SPOTBLOG

Take your Super Bowl party to the next FUCKING level

2012-01-24T18:53:00.003-05:00

Don't fuck around this year. You know you are going to eat sausage at the Super Bowl So why not eat the best sausage and brats made by the brand that invented Sausage and Brats? When it comes to sausage quality matters; all other brands of sausage are made from 35% entrails 25% dicks 30% feces and 10% teeth. At Johnsonville they castrate all animals prior to butchering so you know you are only getting the good stuff. The Johnsonville name has been synonymous with quality for over 500 years, JAY-Z eats these fucking sausages. So this year rather than eating hot dogs and hamburgers buy like 200 Johnsonville sausages and watch your friends tear down your front door and kill each other in your living room over the delicious country smoked flavor of handmade sausages and bratwursts. Also try the "Beddar with Cheddar" sausages so good you will swear they were made with real meat or cheddar.

ty oresti. happy new year yall

2012-01-05T18:20:00.001-05:00

LuigiToilet

2011-12-27T15:19:00.002-05:00

You linked to a song called "Pod Fodder 58", and I can't find the song you're talking about so I'm reviewing this one.

Cool beginning with the guitar and bassdrum. Vocals are not that great. reminds me of Sonic Youth, but not as good.

actually, the vocals are pretty dang annoying..they get more annoying as the song goes on. This song is kinda meandering overall. I like the style of instrumentation and the beat of the song though. but it doesn't go anywhere and doesn't make me feel any kind of emotion.

2.5/5

my song

Pixies "River Euphrates" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdzoK5jwESM

this song/album/band changed my life as a highschooler!!

From: Doug

2011-12-23T03:08:00.001-05:00

Follow up on last nights chat--woke up drunk.

2011-12-22T16:37:00.001-05:00

14 hours ago
Sent from Chat
Doug Bleek

craig
..
14 hours ago
Sent from Chat
Craig Heed

hey
..
14 hours ago
Sent from Chat
Doug Bleek

i am very drunk
..
14 hours ago
Sent from Chat
Craig Heed

awesome
how was the party
..
14 hours ago
Sent from Chat
Doug Bleek

this is incredible
in a incredibke
way
i need to go asleep
now
..

GROOMS + STRANGE SHAPES + ME !

2011-12-06T03:00:00.003-05:00

ONCE UPON A TIME SOME BANDS PLAYED AT THE EARTH HOUSE!
ABOUT SEVEN PEOPLE CAME TO THE SHOW!
THE CONCERT WAS GREAT! THE CONCERT WAS AWESOME! IT WAS A KNOCK OUT!

STRANGE SHAPES BROUGHT A FOG MACHINE
THE FOG MACHINE WAS GREAT
THE ROCK AND ROLL WAS GREAT
THE JAM WAS PERFECT
THE FIRE ALARM WENT OFF AND THE FIRE DEPT CAME!
THE FIRE FIGHTER YELLED AT US

ALL THE BANDS ROCKED IT ON
THE CROWD MURMURED LIKE A FAT ASLEEPIGN DOG
NOBODY LOVED IT
EVERYBODY LOVED IT
THE JAMS WERE GREAT
and EVERYBODY GOT PAID LOTSA MONEY!!!!

WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY

2011-11-27T22:32:00.003-05:00

THE NIGHT THAT WAS: YUPPIE CAFE

2011-11-26T15:12:00.004-05:00

LAST NIGHT the band slothbear performed at a local daycare center called the YUPPIE CAFE. you couldn't even buy beer at this dump but we got $$paid$$ so i won't be too mean. anyways after watching our dear friends perform it was time for our scheduled performance, but not before evil, conniving gatekeepers tried to prevent us from doing the only thing we can agree on loving to do. one attempted to blind us with lies about his 'dying' girlfriend, who presumably attempted to overdose on drugs b/c she's going out w/ a baldy. perhaps we should have relented despite the SLEAZE with which this decepticon attempted to pull at our tender heart strings, but we stuck to our guns only to have him whisk away all our brand new tween fans. and you KNOW its the tweenies who buy the most STUFF. bad vibes got the better of us and our less-than-lively set came to an abrupt, self-imposed end. a sincere apology to our close friends who paid $7 to see this shitshow-- in the future i assure you, we will let the bad guys win.

||||||||PALZ||||||||

Why Janet Maslin's review of Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 is shit, Also why Ross needs to STFU

2011-11-10T11:45:00.005-05:00

In her NYT review of 1Q84 Janet Maslin claims"'1Q84' has even his most ardent fans doing back flips as they try to justify this book’s glaring troubles." despite the fact that this statement is plain untrue, I found the glaring troubles in her book review with nominal effort. Her review consistently criticizes 1Q84 for things that are arguably tenants of postmodern literature while never actually giving reasons as to why they are unsuccessful. The first claim Maslin levels against 1Q84 Is that the book itself is too long, or rather, the book is unrewarding. Despite the fact that the mere notion of books following some length/reward formula is childish especially when discussing Postmodernism. This same claim could be made against most novels written in the postmodern tradition, in The Erasers, Alain Robbe-Grillet one of the pioneers of postmodernist literature, famously described a tomato wedge in a salad in copious scientific detail. The mere fact that a novel is long or a novel contains filler has not been a valid argument against a work since James Joyce wrote Ulysses.
Maslin's second claim, written as a one sided conversation with herself in which she presumably lays the smackdown on all those ardent Murakami defenders (I don't think I need to point out how this could be construed as a little bias), rails against the novels title 1Q84 and whether or not its a play on George Orwell's 1984 (just as Murakami's earlier novel Norwegian Wood was a play on the Beatle's song). She then asks the defenders whether or not the presence of two moons and a reference to Sonny and Cher constitute the novels classification as science fiction. Not only would I dismiss such claims because they are wholly irrelevant. Maslin yet again foolishly misclassifies the appearance of another tenant of postmodernism as half-assed science fiction (Why she cites Sonny and Cher as evidence of this I have no idea). Postmodernism as an artistic movement is largely based in the juxtaposition of highbrow and lowbrow imagery. Maslin cites both the highbrow twin moons (presumably largely symbolic) and the lowbrow Sonny and Cher (ROSS NOTE: Gravity's Rainbow is critically acclaimed for Pynchon's use of similar juxtapositions). The presence of these two elements really only lend more evidence to the novels classification as another work of postmodernist literature while never actually giving any indication of the books quality.
The rest of Maslin's review is largely a summation of the novel punctuated with words like "Ploys," "Unseemly," "Unconvincing," to create the illusion of an unsuccessful novel while remaining firmly grounded in unsubstantiated subjectivism, until she cites an awkward erotic fragment without any context and then uses that as evidence as to why the book makes no sense. In her conclusion Maslin once again steamrolls over any inkling of postmodernist storytelling by openly criticizing the novels ending for not tying up all loose ends and being way more vague than the ending of the Steve Jobs biography.
I cannot vouch for the quality of 1Q84 because I have not yet read it but as an intelligent and critical reader, I would never say that a review as poor as this one, clearly written by a person who has no grasp on postmodernist literature, encapsulates why Murakami on the whole is overrated especially when I would profess myself as someone who enjoys the works of Thomas Pynchon and Don Dellilo, two authors whose novels are guilty of all the misguided criticisms made against 1Q84.
Janet Maslin is clearly unqualified as a reviewer of postmodern literature. Her review makes it apparent she is neither capable of understanding nor appreciating the movement and when she can find no shortcomings within a novels content she has no problem fabricating them from elements of the artistic movement itself. Ross Barkan is a pedantic dope who sees any permeation of literature into the popular consciousness as a negative thing because he likes the unwarranted feeling of superiority he gets from telling people he's read Gravity's Rainbow. That is how he let a terrible review like this one paint a grossly misshapen picture of perhaps the greatest living asian novelist.

this dude taught me how to play guitar

2011-11-07T18:28:00.000-05:00

cf- "Olio"

"Sleepy Daze" anti-video

2011-11-04T02:36:00.002-04:00

we don't have any fans, so I took the matter of 'cheesy fan-made youtube slideshow' into my own hands.

catch the rest of the album and more scribble scrabbles here

c/p

divine intervention

2011-10-31T19:32:00.003-04:00

this weekend we were supposed to go on a mini 'tour' thru delaware and virginia, but luckily our car died halfway thru so we could get to go home and do this.

big upps to delaware tho, except for the bro who stole my beer from behind my amp.

Are Band Could Be Ur Life

2011-09-14T14:17:00.000-04:00

yes

2011-08-01T14:31:00.002-04:00

edit:

Yeah I had these fucking posers today kids think heavy metal vocals and it's just some guys with balls in their mouth

This is real metal.
darkstar3x16 11 months ago

edit edit:

HEAVY METAL
Caboose056 1 year ago

Why 98.7 KISS FM Rules -part 2

2011-07-19T00:44:00.002-04:00

also this video is fucking incredible

Why 98.7 KISS FM rules

2011-07-18T12:41:00.002-04:00

SATURDAYSATURDAYSATURDAY

2011-06-21T02:11:00.002-04:00

seventeen once

2011-06-11T03:08:00.003-04:00

our new single. split 7" w/ lost boy will be available from Rich Moms (nsfw) and at shows. here it at our brand new bandcamp and for an as of yet undetermined period of time, download both tracks for free.

'seventeen once' is the male protagonist's shameful bid at coercing an underage girl into having genital sex. 'oxus armlets,' the band's first true "life on the road" song, was commissioned by comedy lynchpin kevin allison for his 'risk show' podcast, but was seemingly never used.

AHMAHCHAAAS

2011-05-31T00:04:00.003-04:00

a british woman at cameo gallery once asked me if i was from manchester and thought i was ian brown. i don't see the resemblance, but after watching this can see that we are the same, he and i. spiritually.

Slothbear Slaps the American Borener

2011-05-14T13:11:00.005-04:00

So i go to this show last night, no one in the crowd but uggos and fatties. Everyone seems to have gone to Taco Bell beforehand because chrissy's whole house smells like mexi-melts and double decker tacos. Well whatever, the first band goes on and the fatties arent into it, they all start eating white cheddar cheetos because they are under the false impression that they are healthier for you, maybe they are, who gives a shit. The first band does suck, its like the native american leonard cohen or some shit with these two fat dudes who look like dave grohl; both of them. Anyway chief leonard or whatever is rambling about his tribe or some shit and the dave grohls are trying to bum cheetoes from the audience. The audience isn't sharing and the fat dudes are getting bummed out. There is this dude with glasses standing near me and i can literally watch him getting fatter. he went outside to smoke weed and came back 15 pounds heavier. The next band goes on and they are called something else and they are equally terrible in a totally different way. this band actually has fans though because these fat chicks who had been sitting down for the last set all get up and start swaying back and forth. At this point the whole fucking house starts creaking like the floor is going to explode because of all these lardos shifting their weight. At this point i am fearing for my life so i head outside to get away from the danger and someone outside has lit chrissys garbage can on fire and is trying to do harry potter spells or some shit. Not get sidetracked and rail against harry potter but that book has to be pretty close to utter pornography. Hundreds of thousands of kids read those books each year and you could probably count the lessons learned on one hand. Motherfucker drops out of school to kill someone? harry potter never fucking works at anything, hes like fucking scooby doo constantly falling ass-backwards into adventures and splendor. the only difference between harry and shaggy is that shaggy didnt have the same sense of entitlement as harry potter. Harry Potter acted like he ran shit because he had a scar on his forehead; but guess what, you cant have a scar that close to your brain without some of it leaking out (implying...). Anyway the show gets kinda boring so SPOILER: i didnt even stay to see Slothbear; instead i went to brooklyn and ate at this pizza restaurant (lol oxymoron) Fornino's and dude this place was so stupid, people were sitting there ordering pizza of a paper menu (wtf?). Im checking out the menu to see which pizza im gonna get. I settle on this one with mushrooms on it. I take a few glances around the restaurant and realize that the patrons are uglier than the uggos at he american boner. Everyone there is fucking gross and the people across from me are taking pictures of the pizzas and getting drool on their "i love hitler and fat chicks" t-shirt's. anyway the pizza shows up but there is no sauce on it because it is a 'white pizza' which is like a 'red pizza' if it tasted like bread and grease. not to turn this into a restaurant review or anything but the place sucks, dont go there.

Infinte Jest, "Come Dance With Me"

2011-04-29T13:33:00.004-04:00

I sit in my living room. The very, very lo-fi soft rock (the un-hip kind: this is not Double Wonderful kitsch or that je-ne-sais-quoi that is emnated from Hall and Oates, the likes of which manifests triangle smiles, South Park style, evoke Carlos, MacGruber sex scenes &c.) of my uncle "Uncle Rick" plays from my Grandma's speakers. It sounds like a more soulful and bluesy Randy-Marsh'd James Taylor if he were vaguely interested in wizards. Makes me worry about World of Darkness in more than one capacity.

I am thinking about Infinte Jest, which I completed yesterday. Completed reading, that is. There is a still-too-hot-to-eat Meatloaf TV dinner sitting in front of me. I got home from Stony Brook at 5 AM this morning and this will be the day's inaugural meal. It is nearly 2 PM now, but I woke up at 11 so I don't really feel guilty about sleeping too much or anything.

