Remap Recommends, Volume XVII

Remember when you’d walk into a local music, book, or video store and there’d be an adorable section where the employees would recommend what they were interested in that month? 

Welcome to our little version of it, called Remap Recommends. 

It's a chance for the staff at Remap to let you know what they've been playing, reading, listening to, or watching.

Patrick Recommends: "Float (feat: Jim Adkins)" by Jay Som

If video games were my primary interest in elementary school and middle school, music was my primary interest in high school. Some of that was writing about video games transitioning from a curiosity to a legitimate career trajectory, but I also happened to grow up at such a cool fucking time for technology. Napster, the iPod, CD-Rs—all of that was happening while I was in high school. Oh, and street teams. It was the era of the street time, the time when you were sent a box full of tapes and tiny posters you were supposed to put on people's windshields in the parking lot. I promise it was sick as hell.

My high school era cemented so much of the music that I still listen to now. I do listen to new music, but it often goes in one ear and out the other. Not much sticks. When I don't know what to listen to, I'll randomly pick a band I like (i.e. Flaming Lips) and ask Apple Music to make a radio station out of it. The result is something very pleasant while answering emails or writing an article like this, but it rarely results in me going "holy shit, who is this artist?"

So when something does stick, it feels notable. I only discovered Jay Som's single for an upcoming album in a message board thread, because I looked at the "feat: Jim Adkins" part and went "huh, why is that familiar." Oh, right: Jimmy Eat World. I was eating up anything Weezer-adjacent around high school, too, and while many of those bands are lost to time, Jimmy Eat World was one of the really good ones. The Middle remains one of my favorite albums.

Float would be an excellent track without Jim on it. It's a transendent track with Jim's vocals on it. Plus, the music video is such a throwback, too. High school and early college was the time of house parties. Do people still do house parties, where you'd wander around the entirety of a house half drunk and have a million different conversations that you won't remember the next day? That stuff ruled.

Also, I highly recommend playing this very, very loud in a car.

FLOAT DON'T FLYYYYYY FLOAT DON'T FLYYYYYY

Rob Recommends: Stick, Apple TV+

I love sports movies but one of my favorite movies is Tin Cup, a Kevin Costner romantic comedy where he’s a burned-out never-was golfer who falls in love with his golf nemesis’ girlfriend. I turns out I might be a sucker for ”washed-up middle-aged golfer” stories because I’ve really enjoyed Stick, an Owen Wilson dramedy on Apple where he plays a man who crashed-out of the pro tour due to personal tragedy and who crashed out of the rest of his adult life due to his inability to process or handle any of the ensuing fallout.