7.21.2010

Kiss It Better

HOME!

So many people helped us out in the wake of the robbery. Our solid gold bros in Coliseum lent us cabs and hooked us up with First Act Guitars (Coliseum, HOF, Mastodon...) who gave us 3 custom axes so we could keep going. With people having your back like that, it's hard to be existential bitches about your luck. That shit just happens, and you can only be so vigilant. I stand by my love for Philadelphia, but to any bands going through there, it was said to us many times (after the fact) that it's happened a lot there lately, specifically at hotels, and it looks like some kind of ring involving the people who work at the hotels. So a word to the wise, maybe drive 20 minutes out of town to be safe.
All that aside, the East Coast half of the tour was a blast. Got to reconnect with old friends and met a pile of new ones along the way, and played some great rooms with awesome bands (Eddy Current, Kim Phuc, Fight Amp, Disappearer, Mammoth Grinder, so many more...there's almost too many people and good times to list). But some highlights: Rick from Torche took us to Bob's River Place south of Gainesville. When passing through Florida, dear god in heaven, go there. We ate a lot of burritos. Slept in an Airstream. Got a crash course in Savannah while stranded for an extra day with a broken axle and played an amazing house show on 6 hours notice (and we're definitely coming back to hang and bang in October), took out 2 mirrors (mine was just a crappy NYC work truck, but Pat's was a Benz in Boston, so he wins) and a bumper (our own), and shot both our front axels (Sorry Spartanburg/Sorry Dayton).
RIP Friendship Cove 2005-2010. Another amazing DIY space bites the dust. The MTL show was shut down by Montreal police and after 5 years, it looks like our set was the last hurrah for the Cove (and yes - we're aware the same thing just happened with our Cinecycle show and when Cursed played the Black Dot. Don't rub it in, dicks). Luckily at least the boys from Hardtimes got it on tape, as well as a new interview (thanks, boys):



The Toronto show at Parts & Labor (best spot, congrats all around) was the best Toronto show yet, and being surrounded by friends and home for a day was so well-needed. As always, Ivy took some great pictures of the whole night. So many thanks to Coliseum and their man Jason. Part Two of the tour (West Coast) starts in a month (Aug.25-Sept 28). Dates will be up here in the next week. We'll be playing Ann Arbor on the way there and a bunch of shows on the way back from Louisville, including some more Kim Phuc action and a Vermont show with NAILS (so stoked. My favorite LP of 2010).

We're playing in Hamilton (This Ain't Hollywood) and Toronto (Horseshoe Tavern) with C'mon in early October, then touring with C'mon from here to eastern Canada on the way to Halifax Pop Explosion on Oct.22nd, then heading down the US east coast (including shows with Doomriders, Fight Amp and others) on the way to The Fest in Gainesville (and without a doubt, many alligator infested hours at Bob's River Place) and back home.

Incoming, this interview from Signal Magazine and some belated video by Ryan Walker of the Dees (Toronto) show in January. Thanks, Ryan.

Europe/UK tour in Nov/Dec is currently looking like this:

wed 17.11 GER - Leipzig @ Zoro w/ American Cheeseburger
thu 18.11 GER - Giessen @ AK 44
fri 19.11 SWI - Luzern @ Sedel
sat 20.11 GER - Freiburg @ KTS
sun 21.11 ITA - Bologna @ Lazzaretto
mon 22.11 AUT - Vienna @ Arena
tue 23.11 CZ - Brno @ Yacht Club
wed 24.11 CZ - Prague @ 007
thu 25.11 GER - Potsdam @ Black Fleck
fri 26.11 DK - Copenhagen @ Lades Kaelder
sat 27.11 DK - Aalborg @ 1000 Fryd
sun 28.11 GER - Hamburg @ Hafenklang
mon 29.11 GER - Trier @ Ex Haus
tue 30.11 FRA - Caen @ El Camino
wed 01.12 UK - Canterbury @ The Chantry Club
thu 02.12 UK - Hull @ Adelphi
fri 03.12 UK - Manchester @ Retro Bar
sat 04.12 UK - Bradford @ 1 in 12 Club
sun 05.12 UK - Durham @ tba
mon 06.12 UK - Nottingham @ tba
tue 07.12 UK - Bristol @ The Croft
wed 08.12 BEL - Kortrijk @ The Pits
thu 09.12 BEL - Antwerpen @ Kavka
fri 10.12 GER - Essen @ Cafe Nova
sat 11.12 GER - Berlin @ Shokoladen
sun 12.12 GER - Dresden @ Az Conni
mon 13.12 GER - Wuerzburg @ Immerhin
tue 14.12 GER - Mannheim @ Juz
wed 15.12 FRA - Lyon @ Warm Audio
thu 16.12 BEL - Brussels @ Cafe DNA
fri 17.12 NL - Tilburg @ Little Devil
sat 18.12 NL - Horst @ Cafe Babouche
sun 19.12 NL - Amsterdam @ Winston
mon 20.12 FRA - Paris @ Le Pixi tbc
tue 21.12 FRA - in the works
wed 22.12 GER - Fulda @ Cafe Panama

...and there may be some extra dates added to the beginning. Stay tuned and seriously, thank you all and your support for keeping us going out there.

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As promised, here are some more extensive liner notes for most of the songs on the LP:

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DESTROYER OF WORLDS


Destroyer of Worlds is about a repentant inventor trying to retract his own out of control creation too late, a hypothetical narrative based on J. Robert Oppenheimer as he looked upon the beauty and horror of the first detonation of the hydrogen bomb (date place), which he created. He said of it later "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, he takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds'. I suppose we all thought that, one way or another." Oppenheimer was later blacklisted from the military and science community for trying to retract and oppose the bomb.


