Coheed and Cambria announce Neverender shows, are pretty cool.

Coheed and Cambria, whose entire recorded output to date tells the Byzantine tale of The Amory Wars, plan to mark the end of their epic saga with two four-night runs in New York (10/22-10/25) and Los Angeles (11/5-11/8), during which they will play the saga in its entirety - a full record each night.

"NEVERENDER came about because the band wanted to celebrate the end of the Coheed and Cambria saga in a special way," says Coheed frontman Claudio Sanchez. "We wanted to come up with an idea that paid proper respect to this phase of our career, while at the same time gave our fans something truly unique and different. Many of these songs have never been played in front of an audience before so I think we're going to be freaking out at the same time our fans are. It's going to be a major challenge. We're psyched our fans have been so loyal and amazing. We figured they deserved this."

NEVERENDER is the culmination of 10 months of touring the world (including a month of US arena dates opening for Linkin Park this past winter) in support of the band's latest record, No World for Tomorrow. The record represents the final chapter of The Amory Wars, the brutally tragic sci-fi tale of Coheed and Cambria Kilgannon and their family, a story that wraps all of the band's concept albums into one.

"We're really looking forward to going deep and revisiting not only the songs, but also the story," Sanchez offers. "Interestingly enough, us going over all the old material seems to be influencing our writing of the next record, which we're sort of doing simultaneously. And to me, that seems appropro since the next story is the prequel to The Amory Wars."

Now this is a cool thing to do for your hardcore fans. And it doesn't even seem that hard. Just write multiple records over seven or eight years interweaving the complicated arcs of a number of complex characters, and release them alongside comic books that fill in the gaps in storyline inherent in the lyrical narrative. In the process, get famous. NEVER CUT YOUR HAIR. Then re-teach yourselves how to play songs live that you have only previously performed on record, book some dates, and rake in the dough. Money for nothing and your chicks for free, man.

Presale tickets were here but sold out in minutes. Get yours at TicketMaster on Friday 7/18.

Buy The Amory Wars graphic novel here. And (duh) the music here.

Spoon - Prospect Park Bandshell, 7/15/08

Photo: Chris La Putt for brooklynvegan.com

Funny things, park concerts. You can bring picnic food. There's room to sit down. They're not too loud. I'm sure it felt just like any other packed club show to those people pressed up as close to the stage as they could get, but for me, lounging just far away from the Porto-Potties in the back not to smell them and with a stage view obstructed by foliage, it was decidedly more...subdued.

Here's the surprising part: I don't think I ever want to see Spoon in a different setting now. Because if I do, I'll just wish I could be reclining on the grass soaking up the sound under the stars, with no one bumping into me and a beer I put down only to applaud.

So...yeah. Great set. Notable covers: "Peace Like A River" (Paul Simon), and "Rocks Off" (Rolling Stones) to finish the encore. You can download Spoon's version of the Paul Simon song at Daytrotter.

White Rabbits played too. They were pretty rad.

Too Drunk To Buck

Video is full of NSFW language. Duh.
What you'll find above, if you hate yourself enough to watch and listen, is the result of last year's "Crazy Bitch" becoming a hit. This is what happens when you encourage this kind of behavior: amplification of the worst of it. When Buckcherry released "Lit Up" a million years ago, I thought it was a pretty OK song. This latest offering is ribald without a trace of the appeal that usually comes along with raunchy entertainment. It's excruciating.

If you've got the stomach to make it to the 2nd verse, see if you agree with me that the lyrics were chosen exclusively from dirty Google results.

We Are Scientists - El Rey, 7/1/08

I wasn't going to bother writing about this show. In fact, I spent a good deal of the time We Are Scientists were on stage musing at the fact that a band I really like can play, in a venue (and city, for that matter) that I've never set foot in before, and with the exception of the markedly strange behavior of a few members of the audience, I can have nothing to say. The band was great, just like last time I saw them. They played all the songs I hoped they'd play (not a tall order for a young band), and had some fun with the audience. Keith Murray sang most of one song from the audience. Yadda yadda yadda.

There are two things I wanted to mention though.

1. I hadn't been there in a while, but We Are Scientists' website is really excellent. More bands should have websites as interesting and funny as theirs. I especially enjoy their advice page. An example:

   name: Amaar
   query: ok guys, so on a scale of one to ten, how hard do you think it would be for someone to put on pants if they had no arms?

   It would be a good 6 or 7 to put pants on themselves, but only a 2 to put pants on someone else, as they would be able to use their mouth.

   Come for the hilarity, stay for the tour dates and links to buy music.
   
2. Can we address the practice of planned encores? Nothing kills my buzz for a show faster than a band leaving the stage abruptly for 2 minutes while nobody even bothers to cheer (especially in too-cool-for-school towns like New York and Los Angeles), knowing full well the band is coming back out anyway because the lights are still down, the house music isn't on, and the roadie is on stage retuning a guitar. This is slowly smothering the spirit of rock and roll. I'm serious.

There are some good videos from the show at this blog, which is all W.A.S., all the time, and which is also where I found the picture above.

