>>Nostalgia For Infinity

Hey, loyal readers and random googlers (I hope you find the BioShock/Gor slashfic you’re looking for). There’ve been a lack of reviews recently for these exciting reasons:

1.) My band is recording a second demo tomorrow. TOMORROW! So I’ve been busy practising our newer songs, installing new tubes in my amp (turns out that balancing the power tubes in a DSL100 is pretty easy, even when you’re drunk) and restringing my guitars (ugh, replacing strings is for when you break them, at least in my book). EXCITING.

2.) I’ve had a promotion at work at the same time as a friend / colleague has left so I’ve been pretty preoccupied with plugging gaps in dayjob-world.

3.) I’ve been kind of inclined to spend my free time chilling out with films, videogames and friends rather than writing in a darkened room. Not that I have a problem with the latter, but it’s more like work than blowing off steam.

4.) IT’S THE SUMMER <3 <3 <3

I’ll post up the occasional review as and when the mood takes me & will be back with three more levels of experience and a +1 Something of Whatever in the near future. I may also have other cool stuff to share, e.g. a friend and I are going to collaborate on an indie game… I’ll provide writing and “ideas” and she’ll do the hard work. Awesome!!!

If you want to follow something I’m doing in the meantime, check my twitter or tumblr thingies.

…if you can make it down, we’d love to see you there!

Sometimes blogging can seem like a bit of a thankless slog, or worse a pointless endeavour… pissing words into the winds of the internet. This harsh fact is evidenced by the corpses of hundreds of thousands of abandoned blogs and websites. I enjoy writing, I enjoy sharing the things I’ve written and I like the idea that they’re being read, either by friends, those who simply stumble by, or by regular readers who I don’t know. Still, on occasion I wonder if it’s worth pushing myself to keep at it – if I should just focus on my band and writing the occasional story and review stuff when I feel in the mood.

Today a chap I work with, who I think has reviewed books for The Guardian in the past, spoke to me regarding a review I’d written on this blog. He mentioned that the author, who was a friend of his, had sent the link to him as he was pleased with it. The author’s friend realised the reviewer was me… small world, huh? Anyway, it was a really cool thing to hear as I thought a lot of the book in question. Little things like this make the whole endeavour feel a little bit more worthwhile.

It’s also cool when people stop by and leave comments – I’m glad you guys do that. Thanks!

Anyway, I’m posting this mainly because today has been a good day. Despite being shittily hungover and tired all day at work, and getting done pretty much none of the stuff I wanted to do this evening, I feel upbeat about this blog and my writing, and to cap it all off I’ve just found out that my band will be playing its first headline show next month. And now I’m off to get drunk and play music with my friends in said band.

Today is a good day. Have a lolcat.

P.S. Yes yes yes I am still working on my Four Lions review. Apparently a nearby screening this weekend has a Q&A with Chris Morris and the cast. I’m tempted even though I have very few monies…

It’s a while since I posted here about what my band is up to. In fact, I think it’s been so long that I haven’t even mentioned that we now have a MySpace page. Yes, it’s true, we finally caught up with 2004. We’re just in time for MySpace to continue its decline and watch as it becomes a swan dive into a financial black hole. If that’s not punk rock I don’t know what is.

In other news, Jake “bass” “face” Powis left the band in the middle of last year while he swanned off to Japan “for a few months”. It ended up turning into the rest of the year, and now he’s staying for 2010 as well – he’s met a girlie out there. Aww! So we replaced him back in November with Chris Watson, a stalwart of a number of bands around Brighton, presently Another Day Lost (for whom he sings). I first met Chris at the Concorde2 – who we were there to see, I don’t remember – where we found out that we both liked obscure 90s British melodic punk bands like broccoli and Hooton 3 Car. He’s a cool guy not to mention even taller than Jake, and his bass playing brings a more aggressive edge to our sound that I feel has re-invigorated our songs.

We have our third gig – ironically with our third line-up – on January 15th, where we’re opening Friday night’s punk round-up at the Brighton Hobgoblin. It’ll probably be pretty busy so no doubt I’ll be bricking it.

As for the demo which we recorded, oh last May or something, Ben is still mixing and mastering the bloody thing so who knows when it’ll be done. To be honest I’m on the verge of sticking the unfinished mixes online because he’s taking so long to get the proper versions sorted. Anyway, if we don’t have anything available to listen to come the day before our gig I’ll stick those early mixes online so people have something of ours to check out.

Big love and many boozes from Wrecktheplacefantastic!

Time to break the radio silence. Yes, the good ship Nostalgia For Infinity has been coasting through the black unmanned for a while, but things should pick up again now that we’ve crested the wave of 2009 and are bearing down on 2010.

