I Think I See the Light

After two or three weeks when I spent all of my free time doing nothing but packing up and sending out Koro LPs I’m finally starting to crawl out from under the rubble. The orders have slowed to a manageable trickle and I dare say that everyone who has ordered something from me can expect their records in the next few days. In the future I’m definitely going to do a better job planning my releases and making sure that they don’t come out at such stressful times because over the past few weeks I’ve felt like I’ve barely had hold of my sanity. I’ve been depressed and stressed out and I think that my relationships with friends and family have been suffering because of it. Of course now I have to deal with the malaise that comes along with setting the clocks back an hour every fall but the pain inherent in that is assuaged somewhat by the fact that it is now officially leather jacket weather.

In other news, there was a pretty ripping show at the Gorman Street Sluts house the other night with Cross Laws, Street Sharks, Cloak/Dagger and Government Warning, the latter two of which were headed down to the Fest in Florida. Cross Laws played first and unfortunately I broke a string during the 3rd or 4th song. Rich from the Street Sharks was kind enough to let me borrow his guitar (I was already using his amp, so thanks again Rich), though it was only when he handed it to me that I realized it was literally the first time I had played an electric guitar besides my own. Rich’s guitar is a lot different (read: nicer) than mine so when you combine that with the fact that I was also playing in the dark for the first time it means that I played really, really shitty. Fortunately the other two members of my band ripped it the fuck up so hopefully our set sounded better than it felt for me to play it. Anyway, playing crummy put me in a bad mood for the rest of the bands so I probably acted like an asshole all night but I had a lot of fun. Street Sharks were wild as always even though Joel had a bunch of stitches in his head, Cloak/Dagger were even more amazing in the house show environment than they have been when I’ve seen them in larger venues and Government Warning are… well, they’re just Government Warning. They played something like six covers (including two Circle Jerks covers) and almost all the songs off their 1st 7″ as well as a new song called “Arrested” that is going to blow minds when it gets recorded. Fuck, even thinking about this show in retrospect I’m amazed that I managed to live through it.

You can see my photos from the show here. Kevin Collins from the almighty Double Negative was also snapping photos and you can see his pics here.

That’s all for now. Who knows when the fuck I’ll update this thing again. My head hasn’t been in the right place lately.

CBGB

Today Slate has an article on the closing of CBGB that I think actually gets at the heart of why this club’s moving to Vegas is such a big deal. Literally thousands of musicians have played there over the years, and most of them are hardly Patti Smiths, Blondies, Ramones or even Gorilla Biscuitses for that matter. Do you really think that a band with a sound as phenomenally new as Bad Brains will ever get started at CBGB Vegas? Do you think they’ll ever host a 76% Uncertain reunion show? What about a $5 Sunday matinee with Gorilla Biscuits, Youth of Today and Bold? At best the new version will probably be a Hard Rock Cafe with vaguely punk leanings. I’m not terribly nostalgic over CBGB closing (after all, I never actually made it to a show there) but it does suck that there’s one less place for underground bands to play in this country.

Holy Crap

The Koro LP finally came out on Thursday. I put it up on the web site and within 16 hours the 200 clear vinyl copies had sold out. I spent all weekend packaging records until I went through the 100 LP mailers I had on hand. Unfortunately shipping the rest will have to be delayed a little bit until I can get more mailers in stock. Here are some photos to let you know how intense this weekend has been.

Ever wonder how a seriously brutal trip to the post office starts?

Here are two shots of the disaster area that is my record room at the moment:

I’m guessing that it’s going to take me at least a week to climb out from underneath the massive pile of orders I have, which will be just in time for the Koro 7″ repress to come out and the whole process start over! Woohoo!

What I’m Listening to

I was walking home from school today and it struck me that it’s been ages since I’ve written about my listening habits. It’s funny to me now that this site started as an almost-daily account of my personal playlist. These days my tediously written-out personal recommendation of a band pales next to the cold, hard evidence of my last.fm profile, which is an unfiltered view of what I’m actually listening to rather than what I’m trying to convince myself I like.

So, what’s actually on the ipod and the turntable?

For some reason or another the fast Japanese stuff has been tickling my fancy. In particular, Rose Rose’s Mosh of Ass and SOB’s Don’t Be Swindle and Leave Me Alone records are keeping my adrenaline pumping. I remember really liking Rose Rose when I borrowed my friend Joel’s records this summer, but when I scored a copy of Mosh of Ass recently it just clicked into place. I guess it was just the right record at the right time. The same goes for SOB; every so often I get in the mood for 1,000,000-mph thrash and there are very few bands that do it better. Now, if I could only get my hands on some of Mind of Asian’s records…

At one period in time I honestly thought that I’d heard and fully digested all of the truly great ’77 punk records, but I’ve slowly come to realize that it would take a lifetime to immerse one’s self in everything great that happened in that phenomenally creative period. My latest find, however, didn’t come out of a dusty used bin but off of my own record shelf. I bought the Heartbreaker’s LAMF when I went to England in 2000, but it got lost in the shuffle of the couple hundred records I bought on that trip and hasn’t gotten played much in the intervening six years. When Kelly heard the version of “Chinese Rocks” from this record on an old mix tape she dug up I pulled out the whole LP and it’s been blowing my fucking mind ever since. I’ve been listening to the Nuggets compilations a bit lately and I swear that the Heartbreakers’ “All By Myself” is up there with the best four or five tracks on that legendary 4CD box set, and despite their presence on every punk comp ever “Born to Lose” and “Chinese Rocks” are still raging.

I’m almost embarassed to mention this on the site, but since the evidence is right there on last.fm I should say that I’ve rediscovered Integrity over the past week or so. Recently there was an article about straight edge in the Chronicle of Higher Education (a sort of industry trade journal for college professors and administrators) and it mentioned Integrity prominently, then Aversion did a post about Integrity’s For Those Who Fear Tomorrow. Listening to those mp3s made me remember how much I loved Integrity back in the day and within a few hours I had ripped Humanity Is the Devil from my battered 10″ vinyl. I didn’t expect that the record would hold up this well, but “Vocal Test” is as vicious as ever and the intro bass riff to “Hollow” sounds like a modern update of Discharge’s early singles.

Aside from that, Judgement’s Just Be EP, Lip Cream’s 4th LP, the Vicious’ Obsessive EP and the Strung Up / Direct Control split LP have all been kicking my ass lately. I’ve also been enjoying promos I recently received of the Fix official discography CD (puts the Lost and Found CD to shame!) and the Dicks’ live CD, but I want to do proper write-ups on those so I’ll save the in-depth analysis for later.

New Feed

For those of you who subscribe to one of this site’s feeds, could you please subscribe to our new feedburner feed? The address is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/DeadMetaphor

I may well take the old RSS and ATOM feeds offline in the future, so please update your links.

As for those of you who don’t use an RSS aggregator, what are you waiting for? RSS Readers (there are a ton of them available, from bloglines to Google Reader and back) take a collection of your favorite web sites and automatically build you a personalized newspaper that is updated whenever your sites are updated. If you click on the link to our feed above you’ll see buttons to automatically subscribe to Dead Metaphor in a number of the most popular readers.