With new wave hairdos I want girls

There's a new(-ish) radio station in town here, WRXP - New York's Rock Experience, that has single-handedly renewed my interest in the art of radio programming. In fact, I've resisted more than once the urge just to post a set of 5 or 6 songs in a row they've played just to comment on how nicely done it was.

They do most of the things I like, such as not relying on big artists' crutch hits (they play a bunch of Zeppelin but I've yet to hear "Stairway to Heaven," tonight they played The Beatles' "Old Brown Shoe"), playing two songs in a row without even a dry sweeper in between (love that), and playing a palatable mix of good old stuff and decently cool new stuff. Forget that this is what every station says it does. RXP has actually been doing it. For example, they've been playing new My Morning Jacket and Rogue Wave, and they nearly made me crash my car the other night when they played Steve Forbert (mp3), who I haven't heard on the radio since...well since I programmed a station myself.

They've also invested in some talent, which I guess is ok. Matt Pinfield, despite an impressive and enviable CV, still feels the need to tell me during every one of his breaks that he'll be with me for about 42 minutes. This is the kind of shit that jocks do when they're brand new to the field (he's not) or when they're completely phoning it in (ahem). And his cheese-grater voice sounds totally forced. But really, it's fine.

What drives me fucking crazy, and honestly what I wouldn't have expected from a station that's otherwise programmed so brilliantly, is that just like every other station in the universe, I seem to hear a track from Licensed to Ill EVERY SINGLE TIME I listen for more than a few minutes. Who still wants to hear that so often?

Early Beastie Boys material must test extremely well, but on a well programmed station, it does nothing slap me right out of whatever groove a station has me in. It's just not cool anymore. It's like a throbbing growth on the face of rock radio that everyone politely ignores. Stop the madness.

If you're going to play the Beastie Boys (and really, I'd rather you just let them be), at least play "Sabotage."

Secret late night Modest Mouse show TONIGHT in Brooklyn

Umm...yeah. Ticket link.

UPDATE - Very cool that these are no fee tickets, especially considering where you have to go to buy them. Could this be the beginning of an encouraging trend?

Review: Endless Mike and the Beagle Club - We Are Still At War

It's well-worn ground for a music writer (if I may so liberally self-apply the term) to wax rhapsodic about the way things used to be. Music might not have actually sounded better then, but it's hard to argue against the fact that music does not currently steer the zeitgeist in the same way that it did before cell phones, the Internet, and Uggs.

I'd like to think that high school kids still put on headphones and pore over lyrics inserts as they play through a new record by their favorite band for the first time, the way I know at least a few of us used to. I'd love to think that favorite records still earn the honor over time, as they continue to reveal themselves. And oh, how wonderful it would be to believe that if an artist as vital as Springsteen were to start playing in bars today, everyone would eventually know about it. But times have changed, and all those wistful thoughts and $5 will move you 40 miles down the highway, if you're lucky.

With the release of We Are Still At War, Endless Mike and the Beagle Club have sent their best material to date, recorded live and raw, out into the world to be judged. The band has never been bigger (or louder), and Mike's writing has never been better. A quick perusal of the lyrics reveals gems like this from "Back Into Eden" (which you can stream here):

a stop sign that died in the middle of the street
was a hit and run victim of a patron of irony
lying there waiting for somebody else
to watch over the people who can't stop themselves
does that move you to move or call you to stall?
we all see what we want to in signs after all.

Songs like "Fifty-Six" and "Heavy Handed" continue to get better every time I play them (which is every Goddamn time I get in my car), and the former might be the pinnacle of Mike's writing to date. The 1-2-3 punch of "The Incline of Western Civilazation" --> "Spy vs. Spy" --> "Back Into Eden" is unmatched in any other song sequence I've come across this year.

Still, I'm not sure I'd recommend this record as a starting point to someone that's never heard my favorite band before (that'd still have to be The Husky Tenor). The problem is, when a 19 member band gets a good head of steam behind it, it takes a lot to slow it down. Mike's vocals, which carry those poignant lyrics, can't always cut through the wall of sound.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that's seen The Beagle Club perform before that an album recorded live by all 19 members would be both beautiful and cacophonous, full of before-take chatter, misplayed notes, and the embodiment of Fun and the Punk Rock Ethos. Nor should it raise the eyebrows of anyone who's met the band that they co-wrote and performed it in an abandoned warehouse cum art space in a chaotic fury of creation and sweat. I would make the argument that it was the only way this album could have been made, and it's why it's my favorite offering from them thus far.

Though three of the most lovable things about this band -- Mike's writing, the double-digit collective that is The Beagle Club, and their DIY ethic -- at times clash in WASAW, the result isn't a dud of a record, it's just a higher barrier of entry than I think many people afford music these days. It really needs to be absorbed through headphones the first time through, with lyric sheet in hand. It really needs to be played over and over, as it continues to reveal itself with each spin. It's an anachronism, it's too good for this day and age.

If music -- nay, if rock and roll -- still means as much to you now as it did to you then, you owe it to yourself to let The Beagle Club remind you why you ever started liking it in the first place.

We Are Still At War is available for purchase at craftyrecords.net. Or you could just go to a show and buy it there. Songs from the record can be streamed here and here.