Further reading: American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer


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DON'T EVER CHANGE


Don't Ever Change is a song about rejecting pedestals, the fetishizing of idealists rather than the ideals they represent, and about being outgrown by the much younger people around you as adult life and its priorities inevitably finds its way to them.


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MEMENTO MORI


This is about the detrimental effects of apathetic consumerism on the arts, particularly in modern film, and how a majority contently eating up whatever is being put in front of them makes for lazy, minimum effort remake/rehash culture with no point but to strike whatever nerve is left in their overstimulated audience. Demanding more from art than an industry of rehashed, self-referential pop culture and lazy nostalgia trips. If you don't demand any more from culture, you can't expect much more than a world of dead nerve endings, lowest common denominators and broken references severed from any meaning or purpose.


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GAIN


Pretty literal. I am going deaf, but it was for a good cause, and I am learning to read lips.


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CURSE BREAKER


Curse Breaker is about the anthropomorphizing of disaster and self-pitying superstitions becoming just as dogmatic as religion. Making or breaking, glorifying or rejecting the all-too poetic idea of our own shit luck. Rather than accepting things with grace for what they are (and are not), our invented gods inevitably enter the equation. Something must be either a blessing or a punishment from above or below. This is about the existential cowardice of the deathbed conversion and the copout of looking to the sky for the false consolation of some greater external rationale.


Further reading: Thomas Homer-Dixon - The Upside of Down, an amazing book about the physics of what we consider "disaster", and how everything from major diseases to natural disasters are not only natural but necessary, and when we try to cheat the system and circumvent them, we deny the natural world its equilibrium, creating worse problems down the line.


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HIGH SPEED WIRES


About being an analog man in an increasingly digital world. I am a selective luddite. Hypocritical I guess. Computer yes, cel phone no. Blogs yes, social networking no. Basically, the practical and not the social. Maybe I read Orwell way too young, but I looked around for data to back up my inherent paranoias and I found it everywhere. Today it all seems normal, especially to anyone who grew up with the internet already an established thing - to be absent from every present moment, constantly attached to a radiating device, to defer to a touch screen for all decisions and interactions. I read a book in high school that effected me a lot, The Unconscious Civilization by John Ralston Saul, a Canadian humanist philosopher / culture theorist, in which he talked about the impending "canonization of the new information technologies", which I then watched unfold to the letter, albeit in inconspicuous increments. Aside from the issue of the companies who own and trade your information, it's not the modernity or convenience of it that I can't stomach, it's the switch in priorities that finds the quality of your actual reality suffering on account of your virtual one.

This song is about discerning between convenience and dehumanization, and reserving your right to reject that convenience and inclusion/attachment to the world that comes with such strings attached, even if it cuts you off from the majority (in today's case, 99% of everyone you know). I am quite alright with falling behind and out of touch with the endless dead-end narcissism and false persona of that world. If I've learned anything from punk rock, its that it's alright:


"Alienation from what? You have to want to be part of something in order to feel alienated from it." (from Boyd Rice's interview in the ReSearch Magazine on Industrial Culture)


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ALIEN VS CREDITOR


Alien Vs Creditor is about the banks that call my house all day, and the very big business of debt maintenance, about keeping students and working class families in holes as deep and drawn out as possible, and an economy propped up on the debts of the working poor.


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MONEY SHOTS


Sorry but this isn't a moralistic leftist rant against pornography (pornography is as old as time, and no more morally right or wrong than a body itself can be), it's about modern sex symbols falling short of the ones I grew up on. About quantity proctology in the place of sexual personality not working for me (All hole, no glory). As a male, it is my sex and my head that fertility icons have been readied, aimed and fired at from birth. This isn't meant to be heterocentric. Regardless of who you fuck, it's for anyone that knows what they like and don't mind calling bullshit on all the half-assed glass eyed sex symbols of the modern world.


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NEEDLE INTRO (Instrumental)


At Giant, the studio where we recorded the LP, there was this heating duct through the backyard venting steam from the adjoining building making the most amazing and ominous drone. I kept passing it and being transfixed for 20 minutes at a time by this hypnotic noise. We ran a mic outside in the snow and recorded it, and didn't do anything to it for the track. When in Parkdale in the winter, I'd highly recommend stopping by this one alley if you have 8 hours to kill. And the piano: we were taking a break from the vocals, I was fucking around on this old out of tune piano while Ian went outside to smoke a cigarette. I turned around to see him through the glass making a "keep going" sign, having been recording it for minutes already - just the kind of move that we love him for.


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THE NEEDLE


The Needle is about the terrible waste of watching an old and very gifted friend degenerate on hard drugs, and how much it sucks to have a lifetime of better memories of a person replaced by the last and most unflattering face you see stuck to them.


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...I missed a couple but that'll hold ya.


6 comments:

unclegill said...

Wow.. I would do extremely indecent things to anyone in order to catch a Doomriders + Burning Love show. What date are you guys playing at the Horseshoe?

CC said...

Hah. Yeah, we're nailing that down this week. The Horseshoe would be Oct 9th.

Evan said...

Any chance of hitting Buffalo on the way down to the Fest?

Love the LP.

Cheers -

Evan

Paulprintman said...

Burning Love kicks fuckin ass on 11 different levels. Been listening to songs for the burning lovers for a few weeks now and it still rocks my boat. Come to Poland, dying to see you live!

Joe said...

I cannot wait for you guys to come back to Cleveland. It was a TON of fun getting to play with you guys!

-Joe/Little Sister

Unknown said...

Busy men, sounds awesome! Hull show is now at 41 club, my own venue/warehouse space/biker hangout. That's right. Can't wait! Feel free to bring Torche/Coliseum/Doomriders with you ;) Molly.