It's time now to burn.

It's really shameful how little I've written on here about Kevin Devine, even when I was writing more than 3 times a month. Not a week goes by that I don't put on a Kevin Devine record. This gushing is long overdue.

I driving with my girlfriend back to my apartment from a good-but-not-good-enough-to-drive-to-again sushi place in Coney Island, and I happened upon K-Rock's local music show, which is unsurprisingly more refined than the Providence local music show I used to do, and more listenable by leaps and bounds than K-Rock's usual fare of pap and dreck. They played a Jaymay song, actually, which is why I listened for a while. And then they played Kevin Devine's "Another Bag of Bones."

And it's just...something. We sat there in the car mesmerized, as Mr. Devine sang in his unmistakable tones of the human race's quickening drumbeat march towards annihilation. It's some dark shit.

Anyway, maybe it's just the "big election about small things" frustration I've been feeling of late talking, but this song really cut right to the nightmare heart of why I could give a shit about whether a candidate wears a flag pin.

Get it at Amazon here. Please.

Sarah Pedinotti update, band name change

The soon-to-be-formerly-known-as Sarah Pedinotti Band (once briefly known as The Raptors) have been holed up in the Catskills working on the record that will welcome them into the world under their new moniker: Railbird. CD release parties are slated for September in NYC and upstate NY, but you don't have to wait until then to hear some new tracks. Oh no no no. You can hear four new rough mixes right f-ing now at myspace.com/sarahpedinotti. So, do that.

The Lighthouse Song

Speaking of new things worth checking out on MySpace (and really, when are we not), Josh Pyke has posted the first new song from his forthcoming Chimney's Afire record: "The Lighthouse Song." The list of artists whose work I'll grant a preemptive endorsement is dwindling to say the least, but Mr. Pyke remains firmly entrenched there. Buy this record when it comes out. It will be good.

In the interest of not just posting a link to MySpace and calling it a day (not that there's anything wrong with that), here's a mostly forgotten interview I did with Josh Pyke back in 2005 on the now-defunct PulverRadio.com. The interview includes four fantastic live performances interspersed in between poorly worded, mundane questions and patiently delivered answers. I cringe to listen to the interview these days, but the songs are really marvelous.

Fun.

In a move surely designed to make me say "damn" and drink a beer, The Format announced months ago via MySpace that they will not be making any more records. I didn't write about it at the time because if you look back at February, I wasn't writing about much of anything. But it seriously sucked, sucks, and will suck.

That said, an announcement went up today about Nate's new band, fun. Stupid name perhaps, but it's exactly the word I'd use to describe the demo (download available with login) of "Benson Hedges," currently the only song available on the site. Which is a neat concept, really. Imagine if other bands followed suit. What a great day it would be when Animal Collective changed their name to WTF.

If you've got some time to kill and are interested, Nate also posted a long letter to his fans about what he's been up to so far in 2008 here. Make sure you go to the bathroom before you click if you want to get through it uninterrupted.

The National - Central Park SummerStage, 8/4/08

One of the people on the Internet writing about music that I enjoy reading the most is Yancey Strickler over at eMusic's 17dots.com. It's a funny thing because I rarely like what he writes about nearly as much as I like what he writes. His is a way with words worth knowing. So, when he writes nice things about a band that I like, I feel this strange one-sided camaraderie. It's similar in a way to the secret smile you afford yourself when you catch an otherwise typically stoic New-Yorker-in-subway-mode smiling about something some other passenger just did that you also were tempted to smile about. See what I'm getting at here? Me neither. Basically, I just wanted to quote the guy about The National, and here I've gone and written a whole paragraph of anti-content. One time Yancey said this:

The Boxer is just so subtle. I’ve talked about the record with both Joe and Todd in the past couple of days, and that’s the word we all keep returning to: subtle. This is a freshwater album, the slight tugs to Matt Berninger’s voice more in line with the slow currents of a mountain-top lake or a dragonfly-patrolled stream than any ocean that I know. It’s also a very American album, a fact that I am certain of, but have had trouble pinpointing exactly why that’s true.

Being able to watch a band like The National, a band with such rich sounds, helps you to hear parts of songs that you otherwise might not have noticed. Know what I mean? Well, I know exactly what I mean, and I'm not going to say anything further on the matter except that being close enough to the band to see what was going on, I came away from the show with that line about subtlety running through my head. The line about the record being distinctly American, too, but that I think had more to do with drinking a beer and being outside. You shoulda been there.

Fron the Useful Shit Department: Online calendars

I was over at the Bowery Presents website the other day (for those not in the area, they're the promoters of a vast majority of cool club shows in NYC) to check show times and I noticed something I hadn't before in the upper right hand corner of the page: iCal and Google Calendar links. So now, with a single click, I can superimpose every show they're putting on in the city over my Google Calendar (which is, in spite of my efforts to prevent it from becoming so, a now-indespensable life tool).

Granted, there's nothing life changing here, but it's just one more nice touch on a concert promoter's website full of nice touches, and some band sites could certainly learn from the simple utility therein. There's a Last.fm station playing soon-to-perform artists, a regular podcast promoting events, an email list, and the calendar links. The scramble not to be caught flat-footed by having no idea that your favorite band is in town just got a little less frustrating.

I'm missing Chairlift RIGHT NOW.

Photo by Ross Fraser

Chairlift, who might very well be on stage at the Knitting Factory as I type this at the end of a long night of sweating in my apartment, is today's swift-kick-to-the-ass for amassing such a backlog of to-be-listened-to songs that I never got to "Evident Utensil" (mp3) until it was too late.

Don't make the same mistake I did. Listen to this bizarre 80's-ish ode to pencils (other songs are about earwigs!) sooner rather than later, and don't waste the night languishing on your ass when they come through your town.

Chairlift's debut Does It Inspire You comes out 10/18/08 on Kanine Records, although it's apparently already available as a digital purchase at Amazon.

Update: an email from a BlackBerry confirms that yes, I am missing them right at this very moment.