We will not practice this weekend.

At the tail end of the first chapter there is a part where Hal, narrating from the furthest point chronologically, references John Wayne's not having won and Whataburger and Hal and Donald Gately digging up the late Himself's head (or what's left of it, apparently [via Joelle I think] where the cartridge, the novel's fifth or is it sixth and only lethal titual Entertainment).

As of right now I postulate that Hal dosed himself with DMZ. Haven't read any online summaries or explanations yet. This is unadulterated Ginsberg literary detective work, ladies and gents.

Makes me think about those novels in the works of mine. (Last night inspired by Mike Seminara, my successor at Spoke the Thunder to return to fiction writing)
But really it also makes me think about the Harry Potter franchise, those really gratifying plot books &c.

A Tale of Two Cities is one of the most excellently composed novels of all time. Its writing is not particularly enjoyable. However, its plot is more or less unparalleled among works of literary fiction. I remarked all throughout the end of high school that the end of Arrested Development was Dickensian. This should cement just how much I attribute really airtight, complex plot-based writing to the man, whom I only read once and when I was fifteen and probably not a particularly good judge of all things literary. Infinite Jest could have been A Tale of Two Cities and comes closer than any of the other great big postmodern novels (V., Gravity's Rainbow, Underworld) that I've read. The reference to Gately in Hal's chronologically last narrative (the novel's first) was what stopped my vacillation and made me feel for certain that Infinite Jest is a truly Great Novel.

With about two hundred pages to go, I could have outlined a legitimately great, action-packed, skeletal arc of where the book could have gone. Not all of it would have been any good. The AFR assault on ETA could have been something like Death Eaters. Hal's harrowing decision to take DMZ, told from--gasp--Pemulis' eyes... Fighting alonside one another readers and Hal alike chuckle when, somehow, Orin sees Helen Steeply's penis. Perhaps Mario is skilled in the struggle by Marathe's Avada Kedavra. Joelle watches Infinite Jest V or VI and is unfazed, amid womp womp wahhhhhhs and the like.

In all seriousness this is not the sort of gratification I expected. And thank (G/g)od this is not how it all turns out. I trusted DFW would end the novel much better than I possibly could have and he did. But I expected something else, at first.

There are two main points I want to make from here on out and I am not sure how they will be organized. Let me say though that they are points about anit-Pynchonism and Impressionist Entertainment. I think they will weave in and out of one another, because they are more related than I first thought.

I love Thomas Pynchon, which people I know know too well. And I wrote extensively about Thomas Pynchon and the notion of closure in an independent study I completed this fall. Maybe I'll post that here, too, to the chagrin of Craig and whomever reads this thing for entertainment, whomever that may be. In novels like Gravity's Rainbow what actually happens to any characters short of a burnt out and amnesiac Slothrop and an even more burnt out Gottfried (this is a VERY clever joke, sucks no one will get it but a by-this-point-quite-enervated-FDB) is not really alluded to or important in any way. Abundance renders so much obsolete.

I'm going on and on, so here's the point. Infinite Jest is fucking long. It is not a hard read, but it is mammoth. And its 1079 pages could easily crest more like a traditional novel but they do not. Instead of the Deathly Hallows epilogue we get a last vignette, a final fucked up, not at all lucid flash of Gately, a former drug addict, hospitalized and refusing narcotic painkillers after becoming brutally fucked up in an honorable way, waking up on a cold beach after like some seriously like fucked up binge-shooting up and a little Sunshine, in more than one sense. The revelation 20 pages in that Gately and Hal, perhaps the novel's two most central charcters who do not meet at any other point in the novel, are digging up Himself's skull implies something very purposeful, but is ultimately completely superfluous. It alludes to that page-burner plot and the crazy, compositional wild magic that would have extended IJ at least two hundred pages longer, had Dickens been brought in as a consultant toward the end. It reminds the reader curious enough to re-read the first chapter immediately after finishing the novel that DFW is a commericial writer as well as a novelist and, as the entire brunt of the novel's immense statement about entertainment suggests, perhaps the most articulate critic of all entertainment who has ever lived, been published and cared about, that too much entertainment is not good.

What I love about this little impressionistic joke is that DFW is playing with readers interested in what plays out beyond the "fifth wall." I haven't looked for the IJ fan fiction yet, but there's so much room for it to exist. As Eggers suggests in the introduction the edition I have, Infinite Jest suggests that there are readers who could enjoy Pynchon and Elmore Leonard. I suppose he is right, becuase in some capacity that's exactly the audience to whom Infinite Jest is tailored.

DFW's writing does not make me swoon for the poetry of his words. As someone, Eggers again, I think, suggests, there is not one lazy sentence in the novel. His writing is not Pynchon's sublime, as in Edmund Burke, frightening, Andrew Marvell on a bit of DFW's DMZ, comic books and Faulkner mind-obliterating fairweather ecstasy. It is more akin to DeLillo's straighter-forward writing. It is not ravishing so much as it is kind of pretty, pretty potent and, well, sorry T Ruggles P, way, way coherent.

If I were not composing a Spotblog post and were trying to shape this into like an academic paper, I might write something like: Wallace practices what he preaches. He foregoes gratifying his readers with the climax of the AFR's terrorist plot, or the circumstances of Hal's ingestion of DMZ or Joelle and O. sitting together on that porch swing. Gately having a catch with his son, throwing righty and like a rocket. Wallace is not C. He does not guide the needle to your badly bruised forearm and shoot you up with Sunshine. Infinite Jest refuses to give its readers the gratification that Blood Sister, IJ V or VI or Demerol do.

The line "The book Infinite Jest is unlike the film Infinite Jest, perhaps a statement about a difference or two between literature and film" would surely be somewhere in this essay.

I'd probably go on longer, but I'm bored.

When the A.D.A. man comes to Pat, before you re-read Year of Glad, the reader who trusts the shadowplay that DFW casts knows in that impressionistic, intuitive way that Gately will turn out all right and anyone who remembers the basic gist of the novel's first chapter knows that Hal does not. Personally, I like Gately a lot more than Hal, anyhow.

Slothbear Contest

2011-04-29T00:33:00.002-04:00

Slothbear has a new EP or some shit coming out soon and I am giving away one copy for FREE signed by the boys with a personalized letter of sincere appreciation from Doug Bleek. That's right, shit just got real. We are taking the concept of Pokemon Snap and integrating fat people and twitter. The rules of the contest are pretty simple but it is a multi step process so let me break it down for you.
step 1: follow the slothdudes or me on twitter.( @bearslothbearsl and @Ktomitted respectively)
step 2: take a candid picture of a fat person
step 3: tweet the picture mentioning either Slothbear or myself and the hashtag #ssafcontest (bonus points will be awarded for a funny caption)
step 4: we score the photos based on how funny they are
Contest RULEZ
1. photo must be candid, in other words: fatso can't know
2. we are looking for fat randos, not people you know like your fat mom or fat brother. they can however be renowned fat people.
3. obv: no self portraits
4. no shit you find on the internet
REMEMBER:
we are judging these photos on how funny they are so if you see some fat chick order over 10 tacos at taco bell and eat them inside the restaurant alone take a picture and win something for it. Fatties do funny shit all the time, just look at Ralphie May.
GOOD LUCK

animal collective presale password

2011-04-20T19:19:00.000-04:00

summertime

some picx from my one man show

2011-04-10T03:30:00.005-04:00

the other week i had a solo show in the gallery at my school's art center. it was the first time i ever formally displayed my work, and my aunt cathy (shouuuutouuuuuut) was kind enough to take a few photos. here are the ones that came out the least blurry:

pavo album cover-- i never sprayed the evergreens with any sort of fixative or whatever, so they've kinda wilted. maybe i'll replace em someday.

this is another mixed media thing i did of a basking shark, one of my favorite sharks when i was a kid. i had a dream very similar to this, only with heavy floodlighting.

here's one of the few canvas paintings ive ever made, though a lot of the surface is covered in old newsprint. it's a portrait of jordan michael, who tried to paste showpapers onto a painting i gave to joe ahearn as a gift. i figured for my next painting, i'd do a portrait of JM, but this time just layer the paint on top of some old showpapers so he wouldn't have to worry. i unfortunately made him a bit handsomer than he actually is, but it's more about the action-- JM's unsightly septum piercing being forcefully dislodged by magnets, and the damage incurred. considering giving it to him at the next slothbear show he attends. lemme know whatcha think, todd!

spirit ppl album comes out pretty soon

2011-04-06T12:27:00.002-04:00

you can hear it and see a poorly scanned/cropped version of the cover i made here

courtheed was kind enough to take a pic of the original cover i proposed:

i think it was the best one but u kno its like they say, say levee

slothbear reunion tour circa 2025

2011-04-03T23:52:00.000-04:00

Critical Acclaim

2011-03-20T02:18:00.002-04:00

I just wrote a book im not going to plug it or anything but its titled "Spring Cleaning" and i think its pretty sick. Here is what the press had to say:

"Spring Cleaning's jacket claims it is the story of two brothers, Ding Rames and Ving Rames reunited after the events of the Civil War. SPOILER ALERT: The story is basically a rip-off of Rain Man if instead of Dustin Hoffman having idiot savant counting abilities, he has a 15 inch penis. The author even has the gall to refer to Ving as a savant. The characters are one dimensional and despite this, the author clearly gets them mixed up on more than one occasion. The novel lacks any clear scope besides the author mentioning every three pages that the story takes place in the Marvel universe via the Ghost Rider character who serves for little more than a moral compass for Ding and Ving. The novel is told from both the perspective of Ding and Ving with the final act of the story being told by SPOILER ALERT: Ghost Rider, the effect is extremely obtrusive due to Ving being severely mentally handicapped. Much like the rest of the book ending falls flat in a twist in which SPOILER ALERT Ding realizes that he is also autistic but lacks Ving's endowment and attempts suicide, Ghost rider attempts to intervene but realizes that Ding and Ving are merely projections created by Mephisto. This ending merely raises questions and mires the entire plot in an homo-erotic sub-text. While the book largely plods along at a sloppy pace there is one positive aspect worth mentioning. The author has a very peculiar and vernacular which i found intriguing, until I realized that it was only because he used the word 'negro' with extreme liberality. This inveterate usage of the word leads to some of the most creative and possibly artful usages of the word 'negro' ever conceived, but largely comes of as racist and compulsive."
-Doug

Vote for Rachel

2011-03-14T16:26:00.002-04:00

I'm writing on this blog, you people get to read it for free, so head over to this website and vote for my girlfriends dress. Its easy to register you just need an name an email address and a password. they don't even verify the email address so you can use a friends email. then after you've registered got to the voting page and rachel's dress is on the bottom row second from the right (make sure it says Rachel Wendling) then click vote. simple. after you've voted you need to do this everyday until voting ends. then sign in below with the name of your favorite teacher if i get 100 comments and 700 votes doug will write the teacher with the most votes a sincere thank you letter.

yo EDAN

2011-03-05T14:42:00.002-05:00

Hyper Sentinel Force

2011-02-22T20:50:00.003-05:00

Today, I get a text from Craig asking if I'd like to start posting on the spotblog. When someone hands you your dreams you take them.
For a time in the 08 or 09 ( i am hazy on the details, I may actually still be managing them which says more about them than it ever could of me) i managed slothbear. In my tenure as manager I set strict guidelines like "no fat chicks," this rule proved too problematic and I was instantly terminated. While my time as manager was brief, I still learned some valuable life lessons. The first while it may seem obvious is that there is no pain in life that cannot be cured by the sweet release of death. The second: never get between dbleek and his fat chicks. Ever.
Nowadays, I live the lonely life of a recluse. I spend up to ten hours a day excersizing my latent psychic abilities and polishing my wrestling skills. I can stare through a persons soul and follow up with a DDT. When the Illuminati (Jews) make their move and I am forced to wrestle for my life In one of their thunder-gogues you will not want to be In the other corner.
I hope the readers of this blog view my addition as a contributor as the first steps into the golden age of spotblog. You are honestly a dummy if you don't, I realize I have been mum on the subject until now but I feel it is worth mentioning that I am a WHITE GOD. There is seriously a church in Asia where Chinese and Japanese people gather to worship me. I typed this entire post on an iPhone, sure It isn't practical, but it is fucking god-like. Later scrubs!

hummer dragoon

2011-02-05T15:50:00.002-05:00

http://hummingdragons.tumblr.com/post/3090205118/036-slothbear-no-dialogue

"This Long Island based foursome is not exactly going to be remembered ten years from now for renovating New York indie rock, but “No Dialogue” is relaxed yet steady pop rock."

basking shark dream #2

2011-01-31T03:22:00.005-05:00

also check: copy of the Slothbear EP (bottom left-center) and the handy device used to make said EP (bottom right)

a short story

2011-01-24T02:15:00.000-05:00

Elijah came across two individuals upon changing his musical incite and all things for that matter, a few hundred blunts later, they some how came together to form a band in the end that would soon follow a mass genocide of your ear pussy's.

