Skip to main content

End Transmission

 Spicy Dill Pickle (kettle cooked), eh President’s Choice. Took you long enough. I found out about these about a month ago when my wife brought home a bag (and a bag of the new PC spicy ketchup as well). When I cracked the bag I was met with a familiar dill pickle scent, smells similar to PCs creamy dill pickle. Initial taste was a creamy dill pickle flavour followed soon by a nice pepper heat. It’s not an obnoxious spicy, it’s just sort of there for the party and lingers for a while after you’ve finished the mouthful. Natural hot pepper flavour that builds the further you get into the bag. These are some crunchy kettle cooked chips, they’re not playing around. Outside of the crunch, the chips definitely play second fiddle to the seasoning. Potato flavour is minimal, that’s not a complaint just an observation. These are also basically health chips at only 17% of our daily fat and a very surprizing 8% of your daily sodium (usually when the flavour is this pronounced the sodium levels will go up, I guess dill and spice don’t need much sodium to get up in your face) per 50g. I’d say these are similar to the Old Dutch spicy dill pickle, but at a super good price point. Crunchy chips with a nice flavourful heat, bangin’.

Edmonton's Home Front are f'ing fantastic. At the moment I'm listening to their full length Games of Power. Home Front play a synthy (post?) punk with a smattering of other influences. The vocal delivery (and here and there the music) has some hardcore/oi aggression (which makes sense as half of [the two members of] Home Front was in Wednesday Night Heroes). At times there's more punk that shines through, other times (I'm not sure if it's because of the synth) it makes me think of new wave. Throughout the album my mind goes to The Cure, somewhere between early to mid 80's. There's some darkness of Seventeen Seconds through Pornography, but then other times a more poppy The Top/Head on the Door influence shines through. That's not to say that The Cure is the only influence I can hear (this would definitely fit in a mix with Joy Division), but it's the one that I'm most familiar with. Bleak lyrics which are both offset by the melody and play into the coldness that synths can bring to music. Did I mention Home Front are fantastic. They're familiar but at the same time very much their own beast. Go listen to Home Front and  have a dance before the world implodes.  

stay hydrated,

marc

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The End of All Things

 I am not an expert on Nomeansno, but I can tell you this..their music can be quite difficult to get on physical media (LP, CD or otherwise [unless you want to spend somewhat spicy money]) in Canada. Luckily, Alternative Tentacles reissued Wrong. Now, cross border shipping is still muy caliente, but enough distros picked it up in Canada to allow me to put Wrong into my record collection this year. Nomeansno (since 1979) played (ended 2016) chaotic punk rock that I want to say fell into hardcore, but they were far more than a single genre. Wrong is unconventional for a punk band to say the least. The bass is lively as hell, with a tone that's absolutely perfect. The drums know when to get weird and when to kick it into overdrive. I don't know if it's jazz or funk, but there's something in the mix that if Nomeansno wasn't so aggressive it might feel pretentious..instead they're just odd and make me wish I had the opportunity to seem them live. Lyrics are talk sung...

A Seat At The Table

 Uglies chips are funny. Their marketing is (and this is paraphrasing) that they take the unusable/waste chips and produce their chips out of those leftovers. "Reducing waste and helping fight hunger". To me, their potato selection is pretty on par with other smaller scale/independent brands... so I'm not quite sure who's throwing out the potatoes that they make their chips with, IMO the potatoes/waste they use are the good ones. So yes, Uglies, 170g bag (nice size, not too small, not too large). Thin chip but crunchy. Oh, by the way this is about Uglies Salt and Vinegar flavored (yes, no u, these are imports that in Canada are usually found at Winners [at least when I've seen them]). So yes, decent amount of skin on these little kettle cooked chips... fairly white in colour chips. They have a nice white vinegar tartness. I picked up a somewhat granular salt texture when I was consuming. I feel Uglies are no more janky than your average bag of kettle cooked (good...

Stairway to heaven 2

Dear Diary, I was in Dollarama last week picking up some last minute..well it doesn't really matter why I was there. Anyway, as I was in the line for the checkout and out of the corner of my eye I noticed a blue bag that I'd seen a million times before. For some reason this time, it's unassuming blue on blue top with stock photo potato chip bottom intrigued me (that in addition to it being 280g for $2). I thought, to myself, 'hey, they carry Covered Bridge..maybe these Made in Canada "D Gourmet" potato chips are some other high end chip that just happens to be carried in dollar stores.'. I proceeded to take the $2 leap and threw them in my basket. Within an hour of getting home I had cracked the bag and was happily consuming. These D Gourmet Salt & Vinegar potato chips were for lack of better term, pretty run-of-the-mill. The chips are somewhat sterile, no well done chips and no skins, and fairly lightweight. The seasoning is faint but fairly well di...