Aside from a few minor van troubles, tour has been going well.  We only have 8 days left.  It’s weird looking back on some of the earlier shows of tour and realizing that they weren’t that long ago even though it feels like months have passed between now and then.

Since I last updated we played a couple of shows with Touche Amore – one in LA on the 4th of July and one at the Che Cafe on the 6th.  I love watching people lose their shit when a band they loves starts playing and every time I’ve seen Touche play kids lose their minds.

+ Stoked to get home and play this.

+ I’ve been really missing drinking coffee for the past month and this video/recipe from Cool Hunting is giving me a coffee boner.

+ Stoner idea comes to life: Dude lives in a house built of Legos.

+ Just found The Reptillian’s new album Full Health online.  Haven’t listened to it yet, but I expect good things based on seeing them live.  Nicest dudes.

Download The Reptillian – Full Health.

Hopefully tomorrow we have time to go visit the coffee shop we hung out at last time and see the girl who wanted to use her new imac to “yoohoo” us.  We can also stop by the Tuffy’s auto center that charged us $2,000 bucks to fix our van and burn it to the ground.

This is all I’ve been listening to:

For years, loving the National’s music has often meant reveling in the twinge of pain that comes when someone else manages to perfectly pin down and dissect a little piece of your psyche, which is why fans can get so inarticulate when trying to talk about what’s great about the band. As Felix Mendelssohn said, “The thoughts that are expressed to me by music that I love are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary, too definite.” High Violet‘s greatness, above beyond the fact that it’s a gorgeously arranged and performed set of songs of surprising tensile strength and grace, is that it rests its finger on some uncomfortably relevant truths about life after you no longer have the mental, physical, social or emotional wherewithal to spend every night at the bar and leaving the Silver City for somewhere quieter starts seeming like a good move. Anyone who loves this record probably has a very exact idea of how it touches on their own life, but most of us probably aren’t going to want to share.

via Pop Matters

Download:  The National – High Violet

Buy the vinyl HERE.

Download HERE.

At the end of April my band did a weekend tour with a great band from Pennsylvania called We Were Skeletons.  They recently signed to Topshelf Records and will be releasing their new full length very soon.  If you like bands like Kid Crash and Loma Prieta you will probably dig WWS.

Click here to view the embedded video.

+ Converge, Touche Amore, Thursday & Lewd Acts @ Black Cat Tonight

Awesome line up.  If you have $20 bucks to spare this show will be worth it.

More info HERE.

So as most of you probably already know Age Sixteen broke up a few weeks prior to the release of this split.  It’s a shame because their half of this split absolutely kills.  Don’t worry though because 4/5ths of those guys are forming a new band which I’m sure will be just as good as Age Sixteen.

Wren Lloyd‘s half of this split sounds sick though I think they are a band that must be witnessed live to gain the full experience.  Musically they remind me of Canada Songs era Daughters – thick distortion, nauseating feedback and a lot of blast beats.

Download: Wren Lloyd|Age Sixteen Split.

Octaves

The Kindness of Strangers

Pianos Become the Teeth

Renae

Wren Lloyd

The Defect

The Talking Head (Sonar)|407 East Saratoga Street, Baltimore.

6 pm|$8 Bucks|All Ages

It’s refreshing to see a “hardcore” band branch out into territory that is rarely explored in the genre.  Their new song Ballots/Stones, which I wouldn’t classify as hardcore, reminds me of a mixture of the clash, the smiths and wham – mixed with a bit of punk.  Sounds interesting, right?  Check it out HERE.

There’s also a sweet cover of The Get Up Kid’s song Holiday by Final Fight.

+ 57,000 dollar bed

+++++

This made me puke in my mouth a little bit…

This made me envious

I feel like a bit of a douche posting about my own band but I think some of the people who read this blog may be interested in this news.  I’m certainly pumped about it!

Topshelf Records (Defeater, My Heart To Joy) – in partnership with Mayfly Records – is excited to announce that Old Pride, the sophomore album from hardcore outfit Pianos Become The Teeth, is now available for pre-order.

Originally released on CD format by Topshelf in January 2010, the critically acclaimed album will see a limited first pressing of 500 12″ vinyl, split between green and white/green colored wax. All LPs will come with a digital download card as well as a 32×22 inch poster. To secure your copy, go here.

Additionally, Old Pride is streaming in its entirety at Punknews.org. The album’s first track, “Filial,” is still available for free download ( mp3) as well. In related news, Pianos Become The Teeth is gearing up for its 40+ day US Summer Tour from June 11th – July 21. Full itinerary will be announced soon but you can check out the tentative schedule at the band’s MySpace page.

Via BearTrap

and…

Just Say No! Records is releasing a split glow-in-the-dark/etched vinyl 9″ featuring a new song from us and a new song from The Saddest Landscape.  That can be pre-ordered HERE.

Download: Moneen – Are We Really Happy with Who We Are Right Now?

I lost my Ipod so I’ve been reconnecting with my compact disc collection over the past few weeks which has had me listening to some long forgotten records.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Moneen’s Are We Really Happy With Who We Are Right Now was released on Vagrant Records in 2003 – around the time post-hardcore was becoming popular in the mainstream and pop(punk)-rock bands like Saves the Day were in their hey day (STD was actually signed to Dreamworks during this time).

My favorite thing about Are We Really Happy… is that you can tell that the band labored over these songs.

Right from the get-go, it’s hard not to like these guys. During the first song, the title track, a surface observation would be that the singer sounds a lot like Matt Pryor from the Get Up Kids, not a bad thing. As the song goes on, the spastic, fast guitars and intricate rhythms remind me of the Casket Lottery, and the great melodies of Jimmy Eat World. The bridge sections fades to a heavy-reverb spacey guitar, and then unpredictable hits come in, bringing the rest of the band back for a strong ending, bringing thoughts of the intensity of Cursive.

Via PunkNews

]]> http://stokingtheroots.com/2010/04/13/moneen-are-we-really-happy-with-who-we-are-right-now/feed/ 0 http://stokingtheroots.com/2010/04/10/black-out-video-games/ http://stokingtheroots.com/2010/04/10/black-out-video-games/#comments Sat, 10 Apr 2010 21:09:53 +0000 Chad http://stokingtheroots.com/?p=2897 We stopped at a thrift store in rural Pennsylvania today on our way up to Connecticut and came across a few copies of Black Out‘s hit album Video Games.  Fugggggggggggggggg, someones parents just wasted a lot of money.

I don’t wanna go to school

Just wanna be a fool

Just wanna play video games

Everything else is really lame