Back at the keyboard once again, post-Grand Canyon debacle (which I will post about, btw, for those who give a crap; still trying to organize thoughts & force myself to actually type it up), and we've got two updates' worth of new stuff up for all to ogle and admire and deride, as they/you see fit.

Anyway, first up I feel completely and totally compelled to mention that there's this badass show going on tonight (Tuesday, July 15th, for all the poor fools who have no calendars) up at The Mink's Backroom. Headliners are Sleepercar, which is Jim Ward's (ex-At The Drive-In/Sparta) new band, plus excellently awesome locals The JonBenet, Buxton, B., and -- most important to SCR at this particular juncture -- Giant Princess. We'd like to emphasize the coolness of Giant Princess specifically, esp. 'cause we just slapped a review of their free-to-all self-titled CD-R up on the ol' Website (courtesy of Jef "With One F" Rouner; thanks, Jeff!). No slight intended to any of the other fine bands playing, mind you -- we like The JB and Buxton a hell of a lot and have heard very nice things about B., too. It's just that being the ADD-addled people we (okay, I) are, we've gotta focus on what's in front of us, y'know?

Which means this coming Thursday, July 17th, leaves my little brain in twitchy, spastic overdrive. Because not only is Darkest Hour -- a fine, fine metalcore band from DC we here at SCR have been fans of for many moons (old-school interview Ruben did back in the day up here) -- playing that night over at Warehouse Live with At the Gates, Municipal Waste, & Toxic Holocaust (about all three of whom: sorry, no clue what they're like...), but the Free Press's Recession Thursdays thingy will feature mind-blowingly awesome local folks The Riff Tiffs as headliners, playing alongside Lisa's Sons, longtime fave Pale, The Takes, Come See My Dead Person, & DJ Ceeplus Bad Knives.

And just so you're not totally uninformed as to what's going on, we've kindly posted two reviews for you, one of the Riff Tiffs latest EP, festival/snflwr, which you can pretty much only obtain from the band themselves, so pester 'em if you see 'em (I was too slow last time, myself, and they'd already run out of copies) and one for Darkest Hour's latest, Deliver Us. There're other reviews up, as well, like writeups of the new My Morning Jacket, Gallhammer, No Age, Sigur Rós (oh, how I loathe formatting Icelandic characters in HTML...), Pomegranates, & others. Check 'em all out here

While we're at it, we've also got a couple of new show reviews on the site, writeups on the recent Her Space Holiday/Lymbyc Systym/We Were Wolves show at Walter's (here) and the not-as-recent Black Mountain show at The Meridian back 'round SXSW-time (here). We're very proud of 'em, and we're slowly, slowly catching up with the slew of show reviews our indefatigable contributors have been cranking out lately. Y'all do good.

Lastly (but certainly not leastly), yours truly has been finally attempting to rev back up again on actually updating the "Featured Bands" list -- I've kept a ton of deserving folk waiting in the wings for far too long to receive the dubious honor of having me blather about them on the Bands page. I'm working on rectifying that, so now you can read my quasi-insightful writings about local heroes By the End of Tonight, Deathbed Repentance, and listenlisten (sorry that one took so long, you guys!). More will come, I swear.

For now, here's the list:

New Featured Bands: By the End of Tonight; Deathbed Repentance; listenlisten

Live Reviews: Her Space Holiday/Lymbyc Systym/We Were Wolves; SXSW Spills Over with Black Mountain

Reviews: Giant Princess; My Morning Jacket; Darkest Hour; Pomegranates; I Love Math; The Riff Tiffs; Sigur Rós; Gallhammer; Jordan; No Age; Driver Side Impact; Hello Tokyo; Eric Layer; Little Name; Pain Principle; The Gena Rowlands Band; Jet Black Kiss; Juhu Beach; The Oswald Effect; & The Soulshake Express.

Enjoy it, folks, & come on back...

Labels: Featured Bands, Live Reviews, Reviews, Things To Do, Things To See

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Yep, got a bunch of new stuff up lately, including a nicely-sized (I think, anyway) pile of reviews. There's one of the new NOFX live disc, which is surprisingly good despite the title (these days I find myself blasting "You're Wrong" and "Franco-Unamerican" while driving around, at least as long as my daughter's not in the car), and the band themselves will be here in town on 2/26 at Warehouse Live with No Use For A Name, The Flatliners, and Houston's own resurrected pop-punk heroes the Latch Key Kids, plus an after-party with fellow H-towners The Hates. Gonna be good; check out the review here.

On top of that, naturally, we've got a good-sized pile of other reviews, including former King's X frontman dUg Pinnick (the capitalization's his, I swear, not mine), ASG, Emily Jane White, & ex-Casket Lottery/Small Brown Bike-ers Able Baker Fox, among others.

Oh, and I'd meant to post about 'em a long time before now, but we've now got some new Featured Band writeups up, for incredible local folks like Buxton & The Gold Sounds. Here's the whole pile:

New Featured Bands: The Riff Tiffs; The Gold Sounds; Buxton; & Latch Key Kids.

