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Jason Tate
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Review: Saosin – Along the Shadow

Saosin - Along the Shadow
Jason Tate

This first impression was originally posted as a live blog for supporters in our forums on May 3rd, 2016. First impressions are meant to be quick, fun, initial impressions on an album or release as I listen to it for the first time. It’s a running commentary written while listening to an album — not a review. More like a diary of thoughts. This post has been lightly edited for structure and flow.

Let’s take a listen to the new Saosin album. Same thing goes as before — spoilers abound, I reserve the right to change my opinion as time goes on. I’ve got multiple beers sitting in front of me, and I’m hitting play and just going to type out my thoughts as I listen.

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Helpful Safari Extension: Recent Tab List

Jason Tate

I recently decided to ditch Chrome and move full-time into Safari as my main web browser. My main reasoning was that all the bugs I kept running into with Chrome were the kind I couldn’t handle anymore (spellcheck would flat out stop working unless I relaunched, dictionary look-up stopped working right, shortcut keys would fail for no reason). It’s only been a couple of days with Safari as my main workhorse so far, but I’m liking it. I’ve finally got it set up how I want it, and it’s treating me well on our first date.

One thing I missed immediately from Chrome was if I closed a tab by accident, or too quickly, I could right click on an open tab and select “reopen last closed tab.” Sometimes I get moving too fast and still need a link or to copy something from a website after I close the tab, so I used this feature pretty frequently. With Safari, if you don’t do anything else you can quickly hit ⌘+Z to reopen a closed tab, but too often I would start typing again before realizing I needed that last website still. Enter the Recent Tab List extension. This is a great little extension that you can keep in your toolbar to show you all the recent tabs you’ve closed so you can quickly reopen one you may have closed.

Twitter Just Killed Off the Most Useful Twitter Account

Twitter
Jason Tate

Casey Newton, writing for The Verge:

MagicRecs stopped sending me notifications in February. When I asked Twitter about it at the time, the company told me MagicRecs were still active. But I never received another message, and despite having every mobile notification switched to “on,” I’ve never gotten a MagicRecs-style push notification in the app, either. (Twitter tells me this may be a bug.) It’s a shame. Twitter is as hard to follow as ever, and the one useful bot in my life is now dead.

Easily one of the most helpful things on Twitter I used to find new accounts to follow. This company makes weird decisions. Bots are clearly kind of a thing right now and Twitter’s basically walking away from the one of the best ones around. Um. Ok guys.

The Feed is Dying

Jason Tate

Casey Johnston, writing for NY Mag:

Unfortunately, chronological order doesn’t scale well. Once a medium or platform has had its here-comes-everyone moment, the stuff you actually want to see gets buried in an undifferentiated stream — imagine a library organized chronologically, or even the morning edition of a newspaper. People are doing too many things and they are happening all at once, and the once-coherent experience of people using a platform unravels into noise. Who among us hasn’t logged into Twitter only to find friends one-upping each other with meta-meta-meta-ironic jokes about something that happened five minutes ago, and no longer is anyone actually mentioning the thing they’re joking about? Who among us has not followed someone because of a really excellent viral photo or tweet, and then hundreds of posts later it’s like Oh my God, stop talking about your cat, or your car, or your loneliness?

Really good rundown on the idea of “feeds” and what happens when you get too big.

Review: PUP – The Dream is Over

PUP - The Dream is Over
Jason Tate

This first impression was originally posted as a live blog for supporters in our forums on April 30th, 2016. First impressions are meant to be quick, fun, initial impressions on an album or release as I listen to it for the first time. It’s a running commentary written while listening to an album — not a review. More like a diary of thoughts. This post has been lightly edited for structure and flow.

Ok, so it’s about 9pm on a Saturday, I’m mostly done with my tasks for the weekend, and I’m going to crack a beer and dive into this new PUP album for the first time. I thought it may be fun to write some thoughts down and kind of “live blog” the first listen. Maybe this won’t work very well, but I kinda wanna try it and see what shakes out. If it’s successful, and you all like it, I’ll try and do it again in the future for other albums.

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Underappreciated Blink-182 Songs

Jason Tate

For this week’s playlist I decided to just go all in with the Blink-182 theme that’s been pretty unavoidable this week. Instead of putting together just a playlist of my favorites, or the “best of,” I went for what I consider to be underappreciated Blink-182 songs. Songs that I don’t think get enough attention in their catalog. The only rules I made for myself was that I had to keep it under 45 minutes. You can find my picks on Apple Music and Spotify and I’d love to hear what you’d put on your “underappreciated” list.

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Song Clip Fiasco (Encore Episode 122)

Encore 122
Jason Tate

On this week’s episode of Encore we mourn the passing of Prince, discuss Beyoncé’s surprise album release and look how perfect the marketing behind this roll out seemed to be, and try and predict what the new Blink-182 song you’ve all heard would sound like three days early. We discuss Bayside’s new album, The Hotelier releasing a new song, and then tackle some listener questions. We discuss the “image” of bands, our favorite vinyl, how we read websites and why, and then debate if we can declare that emo has been “revived.”

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The Worst Part of My Job

Jason Tate

Curious what I think the worst part of my job is? The easy answer is a day when I get a bunch of personal and hateful things heaved at me anonymously. But that’s more of a byproduct of the job, not actually a part of it. The worst part of my job is when I am sitting online looking at any one of the feeds I monitor and I see something that I know is a “leak” of pertinent band information. Sometimes it’ll be Amazon or iTunes that has prematurely posted album information, sometimes it’ll be a tweet about a new song title from a small market DJ, or, worst of all in my opinion, an actual song leak. I’ve talked about these tough circumstances before; however, I think that it’s worth expanding upon my thought process.

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Teaching a Brand New Fan to Fish (Encore Episode 121)

Encore 121
Jason Tate

This week’s episode of Encore tackles a bunch of listener questions, things like: why would anyone defend The Story So Far kicking a fan? What were our favorite bands growing up and do we still listen to them? What services we use to discover new music? And why do I post about mainstream music these days? We also talk about Taylor Swift and Jimmy Eat World, Moose Blood signing with Hopeless Records, and Green Day, Blink-182, and Brand New.

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Summer Scouts – “Vessel” (Video Premiere)

Summer Scouts
Jason Tate

Today I’m excited to debut the new video from Summer Scouts for their song “Vessel.” The track comes from the band’s upcoming album, Furthest Reach, which is set for release on May 20th. The song deals with the loss of a parent and confronts the realities of how this changes the home. When describing the track, the band explained it as:

Family life and norms change dramatically after the death of a parent. The home itself takes a drastic shift in its overall aura, a shift that slowly continues for years after the death, forever losing its original feeling. While the family’s personalities experience alterations as well, the house itself holds the significant, glaring symbolism of this dark familial change. “Vessel” visits this feeling that no one in the family wants to face and confronts it in an emotional conversation between the singer (an affected family member) and the house.

I was drawn to the vocal harmonies and rhythm section immediately and would probably say this is a good fit for fans of PVRIS and Mayday Parade — it’s definitely pop-rock but with this atmospheric tinge.

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