I waited, and waited, and waited some more. And of course, I began changing my mind about the tracks, completely scrapping the original “Blood Orange”—the original version was not acoustic and was overly long and boring, though it was going to have cello, that actually would’ve been cool.

I found a friend to do the sweet vocals on “Evergreen,” redid entire instruments, and came up with a new, acoustic 'Blood Orange.’ That’s what happens when you’re forced to prolong a creative endeavor, it morphs and changes with time, eventually mutating. John and I finally came to terms with the fact that Eric was unavailable, and in February, I had my friend Brad, from the hidden gem, Thunderballs Studio, mix and master the songs…like he said he would do originally. Though it still felt like cheating on Eric. 

FP: Though this is very cursory because I am new to your music and I don't know you personally, it seems that by listening through your discography in order it seems like there's been this shedding of volume and angularity for a quieter kind of intensity and inscrutability? Is this fair? Accurate? How else has MS changed in your eyes? Where else can it go?

J: This is definitely a question for Lucas first and foremost. I wrote the music on our first record and had a hand through the next two, but since then, it's been all Lucas - which is definitely why our music is better than it ever has been. I have no idea where the music will go and frankly I'm glad I don't. It's always a pleasant surprise to hear what is in the pipeline and to think that I might be able to contribute something to it on the vocal end.

MSJ has changed a lot, just like we have. It's not as if we've completely shaken off all of those post-college anxieties, and not that our lyrics have just completely taken new form, but I don't think the 22-year-old John would have thought that MSJ would eventually have songs using Tolkien as a metaphor for the fear of dying, or that I'd recount the story of a disenchanted Russian Orthodox priest to explore the depressing nature of graduate school. I don't know where MSJ will go, but I know it'll keep going places and I know Lucas and I will keep having good things to say. Right now, the tentative plan is for me to make a visit up to Seattle sometime next spring for the next record. And with that, I'll just end by saying that I think the MSJ will go wherever our friendship takes it, because that really is what has become the heart of the project.

L: Sure. MSJ was originally an emo-inspired punk band with dry guitars and depressingly cathartic yelling. Then time passed, and I started experimenting more with guitar and synths and slowing things down. I like weird melodies and bittersweet hooks (Daniel Ash and Bob Mould are my biggest guitar influences). MSJ is not a “band” to me because it is so personal. I usually go through writing periods and end up with at least the skeletons of most of the songs for a new release, in a short time. Where I’m mentally and emotionally at during those writing periods directly contributes to the music. I send John demos and he’s always just like: “Yeah, that’s cool…we’re such a weird fucking band.”

At the beginning of Dead Kennedy’s (best) song, that they only ever played once, and as a tongue-in-cheek gesture at a major industry award show, Jello says: “Hold it! We gotta prove that we’re adults now! We’re not a punk band anymore, we’re a new wave band!” That has been the running joke between me and John, because “we’re not a punk band anymore,” but essentially, yes we are. Punk is sincere music played confidently with amateur aptitude—Is there a better model for life? MSJ will go on, and I have no clue what it will sound like, but when it gets there I’ll appreciate it. And then time will pass.