Reviews: NOFX; dUg Pinnick; ASG; Emily Jane White; Able Baker Fox; Plastic Idols; Patient Patient; & The Playing Favorites.

That's it for now. I'm gonna head to bed so I can wake up early & prepare my monkey suit for wearin' tonight. sigh.

Labels: Featured Bands, Musical Crap, Reviews, Things To Do

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Yeah, they're both a couple of days old already, but I just wanted to mention that fancy-shmancy new "Featured Band" write-ups are now online for sweet-voiced indie-popsters Piano Vines, who I'm eagerly awaiting to check out on CD (go, U.S. Postal Service, go!), and stoner-rock heroes and all-'round nice guys The Linus Pauling Quartet, who I'd been foolishly willing to dismiss 'til recently (yes, I am an idiot, and I'll admit that freely). More to come, I promise -- look for Rustler, The Riff Tiffs, Program, and a bunch more to magically appear here in weeks/months to come. Got my list, got my list...

Labels: Admin Stuff, Featured Bands

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Hey, folks -- longtime readers (yes, the few, the not-so-proud, the downright embarrassed...) will have probably noticed that the Featured Bands section of the site has been woefully outdated for, oh, about three years now (at least). 'Til recently, long-dead or moved-away folks like Middlefinger, Washington Westcott, & Panic In Detroit had been up there for a really long time, and the writeups for the still-around bands were definitely dated. (I think the Guilloteens' writeup mentioned their "new" album from 2004, Get Knifed, and said I hadn't listened to it yet, despite having reviewed the damn thing in the meantime...)

All of which, frankly, is pretty pathetic for a site that's at least partly about good music in this city of ours. Which is why for the past few days yours truly has been frantically updating & adding to the ever-popular Bands section of the site. Not only are there a ton of new band links, but there's also a decent-sized pile of new "featured" folks, and I've been working at updating as many of the ridiculously out-of-date writeups as possible and moving the ones that're dead & buried over to The Band Graveyard.

Anyway, head over & check it out if you feel like it -- there's more to come, definitely. I've still gotta do long-overdue writeups for Listen Listen, Free Radicals, Radio Pioneer, & a swarm of others...

New Featured Bands: Blades, Ryan Scroggins and the Trenchtown Texans, The Jonx, & The Phlegmatics.

Labels: Admin Stuff, Featured Bands, H-Town News

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Yep, new stuff up on the site, just in time for the end of May. Ch-ch-check it out...

New Featured Band: The Scattered PAGES

Reviews: Arthur Yoria; Land Of Talk; The Little Heroes; The Horrors; Sedalia; Sine Qua Non; Mick Sterling; & Tammany Hall Machine.

More to come. (No, really.)

Labels: Featured Bands, Reviews

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Gonna make this quick -- off to watch big Scotsmen/wannabe Scotsmen throw hammers & such and eat hard-boiled eggs that've been rolled in sausage and deep fried. Just so you know, though, today's update includes two bands playing this weekend: Alex Delivery does a psychedelic freakout thing tonight at The Proletariat (with Frog Eyes), and pop-punker-gone-acoustic Kris Racer will be up at Notsuoh tomorrow night rockin' on the Elliott Smith tip. Both will be real good, we swear...

New Featured Bands: Something Fierce; Co-Pilot

Reviews: Alex Delivery; Kris Racer; Hello Stranger; Alice Despard; Omar and the Howlers; & Sur la mer.

More very, very soon...

Labels: Featured Bands, Reviews, Things To Do

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Yep, new stuff for the new month, with more to come (hopefully very) soon. For right now, we've got a new featured band & some new reviews... Featured Band: Miss Leslie and Her Juke-Jointers. Reviews: Comeback Kid; local H-towners Ragged Hearts; The Comas; Analog Heartbreak; Sue Foley; Mess Up the Mess; The Sleeping (reissue); & Stemage.

Labels: Featured Bands, Reviews

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Man, what a week... It's fairly safe to say that things haven't gone quite the way I'd planned 'em. Seeing as this was shaping up to be one of the coolest weeks for The Rock here in Houston in quite some time, I'd hoped to be the music-fan-about-town. Screw SouthBy -- I figured a little Guilloteens here, some Blades there, plus some Jonah Matranga, all topped off w/some Palomar, maybe some Ladyhawk, and what the hey, some wild Irish fiddle, and I'd be a lot better off than if I were trying to negotiate the hordes of Sixth Street. I'm a married guy with a little midget at home, so I don't get to do this sort of thing real often; I was looking forward to it.

But alas, it was not to be. After spending last weekend nursing my wife and the munchkin w/no ill effects to my own health, I thought I was in the clear. I made it out to Walter's Monday to see the Fatal Flying Guilloteens (warning: do not view the site at work...) -- who I hadn't seen since Mike G. made the switch from drums to vocals, and I have to say that they get better every time I see 'em, amazingly -- and hang with out-of-town pal Conor, which was very cool, and got to re-meet the fabulous Ms. Rosa in person afterwards at Rudz. And hey, no cops raided Walter's, at least not while I was there, so that's a bonus.

