Articles

I wanted Father John Misty to be my favorite concert ever really fucking bad. I wanted his snark to translate even better than I had hoped it would. I wanted the people around me to be just as cheesed the fuck out as I was. I wanted to stare at the pictures I took of him for minutes at a time, absorbing every fucking pixel as unique miniature homages to one of my favorite musical personalities on the fucking planet. I wanted to be so enthralled with the dude as a performer, and he with me as an audience member, that he would shake my fucking hand afterwards. WELL CLASS, MARK ALL OF THE ABOVE OFF THE LIST, CAUSE WE ALL CAME. AND THEMS ALL CAME TRUE. Yes, there was ejaculate. There was ejaculate everywhere. Father John Misty is perhaps the only performer with the ability to tell a crowd of...

The first quarter of 2015 has been one big hairy, thrusting cooze. While there are all these amazing albums dropping like deuces on the gilded throne of life, me and Tom are having all of these heavy stressful life changes happening, and it's fucking terrifying. So where most of us at SYFFAL all live thousands of miles apart, and met on the internet and hold the majority of our friendship within the confines of the internet, Tom and I are real life concert besties. Seeing as we're both married motherfucking parents and don't go out much, except for the aforementioned concerts, we're BFFs in actual AND virtual life bro. And now Tom and his family are moving to a completely different state and we'll be forced to play our brolove out on a like 95% virtual basis. This sucks balls for me. Sure...

As a recovering musician who never really broke and never really played much outside of the Chicago and its suburbs bubble, I've played a half dozen venues around the area more than a dozen times. The Abbey Pub is one of those venues. Amazing fish and chips. Tiny ass fucking stage. So when you make the decision to go see Doomtree and after you've already acquired the ticket you realize it says Abbey Pub, and there's seven fucking people in Doomtree, and that means nuts to butts, well, you have this internal struggle to tend to. On the one hand, small stage means small show means tight quarters means holy shit maybe I get to collect Sims-sweat and Cecil Otter bellybutton lint. On the other, small shows mean sold out mean "oh noes, there will be so much energy in the building the floors...

I hate the dead of winter. Not only because it's fucking cold, but because there is pretty much a halt in new music releases from after Thanksgiving to about mid-January. Soooooo, below you'll find my SYFFAList for December and January. It includes a lot of shit I missed out on in 2015, but discovered through some other random best of 2015 list. it's better to be late for the game than to not show up at all.

When I hear a band for the first time, and (fuck goose pimples) I get a goose boner, I have to set aside time with the band without any outside influence to see if that boner was over what I was actually hearing or just a hope-boner. I got a hope-boner over a band a few years ago and before I had taken a moment with them I contacted them and called them amazing, only to finally listen to them and find all of the things I loved about them completely assumption based.  I needed to start vetting my boners bros.  A quiet room or a solo road trip or a pair of awesome fucking headphones while my kids try to kill each other, I needed one of those options to explore what initially gave me such a massive case of the holy shits. I needed this bandboner to actually be actual bros.  So I got the...

2014 was a calendar year for SYFFAL. AAAAAAAAAAAND YEAH IT WAS A CALENDAR YEAR FOR EVERYONE BRO, THAT'S WHAT CALENDARS DO, THEY TRACK THE DAYS OF THE YEAR BRO. Nah, frealdo, 2014 was a dope year for the SYFFALs. I mean, lots of weird shit happened. For example: Tim decided over the summer that he was done full time SYFFALing, to focus more on not SYFFALing. This means he gave his keys to the SYFFAL executive bathroom over to Tom. So now it's myself (Joel) and Tom who lead this group of music misfits in our constant fondling and fellating of all things balls ass and jesus balls. Tom's chin won Best New Artist at the VMAs and is now working on its second paleo cook book. Brando discovered he's actually a fucking pirate and loves pho like it's nobody's business. Johnny spread his wings and...

Whenever it comes to musical taste I always preach there is no right and  there is no wrong. Especially no wrong. Our job at SYFFAL is not to tell you what to listen to; there are thousands of blogs who pretend to be the authority in that area. Rather, we share with our readers the music that we love and we write about it with unashamed enthusiasm. We hope to bring you joy and we hope to bring artists fans. We aren't critics. We are a community. Below you will find a list of 10 songs from each member of our staff. These tracks are our favorites from 2014; the songs range from the pop perfection of Taylor Swift to underground Indie rappers like Nocando. Fuck, thanks to Joel a country song even made the list this year. It's a SYFFAL miracle! In the spirit of community we ask you to share a...

Guys, I like weird ass hip hop sometimes. And I like to eat sugar sandwiches while cutting out death threats to Bokeem Woodbine while listening to said weird ass hip hop. While curating my most recent opus to said Dead Presidents actor, I ran through the impressive collection of releases from Chicago group SLUDGE FACTORIE. Hit play below while crafting you're own letter to Mr. Woodbine. Talk about weird ass hip hop guys! No, seriously, talk about it! Now, you ass hats! Okay, are you taking about it? Good. So v8 TFD, the MC of the group (all production is handled by SYFFAL snuggle bunny Morbidly-O-Beats) is beyond crazy with his tangential word play, and stream of subconscious rhymes. Picture Dose One on LSD, during a schizophrenic break, but purposefully, and perfectly bizarre....

Quarter four is like the calm before the Year-End storm. And this year has been fucking nuts! I can’t sugar coat that shit. I got fatter. My exwife got skinnier. My kids got bigger and thus eat more and need new shoes all the time. I’ve stopped shaving. I never got that raise. And, the most egregious societal slight of all, I didn’t get famous. Like even a little bit. These personal little Fuck you universe-isms pale in comparison to some of the shit society has gone through in the last quarter. People have literally taken to the streets because police keep killing people. And then everybody else mostly stayed home and posted support on social media or did other stuff like watch Big Bang Theory. DAS RACIST! With air strikes and drone attacks on foreign soil in ‘Mericah’s name, and...