2011-01-14T02:03:00.002-05:00

click to enlarge for unabridged revelation

THE NO SPIN ZONE

2010-12-27T12:38:00.003-05:00

http://twoyoutubevideosandamotherfuckingcrossfader.com/#gpXJ8GQOY60/LERvuEc5eBo
set the video on the left to 4:20 and pause
align the crossfader in the center so that its maybe a smidgen closer to the left
press play on the video on the right
when video on the right reaches :12, press play on video on the left
band of the year?
YOU DECIDE(D)

sketch study for back cover of 'canter on'

2010-12-26T19:32:00.004-05:00

click to see full img, as always

Merry Christmas from SlouchBird

2010-12-25T02:29:00.005-05:00

endemic to just how little was ultimately accomplished this year, here's the same xmas video as last year, courtesy of good ole uncle ed

cover of my solo record

2010-12-22T14:47:00.003-05:00

hit city b/w la da da
ETA: onea these days

ty kubra

2010-12-19T14:28:00.000-05:00

http://elfyourself.jibjab.com/view/D3gdomjN21HKAglv?cmpid=ey_fb_friend

new spirit people is fire yall

2010-12-12T01:16:00.002-05:00

our friends henry, carlos, and even brian, aka The Three Jews from Brooklyn, have been toiling away indiligently with dbleek in producing their debut, yet-to-be-titled LP. i've had the first three tracks to said LP for a lil while now, but for those without VIP access the first fallen fruit of doug/henry's labor, "keep knees," is up on their myspace. it's track one of what is currently my most anticipated musical release. also be sure to check out the lo-fi sammy and quiet rooms demos, which are equally excellent songs that only sound better in their album incarnations.

pals

Slothbear featured in GordonEveryday: American Boner Edition

2010-12-08T16:22:00.002-05:00

some pretty sweet footage of us playing our upcoming single "seventeen once" in the beginning, as well as the subliminal murmur of henry's voice. around 5:25 gordon sick burns slothbear, and right before the cut you can audibly hear me shout "fuck you"

Smashin N Crashin (2010)

2010-12-07T16:54:00.002-05:00

Step Brothers meets Philosophy of the World

fun express hot

2010-11-28T23:23:00.000-05:00

New Harpoon Forever Intangible 7"

2010-11-27T15:50:00.002-05:00

http://www.mediafire.com/?kd338oosh5r1ia5

our good pals/adversaries/near TORBUSmates in harpoon forever have just issued their second single. the A side, "creedence pattern," begins with a courageous introduction from my favorite member of the H4E entourage, and marks the vocal reemergence of idyllic internet personality D Tony Spaldo, who was the driving creative force behind one of slothbear's all-time best greatest best bands, alex and the horribles. "maya angelou" features some pretty sick wah guitar as well as some fairly impassioned jamblockery. overall i think this might be better than the first harpoon single, which i also thoroughly enjoyed, and what's more encouraging, my two favorite songs of theirs -- "judy b" and "cruel story of youth" -- haven't even been released yet.

drew this bitch for ross's lil lit mag

2010-11-26T12:34:00.006-05:00

spoke the thunder

its gonna be the cover

2010-11-25T12:15:00.000-05:00

WKND RECAP

2010-11-21T15:13:00.008-05:00

friday we made the trek down to the university of delaware to play our very first out-of-state show. things got off to a rocky start when josh called shotgun in the accord, and bereft of his ipod, asked to use mine to commandeer the 3+ hour playlist. i, understandably so, said we could plug mine in if i got to pick at least some of the songs. josh refused, and so i opted to keep my ipod, listening thru headphones to tune out the dire second half of surfer rosa. josh, now realizing hardball was in play, put his seat in a gratuitous recline, crushing my legs. these dire driving arrangements lasted the whole ride down, highlighted by my intermittent kicks, shoves, and at one point strangling of josh using my foot and his seatbelt.

livid and ready to rumble, we arrived at our good pal kolitz's house around 3:30 pm. kolitz was kind enough to get us this show, which was to be with some purported local favorites. however, we quickly learned that there was no drum set, and that kolitz's drummer contacts were all huge misers about lending their equip to some fellas who made the 150+ mile trek. a walk to the local "hip record store," RainBow (i figured it was a gay bar) yielded no leads. it did, however, provide a cutting insight into the collective psyche of supposed music aficionados outside new york: they were in fact no less jaded, only a bit dumber. hipster clerks and their chubby patroning counterparts seemed nonplussed as kolitz attempted to get people to come to the show later, which, as far as slothbear was concerned, seemed less and less likely to happen.

it was then that kolitz had an epiphany (his first of ~umpteen), and called his friend who was in a local band called atlas, offering him a spot on the bill (a vacancy regrettably left earlier that morning by our good pals the labor daze) in exchange for use of his kit. i'm not sure exactly what the specifics were, but he agreed so long as his housemate was home to let him in. relieved and excited to be playing, we all high fived, spiritually, and went back to kolitz's.

resting on our collective laurels, and in the midst of finalizing a setlist, kolitz got the call back from atlasbro. this was the first in a harrowing series of Moment of Truths, wherein kolitz seemed initially elated to be getting a phone call, then made some comically discouraging face of anguish as the bad news came thru the receiver. it was now past 5 pm, and we had to start from scratch.

kolitz seemed to think our best bet was some dudes he knew who lived in a nearby space called skid, or SKID, or S.K.I.D.-- no idea which, but these losers didn't have phones and wouldn't respond to our loud knocking. briefly contemplating breaking in, under the infallible pretense that you can't be legally reprimanded for burglarizing drug dealers, nor be subject to out of state law, we decided to contact an old high school acquaintance for assistance. he didn't pick up and never answered my text, and for this, matt nicolae will forever be one of the many lost souls to occupy space on the slothbear shitlist.

we walked back to kolitz's, and now his housemates were kind enough to try their hand at getting us drums. these attempts, much appreciated as they were and still are, proved fruitless. it was now past 6, and the doors were opening at 6:30. morale was low, when kolitz took one last shot in the dark. walking out of the room as he made a phone call to someone he admittedly hardly knew (he had to get the number from a friend), he returned with improbable news: we had found a savior, and His name was Greg from Memphis.

with ~15 minutes to spare, doug and kolitz went off to pick up the drums as the rest of us made our first foray into the UD campus. ironically, as we went about getting said drums, several previously AWOL contacts began to come out of the woodwork, offering drum help. it's worth noting that somewhere around this time, josh offered kolitz some of the fudge his mom had packed him (he never offered me any), to which kolitz kneejerkingly replied "no thanks, not a fudge man myself."

we set up, did a brief and sheepish interview, and eventually played a competent but not altogether fun set. the vocals were too loud by my ears, and we didn't get to play little qid. people really liked "birds" though, a song which we hope to record and release soon. we were followed by this gypsy chic girl's two hour, eight song ukulele set. at one point, she gave a pretty stock shout out to "the band before," and said we did a "really good job," to which some hero/miscreant responded "NOT REALLY!" to mild applause. she also faked some sort of annoying accent throughout the second half of her set, but only the second half. when we went home at the end of the night/beginning of the morning, we took with us friendships new, experiences unforgettable, money nonexistent, and irrepairable damage to certain romantic relationships.

the next night we marked our homecoming at the sports page bar in lindenhurst. what initially caused ian to ask why we didn't just stay home and practice instead (shades of Beery's on 1st glance) yielded what was, for me, a decidedly better time than the previous night. incorporated village of ghost played a thoroughly swell set, which at one point featured the final/only enjoyable scene of there will be blood on an overhead projector, as we enjoyed free pitchers of beer. at one point, the four of us explored the renaissance technique of rubbing your palms and pressing them against your eyes for five minutes in order to see the world more vividly, incidentally invoking the sympathy of a concerned IVOG member, who must've enjoyed the spectacle of the four of us in a corner of a bar with our faces buried in our hands.

making the best of a one mic PA setup, we built our setlist accordingly, and played a pretty decent set to general indifference-- in fact, i'd say that night's rendition of "seventeen once" (another hit-to-be) was my personal favorite to date. after a refreshingly raucous little qid to avenge the night before (at which point the mic began to cut in and out), we also got our most unexpected encore to date. we played another song nobody knows, then tried to figure out this charming man (FTR i know the whole thing, not to throw anyone under the bus) before giving up and calling it a night. the four beautiful young magistrates made $25, went to sleep, and awoke in the morning, ready to navigate thru this frightening deep sea gorge we call middle earth, accepting the fragility of life in the face of the anglerfish -- society -- which have scorned them once agayne.

slothbear mission statement

2010-11-18T22:13:00.002-05:00

Corey v Anteater Chronicles

2010-11-12T22:41:00.003-05:00

ty fat daddy b

2010-11-12T16:40:00.000-05:00

mere conjejceture

2010-11-03T21:39:00.003-04:00

only the second brainiac interview i've ever found and the first videotaped one

2010-11-03T01:15:00.003-04:00

timmy taylor was a pretty suave dude.
schmersal is the bratty bastard child of 1993 thom yorke and pre american idiot tre cool.
the part where they talk about driving recklessly is pretty upsetting, all things considered
girls against boys, the jesus lizard, and six finger satellite were all terrible.

2010-10-31T13:00:00.000-04:00

why does god hate me why wont he let me be happy

2010-10-26T02:11:00.004-04:00

why does god hate me why wont he why does god hate me why wont he lewhy does god hate me why wont he le me be happyt me be happylewhy does god hate me why wont he let me be happyt me be hawhy does god hate me why wont he lewhy does god hate me why wont he let me be happyt me be happyppywhy does god hate me why wont he lewhy does god hate me why wont he let me why does god why does god hate me why wont he lewhy does god hate me why wont he let me be happyt me be happyhate me why wont he lewhy does god hate me why wont he let me be happyt me be happybewhy does god hate me why wont he why does god hate me why wont he lewhy does god hate me why wont he let me be happyt me be happylewhy does god hate mewhy does god hate me why wont he lewhy does god hate me why wont he let me be happyt mewhy does god hate me why wont he lewhy does god hate me why wont he let me be happyt me be happy be happy why wont he let me be happyt me be happy happyt me be happywhy dowhy does god hate me why wont he lewhy does god hate me why wont he letwhy does god hate me why wont he lewhy does god hate mewhy does god hate me why wont he why does god hate me why wont he lewhy does god hate me why wont he let me be happyt me be happylewhy does god hate me why wont he let me be happyt me be happy why wont he let me be happyt me be happy me be happyt me be happyes god hawhy does god hate me why wont he lewhy does god hate me why wont he let me be happyt me be happyte me why wont he lewhy does god hate me why wont he let me be happyt me be happywhy does god hate me why wont he lewhy does god hate me why wont he let me be happyt me be happywhy does god hate me why wont he lewhy does god hate me why wwhy does god hate me why wont he lewhy does god hate me why wont he let me be happyt me be happyont he let me be happyt me be happywhy does god hate me why wont he lewhy does god hate me why wont he let me be happyt me bewhy does god hate me why wont he lewhy does god hate why does god hate me why wont he lewhy does god hate me why wont he let me be happyt me be happyme why wont he let me be happyt me be happy happywhy does god hate me whywhy does god hate me why wont he lewhy does god hate me why wont he let me be happyt me be happy wont he why does god hate me why wont he lewhy does god hate me why wont he let me be happyt me be happylewhy does god hate me why wont he let me be happyt me be happywhy does god hate me why wont he lewhy does god hate me why wont he let me be happyt me be happywhy does god hate me why wont he lewhy does god hate me why wont he let me be happyt me be hawhy does god hate me why wont he lewhy does god hate me why wont he let me be happyt me be happyppywhy does god hate me why wont he lewhy does god hate me why wont he let me be happyt me be happywhy does god hate me why wont he lewhy does god hate me why wont he let me be happyt me be happy

videos of the week

2010-10-23T01:35:00.002-04:00

http://www.endlessyoutube.com/watch?v=eCss0kZXeyE&start=0m0s&end=0m7s

lost boy - 1991

2010-10-20T17:15:00.002-04:00

better than any pixies album

gnomefoam - repeat (girls with bangs)

2010-10-17T23:07:00.003-04:00

sick new track finds our R&Rmate moving towards unchartered pop waters while not only sampling don't taunt a tiger, but tackling a very pressing counterculture phenomenon:

check it out, as well as another new track called "rainbow juice" which i think i might actually like even more

you should also download his extensive back catalog

palz

STEADFAST INDIE

2010-10-15T21:26:00.002-04:00

looking for info on somoking weed Never really Heard of It can anyone help?

2010-10-15T20:15:00.003-04:00

ed wibeau =@

2010-10-14T02:05:00.004-04:00

http://edwibeau.wordpress.com/2010/10/10/auf-die-ohren-2-slothbear-qids/

google translate sez:

On the ears! # 2: Slothbear - Qids
Published on 10/10/2010
Post a comment | by acoustic firework
Slothbear I have known for some years, but in me is still sailed past that their first proper album in April of this year is out. I thought they were always great, especially at a time when their recordings sounded shitty still. Since you had to work really something, because the songwriting of the troops is just totally sympathetic, fresh and great hid "back then" but after tons of bad reception caused by noise. But the more you just took the true talent of the group, the more you have them somehow in love with, with their subtle, bratzig recorded songs. Almost like a bear just damn cute but somehow too big and loud.
This detour has to do with "Qids" no more. When I heard that the album was recorded in good sound quality, I found it almost a pity to me about myself I could make an impression. The thing is still noisy, but still as lovable. Only this time on a readily accessible level. From listening to the old songs from the first EP is a big part in a new light. Unfortunately, there is my favorite, "You Make Me Choose You," but I can cope.
So, overall really nice and great indie rock for fans of groups like Pavement and Dinosaur Jr., fits me just so totally into that stuff. And above all, the small group from America to know there is too little!

