I’m finishing up writing this piece at like, 1am on Sunday, so this intro will be a little short. Also, if the music review on this one is total nonsense, I’m sorry. It is hot off the presses. I am not revising it.
I had banh mi for the first time this weekend. Good god. My life up to this point has been empty in ways I failed to realize. I’m not even usually a huge sweet and savoury guy, but this sandwich made it click for me. So many flavours, all working so well. And that bread, holy moly. I love living somewhere where so much different food is available, and I really need to take advantage of it more. This was just sitting there, ignored by me for years. I feel serious regret over all of the Vietnamese food I haven’t eaten in my life.
So for the past two weeks (since I didn’t get a blog out last week) I’ve been following the Seattle Mariners and the New York Mets. I was expecting to enjoy both of these teams a lot; I’ve always liked the Mariners, and the Mets’ offseason had me looking forward to how their various roster moves would turn out. Bo Bichette’s arrival in New York in particular had me looking at the Mets as a potential NL favourite. Both teams are off to slow starts, but the impressions I’ve come out of these two weeks with couldn’t be more different. The Mariners are an endlessly fun team to follow, with maybe the only truly joyful fan culture I’ve yet seen (I’m including the Blue Jays fan culture in that, by the way). The Mets, on the other hand, are just depressing.
I’ll start with the Mariners, to keep with the theme of talking AL first. I should start by saying that Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein’s “History of the Seattle Mariners” documentary is the thing that got me into Baseball, so the Mariners have always had a special place in my heart. I am fully on board with their description of the Mariners as “protagonists” rather than competitors, seeing as how their team is full of eminently likeable protagonist types, like Julio Rodriguez, Josh Naylor, Randy Arozarena, Bryan Woo, and even Cal Raleigh, who I have to admit I still like even after all the WBC nonsense. Every season for them is a hard fought battle with ups and downs, and having never been to the World Series they’re a perpetual underdog, even in a season like this where outlets like FanGraphs are expecting them to be one of the best teams in the league.
I didn’t glean anything from watching the Mariners these two weeks that really changed any of my impressions of them. They have a hard hitting offense that’s really exciting to watch, and a bunch of really capable and compelling pitchers. The expected heroes who I mentioned above are all still being very cool and fun, but I’m also finding myself excited by Luke Raley and Dominic Canzone. The only real drag is Brendan Donovan, who killed the good vibes promised by his opening day home run by pulling off his batting helmet to reveal a thin blue line bandana. When you see a guy who looks like Brendan Donovan, it’s sort of a coin flip as to whether he’s going to be really into craft beer or really into fantasizing about killing people; unfortunately evidence is pointing towards Donovan being the latter.
Now, I don’t like how MLB teams all have advertising on their uniforms these days. The Jays’ TD patch, for instance, is just gross. But the Mariners get to have a Nintendo patch, which is hilarious to me. I love it. It sort of makes up for how much I have to hear about T-Mobile every time I watch a Mariners game. This is a tangent, but why do cell phone companies even advertise? Does anybody actually choose a service provider through any method other than internet searching for the cheapest rate? Does advertising really work on anybody? It starts to feel sometimes like all of these companies are just lighting money on fire. Hell, Sportsnet keeps running this ad where Idris Elba (who I’ve really lost all respect for between this and the gold thing) tells me about AI solutions for businesses. Is the average Sportsnet viewer a business owner? I kinda doubt it. Who is this for? I think this company is wasting money by having Idris Elba harass me (broke, absolutely not a business owner, pathologically averse to AI) in between every half inning of every Blue Jays game.
What the hell was I talking about? The Seattle Mariners?
Maybe the Mariners’ crowning jewel is that their fan culture is not repulsive. Intermittently browsing the Mariners subreddit is the only time I’ve actually had fun looking at a Baseball subreddit. These people really love their Baseball team unconditionally. There’s no postseason or bust attitude, and when they complain about their manager they generally do it without demanding that he be fired. Mostly they like joking around and celebrating when their players do cool stuff. To again reference the Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein documentary, I am finding their description of Mariners fans as evolved to be essentially correct. Especially after following the Yankees’ dumb stuck up jackasses and the Giants’ sadsacks last time, I’m finding Mariners fan culture refreshing.