I stuck around Walter's after the Guilloteens long enough to catch part of Iron Age's set, which wasn't bad, I'll grant, but mostly got me desperately needing to rip my Metallica CDs onto my iPod. And it was good to say "hey" to Mike and Shawn G. once again, even if Shawn thought I'd left town a while back to go to school up in Denton. Ah, well; better than dead, I guess, and I had a damn good time, all things considered.

Tuesday was equally a blast, at least at first. I swung up to Super Happy Fun Land in the pouring rain to catch Jonah Matranga and hang out w/friend Mel and his crew, all of whom happen to be the coolest folks. After a truly, truly bizarre, halfway-hysterical set by a SXSW passer-through named Toof who did things with a bass guitar, a keyboard, and an iMac that I still can't entirely comprehend (and if I could remember more of the lyrics to "Just Give Me Anal In the Morning, Baby," I would, but then this site would probably be blocked from every high-school PC in the known universe, if it isn't already), Jonah took the stage and played low-key balladeer to all us emo-kid types.

He played some new songs he's been working on, and they blew me away -- at one point I caught myself thinking, "oh, yeah, that would be great on a mix...no, wait, maybe that one..." The high point, though, was him acceding to audience demand and rocking out (acoustically) "We Had A Deal," off The Volunteers. I've never seen somebody so happy to hear the crowd singing the words louder than they were in my life (actually, that kind of thing's usually just uncomfortable and weird).

Afterward, I caught a bit of Barbez's set -- liked the klezmer-sounding songs, not so big on the rest -- and then headed for House of Pies w/Mel, Jonah, and two Jonah fans/friends whose names I'm utterly and completely blanking on (sorry, ladies; my memory of the evening is hazy). Sure, I was up way, way, way late on a work-night, but I couldn't pass up the chance to cap the show w/some chocolate cream pie.

Unfortunately, nature had its revenge on me, later that night, and by morning I was thoroughly miserable, sick, and exhausted. And I've been fighting this goddamn flu crap ever since. Profuse, profuse apologies if anybody I ran across/into, esp. at SHFL (which is, by the way, a very cool place to catch a show), is now sick thanks to my plague-infested self. I am really sorry, even if you cut me off on the freeway home or something; I wouldn't wish this on anyone. I don't remember anything of Wednesday, and was so out-cold I couldn't even make it to the Palomar show, despite their album being utterly great. I spent the next two days feeling up and down, and now it's St. Freakin' Paddy's (okay, it was, about 20 minutes ago), and I'm so sick I can't even knock back a celebratory glass of Jameson's. Fuck.

Ah, well. On the plus side, there's still time to check out one very-very-very cool show tomorrow, er, today (Sunday, 3/18, that is) -- Winterpills are playing at Last Concert Cafe with a bunch of local folks (Carrie Ann Buchanan, Dave Fahl, & a few others I can't remember). And because we here at SCR would like for this little e-zine to be at least a relatively-current proposition, we have -- lo and behold! -- put up a review of the new Winterpills disc, The Light Divides, in time for the show. Read the review here, then check out the band; they'll be good, honest.

And hey, while we're at it, we've also updated the Bands page slightly to include screamo/loud-and-noisy/whatever-core heroes The JonBenét. Enjoy; more updates to the horribly-outdated Featured Bands to come soon...

Labels: Featured Bands, Pseudo-Reviews, Reviews, Things To Do

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Yep, new stuff up for the new week. Featured Bands: Sharks and Sailors; The Western Civilization. Live: DragonForce. Reviews: Loney, Dear; Die Hunns; The Jonx; Lucas Cates; Sebadoh re-issue; Teenage Harlets; tvfordogs; & Mike Uva.

Labels: Featured Bands, Live Reviews, Pseudo-Reviews

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Damn. It really feels at times like I've neglected the Houston "side" of Space City Rock for the better part of five years now. And that sucks. Nobody to blame but me, unfortunately -- with the house, the wife, the kid, and the attempt at making the e-zine "side" of the site work like, well, a real e-zine, I've tended to shove the Houston stuff aside.

The result of that is moments like last night, when I was going through the Bands page of this site, and I kept hitting little bits of various band blurbs that made me spit out my soda and yelp, "What? how fucking old is this?" And yes, it really has been that long since some of those writeups were updated, to the point where I ended up moving Los Skarnales, Panic in Detroit, and Sore Loser all over to the Band Graveyard. Sad, sad, sad, I know.

On the positive side, I added the first two "new" bands to the Featured Bands section in quite a while: Georgia's Horse and Mansion, to be specific. I've only relatively recently heard either band (hard to believe, really, given how long Mansion's been slugging it out in the scene; sorry, you guys), but they've both knocked me over in a big, big way in a pretty short amount of time. If you haven't seen/heard them already, you really, really need to. Seriously.

At any rate, this hopefully will signify me turning over a new leaf for the "locals" part of SCR. Keep an eye on the Bands page, in particular, 'cause I'll be attempting to add a bunch more deserving local heroes to the list in the coming days...

Labels: Admin Stuff, Featured Bands, H-Town News

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