The self-titled debut EP available as a free download on Rack & Ruin Records. Caution: Loud and crashing!

http://www.rackandruinrecords.com/releases9.php # album2

The album Qids there has long been the Internet for free, right now I think only the Media Fire link. If the words should no longer be legal to simply write and I take out!

http://www.mediafire.com/?zmzygd053wj

This entry was posted on under the eyes, music. Permalink add to the bookmark.

Slothbear and Fun Explorer in Impose

2010-10-12T11:24:00.002-04:00

some real gems here

FE play list

2010-10-03T12:40:00.002-04:00

new EP

2010-09-24T23:22:00.002-04:00

so last weekend we started recording a new EP, a last hurrah for josh's empty old house in roslyn. we are thinking of calling it CANTER ON and it will have 5 songs. one song is a bit of a dark, quasi-improv jam; another one is sung by doug, a sloth first. two of the songs have been kicking around for a while in secrecy, and the last one is legitimately new. in general it's a cloudy one and we are very excited about it-- been employing some new recording techniques such as recording live, all of us, running the ole 4-track as a room mic, adding some haunted piano and found sounds, and tuning the drumkit.

i am working on the cover art in my intro to printmaking class and will post it semi-shortly. the bulk of the basic tracks are hopefully done, but i don't know when everything will be finished, nor released, and am not comfortable making predictions given how long it took us to make a record last time.

spotblog acknowledged as chillwave authority

2010-09-18T13:00:00.001-04:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chillwave#cite_note-3

They also called us Sick !!

videos of the week

2010-09-17T22:38:00.002-04:00

ty casey hicks; yw ezra tenenbaum

2010-09-06T14:47:00.002-04:00

http://www.shortandsweetnyc.com/2010/09/slothbear-qids/

ever think about what a joke showpaper is?

2010-09-03T20:55:00.002-04:00

i mean the art is generally pretty cool and i guess i of all people should view that as just grounds for its existence but seriously-- it's called ohmyrockness.com, and they're not nearly as up their own ass about shit. their benefits are horrifically promoted and attended and the money that should go to the bands for playing just goes back into financing this utterly unnecessary publication which is probably just run by rich kids anyway.

shortpainkiller tagged Fuck Explorer with still awesome though, unchill bros and pizza dick. 15 hours ago

2010-08-27T12:28:00.001-04:00

)untitled(

2010-08-18T11:10:00.002-04:00

Anna Bradley just made my favorite album of 2010.

"Pavo"

I'll post a link when it's officially out, and the cover art (made by Palz of Animal CollectimeanSlothbear) whenever I find a jpg.

-Josh

Earnest for a ch

2010-08-09T17:23:00.001-04:00

Nana's

2010-08-06T23:44:00.003-04:00

Earnest change of pace-- I feel now's as good a time as any to give my favorite venue in da world a plug. It's my friend Matt's house across town in Valley Stream (Woodmere, really) and it's called Nana's. Nana's was once Matt's grandma's house but he came to live there because a tree crushed his bedroom in his old house during that one weekend earlier this year when there were hurricane force winds. Matt made the good call to then turn his newfound crib into a DIY venue, which has come to host free house shows (free beer for bands, though I'm told this was initially applicable *only for Slothbear*) ~every other Saturday since the beginning of the summer. The 'Grand Opening' show, which was a record release party for the very sweet LP Matt's band SDLK made, blew me and the rest of Da Bears away (Doug actually got lost en route). The haunt has since served as a consistent source of good, hospitable timez for us and the rest of our own little corner of Alt. Look how much fun we've had!:

There's actually a show there next Friday which I would indubitably attend if I were stateside, featuring SDLK, Gaza Striptease and Highway Gimps. On the 21st, we'll be sharing the bill with fellow Nana's favorites Anna Bradley and The Labor Daze (as well of SDLK of course). The last scheduled show of the summer is the 27th, which should hopefully feature Lost Boy ? and perhaps even Fuck Explorer, if we can get a hold of those guys (very standoffish, major pricks). After that, Matt's gonna knock down some walls and turn the place into a studio wherein SDLK will begin recording new material. Shows will pick up again, though perhaps not quite as often. I urge any band which any semblance of an interest in playing Long Island (just outside Queens, and near Green Acres mall, home of the Murderplex and the Walmart where that employee got trampled) to get in touch. Likewise, I encourage any Indy Rock Enthusiast to come down and check out a show sometime-- I mean, it's fucking free, u miser.

dying for bad music rates Fuck Explorer EP as highly as Qids

2010-08-05T15:29:00.004-04:00

http://dyingforbadmusic.blogspot.com/2010/08/slothbear-2010-qids-fuck-explorer-2010.html

kinda bummed about how josh broke all the indy rock reveiws rules

2010-08-01T04:09:00.002-04:00

consider the series officially retired

Indy Rock Reviews::: Julian Lynch- Mare

2010-07-23T15:39:00.006-04:00

By Josh Ginsberg

Julian Lynch is one of a handful of presumably New Jersey based musicians like Liam the Younger, Fluffy Lumbers and Big Troubles who have become featured on Pitchfork in a manner inseparable from Ulysses S. Grant’s presidential cabinet to me. Associated with Underwater Peoples, a label/collective/something or other from the Garden State, Lynch’s new album Mare, a very enjoyable bedroom rock album, is one of the best the collective has produced. Part of what attracts me to Mare is the notion that many other albums of its kind exist, some better and some worse on Macbooks or 4-tracks scattered among college dorms all over the United States, but that this one stands out against the rest for one reason or another. I don’t mean to disparage Mare. It is quite good.

Apparently, Lynch is making records concurrently with getting his PhD in Wisconsin, if I’m not mistaken. Mare sounds like the work of a highly talented music lover (especially when assuming, as I am, that Lynch plays every instrument) more than a musician (which the Lynch of my mind, who is playing all these instruments quite well, undoubtedly is). The Julian Lynch of my mind is someone who is eking out his musical ambition and talent during the down time of a rigorous previous engagement. Fortunately for Lynch, he is getting critical recognition from juggernauts like P4k, which must be very gratifying. When I checked out Lynch’s Myspace the day after his album was given Best New Music, his tour of the South has a single date listed, with the rest of the dates listing a city and “TBA” or “Need Help!!!”

Mare is an enjoyable listen. It is not a rich tapestry of sound per se. It is faded and muted in ocherous tones: a pale wheat blond, a distant red, a whole lot of soil. The instrumentation ranges from sparse, down-tuned percussion, drums that sound like canyons loosely bound with cloth, to layers of icicle like strands of strummed and plucked acoustic guitar strings to a bass clarinet that sounds on the verge of implosion, rifts of time’s passage along its body affecting its tone and blemishing its appearance. On Mare all the instrumentation is both cohesive and impressive, in a way that has more with atmosphere than chops, but is not devoid of the latter.

If the Rolling Stones’ “Moonlight Mile” was eviscerated of the pristine grandeur and sweeping resolve with which it was stuffed and was refilled with a slinky auto-wah and intentionally inauthentic sounding marimba via keyboard melody, it would come close to approximating the album’s title track. Opener “Just Enough” establishes that Lynch uses a similar guitar playing style to Matt Mondanile and Martin Courtenay, who in turn lifted it from Ira Kaplan and Lee Ranaldo, but allowed it to bleach out in the sun and mellow. The melodies are a little stranger and more off kilter sometimes treading Pavement territory, but they are still very decidedly evocative of Real Estate and Ducktails, despite a sound more removed from the beach and more akin to Woods and the woods. There is a weird depravity about Lynch’s guitar playing on “Just Enough” that I find rather enrapturing. The farfisa organ in the background is exemplary of the nice subtleties which spring up all over Mare.

The percussion is impressive throughout the album, as is the dim ambience against which it is set. “Still Racing” is one of the album’s best cuts. It features a choir of hushed Lynches singing atop a thick safety net of acoustic guitars and mandolins. The song could have been at home on Young Prayer by Panda Bear. “Ears” also evokes Animal Collective, albeit in a different way. Lynch sings in a falsetto which evokes Beirut’s horn arrangements in timbre in tandem with Avey Tare. The guitar solo is impressive and sounds as if its notes are stuck in glue or honey, each note sustained giving way into a spill of hot white hum. It is the most traditionally cathartic crescendo on the LP. The furious clarinet playing on “Ruth My Sister” is impressive as well, evoking Bruce Springsteen, Bleeding Gums Murphy, a panorama of back alley imagery and that new Ariel Pink album (just a bit) to me. Another one of my favorite songs on Mare is “Travelers.” Think forests, dystopian guitar licks and avoiding tripping on tree roots while maneuvering frantically as best as possible for an approximation of what it’s like to listen to.
RATING: 4.4
BETTER THAN QIDS?

Proto-Indy Rock Reveiws: Veckatimest

2010-07-23T15:01:00.003-04:00

Grizzly Bear- Veckatimest
By Josh Ginsberg

As I write this, in a sticky basement, I am in the midst of an unusually warm April and Veckatimest is slated for release on May 26th. What I’ve been listening to is the “low quality leak” that turned up in a sendspace link on a friend’s facebook status in early March. Veckatimest is named for a small island in Dukes County, Massachusetts that I have never visited. I cannot liken the waves of effervescent, vintage American pop that Grizzly Bear condensed into the four minute bliss of “Two Weeks” to a picnic on that island’s shores. I cannot compare Daniel Rossen and Ed Droste’s elaborate guitar playing to the dense tree line, which weaves meticulously, creating an almost psychedelic aerial view or that guitar sound/forest’s impenetrability, dense unyielding space with only slight crevices left to slide deeper into. I cannot compare “Dory,” from experience, to the clear, foamy, creek that cracks through the foliage of the forest floor, lined with flat, slate-grey stones. Nor can I liken the reflection of closer “Foreground” to the view from the beach at night, at the flickering lights of some small, quaint harbor on the Massachusetts mainland. But those are the images inseparable to me from Veckatimest’s sounds.

Grizzly Bear crafted a stellar album. Bassist/Clarinetist/Flautist/Producer/Arranger Chris Taylor mixes the songs flawlessly. His bass guitar playing is excellent, and his sound manipulation, which is exemplified best on the instrumental potions before the second verse of “Fine For Now” is shimmering and enchanting. The most fascinating thing that Taylor accomplishes is the creation of a heavenly, ethereal arrangement, which the orchestral and chorale arrangements augment. He arranges strings beautifully and subtly on “About Face” and they never sound superfluous or forced. The quintessential example of his aplomb as an arranger and composer can be spotted on “I Live With You,” which begins with Taylor’s signature woodwinds, and a harp, before a low section of strings cuts in and the song gives way to a women’s choir, who can be heard laughing and talking to one another if you listen closely enough to the parts where they drop out. Chris Taylor is a peer to Van Dyke Parks or George Martin if I’ve ever heard one.

One of Taylor’s most essential contributions to the band is his innate ability to balance the different singing voices of the members, particularly the two lead vocalists, the lush, soothing, snow-capped vocals of Ed Droste and the quivering voiced Daniel Rossen, who seems capable of necromancy at his most sinister moments. The two men sing together on most songs, and while it is easy to peg a song like “Fine For Now” a Daniel Rossen song, because he sings the lyrics, the song wouldn’t be the same listening experience if not for the sheets of Ed Droste’s harmonies. While Rossen sings the lead vocal on the pre-chorus of “Fine For Now” it is Droste’s soaring backing vocals that steal the show. Rossen and Droste don’t harmonize like the Dead, Beach Boys or CSNY. Their harmonies are more evocative of the infrequent but perfectly complimentary harmonies of Thom Yorke and Ed O’Brien or the duel lead vocals of Avey Tare and Panda Bear; both voices are distinct melodic entities more than harmonic ones. After a chorus punctuated by a guitar part that is sublime in a sense that is strictly in tune with Edmund Burke’s conception of it.

The guitar is evocative of harrowing cliffs and mountains that taper endlessly, piercing the holiness of whatever heavens may lie above, Droste vocalizes a passage that may have been played out on the electric guitar by a different band, but Grizzly Bear display their immaculate ability to sing. “Two Weeks” is led by Droste, who sings the simple, plaintive lyrics. But the strongest hook on the entire album is the three-way harmony between Rossen, Taylor and drummer Christopher Bear, that is sung between Droste’s lines.