On a personal level the last three or four months have been pretty fucked up, but after a relaxing and head-clearing break over Xmas and the New Year I’m feeling a lot better and more optimistic, which is always a good thing for my writing. I’ve got some reviews queued up for the next few days and will hopefully continue to provide semi-regular content as this shiny new year grows.

Thanks for your patience!

A few weeks back my band spent the day in Studio 284, Brighton’s number one seafront-based DIY punx recording studio. I figured I’d write a little diary-style piece to celebrate our first crack at proper recording.

Why were we there? We wanted to record a three-track demo for two reasons: firstly, so that we could acquire a new bassist once Jake heads off to spend three months in Japan, and secondly, to try and convince promoters to give us more shows. Sans bassmonkey that second point might prove tricky, but hey, we’re thinking ahead.

Unfortunately I don’t have any mixed and mastered copies of the recordings as yet. We ran over the slot we’d paid for by a couple of hours and still didn’t quite get everything done. The only really problematic bit of what we got was in the vocals, which aren’t great. Ben (singer and lead guitarist) is planning to re-record these but it may be a few weeks before this gets done. Some of the guitar and drum parts were also a bit sloppy, but the drums don’t matter since we were playing to their rhythm anyway. It’s just the guitars, really, which are occasionally slightly out during the faster parts where both Ben and I are palm-muting. I’ve always sucked at palm-muting really fast. Still, fingers crossed this can be ironed out in the mix, and hopefully then I’ll be able to at least get some vocalless masters to put up here soon so you can check those out.

I took my camera down with the intention of taking some photos but ended up not bothering. It turned out to be way more fun to drink and listen to / play music. Who knew? So anyway, I turned up later than everyone else as I had to work the morning, but when I arrived we were still getting the drum tracks down. Jack has only been drumming – with us and at all – for about four months, and thanks to Jake skipping town we’ve not practiced as a band in the last two. So, it figures that those would take a while, but eventually they were done. Then Jake mocked us all by recording all of his bass parts in the first couple of takes. The bastard.

Ben got his guitar parts down in about an hour, including setup, and then it was my turn… I took about two hours, most of which was spent on our fastest and most complex song, ‘Like Corpses’. The final recording of it wasn’t perfect but it was about as tight as I was going to get it in the circumstances. Fortunately, after spending an hour repeatedly trying to get that bastard perfect, I went back to my favourite song (‘The Bus Song’) and nailed a perfect take. Woohoo! Fortunately Austin, 284 recording chap and he of Flatpig, convinced me to play with his Les Paul which was a damn good call. It is a nice guitar and for the first time I want something to play instead of my Epiphone SG.

The vocals took a while to get going since the first pair of headphones Ben tried were screwed up in a weird way: the recording came through fine, but his own vocals were entirely inaudible. So the first few takes were pretty bad! They got better once we switched out the ‘phones for another pair, but we didn’t have time to get them spot on as we had just 10 minutes to get some backing vox down for ‘Like Corpses’ (which has a three-headed shout at the start of the chorus) and ‘Down With The Ship’ (which I do some backing gruffness on during the chorus, and which Jake busts out his finest scream crunk screeching for the bridge). As luck would have it I got the broken headphones so couldn’t hear myself, but apparently my policy of “if in doubt, max the gruff” worked out.

It was fucking good fun and honestly, I can’t wait to get writing more songs and get back in the studio… it’s a helluva lot less pant-wetting than playing live, hahaha.

Oh hey, I missed the zombie apocalypse again. Bummer.

Kinda neat to see that what started out as a joke among a few SF&F crit blogs has taken on a life of its own though.

Everything is better with zombies. <3

I don’t tend to post band news up here unless a band I really like splits up, but Warren – drummer with Against Me! for a good eight years – has just left the band. Or been fired, depending on whose version of events you read – follow that link for the statements. Sad times indeed. Warren is a fantastic drummer and a real friendly guy; although I only spoke to him briefly once or twice myself, it’s pretty much universal opinion that he was one bona fide cool guy. Apparently his next project will be running a Mexican restaurant in Gainesville. If I ever make it over to Florida for the Fest, I’ll have to try a few tacos.

It’ll be interesting to see where Against Me! go from here. New Wave cemented their shift in direction – a process clearly begun with Searching For A Former Clarity – away from the aggressive folk-punk of their youth and towards a more mainstream rock sound. Last year Tom Gabel – founder, singer and guitarist – released the solo record Heart Burns, an EP which was hailed by some as a return to his roots but which to me lacked the passion that made early Against Me! so utterly, brilliantly vital.

I hold no grudges against the band for ’selling out’, and respect Tom’s efforts to lyrically document the process of being drawn into the major label music industry, but New Wave is merely a good record to me. It is a far cry from Crimes As Forgiven By, a record which hit me so hard and was so important to me that it seems fair to deploy an old cliche – it was a record that changed my life. Ironically, Crimes predated Warren’s involvement in the band (at that time Against Me! was Tom on guitar and vox, Kevin Mahon on bucket drums). So now it seems that things may have come full circle, concluding my love affair with the most important band of my early twenties.

