Month of December , 2006

Tomorrow night my favorite local band Screaming Females is kicking it live at The Parlor, a rocking basement venue in New Brunswick where they host the coolest and weirdest and funnest bands around, and have the best local DIY thing going in the whole damn state. There. Needed to get that out there. Full details on their MySpace.

If you like the Screamales' record Baby Teeth or if you're becoming an otaku, you might be interesting to know this little tidbit that Jarrett posted on their blog recently, a promo to get you out, since it's their third show in about a month down in New Bruns:

So how are we going to get you to all three shows? Well we have a plan. The vinyl release of Baby Teeth should be available in the near future but until then we are going to be giving away 3 super limited edition hand decorated test pressings of the album; one at each show. Test pressings are what the factory sends you to give final approval before they print it up for real. There are only 5 in existence. They have only blank labels and no jacket but Marissa is going to be drawing all over them and making custom jackets. Misfits test pressings sell for thousands of dollars and thats only The Misfits, this is freaking Screaming Females!!! At each show there will be a competition to win the album.

A good pitch, if I've ever heard one.

Also, I saw this on MySpace earlier today and I must repost it:

We Are The Seahorses are, as Adam said, Porno Clash, and their Christmas Spectacular is likely to be no let down on that score. It will be sweaty and dancing and half naked and glittering and loud enough to rival NoFX. I've seen singer Dale Seahorse perform with Titti! a few times over the last few months, and I think he's really starting to get that balance of inanity and entertainment and good pop dance music down to a working equation with his live antics, and I'm looking forward to catching his main act, We Are The Seahorses, soon.

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On a totally different note, I've just returned from a breath taking and near death cross country trip. So, hello. I should be posting more regularly soon. As ever, send us your music, your shows, your unwashed masses: sceneless@gmail.com. Many thanks to Adam for moving us over to the new server without nary a blip!

Dave Walsh, a friend of mine from Greenpeace who runs the fantastic site blather.net has recently opined about one of his favorite bands from Back In The Day (post 80s) over on Sweeping The Nation that is an absolutely fascinating read:

Whatever this was on the radio, it wasn't fucking Duran Duran. The genius behind this fantastic racket was furious, that was for sure. But why was he so worked up about Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania's communist dictator, who had been executed, along with his wife, while singing the fourth word of the communist song L'Internationale on Christmas Day 1989? I had no idea. I was a smart enough kid, but was only lurching towards an understanding of international politics. Fanning's voice came on, and told it was a guy called Cathal Coughlan and the band was the Fatima
Mansions. The song was called Blues For Ceausescu.
[snip]
That's 16 years ago, and I'm still thinking over what Cathal Coughlan was singing about. I've met the man, but never asked him about it. Sometimes I think he's musing on the return of Ceausescu, Messiah-like, or as an anti-Christ, but this time as the King of England. Other times I think it's not really about Ceausescu at all, but the whole fucked up state of the UK at the time... and, for that matter, Ireland. Maybe it's a fusion of all these - a goodbye and good riddance to Ceausescu, with an observation that the late dictator would have felt right at home in Thatcher's Britain.

Click here to read the full article. It's an engrossing exploration of a song and a place in search of meaning both for the original artist, and the listener. A bang up job, Walshy.

Good day.
Some nerd news for y'all:

Sceneless has been experiencing some weird outages, usually early in the AM hours, when most people are on the Internet and reading when they should be working instead.

Due to these frequent and unfortunate outages, I've abandoned our former hosting company and moved the site to a different server.

If any comments or posts have been lost as a result of the move, I do apologize, as you will have to post them again.

Cheers

Adam

As humans, I think we're trained from day one to fill the communication void between each other by spending money on stuff. Stuff gets us talking: Alcohol, sports, art, books, music.

As sad as it is to see Tower Records go out of business, Shannon and I made out like bandits - coming home with a pile of CDs at 50-70% off normal sticker price. It's the first time in a very very long time that I have gone on a music purchasing binge, and it likely marks the occasion of the last time I will shop at a big box music store. Specialty stores like Generation and Kim's will always exist because of the strong elitist niche they command, but thanks to Amazon, places like Tower and Sam Goody are a dying breed.

And good riddance, too. Most CD prices were between $15.99 and $17.99, with singles between $3.99 and $7.99. Imports were coming in at $33.99. And the computerized ordering system that long since replaced Human Purchasers was putting Tower in a huge hole of debt. The video manager was telling us that he had 20,000 pieces of overstock, most of it copies of the same merchandise.

Shannon worked at Tower for a little bit, and explained the computerized purchasing system to me. All CDs and Videos were given a rating 1 through 10. A rating of "1" would be the most popular stuff, your Jay-Zs and Madonnas. This stuff would get ordered in absolutely insane quantities, left to sit on the shelves or in the storeroom for months because most people who would buy it usually buy it the day it comes out.

A rating of "10" would be the most obscure, like boxed sets from Ant-Zen, reissues of old Can albums. You know, the kind of stuff one goes to a record store to find because they can't pick it up when they are at Target or Wal-Mart. The kind of items that human purchasers would make sure a couple of copies were in stock to keep the store fresh and unique. When the computerized system was put into place, items rated 9 and 10 were getting thrown away. Ok, returned to the labels. But still. It was like throwing them away.

When this happened, Tower essentially began to throw away precisely what would have kept it alive in the face of online purchases and the Discount Giants. Smaller stores have learned this lesson and have thus far been able to stay open. So good riddance to this awful formula, but a part of me will always miss the randomness of browsing the "C"s in Rock/Pop/Soul, finding a soundtrack scored by Nick Cave sitting right next to Cindarella, or finding an O'Jays disc misplaced under Merzbow.