Songs like “All We Ask” find Rossen and Droste switching off between verses and choruses, with Rossen singing the swinging, “faltering,” chorus, evocative of jazz-age cities, streets crowded with taxis, sidewalks swarming with neatly dressed pedestrians, straight off the page of some F. Scott Fitzgerald story, as a choir of Drostes sigh forlornly. The song’s bridge, on which a pew of Grizzly Bears, most prominently Droste, laments as the song draws to a close, “I can’t get out of what I’m into with you.” Droste and Rossen also sing excellently without each other’s help. Rossen’s vocal melodies are some of the best on the album, especially his fierce, tormenting vocal on the chorus of “Southern Point,” which manages to sound like Armageddon while being entirely void of melodrama. His next best solo performance occurs during the vocal passages when he is not pitted against the women’s choir on “I Live With You,” which shows his ability to let his vocals soar, a hard thing to prove yourself worthy of for someone who sings co-lead vocals in a band with Ed Droste. It is strange to think back to the days before Rossen joined the band, as he is every bit as essential as Droste, and contributes an incredible amount to the band with his guitar work and songwriting.

On Veckatimest the acoustic guitar is still featured prominently, such as on songs like “Southern Point,” or “Dory” or “Hold Still.” However, on most of the album, it is the electric guitar that is more prominent. The electric guitars evoke the raw, dry volume of pre-1975 Neil Young, but they are dampened with reverb and frayed with short delay. Passages like the climactic point on “Fine For Now” pop up on many of the album’s songs, including the should-be single, “While You Wait For the Others.” That tone echoes late sixties Americana while still sounding at home amongst the guitar work of bands like Animal Collective, Deerhunter and Abe Vigoda. The extended instrumental intro of “All We Ask,” cloaks the picking of Yellow House in the same tone used on Friend EP tracks like “He Hit Me.” One of the best guitar moments on the album is one of the most ambiguous. The little, bursts of reverb moistened guitar that bloom like sonorant cactus flowers on “Ready, Able” almost sound like a sample, because of how quickly they blossom from non-entities to flourishes to nothing again. This is another instance in which beautiful short delay is employed.
Veckatimest also boasts an incredible keyboard sound. The keys that open “Two Weeks” sound more like a sunny, Kentucky garden or stretch of hills than any Lynard Skynard riff ever could. The high-end electric keyboard arpeggios of the songs chorus bore tiny little wasp nests into the listeners’ subconscious, and remain rooted there until re-listened to.

The most impressive sound on the album is the drum sound, which is produced immaculately. Christopher Bear plays beats that heavily utilize toms, but unlike the taut tom sound of seventies rock or the loose sound of tribal music. His percussion is mixed almost subliminally. Where another drummer might pump up a song with a driving, two armed assault on a snare drum, Bear achieves that same dynamic before the chorus of “Southern Point,” with nothing more than cymbal wash. His driving beat through the chorus mixes a snare pattern that could’ve been pattered out by a soldier marching through the wintry woods of 1778, and plays a fill that is more akin to Jamaican music or Metal than the “indie rock” it will lumped together with. The album’s most noteworthy drum pattern is the beat of “Two Weeks.” “Two Weeks” only hardly suggests the odd, syncopated beat that carries it, while riding its waves the entirety of the song. The beat is based around the rims of snares and his swiftly pinched high-hat. It might be the last thing the average listener would point out, but it’s one of the first things that hits. Christopher Bear’s jazz training is especially apparent on the end of the song. While Ed Droste manipulates some strange device that creates bright, melodic oscillations, pitted against what sounds like a tremolo-drenched electric guitar, Bear assaults with bells of his ride cymbal with more finesse than any of the jazz greats of the bop era. Not once does
Christopher Bear surrender his distinct style for a bland rock beat.

The songs on Veckatimest are more or less all top notch. Veckatimest features songs that are all memorable and that don’t bleed into each other as the songs on Yellow House sometimes did. The album is brighter, although, minor key melancholia is evoked at some point throughout at least half the songs, such as on the chorus of “Ready, Able,” the verse of “Fine For Now,” or the late-night-side-of-the-highway piano lines of “Foreground.” The only shortcoming of the songs is the occasional lyrical dud. The Grizzly Bear guys aren’t really elaborate wordsmiths. They aren’t bad lyricists per se, but they offer quatrains of seemingly meaningless, sometimes prosaic ramblings or non-sequiturs, best exemplified in the chorus of “Two Weeks,” which reads “Would you always / Make it easy / Maybe sometimes / Take your time.” Ed Droste isn’t exactly saying something poignant and if his execution is something shy of adroit, but that doesn’t detract from the song’s merit. I thought the lyrics of the verse (“Save up all the days / A routine malaise / Just like yesterday / I told you I would stay”) were good until I read them on paper and realized they were sort of juvenile and disjointed. Grizzly Bear are simply not a lyrics band. The best lyrics on the album are probably those on “Dory” which opens, “Oh wildly cohering in a watery deep….”

Veckatimest is the first truly consistent album of Grizzly Bear’s career. Yellow House is a much “cooler” album, but where Yellow House creates a distinct and fascinating horizon of sound that melds pre-War Americana, pastoral woodwinds and the fiercest acoustic finger picking and guitar webbing this side of John Fahey, Veckatimest offers twelve hooky and neat songs. Song albums are never as “cool” as album-albums, where a really cohesive and distinct mood is created and explored until the breaking point but they’re a lot more enjoyable to listen to. Grizzly Bear have released a greatest hits worth of great songs between their debut Horn of Plenty in 2005 and their Friend EP in 2007, but never before have they crafted an album as great as Veckatimest.

Indy Rock Reveiws: Small Black

2010-07-23T14:54:00.001-04:00

Small Black, Big <3
By Josh Ginsberg

Small Black is probably the first band I’ve liked from Long Island that I have not been a member of. In the wake of emo Long Island has become associated with the cranky inhabitants of suburbs, self-mutilation and skateboarding at malls instead of the cerulean water that tickles its forks, the radiant flora that spring up from its earth and the modest but lovely fauna that carouse among the flowers. Small Black doesn’t evoke those things--they’re not Real Estate!!!--but they miraculously evoke an image of the mystic apocryphal nineteen eighties Long Island I was conceived on and born during. Small Black evokes the steamy, foggy streets I’ve walked down many times, wearing a hoodie and thinking about a girl. Their great self-titled five song EP catches me between the contradictory emotions roused in me by kids smoking pot in and around swimming pools. Small Black makes me disdain the spoiled aimlessness of “Long Island adolescence” but also makes me long for an amble past a local duck pond, holding hands high.

Small Black is “glo-fi,” a trippy, mellow brand of lo-fi that sounds a lot like the Ninja Turtles Soudtrack cassette I used to listen to in bed at night in 1993. The lo-fi recording creates a haze not unlike a moist summer night, which obscures the sound as sfumato might a painting. Small Black sounds sort of thin and tinny on bad speakers or when played too quietly, but on good speakers or loud in headphones it sounds great. The EP opens with the same low-end drum loops the keyboards you find left out for the trash boast. “Despicable Dogs,” isn’t a far cry from New Order’s “Temptation,” but the longing is even more palpable. This super-cool Pitchfork approved jam also evokes Neon Indian and Washed Out. Lyrics are close to indecipherable but reference smoke machines and being lost in the woods. The dizzying physical sensation of running and ducking, drunk, breath visible in front of your eyes, is unmistakable and inseparable from the listening experience.

“Weird Machines” implores the listener to lie upon a mattress. It is darker than “Despicable Dogs” and its keyboards would evoke “This Heart’s On Fire,” if the rest of the song were not eviscerated of raucousness and pomp. Its chord progression is more melancholic, similar to the EP’s fourth track, “Pleasant Experience,” a song reminiscent of Neon Indian’s “6669 (I don’t know if you know).” Spacey and subdued, the song gives way to a fluttering of eyelashes, a synthetic mandolin a galaxy away and a chorus of opaque sensation. Something is hard to pin down. The percussion and winking bass line of the EP’s anthemic via anti-anthem,“Lady in the Wires,” is a pleasant way to end the EP. And things grow even murkier and more indecipherable as melodies grow more uplifting on the track’s long build.

Centerpiece “Bad Lover,” is infectious. It is the most danceable song on the EP, but really lends itself to a drowsy sway. Love is wasted and ambient guitars, pushed back beneath an astral synthesizer and percussive loop, evoke Loveless only slightly. Listening to “Bad Lover” reminds me of sitting with my legs up on a bed, leaning toward a lover’s warmth and shifting my weight to one hand as I bring my opening mouth toward hers. The pulse of the song’s chorus feels the same as the comforter and mattress recoiling under my palm and looks like the specter of an approaching face beneath closed lids. Posture is self-consciously straightened and in this immersive dorm room or park bench of sound the sense of touch is made immaculately and inexplicably present. Josh Kolenik reminds a listener of the realization “You are not in love,” a poignant one when the number of women kissed and kisses per woman grows inversely. “You were running off to / Perhaps to see her,” he sings over groupings of notes too crushed, too hushed to be chords, “Drawn to the site / Moving bones.” Small Black seems almost self-referential when two voices sing of “Drifting fog,” and either “Rain under water,” or “Laying underwater.”

Small Black were great live. I was lucky enough to wander into their set at U-Café early into the semester. The songs sound even better with a real rhythm section playing them and Small Black’s set may have been one of the most pleasant experiences I’ve had at a show. Now signed to Jagjaguwar, I assume that a more proper release from Small Black will surface before the year is through. For now their EP will make ambling through a flurry or crunching over see-through snow a little more worthwhile. Too bad those guys pretend they’re from Brooklyn.

Indy Rock Reveiws::: Panda Bear - Tomboy/Slow Motion 7"

2010-07-23T13:33:00.012-04:00

I remember reading an interview with Panda Bear post-Person Pitch where he said that the experience of meticulously forging an album of that caliber from such an immense pool of samples was so taxing that he couldn't picture himself being in a place to make another one anytime soon. One needn't do more than simply take a gander at the tracklist of the all-Avey, all-the-time ("Loch Raven" as exception) Feels to see how Panda's hands were tied making his solo record, the majority of which was released through a series of seven-inches starting in '05 and leading up to the full-length release.

Three years later, Panda's back at the ole grind, prepping the follow-up Tomboy and once again drumming up anticipation through a series of advance singles. In these heady Independent Rock Music times, where bands like jj and Los Campesinos! are issuing presumably shitty sophomore efforts just months after their shitty, breakthrough dealbreakers were released, three years is an even longer time in music years than it had been previously. Still, with Panda's contributions to Animal Collective becoming more and more prominent and individualized, culminating in the two most popular Merriweather singles both being Panda-penned, my impression was that he was effectively parlaying the fact that Person Pitch was more beloved than any AC release into a more centrally creative role within the band. The McCartney (optimistic, more popular) to Tare's Lennon, If U Will. So I'm honestly a bit surprised that we are just a few months away from the release (and probably much closer to the leak) of Panda's fourth solo LP, and hopefully his second one that I actually like.

Anyone reading this is likely well acquainted with how Panda has described Tomboy-- guitar-based, a departure from sampling inspired by the likes of Kurt Cobain and Jack White. For those keeping score at home, that's supposed to come off as really intriguing because you see, Cobain and White play(ed) big distorted rock guitar and are less-than-adored by hipsters, while Animal Collective aren't a rock band, but do make hipsters go apeshit. In fact, in a Feels-era interview, the AnCoBros ("Bro's?") claim they never have and never will use distorted guitars even though they like how other bands use them, because it just ain't they steez. I've never heard them explain "Cuckoo Cuckoo." Anywho, the live bootlegs from January sounded promising enough, and, perhaps thankfully, very much Panda Bear.

Listening to this first single, featuring the album's title track backed with a song called "Slow Motion," which may or may not make the LP, I was immediately disheartened to realize that "Tomboy" was in fact "Track 02" from my boot, one of my least favorite tracks. I think a lot of people hear/read "guitar-based" and immediately think Feels here, which is a fundamental mistake because Panda of course does not play guitar on that record. In actuality, the guitars on "Tomboy" share little in common with the lushly warm and watery alt-tuning drones employed by Avey and Deakin. Here, the guitars are tinny and small, even vaguely 8-bit sounding. Perversely enough, it almost sounds like Panda was taking cues from the very chillwave artists who are so heavily indebted to Person Pitch. But whereas chillwave songs tend to be built around a simple but catchy central hook, and shrouded in just enough fuzz to fill out the mix, "Tomboy" is a lightweight dirge, backed by slight percussion and ultimately too glaringly lean. Some mildly appealing melodic elements emerge with repeated listens, but the song rings ultimately, like much of the work of notorious Panda wannabe El Guincho, as a failed hypnosis attempt.

"Slow Motion" corrects the misstep of using a metronome-level backbeat, here employing a robust hip hop sample. The guitars are more heavily processed, thus sounding less like guitars, as the song floats through subtly-varying chanted sections, the penultimate ("It's how we show what counts.") being the catchiest. Still, if this song were but another section in "Good Girl/Carrots," it would be easily the least memorable. Which isn't to say it's bad-- neither of these songs are bad, per se, they are just shockingly underwhelming when coming from a member of a band who these days seemingly can do no wrong. And while if the bootlegs are any indicator, there is definitely enough material -- "Surfer's Hymn, "Drone," et al -- to yield an adequate album, this first single, intended as a teaser, serves mostly as a buzzkill.

