Friday, July 31, 2015

An Overview of "Sour Solution"

So apparently all the key guys from the European Sweet Skateboards jumped ship late last year to start their own brand, Sour. I'm not sure why they all decided to leave, but you don't usually see that if the team is generally okay with where they are. Whatever the story behind that might be, they started their own brand and came out with The Sour Solution back in January. In the last week, the full video showed up on the web. I don't really care to 'review' the video other than to say I really liked it, but I think it might be fun to go through most of the parts to bring out some highlights.

Starting things off, we have a pretty entertaining bail section starring Simon Isaksson. At 1:45, there's a really cool trick where Simon does a Bennett grind where he grinds on the OTHÉR side of the ledge and then scares the hell out of a pedestrian, which makes it a line as far as I'm concerned. At 3:10 he starts a line by doing a slappy bluntslide (second one in this video part, mind you) and then ducks under a rail mid-slide. It's awesome.


Monday, July 27, 2015

Why Haven't I Seen This?- 24

There's tons of good skate footage out there. I just want to share something that's good that you maybe haven't seen before to get you stoked on skating.

So for the next few weeks, I'm going to be featuring clips from a great video that I stumbled upon titled Brainsworld. A lot of the spots in the video are also featured in the A Happy Medium series, which makes me think that these guys are from Arizona, although they're a bit younger than the Happy Medium crew.

This week we have Tyler Gould up to bat. Tyler's sick, you guys. This video part alone features some really awesome fastplant variations (a la Jeff Stevens), one of the most solid backside flips I've ever seen, and a kickflip 5-0 that's just perfect in every way. I hope you like it.


Thursday, July 23, 2015

A Tribute to Pop Shuvits

It's pretty rare to see just a plain pop shuvit in a video part. It's pretty obvious why: it's just about the easiest trick you can do. A lot of kids learn shuvits before they can properly ollie, and I know that I could pop shuvit for weeks before I ever learned my first kickflip.

I think that a good pop shuvit really is a think of beauty though. For one thing, it's a true test of pop- there's no foot drag or flick, so all of the height comes from raw pop. Since all of the movement happens with your back foot, there's this cool symmetry where you start the trick with your back foot and stop it with your front foot. A good pop shuvit should look like your backfoot is delivering the tail of the board directly to your front foot. I can't help but feel alone in my appreciation of this trick though, because nobody else really raves about pop shuvits. So maybe through this tribute, I can convince you that a good pop shuvit is a beautiful thing. I'm not focusing on frontside shuvits, 360 shuvits, nollie shuvits, or fakie shuvits. Just regular, backside pop shuvits to really showcase how great this trick is.

For starters, let's look at Brad Staba's trick tip of a pop shuvit. It features a whole montage of good pop shuvit, but Staba has my favorite. It's a smooth, floating one that really just seems to work out perfectly.

Monday, July 20, 2015

Why Haven't I Seen This?- 23

There's tons of good skate footage out there. I just want to share something that's good that you maybe haven't seen before to get you stoked on skating.

So for the next few weeks, I'm going to be featuring clips from a great video that I stumbled upon titled Brainsworld. A lot of the spots in the video are also featured in the A Happy Medium series, which makes me think that these guys are from Arizona, although they're a bit younger than the Happy Medium crew.

This week we've got Tino Rincon. All I have to say about Tino is that he looks unnaturally natural on a board. At one point he does a nollie frontside 270 to back tail 270 out, and he does it with more ease than I thought possible. Enjoy.