All the same… it’ll be interesting to see where the band go from here.

Yes, we have another show. A mere five and a half months after our first! The world of rock & roll is fast-paced and demanding, and many get left behind. But not we: we have seized the reigns and are clinging firmly to the frenzied horse of punk rock.

Okay, actually, our drummer quit right after Christmas, we took a couple of months out, and we found a new drummer in March/April. We’ve had about a half dozen practices now and everything is going well, so when we got offered the chance to play with Chillerton and Cheap Girls we jumped at the chance. Actually, I like Chillerton enough that I had a little jaw-drop moment when I heard. I must’ve listened to their side of the split EP with When All Else Fails a hundred times.

Anyway, we’re on first, so I’m guessing that’ll be at about half seven, eight-ish. After us is Kept By Casino (who were Jalopy), then Chillerton, and finally touring US band Cheap Girls.

We play melodic rock with a sort of punky edge. Lots of harmonics and octave chords. We like that. I’m not sure what Kept By Casino play, but I’ve read “too indie to be punk; too post-hardcore to be indie and too punk to be post-hardcore. Fans of McLusky take note!” MySpace page is here. Chillerton play melodic hardcore / gruff pop-punk in the vein of No Idea, but with a South Coast spin. Cheap Girls play power pop that’s reminiscent of Smoking Popes and the Lemonheads. It looks like being a varied, fun line-up, plus it’s £FREE! So do come down and check it out. And if you like what is fed to your ears, bung some cash in the donation bucket so that the tour can afford petrol and food.

Click on the flyer thumbnail to see a bigger version. Facebook event page here, Last.fm event page here.

[ P.S. I'll be getting back from ATP the same day as this gig, so I will be hilariously hungover and tired. I am sure that this is a recipe for Inevitable Good Times. ]

Okay, okay. I’ve been terrible for the last few weeks. Without even the del.icio.us round-ups this blog’s been looking like a ghost town. Here’s the thing: I’ve been torn two ways between sleeping really badly (insomnia is no fun) and being really busy with the day job. I know no one reading this gives a rat’s ass about excuses, but that’s yer lot.

I also need to shake up what I’m spending my time on. Project 365! has been fun, but it’s also quite intense and I’m routinely leaving it a fortnight between posts. I think I’m going to knock that little experiment on the head unless anyone is really enjoying it. As in masturbating whilst reading and unable to achieve climax without an update. Project 52! I’ll probably keep going because it doesn’t require such regular updates, and this allows me to think a little deeper and write a little more broadly about the books I’ve read.

I’ve enjoyed the few music reviews I’ve done recently and I want to start doing more of those. Every time I listen to a new record or attend a show I’m thinking about what I can write about it. The actual writing it up part is a bit trickier, but I’ll work something out. Even if it means taking a little notepad to shows and looking like a bit of a dork.

Friday flash fiction: as you’ve no doubt seen there’s been very little of this for a while. I’m pleased that the few people who got back to me about ‘Funeral’ had positive things to say as that was an interesting one to write. Going back a bit further, however, to the week where I posted four stories in five days, I realised that I was pushing myself to achieve quantity rather than quality, and often I was writing up half-formed ideas. ‘Heralded By Iron’ isn’t even an idea: it’s a collection of vaguely cool images. I don’t want to be sharing sub-standard fiction. Or at least, sub-standard for my own meagre abilities.

So as far as the flashfic goes, I’ll post one up when I feel like writing one. No promises. I get the most readers and feedback for my short stories, though, so don’t think this is me abandoning the Glorious Experiment altogether.

I also want to get back into writing longer fiction. In fact I have a couple of novel ideas floating around that I’d like to try and make a start on. It’s been some time since I attempted a novel (not since ‘07, I think). This is not even mentioning the dozens of longer short pieces that I need to rewrite and try to get published. Did I mention that I’m lazy and poorly motivated?

Here’s the plan: I’m not going to force myself to meet any sort of schedule. I react poorly to deadlines and very quickly grow to resent them. What I am going to do is write what I want, when I want, as often as I want. This may be a music review or flash fiction or a P52! post or even one of my intermittent political ragebursts, and you folks will see these. Or it may be some work on something longer, and you won’t see these, but if there’s something interesting about the creative process, my mistakes, or my successes, I will probably share these anecdotes. I may even write occasionally about my band, Wrecktheplacefantastic, because our new drummer has pretty much nailed all our old songs and we’re looking to write new material and start gigging again.

Sound fair?

Thanks to everyone who regularly visits this blog: you make it all worthwhile.