RATING: 3.8

BETTER THAN QIDS?:

AIM Interviews, vol. 1: Harpoon Forever/Alex and the Horribles

2010-07-21T16:45:00.003-04:00

AIM interviews, vol. 1: Alex Goldstein and Tom Malach of Harpoon Forever/Alex and the Horribles

Alex Goldstein fronted the New Jersey based garage group Alex and the Horribles. Their first album, Horribles!! (its title itself referencing an Attractions album) was released in 2008 independently. Based on a songwriting relationship between Goldstein and lead guitarist Derek Spaldo the band garnered a substantial buzz (via RCRD LBL, Pop Tarts Suck Toasted and others) with a set of songs that sound equal parts Oasis and Dinosaur Jr and charmed listeners with the streaks of classic rock and hardcore sensibilities that their sound was marbled with. After their darker sophomore album, Sleepwalking Into the Future, released in the wee early hours of 2009, Spaldo found the perfect reason to quit; the only reason a member of a band like the Horribles could find to justify leaving the group: He wanted to pursue his acting career. After Sleepwalking, the band dissolved, putting out two short albums of mercurial consistency. The lineup disintegrated to Goldstein, Spaldo and Tom Malach, the band’s bassist and spiritual core. Return to Popcert (2010) was the first Horribles album that Goldstein wrote most of. An elegy for Jay Reatard, Goldstein channels his fallen hero and surpasses him with the hits comp worthy “An Education”. If half the battle of being a musician is having the chops (the likes of which Goldstein, whose singing style can be dubbed anti-singing, alternately screeching and cooing on the edge of the tiny line between on and off key, was probably suspect of having) and songwriting capabilities to engage an audience, then the other is having the band to back the songs up. If Goldstein cared enough to be stricken with a plight of any sort, his band’s nebulous state would be that plight.

With the new single “Summer Vacation”/ “Paddle to the Sea,” Goldstein’s new project Harpoon Forever (billed as Classic Rock and Twee) seems poised to take the dive into serious music the first two Horribles albums intimated was a real possibility. Goldstein picked up guitar, stepped to the forefront as sole-songwriter and wrote both songs on the single. Tom and Spaldo are there too. Tom no longer playing bass, shows off his Quicksilver Messenger Service and Lynard Skynard worthy chops during the three minute guitar solo of what sounds like it can only be a joyous paean to getting BBQ sauce on one’s fingers after eating a huge plateful of ribs. Spaldo contributes guitar and drums and former Crabagado bassist Cesar Araki’s brother Danny plays bass. With a live lineup still up in the air Harpoon Forever could easily go the way of the dodo. However, the inured fans of Alex and the Horribles still hope that Harpoon Forever will be the band to thrust Goldstein & co. into the widening gyre of their second coming.

You can IM Alex Goldstein @ cariboublues and Tom Malach @ woodenfloors6 on AIM. I did. Don’t be shy.

Josh Ginsberg: When was the last time a project of yours was written about?

Alex Goldstein: Honestly, I'm not sure. The last time I received a good amount of press was about two years ago. We, Alex and the Horribles, released an album in the winter, and that sort of got "picked up" by some blogs towards the summer/fall. There were some very nice and flattering write-ups then, but after that we sort of fell apart within ourselves and found it difficult to really be together as a "band", so I guess there wasn't much consensus to write about a group that really isn't even together in the first place. Though you have written some nice stuff about us in your school newspaper.

JG: You played the After the Jump festival in Brooklyn a while back with some big bands. What was your experience with that like?

AG: I met a guy named Bryan Bruchman at a Daniel Johnston concert. He was very helpful for our band and gave us many good pointers. He sent our album around to a few of his friends who had blogs, which led to us becoming Band of the Week on Pop Tarts Suck Toasted. The After The Jump Fest, I believe, is curated by a few blogs who each pick some bands to represent them. Pop Tarts Suck Toasted picked us, and it was a very good experience. Just being able to say that at a young age I was able to play with some "big" bands I admire like Titus Andronicus or Ponytail at a great venue such as the Music Hall of Williamsburg was a great experience, and for better or worse a helpful ego booster.

Tom Malach: When we played that show we were there for ourselves. I don't think we knew any of those bands at the time (except for Titus Andronicus) so we just kinda played, did an interview, and went home. We watched some really loud band that sounded like Slipknot. In retrospect that was an awesome show but we didn't really have the presence of mind to take it all in, back then.

JG: At what point were the Horribles functioning most efficiently and what happened to change it?

AG: We were most functional from September to early November 2008, where we were able to play every Friday afternoon. We practiced enough to become a tight live act, and had some good songs under our belt. But life got in the way, Derek was in a play that required him to not be able to practice, and because we played at his house, the band became non-functional. We hit a good stride, and then stopped abruptly, which was a bit damaging.

TM: There was a time in the fall (while we were all at college) that we came home every weekend to play. That's when the songs from Sleepwalking were being written and practiced. It was definitely the tightest we ever were. Then we made the album and sort of stopped.

JG: Why do you think other records weren’t blogged about? Do you think that was because of a conscious decision you made to self-promote less, the band’s instability or something else?

TM: I think after we made Sleepwalking we all kinda knew we weren't gonna be playing shows anymore, so maybe that’s why we didn't send it out.

AG: We just didn't play live shows. The first CD got blogged about because of Bryan Bruchman, and we owe him a lot. But we were also a good live act, and that helped too, probably even more. I've seen some of the goofier stuff me and Derek made within the last year, like "Return to Popcert" posted on some small blogs, but we made zero effort to promote that stuff, we just did it for fun, off the cuff.

JG: A guy I went to high school with was profiled in The New York Times last week. Commenting on Pitchfork’s Altered Zones blog, he said, “It puts the spotlight on bands earlier and earlier in their careers. Great full length records and great careers will be lost because kids don’t know how to handle that pressure.” Do you think there is any credence to what he says?

TM: To some extent, but it doesn't really matter what blogs say, so I don't think the pressure is that intense that people can't handle it.

AG: I don't have any personal gruff against blogs. It sort of comes to a point where I'm just a songwriter, and that stuff is more the business end of it, promotion, marketing, that sort of deal. Once you get out of the attic, and start sending your stuff out, it becomes a business. I'd rather spend the time or money I would on paying promoters or dealing with the "Music Business" on playing soccer or buying sweaters on sale from Opening Ceremony.

JG: Alex, people might not notice due to the fact your vocals aren’t mixed incredibly prominently, but you’re a very allusive writer. In fact, there are parts of Sleepwalking into the Future that are somewhat humorously similar to The Waste Land, both in terms of the prominence of references and the sort of pessimistic mood, which pervades songs like “Mouth Jazz” on the second half. Why do things like films, books, bands and songs factor in so heavily in your songwriting?

AG: That's a weird concept to think about for me, because the way I think in general has changed so much since I wrote those songs. I feel like I've grown up a bit, but I still consider myself very young. I could say that I'm a product of Post-Modernism. I grew up with Quentin Tarantino on HBO, and seeing him place bits of other films or what-have-you in his movies had a big impact on me. I'm definitely more of a student of film than I am of music, and I guess I think comparatively. When Jim O'Rourke names an album "Bad Timing" after the Nic Roeg movie, I feel an affinity with the music before I've even heard it, because I absolutely love that movie. I feel like that can be an example of childish thinking, but it works within my head. I guess I'm inspired by movies like In The Realm of the Senses, Sweet Movie, Metropolitan, The Last Emperor, Happy Together.... some sort of collected mood that stuff has, maybe only I can see it-- those movies aren't exactly similar on a technical or aesthetic level-- but a certain bittersweet flavor they possess is what I strive for. Fredrico Garcia Lorca called it "duende", that demon that haunts you, but makes you create great art. I'm trying to lasso that bastard down and ride him by the horns.

JG: Could you trace all the references that appear over the course of a song and map out the connections? How about “Mary X” and “Paddle to the Sea”?

AG: Mary X is sort of like Cap'n Jazz sort of verses mixed with a chorus that's equal parts Pulp and Dinosaur Jr. The jam at the end is meant to evoke The Band. Lyrically, I was trying to write something very "New Jersey"-- something that could have been on the Wrens' "Meadowlands" or even a Bruce Springsteen song. I also read a book of poems by Betsy Andrews called "New Jersey" that helped me create the mood of the song. "Mary X" is a character from the movie Eraserhead, she's the main character's girlfriend. This is a reference to the first album we did, which had a song called "Girl Across the Hall", who is Henry Spencer's other love interest in the movie. If you go to Harmon Cove Plaza in Secaucus, New Jersey and stand on the little bridge directly across from the shopping center, you can get a feel for where I was coming from.

"Paddle to the Sea" is a sort of three-part story, lyrically. The first part is about the Canadian children's film "Paddle to the Sea", where a boy carves a little wooden Indian named "Paddle" and throws him into the ocean. The camera then follows Paddle's journey. It's amazing visually, I definitely recommend it. I tried to write about his story from his point of view. The second half is about Milton Sanford, who I mention in the chorus. He owned racing horses in New York state and New Jersey, one of the horses was named Preakness, which the part of the town of Wayne called Preakness is named after. Sanford made a race called the Dinner Party Stakes which would include three year old colts and fillies. The governor of Maryland at the time, Oden Bowie, said that if the race was in his state, he would build a new track to host it. So the Pimlico Race Course was built in Baltimore. I like the idea of having "colts and fillies" be the types of horses, because of the Indianapolis Colts and the Philadelphia Phillies, who both lost their championship games in their respected sports. It was a bit subconscious, but that was a cool idea. The gesture "the trees that are slow bear the best fruit" comes from the French writer Moliere, who wrote Tartuffe, and I thought it was funny, because that certainly doesn't apply to horse racing. I like horse racing a lot, I attend the Meadowlands Track near my house whenever I can. I liked a horse named "Boogeyman" rode by John Campbell, who I wrote a song about. The last half of the story, after the big jam part, is a sort of John Cassavetes-type deal, about a friend who sees an old pal of his, all beat up from a harsh life, pick up a former girlfriend at a bar. The friend talks to him after the encounter, but unlike what he once said to him, he eschews the statement made in the Fritz Lang movie Metropolis, and says it's "time to cut your heart from your mind."

Musically, the first part of the song is meant to have a New Wave sort of sound, I cribbed a bit from A Flock Of Seagulls and The Vapors, but the melody is sort of like a Pavement one. The chorus is meant to sound like Led Zeppelin or the Groundhogs, the mid-part to the jam is cribbed from The Classical by the Fall. The jam itself is a bit akin to "Free Bird" but I know Tom, who did the solo, threw a lot of great stuff in there. There's a slight reference to a Phish song in there. When the song dies down, that's meant to be like a Bonnie "Prince" Billy song, though there are elements of Pink Floyd in there. I also cribbed a lot of influence from Hoku's "Another Dumb Blonde" in that part. Overall, the structure of the song stemmed from some Fiery Furnaces sort of stuff.

JG: Speaking of Pavement, what about that Pavement analogy (“We used to be like Terror Twilight / Now we’re stuck at Pacific Trim,”) on “Northern California”? I’ve always thought that was a particularly interesting one.

AG: The Pavement line, was sort of a cross referential idea-- to the state of the band, and to the fictional relationship in the song. I guess "Terror Twilight" is well produced and thought out, while "Pacific Trim" was more off the cuff. So I guess it was a comment that things were falling apart? It's a bit silly, I think I just wanted to shout out a band on the album, like how Pavement themselves would reference artists by name.

JG: As a guitar nerd, I have to ask you Tom: What were you channeling when you played on “Paddle to the Sea”?

TM: Unsexy Answer: I was actually really nervous and I did a take before it and the solo was actually a lot shorter than I thought it would be. So then I did a second take and it went okay. Sexy Answer: Duane Allman and Dicky Betts

JG: What do you want for the trajectory of Harpoon Forever? Is the word “career” something that bears any resonance to your relationship with music?

AG: Well, Harpoon Forever is much more real to me than the Horribles were. I write the music in it, so it's closer to me. I would like to play shows, do interviews, have write-ups, reviews, like any other band. That stuff is all very flattering and I enjoy doing it very much. Anything that I can do that others enjoy and I can get something out of myself. The word "career" to me is a very financial one, I don't really view this stuff as a money-making venture.

TM: Hopefully Harpoon Forever can grow into a band I can just sort of discover stuff in. I'm not writing the songs or anything so it puts me in a nice detached situation where I can just bring my musical touch to it. It'll keep me on my toes, all the jams and improvising. I don't necessarily think about the word "career" when I think about music, but making music is what I want to do with my life.

JG: Big Boi or Andre?

AG: The Pharcyde. MF DOOM and Quasimoto are my favorite rappers, besides the Pharcyde. I like that sort of stuff, Stones Throw is an awesome label. I love Dam Funk, complete genius. Gary Wilson too, I talk to him every now and then he's a great, great guy. A personal hero.

TM: Thats a tough one. Probably Big Bo, but its a photo finish.