So overall the Mariners are an exciting team who are fun to root for. I like them a lot.
On the other hand, we’ve got the Mets. Being a Mets fan seems like a curse. This team’s identity at this point is built pretty much entirely around a boom/bust cycle of tremendous promise followed by massive disappointment, as promising new players underdeliver, incredible seasons implode at the last second, and superstars depart for greener pastures. As a result the fans have the vibe of a sullen child who has given up believing that their dad means it when he says he’s going to make it to their piano recital.
Now, I knew all of this about the Mets going in. I was familiar with the bitter sadsackery of their fan culture, since Mets fans are more visible than really any other sports fandom on the corners of social media I tend to frequent. I had seen the big hopes to big disappointments cycle play out in both 2024 and 2025. But still, after that offseason, I really expected the Mets to be a fun team to watch.
My god. I thought the Jays lineup was having a slow start. If I have to watch these Mets go three up three down on consecutive groundouts one more time I’m going to puke. Even Bo Bichette, one of my for real favourite players, is not fun to watch in this environment. The Mets’ lineup has a bunch of good players, but inexplicably none of them except for young catcher Francisco Alvarez are really playing well at all.
Now, don’t get me wrong, players having a slow start is understandable, and doesn’t immediately make for a boring, contemptible showing. The Blue Jays, for instance, are still grinding out long, compelling at bats, even though those at bats are frequently ending in disappointment. The issue is that this Mets lineup looks asleep. They just ground out constantly. They’re boring to watch, and I hate seeing Bichette like this.
The pitching, at least, is better. Freddy Peralta (one of those offseason acquisitions that had me optimistic about this team) and Nolan McLean are both great, and very fun to watch. But the problem is that good pitching actually kind of becomes frustrating to watch when the pitcher isn’t getting any run support. Pitchers can’t win games on their own, and watching them try is a little bit like watching Sisyphus get flattened by the boulder.
It would be easier to look past a slow start if the fan culture was at all endearing, but Mets fans seem to have given up on being happy. That subreddit is a depressing cesspit. They’re calling for the manager and the POBO to be fired, they’re trash talking their players, and, well, why wouldn’t they? Not everybody can be a Mariners fan.
As an aside, what the hell is going on with the audio mixing at SNY? The crowd noise was regularly overpowering the commentators while I was watching, and sometimes it sounded like the commentators were panned in one ear and the crowd panned in the other when I was wearing headphones. It made the Mets broadcasts borderline unwatchable for me, such that I occasionally switched to the other team’s broadcast mid-game.
Mets fandom is, overall, not a club I am interested in joining. But they still have Bo Bichette, which is more than I can say for the San Fransisco Giants.
1. Seattle Mariners
2. New York Mets
3. San Fransisco Giants
4. New York Yankees
Next week I’ll be covering the Kansas City Royals and the Arizona Diamondbacks.
My New Band Believe is the new musical project fronted by Cameron Picton, bassist and sometimes vocalist of black midi. This is the second “solo” effort to come from the black midi guys since the band broke up in 2024, following Geordie Greep’s “The New Sound” (I put “solo” in quotes here because My New Band Believe is not really a solo project or a band, and Geordie Greep could probably just be releasing music as “black midi minus Cameron Picton” instead of “Geordie Greep,” seeing as how Sean Evans and Morgan Simpson both appear on “The New Sound”). As such, I really can’t help but think about this album in comparison with “The New Sound,” and with black midi, and even really with Black Country, New Road, for good measure.
