EARCANDY: Canadian Softball - Awkward & Depressed (FFO: Emo, Post-Hardcore, Pop Punk)

Canadian Softball – Awkward & Depressed
July 28th, 2017

Jarrod Alonge is a YouTuber who’s been around for a long time but has really been killing it since 2013 or so. He started out just making tongue-in-cheek videos about “emo kid” and “scene kid” culture and music and soon graduated to making more polished videos where he made parody versions of popular metalcore bands. From there, nothing was out of his reach and he made parodies of pop punk, progressive metal and plenty of other genres. Not only that, members of the bands he parodied would come in and do guest vocals or instrumentation for later projects.

His projects include Amidst the Grave’s Demons, a collection of songs poking fun at the obnoxious and repetitive nature of modern metalcore, Sunrise Skater Kids, a silly and upbeat take on what pop punk has become, Rectangles, a very well-written take on progressive metal and a handful of other parody “bands”.

Recently, he teamed up with fellow YouTuber and female metal vocalist Lauren Babic to create CrazyEightyEight, a band that covered a few older songs like “When You Were Young” by The Killers and to create some original music with progressive instrumentation and heavier female vocals.

Seeming to be a busy man, Jarrod set out to create an album with another of his projects, Canadian Softball, a play on the progressive rock band American Football, earlier this year. He ran an IndieGoGo campaign and recently released the full album, Awkward & Depressed on July 28th. Pledging to “Make America Emo Again,” I think he certainly completed his goal and the album is very much worth a listen.

It’s not what I thought it would be, which was a fairly coherent parody of modern “emo” and pop punk from start to finish. Instead, it’s a large variety of songs that fall under different eras of emo music since the late 90s. There’s an emo medley at the start of the album, which is what he really built his musical career on, there’s a song that pokes fun at the over-complicated math rock niche, there are songs teasing bands like Modern Baseball and The Wonder Years. There’s even a song that sounds like it was written by Escape the Fate or Hawthorne Heights.

I hope you enjoy the album and if you have anything you’d like me to take a listen to, please feel free to let me know.