You can download Harpoon Forever’s single here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?9bgtp0xjqab5h20

And the Alex and the Horribles discography is available here:
http://www.myspace.com/alexandthehorribles

Or you could always hit them up on AIM for it.

inception

2010-07-21T12:28:00.000-04:00

July 20
5:13pmMe

would you say you like black people more or less now than you did 10 yeras ago
July 21
2:07amMe

sow ahtd you say on the wavves review comment section

we're all bros here
2:10amMe

some demons cant be outrun
12:25pmGary is offline.

Indy Rock Reveiws::: Beach House - Teen Dream

2010-07-16T15:28:00.013-04:00

My initial hatred of Beach House was rooted in reasons nearly polar opposite to the root of my initial disdain for Wavves. Where Wavves' brazen one-dimensionality, its haphazard recycling of the same few surf punk chord changes, and the rapturous praise it was almost instantaneously greeted with left me confounded, embittered and depressed, the seemingly conventional perception of Beach House as sophisticated, refined "smart music" a la Dirty Projectors (marginally rougher around the edges), provided a different road map to those same disenchanted feelings.

Of course, status alone is preposterous grounds for disliking a band -- even Malkmus conceded that "1979" was a sick jam -- and I'll be one amongst the droves to consider Grizzly Bear, the poster band for "smart independent 'rock' music," to be one of the very solidest groups making music right now. But Grizzly Bear's music is innovative and expansive, their approach to making music admirably meticulous (just seeing the aerial shot of the infinite clusterfuck of wires, close-mics and foot pedals from the Veckatimest sessions was stressful), their god-given proficiency undeniable, and their songwriting good to very good. Beach House's seemed to lack this expansiveness and innovation, devoid of an edge, and their songwriting lacking of any sort of intangibles. My first hearing of the band was a front-to-back listen of one of the two pre-Teen Dream LPs, I'm not sure which, and the experience was a total wash-- no hooks, chord changes in vain, slow. I only got through the first two songs of Dream before dubbing it an indisputable piece of shit, and giddily expounded upon just how shitty I thought it was as soon as I met up with the friends I'd assumed would indubitably hold shallow affinity for the arpeggiated, reverb-drenched turd. I made excessive, unnecessary note of how unattractive I thought the chick was.

The reality of music listening, as far as I'm concerned, is that despite the sheer multitude of records out there, one only has the will to download so much. People often lament the fact that music downloading has jaded listeners who amass obscene quantities of mp3s, give said mp3s a cursory listen, and then disregard them forever. While I'm obviously sure this still happens, I think more and more people are becoming jaded to the point that they don't even bother downloading shit anymore because, if that Costco-inspired approach to record collecting taught them anything, it's that most music sucks. Why download the Male Bonding LP if the track I heard on YouTube sucked? The positive fallout of this is that less music, at least for me, means reverting back to the days of actually spending time with albums, and granting second chances. This, coupled with the demand twice a week for three-hour iPodathons to keep me sane during art class, proved to be Teen Dream's opportunity to redeem itself in the eyes of Master Craig John Palzius Heed, Esq.

There is a certain majestic quality to the songs on Teen Dream which was just understated enough for me to miss it the first time around. Opener "Zebra" does well to epitomize this quality-- an articulately arpeggiated verse gives way to an ascendant chorus which fits the bill of its lyric ("Any way you run, you run before us/Black and white horse arching among us") and conjures feelings of making one's way through billowing white silk curtains and into the sunlight, as well as the scene from the first Jurassic Park where they seek refuge from the herd of Gallimimuses under that fallen tree (minus the T. Rex). "Silver Soul," which the first time around just sounded like lite FM bullshit to me, also stands out on repeated listens, its chorus a memorable, universal lament, accented by the chick's infectiously fluttering vocal fills which pervade the rest of the disc. "Norway" explodes in a magenta-and-off-white rush of lush-'n-hushed vocals and swirling guitar before settling into a mid-tempo shuffle for the verses, replete with whale sounds, (c) Kevin Shields 1991. It returns to that first propulsive section for the chorus, and to my ears had "lead single" written all over it, though I don't think that was ultimately the case. However, the cream of the crop here is the track directly following, "Walk in the Park." Starting like so many of these songs with a cheap drum machine beat, resulting in a dichotomic sound when all those crisp reverb plug-ins kick in, a reclining clean-channel guitar lead eases its way into verses introspectively sung in the second person. Flurries of Italian-sounding guitars clear every cloud in the sky and pan to an aerial view of the park's shimmering canopy for a gorgeous chorus, as sweeping and stately as anything on the first Vampire Weekend LP, yet better than anything on it. In fact, this is one of the best songs/choruses I've heard all year, right up there with "No Dialogue," "Don't Taunt a Tiger," "Killed by Cars" and "The Exceptional Bastards." Running with the theme of vague-at-best Vampire Weekend comparisons, the second chorus is followed by a coda that leaves me longing for a third choral go-'round a la "Campus" (I first felt solidarity with a particular friend when he turned off "Campus" just before the ascending major scale coda in favor of "Marquee Moon"), except the coda of "Walk in the Park" is actually quite good, just not as good as that chorus.

"Used to Be" would be a microcosm of the album's second half (despite concluding side one) if it weren't for the fact that it's probably weaker than any of the songs to follow. A pleasant-enough pseudo-chorus doesn't take flight into a post-chorus the way you'd like, and for that, the song rings a bit flat. Still, Teen Dream proved once again to be a record which gradually reveals itself; I'd slagged off the second half entirely until relistening for the sake of writing this, and in that most recent listen found that while none of the later tracks close in on matching the heights of the Big Four, they still retain legitimate merit. "Lover of Mine" is a subtly-solid number which vaguely reprises "Norway," while "Real Love," the real latter-half gem, is also possibly the album's slowest song. And while a slower, spacier second half is characteristic of many classic albums -- Feels, Begins-with-a-Q, Ends-with-an-S, Isn't-a-Legit-Word -- where a song like "Banshee Beat" or "Daffy Duck" can actually command greater attention for their sparseness, a track like "Better Times," while decent (still not crazy about the key change), doesn't quite make the grade. Likewise, "10 Mile Stereo" seems to take a tempered approach to reaching a "Walk in the Park"-esque zenith, and the results are alright but not the same. "Take Care," a titular farewell in a similar way to "Bye" from Figure 8 (though with vocals), is built around the simple-yet-poignant couplet "I'll take care of you/If you ask me to," which actually seems to lose some of its luster as it fades into daydreams.

All in all, Teen Dream is an adeptly-crafted album that, at least for me, took a bit of time to appreciate. Still, while it is technically solid front-to-back, it can't help but feel frontloaded for having its four best tracks bunched together at the very beginning. For that, I can't call it a great record the way so many others seem to because it just doesn't flow like one. However, it's clear now that Beach House isn't merely lite FM bullshit -- at least not on this album -- even if I do picture The Captain & Tennille singing all their songs. And honestly, the girl isn't really that ugly.

RATING: 4.8

BETTER THAN QIDS?:

Indy Rock Reveiws INDIE ROCK ANNOUNCEMENT::: Twin Sister sign to Domino

2010-07-14T01:47:00.001-04:00

Indy Rock Reveiws MIXTAPE:::B- songs by C- bands

2010-07-09T19:57:00.013-04:00

Best Coast - "When I'm With You"

I can't tell whether or not this chick is cute because I can't tell whether or not she's secretly chubby, plus she looks fifteen years older than she is and that just doesn't bode well in the long term. Terrible marriage material. Anyways, this is a pretty catchy song, albeit the sort of jaded and insincere bullshit you could only deal with for three to seven days, tops. Still, a memorable, if unoriginal hook, with proto-pre-King Wavves production. Unsurprisingly enough, her only other good song, "Feelings of Love," is melodically similar enough to always feel as if it should break into the chorus of "When I'm With You." I don't understand how the ole idea pool can be so shallow with these people, and yet time and time again, there's always some ponce in some high place who's ready to push it. If that very same ponce ever happens upon this here blog, I'd just like to say that this whole beach-themed, cat-loving stoner aesthetic (see: artwork for this forthcoming LP, the Wavves one below) is pretty lame. I read an interview with this ho where she likens "When I'm With You" to "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" (the audacity mk III). No wonder she flunked outta art school.

Washed Out - "Feel it All Around"

A pretty pimp song honestly; the drum fill sample is especially sick. "New Theory" is another good one, embodying that same feel good vibe while being perhaps a bit more buoyant. Unfortunately, that's pretty much all this dude has in the tank. In fact, I'd tell you to just listen to Small Black instead, since the first three songs on their EP are great, as is their b-side "King of All Animals," but they never responded to a heartfelt email I once wrote them, and so I'll just assume they're a buncha pricks who don't need your money or hard drive space.

Delorean - "Stay Close"

I don't have it in me to be hard on these dudes. They've apparently been at it for ten years now despite only breaking about a year or so ago, and they don't exude the air of obnoxious hipsters. Respeck. This song, while sort've gay, is a very good song, ageless by modern indie rock standards in that I probably first heard it about a month ago and can still appreciate it. A "sick running jam" if I'd ever heard one. However, my reservations about it-- that it's like Merriweather taken one step too far into the realm of gay, guido fist-pumping techno -- are endemic of the rest of this disc. A collection of not-quite-there-yet Person Pitch outtakes, with just enough thump to not be completely surreal if heard blaring out the window of a white Escalade on Franklin Avenue.

Sleigh Bells - "Crown on the Ground"

This chick is really hot. Didn't know whether to single out this one, "Straight A's," "Rill Rill" or "Tell 'Em." Those were the only ones in consideration because the rest are all a bit shitty. I'd pretend to like them all if this chick was my girlfriend, tho (the one about her A/B tracks does have one cool riff...). I believe I already used the phrase "jaded, insincere bullshit" so I'd rather not sound redundant. It's funny though that the retard/dude in this band used to be emo. I guess when you rock a tattered, circa 1986 NY Mets bullpen jacket, you're ironic enough to make all those bozo brainz in Brooklyn forget.

Girls - "Lust for Life"

Man, fuck these guys. Talk about a shallow pool, every song's bread and butter is the major-to-minor chord change. Josh and I actually started a joke side project called Cuddleston Bear, in which we did the same thing in a strictly pre-1965 Beatles style. In fact, the lone fruit of our labor, "ILU," was posted on this blog a long while back, and I'd advise trying to track it down somehow as it's better than Girls, and if you're the type of person who frequently listens to Girls, it's not like the time wasted on tracking down a Slothbear rarity would've been better spent anyway, right?

Dom - "Burn Bridges"

Another dude who is all about smoking pot and loving his cat. That these fuckheads became a hype band only a couple months after forming is sickening. I do endorse this track's misanthropic message though (I only know two lines), but tried myself to temper any bridge burning by excluding any "one B- wonders" who may be slightly more inclined to stumble upon this blog post in their vanity searches.

download link: http://www.mediafire.com/?zmzygd053wj

This playlist is only six songs because, had these bands kept their respective records to only six or so songs, perhaps they would've been good like the one I made.

Indy Rock Reveiws:::Wavves - King of the Beach

2010-07-08T21:46:00.006-04:00

Indy Rock Reveiws is a brand new segment of the Spotblog. In it, palz provides his expert insight on the latest vaunted indie rock releases. In tribute to Pitchfork Media, aka the last vestige of *rEaL* counterculture, all records/bands/songs will be graded on a scale of 1 to 6, with decimals, and a final verdict of "Better than Qids?" To give some sort of context, a perfect 6.0 would be equivalent to a 9.2 BNM p4k album.

I went into seeing Wavves live at the Market Hotel (good riddance) in February 2009 already moderately embittered towards him. I heard "So Bored" and was wholly unmoved by it, and was disheartened to learn that the weedheaded, skateboarding doofus behind this music, only a couple years older than myself, was already being praised by p4k and ABC news just months after playing his first show.

The show I was about to blow $10 on, however, would serve as a demoralizing crash course in present day, Brooklyn 'DIY' (the audacity mk II) indie rock. In a venue my band couldn't sniff booking a show at, promoted by a tyrant (UNWUR) who can't be bothered to respond to my emails (no matter how threatening), I bore witness, first hand, to the paradox of modern independent rock music: none of these bands can fucking play.

Between shambolic sets from Wavves themselves, opener Nodzzz(zzz?), the texturally/melodically insipid Blank Dogs, and one of the biggest piece of shit bands going right now, Woods (I didn't even stay for them, and it would be months before I had the misfortune of even hearing their music), it became distressingly apparent that, had Ian and I owned a reverb pedal in high school, we could've been niche famous.

The same regurgitated power chord progressions, compartmentalized ambitions, and stylistic neglect of originality which permeated the duration of that show would pop up time and time again on many a 2009 release and are all amply showcased on Wavvves. Its failed noise experiments and objective clunkers where songs were presumably supposed to be (see: "Beach Demon") notwithstanding, Wavvves satisfied on the absolute dumbest level. I enjoyed the chord progression of "So Bored," Mr Wavves' go-to progression (more on this later), when I first heard it in high school on "Wave of Mutilation"; I enjoyed it more than I did in "So Bored" yet still less than in "Wave" on "To the Dregs." These two nearly-identical tracks are brazenly featured on the same half of the same album is so preposterous I almost have to applaud Wavves.