This album is a sharp left turn from the black midi sound, but is still very recognizably coming from the guy who wrote “Eat, Men, Eat.” It is, for one thing, almost entirely acoustic, leaning into a folky, chamber-pop sort of style. This is a departure from black midi’s chaotic, noisy prog rock, but not really that drastic of a departure, as both styles allow for free flowing structures and impressionist lyricism. “My New Band Believe” is really just a direct development on Picton’s contributions to black midi. It feels like he’s found his voice in a big way.
This album’s song structures are maybe it’s most immediately compelling feature, and the one it shares most with black midi. These songs are often linear and often narrative, with motifs that reoccur rather than sections that repeat. Instrumental layers come in and out, developing a little more each time, offering every song a strong sense of forward momentum. This sort of shifting, linear songwriting appears at varying intensity through the album: on one end there’s “Target Practice,” the opener, which is built around a simple melodic theme that is repeated with variation as the instrumental builds up around it; on the other there’s “Heart of Darkness,” an eight minute long track that is essentially split into three movements, like a classical composition. This way of structuring songs makes for really compelling listening that demands and holds your attention, and pairs very well with Picton’s narrative lyricism.
The lyricism is one of the big things that sets this album apart from black midi, for me. Gone is the pitch black, sort of ironic, sort of apocalyptic tone of the average black midi song, instead we get genuine narratives with real, straightforward pathos. Picton’s songwriting always leaned a little in this direction, but on this album he’s able to pursue it completely, no longer limited to one or two songs per album that have to fit the tone set by Geordie Greep. “My New Band Believe” gives us a fiery revenge ballad, a tender and devastating story of love and loss, and a somber depiction of a one night stand, among other things. Stylistically the lyrics are impressionistic, with Picton usually singing broken bits of dialogue delivered by characters in the narrative, but where the lyrics don’t always convey all of what’s going on, the music fills in the gaps, providing ample narrative structure and momentum.
I like this lyrical style at least as much as the twisted nightmare stories black midi focused on, and I like it a lot more than the direction Geordie Greep took on “The New Sound.” I think it’s worth comparing the two albums, because they both feel like developments on the black midi sound. Greep leaned more into the technically elaborate electric side of black midi, while incorporating more Jazz and Bossanova influence. Lyrically, he went hard into the more neurotic side of what he was doing on black midi, penning an album all about pathetic men. Each song on “The New Sound” is about a new character to detest. I like “The New Sound,” but I find this element of it exhausting. I do not find a great deal of feeling beneath these detailed portraits of nasty losers, and by the end of each listen I find myself sort of tired of the album’s narrator, wishing for someone to tell me something real. The virtuosic electric guitar and lush jazz-rock arrangements add to this feeling of detachment. The album is cold, constructed.
I don’t mean to be too hard on “The New Sound.” It still blows my mind every time I listen to it, and the songwriting is definitely sharp, despite not exactly being anything I really respond to.
”My New Band Believe” starts at the same place and runs in the opposite direction. It’s entirely acoustic, which gives everything a close and intimate feeling, even when the arrangements get big and complex, and Picton’s songwriting goes for narrative pathos, building on the underlying humanity in “Eat, Men, Eat” instead of the sardonic darkness. Really it reminds me a lot of Black Country, New Road’s “Forever Howlong,” in that both see their artists leaving behind the trappings of prog and delving into chamber pop, and both see young man neuroses swapped out for regular old storytelling.
The Windmill Scene, as I’ve seen it called, has been for me pretty much the most exciting thing happening in contemporary music over the last decade. black midi blew my mind when I first heard them, right around the end of my time in high school. It’s remarkable to me how much room all of these artists evidently had to grow. What I see in “My New Band Believe,” I see in “Forever Howlong” and “The New Sound” as well: artists who developed remarkable, complete sounds early in their careers, who now refuse to rest on their laurels, finding new ways to develop and elaborate their styles, and taking big new swings and turns. I love how much these same people are still surprising and delighting me. The climax of “Actress” hits me with the same force now that “bmbmbm” did almost ten years ago. I can’t wait to find out what weird new thing from one of these artists is blowing my mind ten years from now, because I’m sure that it will be something.
Rating: ☆☆