Tales of the Salty Bag

FRIED PICKLES WITH RANCH FLAVORED LAY'S. As you can tell by that first line, I recently had a friend that went on a trip to the States and was kind enough to bring me back a bag of 'merican Lay's (unsolicited at that [thanks Top]). I got them on Monday and I'm already cracking them and posting..this is a pretty quick turnaround from procurement to this here blog. I'm not going to tell you what I think they're going to be like as I have heard second hand of another's first impression, so without further ado...they smell like dill pickle chips with the faint odor of a gym bag (or something to that affect [that was unexpected]). They taste like creamy dill's first cousin. Dill is up front and centre with some creamy texture to the chip seasoning. There's almost a hint of the most faint blue cheese flavour, I know they're telling me it's ranch on the bag but I get some sort of blue cheeseness (maybe it's just me [I have been eating a lot of b

I had a small bag of chips earlier this week, they were about a month past their best before date so I was concerned about 2 things. 1 - Small bags go stale a lot quicker than large bags. Don't ask me why, it's just that way. 2 - They were of the Lays Streats of the World variety. Pizza to be exact. (the reason I was concerned about this is because I thought that once again I missed blogging about a limited time chip in the time-frame when people could actually go out and purchase if my words made the chips seem appealing [the day after I had my Pizza Lays I was at work, and a co-worker broke out a bag of Pizza Lays, I guess they recently re-released this flavour for a limited time]) Now what do these Pizza Lays smell like? Large chain pepperoni pizza. The crunch is somewhat lightweight (I guess midweight if you take kettle cooked out of the equation). Now I can hear you screaming, 'but what about the flavour Marc. WHAT ABOUT THE FLAVOUR!! DO THEY TASTE LIKE PEPPERONI

Wow this year is flying by. I'm already writing about Mal Blum's latest offering, Pity Boy . This album was high on my list of anticipated albums because their last album, 2015's You Look A Lot Like Me , was bangin'. With Pity Boy, Mal once again brings their somewhat monotonous voice to deliver their poetic lyrics over top of predominantly (mid to late 90's) alt rockish music. There's some bounce and sweetness here and there throughout the album, but for the most part there's a lot of subdued darkness reflected in both the music and the lyrics. When I read the lyrics they came off as very personal, they're not specific to the point of being not relatable but they are definitely autobiographical. There's some nice use of metaphor throughout the album and repetition/semi-repetition (does that exist, she'll repeat a group of words but sort of change the order sometimes or throw in a new word here and there). When the songs dip into relationships, i