ahh, jeez. If I’d known you were into vinyl, I’d have thought twice about these recommendations ;)

You can tell that this wasn’t written by a parent. Parents know that the small child is already covered in jam, despite there being no jam at the BBQ

Glad to spread the good news. I think I found them in a listicle about “the best non-metal satanic groups” along with Amigo the Devil, Twin Temple, and Dorthia Cottrell, among others.

I found a lot of good music from that list, and it wound up sending me down a three-year rabbit hole when it mentioned psych doom and stoner rock, which I had never really explored (and now stoner/doom is one of my favorite genres).

So, clearly I have pretty positive memories of that particular article; I’ll see if I can find it again, because if you like Bridge City Sinners, there’s a lot more to explore

Edit: found the link and it’s just as good as I remembered from when I first found it 3-4 years. I still listen to a lot of these bands

Edit 2: It seems like the Sinners aren’t actually in this list directly, but I have a vivid memory of discovering them through this article, so I must have dug into the “People also listen to” sections in Spotify

That’s fair. Psychobilly tends to have more punk/progressive tendencies, but like most music scenes, there’s a wide variety of people who self-identify into that group, not all of whom share the same values/politics. With Rockabilly in particular, you get considerable overlap between the nostalgia for the fashion and music of early rock’n’roll and the nostalgia for the politics and society of the same era.

Libby Lux, lead singer of the Bridge City Sinners, fits the bill pretty well, but as you say, no mohawk. I feel like once you get into the folk-punk/psychobilly scene, the default is more often rockabilly greaser/pinup than punk but there’s exceptions to everything.

Edit: Also, their particular flavor of satanic folk-punk is particularly good, if you’re into that sort of thing. I think they do a pretty good job of writing catchy songs with a mashup of B-movie pulp (a la The Cramps or the Misfits), occult themes and imagery, and modern relevant topics like mental health issues and substance abuse. 9/10, highly recommend, especially their first 2 albums, the first of which has my all-time favorite version of “St. James Infirmary Blues”

ISIS the American post-metal band, not ISIS “the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria”

Fria Liga (aka Free League) has lots of niche tabletop games, although iirc, they focus much more on the RPG side than the wargaming side.

There’s lots of good stuff in the UK that I’ve found by browsing Kickstarter and small independent game shops online. I don’t what you’re into specifically, but there are lots of grimdark Mörk Borg inspired stuff out there right now that use system-agnostic minis for wargaming. Forbidden Psalm is one I’ve been pretty into for a bit, and I think they’re out of the UK.

Disclaimer: I have no idea what the gaming scene is like for a lot of these; I just have a bad habit of collecting indie games I’ll likely never play

And Data’s got that devilish flow, Worf with the Bat’leth, no halo

100%. The only redeeming quality of boredom is that it encourages you to go out and gain other interests and skills in the absence of other entertainment, but that’s more in the “I’m done with my homework and have nothing to do for the next 2 hours until dinner” sense. And even before smartphones, TV, booze, and weed easily filled that niche if you weren’t careful.

It’s just that a majority of them now seems to be incapable of focusing on anything for more than a few minutes.

I teach chemistry at a college and I don’t think it’s any different than the past; it’s just more obvious. When I was in middle school, I would tune out all the time, but I didn’t have a smartphone, so I brought shitty fantasy novels to read under the desk. In high-school, I would tune out all the time, but I didn’t have a smartphone, so I would just leave or draw band logos. In undergrad, I would tune out all the time, but I didn’t have a smartphone, so I doodled or wrote song lyrics in the margins of my notebook. Even in grad school, i would frequently just straight disassociate my way through lectures when I ran out of attention span (so every 5 minutes or so).

There’s tons of pedagogy and andragogy research that shows that humans in general only focus for 10-15 minutes at a time (and it’s even shorter for teens and males in their early 20’s), and that’s remarkably consistent across generations. I don’t think people actually have shorter attention spans; they just have an easy way to mindlessly fill that void that is harder to come back from without an interruption. Frankly, my students from Gen X all the way to Gen Alpha students do pretty good at paying attention, but even my best students still zone out every few minutes, and that’s fine. It’s just human nature and the limitations of the way our brains are structured.

or “water closet” in the UK

Not an expert in Eastern religions, but it looks more like Shinto or even Hindu than Buddhist.

Was going to make the same connection; nice work

Us old folks can’t do anything about being cringe most of the time, but we can be supportive and protective of our kids. I think you’d agree that that’s the bigger win here, so good job fellow parent.

Keep in mind, these are almost certain to be the same people who complain about how political everything is these days. What they mean is that they don’t want to see leftist/progressive memes, but they’re fine shifting the Overton widow to the right.

Friend, that’s a possum

Naw, there’s no “cheating” in this community; we had a day a month or two ago where we posted nothing but Johnny Cash for 8 hours straight. Frankly, just “unsettling or introspective” is a decent connection on its own, and even something as niche as “I was introduced to both of these bands by the my first college roommate” is fair game

Edit: I forgot to mention that any connection is good as long as you explicitly define it in the post body

I’m not OP, but it’s the same band, so I’m assuming that’s the connection

The religious aspect is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, since Brand New was very prominent in the post-punk revival of the late 2000’s that heavily featured a lot of fairly religious bands and a lot of bands that wrote lyrics questioning the religious scene in which they first took hold. Underoath, Thrice, etc. were all a huge part of the West Coast emo/metalcore scene that also drew a lot of Brand New listeners, but Brand New was never a religious band, although they shared the stage and toured with a lot of bands that were (at least at the time).

It should also be noted it was later found out that while this album was being written and recorded, the songwriter, Jesse Lacey, was grooming and abusing an underage fan, so the themes of hopelessness and wishing for redemption should also be viewed through that lens. If you can handle that context, the entire album is a masterpiece.

Agreed. However, it can’t be denied that he wrote some tremendous music, and knowing the context of his actions actually lends the lyrics to this album a lot more meaning.