As I see it, the whole idea of something being a "guilty pleasure" stems from the fact that what you gratifies on a sensory level does not always pass the litmus test of what gratifies on an artistic (and often enough, social) level. I can appreciate a chord progression I'd heard before, but knowing it was cheaply recycled, not once, but twice, reflects pretty poorly on the artist here, and it's admittedly salt in the wounds to see something that lacks so much integrity garner the attention and praise it does, while the virtues of my own endeavors go largely unappreciated. I'd compare this paradox of enjoyment to hate-fucking-- think of some famous hot chick you'd love to bang, yet think is a stupid whore. After all, aren't the need to slam and the need to rock out both more or less physical?

It's even easier to hate Wavves when you consider what an ingrate prick the dude is, all storming off stages in places most could only dream of visiting, in front of thousands of paying fans. What almost separates him from the pack, other than having slightly better taste in stolen melodies than his contemporaries, is that he doesn't seem to be complacent. As embarrassing as it was to watch live clips of him trying to keep up with Zach Hill, it's still sadly a noble attempt to try and move outside his comfort zone. The same goes for his shift into the world of high fidelity recording on King of the Beach.

Recorded in the same studio (I think) as the way better Merriweather Post Pavilion, King of the Beach boasts a production that, to quote Sam McKeon, "pops!" and this proves effective on the standout title track and the equally satisfactory "Super Soaker." I was all ready to say that "Linus Spacehead" features the catchiest chorus he's ever taken, but apparently one of the ex-Reatards wrote that one. In fact, the Wavves dude himself only wrote nine of these songs. Of these, the best is "Mickey Mouse," which had p4k shitting themselves about a year ago when they heralded it for being "lo-fi Animal Collective." Here it's cleaned up, but the description is ultimately apt-- a neat horn sample he likely obtained using the same expensive software which lent past Wavves releases those signature distortion filters casts shades of "Comfy in Nautica" before the fuzzy guitar and warbled falsetto drop in. Listeners/suckers are more likely, however, to latch onto lead single "Post Acid." The verses sounding like a revved up "Summer Babe" with guitars that cut in and out on an absolute dime, the song is pleasant enough until you get to the chorus and realize that this could quite easily be a late 2000's era Weezer cut. That something supposedly representative of the gritty underground could evoke "Troublemaker," and that that same something could also make hipsters lose their shit while simultaneously ignoring my heretofore life's work is just downright heartbreaking.

Elsewhere, there's not a ton going on. "Convertible Balloon" is the token chillwave nod, "Baby Say Goodbye" drags a little but its heart is in the right place, and "Idiot" sounds like track 3 on Nimrod. Like every other 21st century indie rock album that has some sort of lo-fi affiliation, there's a track that cribs the already red handed "Just Like Honey" ("When Will You Come?"), but most interesting of these throwaways is "Take On the World." Reverting back to that old "Wave of Mutilation" progression, Wavvesguy sings something about lamenting the fact that everything he writes is the same. Maybe this kind of confession would endear Wavves to people, but while I'll likely often listen to the first two songs, "Linus" and "Mickey Mouse" whenever I go running or out driving on a sunny day, it won't keep me from still harboring some sort of deeply seated rage towards him.

RATING: 4.2

BETTER THAN QIDS?:

2010-07-03T13:25:00.001-04:00

collateral nanage

2010-06-27T16:53:00.000-04:00

early scan of the Anna Bradley LP cover

2010-06-26T01:45:00.001-04:00

LET IT BE KNOWN

2010-06-22T18:46:00.001-04:00

we challenged beauty feast to a game of basketball and they were too afraid to play us

RIP

2010-06-20T23:33:00.000-04:00

this is one of my favorite things that i ever made. unfortunately the paint made the paper pucker and it ended up very dogeared. but what's worse is now i think it's gone forever since i can't find it anywhere.

i'd been working on a sketch for several days now that was ruined today by a stupid decision and my own short temper. i am very upset over this and would like to wish horrible, morbid, disgusting, unfathomable, inhumane, PUTRID things on no one in particular.

Fr: Josh

2010-06-17T03:03:00.000-04:00

Yoni just suggested the girls might enjoy watching the four of us guys fuck each other.
June 16, 11:12 pm

our best/worst show

2010-06-15T14:23:00.000-04:00

id'n urges
jz
white christmas
birds
missed a cue
kick pedal broke
break for technical difficulties
seemingly endless meandering improv jam (w/ secret fuck explorer cover)
'RISK' song (40 sec)
i fuck it up around 5 sec mark
proof
entropy
___________
entire room chanting "DON'T TAUNT A TIGER" >
don't taunt a tiger
rapturous applause
killed by cars >
cont'd rapturous applause
josh's amp cuts out
kick pedal breaks again
crowd a cappella's "borrow that car..."
-fin-

o ya and heres my backyard

2010-06-10T03:21:00.000-04:00

we're on twitter now

2010-06-10T03:13:00.000-04:00

twitter.com/bearslothbearsl

if someone wants to give us some tips on how to use this fucking thing hit us up on said twitter and hopefully i'll be able to figure out how to retrieve your message

2010-05-25T22:03:00.001-04:00

Codex Slothaphinianus

2010-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00

Regarding Cell Phone safety, Larry King Live had a woman on (May 17th) whose husband got a brain tumour from excessive use of a cell phone. Recent study on cellphone use & brain tumours was inconclusive but there does seem to be a connection, so all you young people out there & older ones, too, please use your cell p...hones sparringly and get a hands free headset. I love the TV documentaries about UFOs, USOs, The Nostradamous Effect and Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and Climate Change. I think I would like to be friends with a member of the British Royal Family on Facebook. No such luck I guess! Did anyone see Family Guy tonight? It was funny. Stewie gets baptized with tainted holy water. Stewie says that old people are ugly no matter how cute they try to make them look on Desperate Housewives...then he tells viewers he will wait while they go to ABC and check for themselves. I kkeep getting e-mails about the oil spill being eco-terrorism. I haven't opened & read these e-mails, but I did hear a talk radio show where someone speculated it could have been sabatoge. Happy 18th Birthday Christina Marie! We love you! Best of luck at university! I clicked onto Carol's photo...food looks delicious; her other photos are nice, too. Beautiful song; according to Wikipedia, this band went on hiatis in 2007. Craig, you know what they say about publicity - no good or bad, just spell my name right! Here is a brief sample of Take It Easy Hospital. I love this band - Take It Easy Hospital. Also, jellyfish are blooming much more frequently than was the normal cycle. Could global warming be to blame? When the Japanese try to kill the Nomura's Jellyfish, the fenakes release millions of eggs and the males release millions of sperm, insuring the next generation of Nomura's. They go to the ocean floor as polyps and can stay there for a very long time; then, something triggers them to change into the Normura's jellyfi...sh; scientists don't know what the trigger is. Nomura's Jellyfish have invaded the Sea of Japan; they can be up to 450 lbs and 12 feet wide. They sting and kill fish that the fishing industry of Japan depends upon to feed its people. Jellyfish can live almost anywhere in the seas - the cold Artic, the hot vents and the deep ocean. Irukandji jellyfish cause irukandji syndrome if they bite you and it can cause death; can be treated but there is no anti-venom. Box jellyfish have 24 eyes and primitive nerve endings that interpret what they see so that they can capture prey. The universe will end in one of 3 ways - The Big Freeze, The Big Crunch or The Big Rip. Boston U. students rock! I love this song! Maybe time on other planets is different than time on Earth. Life on another planet in another galaxy may look very different than ours if they don't have water as the giver of life but some other liquid instead. Would we age slower on other planets in other galaxies? Physicist Brian Cox of the University of Manchester in England used to be in a rock band called D:REAM. Think of all the planets out there and we have no idea what is going on on them unless they are being recorded by the Hubble Telescope or something like it. An electron can be in 2 places at the same time; maybe living in different parallel universes; a multiverse. Can a person be in 2 places at the same time? The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal. Whatever is not forbidden is mandatory - Michio Kaku. Naturally occurng wormholes may have been created at the time of the big bang. If you had a spinning black hole and a worm hole because of it, you could jump in if you could keep the wormhole open so it doesn't come down on you; then you could go back in time. Wormholes may work as time machines, too. They are shortcuts. the previous show was about a parallel universe which functions by means of a very thin membrane. If you are near a black hole, you would age much slower than you would on earth. wormholes in space & time may be a gateway to the distant past. The faster you travel, as in a train, airplane or rocket ship, the more time slows down although it is infintessimal. Gravity bends space and tme. Michio Kaku wrote the book The Physics of the Impossible. I recommend young people study physics and astronomy. I am watching a show on Channel 170 about Time Travel. Fascinating. Christina F. sorry, just went on Bergeouhy & got your friend on facebook request; i usually use Warrington103151@aol.com which I read almost every day. Oven Fries With Garlic Aoli Recipe by Curtis Stone. Hi, Camille. Thanks. I know I look ugly! And fat! But, it takes alot of exercise & eating in moderation to stay in shape. Imagine all the people, living life in peace. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. Maybe one day you'll join us, and we all can live as one. - the late great John Lennon. I made chocolate chip cookies with walnut oil instead of butter; had to add a bit of canola oil to make up 1 cup; now, out of walnut oil & have to buy more. Remembering those innocent days of Cousin Brucie. There are alot of great singers & musicians from the younger generation. My favorites are Coldplay and The Frey. Also, an up and coming band named Slothbear of which our son, Craig, is a member. I went to Pathmark. I bought walnut oil, extra-virgin olive oil, canola oil and white balsamic vinegar as well as some other things. Walnut oil is healthy and I bake sugar cookies iwth it as the recipe asks for vegetable oil. Arlene B. Heed. Watched Biography of Andy Gibb; he was so handsome, so talented, what a waste for him to kill himself with drugs; he had a daughter and she looks like him. Hope we all can make the world a better place for ourselves, our children and grandchildren, etc. It is still snowing, but not big wet drops like yesterday; it looks like very fine snow, but it has accumulated at 7 to 14 inches. Where is Spring? Sorry, last comment was directed to Phillip. Glad your much needed vacation was everything you'd hoped it would be and maybe more. I didn't know this was an old-fashioned way of facebooking. I remember Mr. Revett used to tear boys shirts off. Another great song by the Frey (or is it The Fray?) - You Found Me. Lead singer has a very distinctive voice. I love it! Sorry, song by Carolina Liar is SHOW ME WHAT I'M LOOKING FOR. First, Josh, glad you are such a prolific reader. Wish Craig was! (Sorry, maybe Craig is and I don't know it!). Secondly, I love the song by Kelly Clarkson ALREADY GONE. Also, song by Carolina Liar SHOW ME THE WAY TO GO. Read an article in TIME about child-sex slave trafficking in South Africa. Made me almost physically sick. These poor children are tortured, raped, and often die of AIDS. Some religious and social workers try to rescue some but can't stop the ongoing horror. Reading the book The Man From Pakistan - The True Story of the World's Most Dangerous Nuclear Smuggler by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins. To think all this was going on and I was so blissfully ignorant! If you go to www.cafepress.com and type Sloth Bear in the Search Box, you get Sloth Bear tee shirts & hoodies. With great sayings on them.

Looking for a new "label"/website

2010-05-20T00:44:00.000-04:00

if you have money to burn and would like to put out what has so far been my personal favorite album of the year, please, by all means, get in touch.

vindication

2010-05-16T03:39:00.001-04:00

block 0 notes0 notes1 note reblog
persifleur:
Reply
250 max250
cancel
vanity imprints, you slut

do you count as a label if you give everything away for free? i don’t care. follow the link to download full albums from strange shapes, slothbear, beauty feast, and past planes. i went for the slothbear, but stayed for the shittiest blog ever.

vanity imprint

Olio Limelight

2010-05-06T10:37:00.000-04:00

set fader to dead middle
maybe even a smidgen closer to rush actually
change background to party

We are banned from Death by Audio

2010-04-24T01:22:00.000-04:00

Received a pretty steamy email from edan of entertainment 4 every 1 detailing how annoying we are and mentioning in passing that we're banned from ever playing DBA again because I wrote 'Slothbear' on the wall in pencil. He wrote something to the effect of 'I HAVE TO REPAINT THE WALLS EVERYTIME A PUNK LIKE YOU HAS SOMETHIN IMPORTANT TO SAY' but i had just made the vow to stop being self-righteously belligerent and so i sent him a polite and heartfelt apology while noting as delicately as possible the fact that one needn't paint over erasable lead.

Regardless, this comes just days after I called Joe from silent barn out on facebook for being so cold to slothbear all the time. Coincidence?

we did play our first (solicited) encore yesterday though

2010-04-18T19:05:00.000-04:00

finished the set and after the five or so people in attendance (not including the silent barn 'bigwhigs' who as usual refused to give us a fair shake) cheered, a deafening silence was broken by someone saying something to the effect of "yeah, why don't you guys, y'know, play some more?" good times

proof
17
no dialogue
tiger
olio/d
___________
white christmas
fa la la
little qid

I really hate New York

2010-04-18T15:29:00.000-04:00

just a buncha jaded snakes in the grass and general m-fuckers