Hosers In All Their Glory

Hosers around the nation took to the streets tonight to celebrate the only Olympic medal that matters: men's hockey. Oh it was a beauty and then some. I'll admit, when the States tied it up late I was rattled. And! I even went so far as to say that Crosby was choking. Woops...

So, here for your amusement, are some shots from Ottawa's Elgin Street and Parliament Hill. After every major hockey victory it's the place to be. Yes, it has nothing to do with TEMOS, but hey, why not?


The scene on Parliament Hill. Revellers crowd around the centennial flame.


Hosers dole out high-fives to people in cars on Elgin.


Dudes in the Canadamobile feel the love.


Germany is defeated! The war is over!

Dear Miley: you're welcome / we're sorry

Hello again friends. So by now our most obsessive fans have already learned of the great crime against good taste that we recently committed: the "cover" of Miley Cyrus' "Party In The USA". Here's how it came to be.

So the good folks at cokemachineglow reviewed The Carl Wilson Lake Mystery a few months back, setting into motion the events that would force us to go into hiding and hire reasonably convincing doubles to distract screaming teenaged girls while we went about our lives. Then those same good folks came to us with a proposition: the inclusion of one of our songs in a podcast they were putting out in the new year. The only catch: the song would have to be a cover, and a cover of something from 2009 (a rule which later changed, hanging us out to dry hugely). We happily and hastily accepted but then hit upon the horrifying realization that not one of us could think of a single song, worthy or not, from the past year, with the exception of a Wild Beasts tune that was far too good and complicated for the week and a half we had to complete the task. Panic began to set in.

But then Andy dug deep into his bag of tricks and called upon friends and family who know things about pop music. We reconvened and spent a half hour watching youtube videos of hit songs that not one of us had ever heard before. As soon as Party In The USA came on we knew we'd found our muse. First: musically it is about the simplest, easiest song in the world, which appealed to our laziness. Second: it is quite possibly the stupidest song ever written. Shaking my hips, like, yeah! Ridiculous. We'd hit the jackpot.

Within seconds Brian had sort of figured out the guitar riff (good enough!) and I'd sort of figured out the bass (good enough!) and we started laying it down. Yes. No problems at all. But then came the horrible part... the singing. Now singing those terrible words is bad enough, but I was forced to subject myself to a much more acute torture. For, never having heard the song before, I had to actually listen to it, to figure out how it went. So there I was, alone in a dark room, for hours, watching that cursed video over and over and over again, feeling like a major league degenerate / pedophile. Miley is on the hood of a car. Miley is not wearing much. The camera lingers on Miley's backside. The camera lingers on Miley's chest. Young girls everywhere feel "empowered" or some crap. I was thoroughly assaulted by what everyone already knows: Miley is very young. Miley likes to jiggle around. Great. The whole experience made me feel old and sad.

However, there is an excellent tonic for this: the world of Daniel Johnston. I had to fight the effects of Miley, so I wound up listening to a certain Johnston tune. It infected my mind. Then, when I went back to the studio to finish the singing, I hit upon a glorious realization: that this particular Daniel Johnston tune and Miley's monstrosity fit together like eggs and bacon. And there you have it. Pay attention and you'll hear it for sure.

So you want to hear it? Go here. Or here. Or here.

Touching What? Made of What?

Our band has a strange name. It's true. So how did it come to be? Listen up, and we will tell you.

We never intended to pick a weird name or anything else. In fact, we never really had any intentions with respect to a name at all. After Andy returned from the cult and we started recording in my attic we realized that we needed a name. For the uninitiated choosing a band name can be EXCRUCIATING under the wrong circumstances. It goes like this:

SINGER: What about (adjective) (noun)?
BASSIST: Yeah, maybe. It's a little too (abstract OR concrete).
DRUMMER: Maybe (noun)?
No one says anything.

Fill in the dialogue with the following...

NOUNS
Academy, Minister, Shotguns, Pretzel, Cavemen

ADJECTIVES
Poisoned, Sacred, Wild, Electric, Drowning

You get the idea! In some cases the process of deciding on a name can take weeks or even months, as a band temporarily goes with "Electric Academy" until something better comes along. I haven't yet googled it, but I bet there really is a band called that...

Well! In true TEMOS fashion we didn't have time for that noise. Oh no. You see folks, when it comes to decision making we don't screw around. We often don't even talk about the question at hand, we just pick a direction and go there. This makes working together very easy, and makes our tunes a bit odd. Perhaps you've noticed. Anyways, we devised an excellent scheme to get us a name pronto: a tournament! Yup, a 32 name, single-elimination tournament. We sat down and wrote up 32 possible band names on the spot, and then paired them off. Then we voted on them. The system worked like this: we three sat on chairs in my kitchen, facing a wall, with our hands behind our backs. My ladyfriend read out a pair of names, and each band member flashed one or two fingers, indicating his choice, but invisible to the other guys. Katie tallied the votes, and the loser was eliminated. Voila! Perfectly simple. Unfortunately we can't remember any of the rejected names, except "Duck Soup" which would have been... great? No.

However, this little tournament ended with no small measure of controversy. For you see, the very final matchup, for all the marbles, was TEMOS vs. Ptarmigan. And? Ptarmigan won! Yes, that was our name. For two days. I confess: I voted for Ptarmigan. I don't know who else did. But shortly thereafter the other guys grew uneasy. We'd made a mistake. TEMOS was just so much better, so much more us. And so Brian lobbied for a reversal of the tournament verdict. We all agreed, and there you have it.

Now where does TEMOS come from? It was Brian's idea, and it is a lyric from a song, by a legendary Ottawa band. Name the band and the song and you win a HUGE prize.