Free for You & Me: Something Fierce/Indian Jewelry/BRMC(?)

Behind the curve, as always…damn you, New House/Day Job! I’d like to vow that if I ever win the lottery this here blog will be so kickass and up-to-the-millisecond current that it’ll fry your hair just to look at it. Except that I know I’m inherently too lazy for that, and so — hey, I bet they’re re-running No Reservations on The Travel Channel right now…

Anyway, today is A Good Day, because you, I, and everybody else in the vicinity have the opportunity to partake in some genuinely good, honest-to-Bubba free stuff. Here’s what you can grab hold of for exactly zero dollars:

Something Fierce’s new, as-yet-unreleased EP, free!: Well, due to some bad luck on their label’s part (nothing intentional, I’m told), the long-awaited Modern Girl 7″/EP by our very own Something Fierce still has yet to materialize. They’d put the title track up on their Myspace for all to hear & admire, but no vinyl has yet reached the shelves.

So, seeing that all us SF fans have been desperately longing for more full-on rawk in our lives, the SF crew decided to take matters into their own hands and self-release the whole EP in digital form on the brand-new (and also very cool) HoustonPunk.com site, all for free-free-free.

Now for the bad news: for some reason (which is possibly on my end, I should note), I can’t yet download any of the damn EP tracks in their entirety. I get between 1/8th and halfway each time, then it craps out & leaves me with half a song on my hard drive. Argh. I only hope that this problem is because so many rabid Something Fierce fans are flooding the site that the server just handle all the requests or whatnot. Got my fingers crossed on that one, y’all.

Anyway, if you have problems like I have, keep at it — thanks to Stephen Fierce, I’ve got a couple of the tracks (the title track and “Hey Houston”) on CDR right here in front of me, and, to put it bluntly, they’re bad-fucking-ass. “Modern Girl” still can’t supplant “Teenage Ruins” as my all-time favorite SF song, but I’ll be damned if it’s not a close second.

Plus, while you’re frantically downloading and MP3ing, be sure to check out the HoustonPunk.com site itself — it was started up recently by Teenage Kicks guys John, Stewart, & Kirke, and so far it’s looking nice. It’s about damn time, really, that somebody did this; I’m no authority on punk stuff in this city, myself, and it seems like just about every other musical niche is well-represented on the World Wide Whatever. I can recall a handful of “Houston Punk” sites from back in the day, but they were all scrappy & scratchy & died early deaths. This one, I would wager, has staying power. Seriously, check it out.

Indian Jewelry @ SoundEx, gratis!: Yep, you might’ve noticed it on the calendar for a little while now — local agitnoise experimenters (c’mon, how would you describe these folks in a couple of words?) Indian Jewelry are back in H-town tonight, finishing out their recent tour for new album Free Gold, playing for the sheer hell of it (and the hope that they might sell some records, understandably) over at Sound Exchange at 8PM.

While I haven’t yet heard the album (apparently I’m not the only one, at least), I am fully in awe of every ear-destroying/crazily beautiful thing these people do, and you can have no doubt that whatever the heck happens at SoundEx tonight is going to be pretty cool.

Plus, shows up at SoundEx are always fun, in a cramped, hipster-ish kind of way. I think your Scenester Coolness Quotient is raised 34 points just by entering the building, actually… And hey: free. What more do you want?

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, for…free?: Alright, so this one’s a bit strange. From David over at Houston Calling, apparently Black Rebel Motorcycle Club are playing an RSVP-only private show tonight at Warehouse Live. I don’t know the details, really, beyond what’s in David’s post, but he says it looks legit. Dunno if they still have openings, but hey, you won’t know ’til you try, right?