…to say that we’re heading down to the Media Club tonight to check out the Misfits Party Part II. Featured bands are Modern Creatures, Nu Lines (Nu Sensae and B-Lines) and White Cuts (White Lung and Random Cuts). Oh, and Mish Way from White Lung is dropping a DJ set. Doors at 10pm because the Media Club has some other event beforehand.

Look for a brand new interview with our new pal Marissa Johnson from Weathered Pines tomorrow! (Spoiler: I get schooled in country music.)

Well, here it is! Good news for rained-on people! We just got word today from Nominal Records and Dejlig Records that the test pressings for Vapid‘s first LP Practically Dead (Nominal) and Weathered Pines‘ first LP The Sky Between the Buildings (Dejlig) have arrived. Basically this means that the two albums we’re most excited about this year are going to be released one after the other in the next short while (Weathered Pines in November, and Vapid in December is the goal). Stay tuned for news on release parties, as well as interviews with both bands!

Edit: Also! There is a new(?) Vapid track called Choke up at the Nominal Records MySpace site. It’s not on their 7″ or on the Emergency Room Compilation, so it’s new to me. Hooray!

Vapid photo courtesy of the band. Weathered Pines photo courtesy of Steve Louie.

For those of us who still read newsprint, there’s a great big article on our friends at the Safe Amplification Site Society in this week’s Vancouver Courier. You can also click here to read it online with all the pictures and whatnot. We’ve also reprinted the text (after the jump) in case the article ever gets taken down. Go Safe Amp kids! You guys are awesome!
Read the rest of this entry »

Hey again! I didn’t plan on posting anything else today, but then I came across the new songs that Moonshiner has up on her MySpace site. If you head there right now you can hear the completed Island Vacation as well as demo versions of Baby Don’t Go, Teen Angst, What Do You Wanna Do? and Street Walkin’. So yeah, this site is officially in love with Ms. Burns and her music now, so head on over and check it out!

Hey! It’s an actual review! Real site content! Well, I’ve been kinda under the weather lately but today I’m feeling a lot better and I really wanted to get a review of the Man Your Horse Tails EP up since Julian was nice enough to come and visit me at work last week and put a fresh copy in my hands.

So what to say? Well first off, the EP is a total success insofar as it looks good, sounds good, is well packaged, well recorded and really shows the diversity of the band. It really is an excellent recording and one most welcome in our collection. Although comprised of just six tracks, you really feel that you’re listening to a full-length album not because the songs are overly-long (they’re not) but because it’s obvious that a ton of time and effort went into the recordings. We love rough and tumble EPs recorded over the span of a weekend too, but this is clearly not one of those and the care that went into it really shows. (Editor’s Note: Apparently the entire EP was recorded in one night at their own jam space. Jesus Murphy!)

The only fault that I could find, really, was that each song on the EP is so different that the project as a whole seems to lack full cohesion. Man Your Horse have only been around for just over one year, but this EP almost comes off as a career retrospective featuring very different music styles, time signatures and even lead vocals (often within the same song). Julian Marrs can sing like nobody’s business. That’s beyond question, but what I’m wondering is if he has yet to choose a vocal style of his own as the vast differences tend to come more from him than from the rest of the band.

But then again, what do I know? If you watch their live performances (see below), you’ll see exactly how everything comes together live. Any criticisms that can be found with Man Your Horse are merely nitpicking. Julian, Scott and Calum comprise a very dynamic band with a lot of talent and a great stage presence and they really deserve a good listen.

Holy frick Twin Crystals! Take that cheese state!

Steve Watts – aspring actor and frontman for local punk band Irreverents – contacted us last night to let us know that there will be a fundraiser tonight at The Cellar for an independent horror movie they’re trying to make. The film is called Uncut and sounds similar in theme to The Blair Witch Project, with the exception that it’ll be a full-length movie shot all in one take.

So there you have it! If you want to support local film and show your love for local punks Irreverents and hip-hop heads Black Market Propaganda you may want to head on over to The Cellar on Granville tonight. Oh, and we should also mention that there will be a Halloween costume contest, a 50-50 draw, a dance-off and some sort of world record attempt involving the alcohols. Bands hit the stage at 9:30pm and minimum requested donation is $10, $12 the door.

Hey everybody! We came across this two-part documentary produced by Culture Catch on the (now defunct) Vancouver band They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Filmed at the 2006 South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival in Austin, Texas, the film really captures the fun and mayhem of the band’s live performances. I was lucky enough to meet lead singer Nut Brown after a solo opening performance just before he moved to Montreal last year. A real showman and an exuberant creator of dissonant musical forms, Nut Brown will definitely be missed.

In our never-ending quest to get paid while goofing around at work keep everyone in the loop, we’ve fired up our very own Facebook group. We update it even more frequently than we update the site because we don’t want you to think we’re grab-assing around when in fact we’re busy reading band news, sending out interviews, meeting folks, and listening to local recordings WHILE grab-assing around. Basically there are two points to this post.

1) You should become a fan of our group on Facebook, and
2) We think the term ‘grab-assing’ is hilarious.

Okay!

Ian Explosivo

Well, here’s hopin’ you didn’t have anything scheduled for October 29th because now you’re going to have to cancel it. Even if it’s a major surgery or your own wedding. Why? Because local punk superheroes The Jolts are puttin’ on the leather jackets and hitting the stage for a 25-song Ramones set at The Rickshaw! Hot Jesus!

Special guests include Evilive and Brigadoom. Doors at 8pm?

Band photo courtesy of Palomino.