So Many Bands

The Paper Shapes recently posted a new song that will be on their upcoming EP. What makes this track special is that this is the first song the guys recorded together as a group. When the initial EP, Space Invasion was recorded (which you can listen here), the current line up hadn't formed yet. This track "Bed Bugs" was recorded with Kevin Butler from Test Tube Audio and it sounds pretty awesome. Have I mentioned how much I love this band? It's not official yet, but this might be my new favorite band.

I was lucky to get an exclusive performance of this song after their interview. All seven of us comfortably crammed in their practice space and the guys rocked out for me. Thank god for earplugs. (Thanks Alex.) Ah, the perks of the job.

Anyway, so listen to the song, download it, share the wealth.

For those that missed it, here's an interview I did with the Paper Shapes for my now-named Accent blog, Sarah's Abusive Pencil.

If you live in Austin and didn't know that this week was SPEAK week, you obviously do not engage in Twitter and Facebook. Congratulations. Social media hasn't taken over your life yet. However, for the rest of us, we all probably received one tweet in your alerts that informed us that the band SPEAK is releasing their album tonight. Woo.

Throughout the week the band held little events including an album listening party and a Waterloo in-store performance to promote the album. Unfortunately, since my newspaper had to go to print yesterday, I didn't get to attend either one. However, the paper is done! It's been sent off so I plan on having fun tonight.

Joining SPEAK at the Independent is a Clap!Clap! reunion of sorts. For those that don't remember the San Marcos band Clap!Clap!, the name pretty much explains it all. Clap!Clap!'s groovy (yes, I said groovy) electronic dance pop never had a show when the crowd wasn't dancing. How many other bands do you know completely filled the stage with over 10 band members including members that only had one sole purpose, dance and clap. Genius, I must say.

So tonight two other bands, Love at 20 and missions will be opening up for SPEAK. Here's a little preview of what these bands are about.

Not only is tonight's SPEAK's album release show, but also the live show debut of Love at 20. Love at 20 is the brainchild of Mike Groener, who might be a familiar face to fans of Clap!Clap! This band however is also more like an Austin local super group as as part of the line up is bassist Louis Lemur, who's also from Clap!Clap! and The Always Already and drummer Mark Toohey who was in a band a looooong time ago called Slow Motion Picture (bonus points to you if you remember that band).

Mike took time to answer a short email interview in preparation for tonight's show. Stay tuned for an in-depth interview I'll be conducting tonight with him at the show.

How did Love at 20 come about?

As Clap!Clap! achieved its greatest success, I became increasingly dissatisfied with the cathartic aspects of the project. Josh and I were able to write songs together very well, but ultimately, I wasn't able to project my more personal thoughts into the music. I loved writing music that's pure purpose was to make people move. But in my opinion, music lovers can take a one-trick pony for so long. I am always seeking music that both moves me physically and emotionally. In effect, after a good year off from live music, I regrouped and began writing a musical "memoirs" of sorts under the name Love at 20.

With "Time to Begin" available for free download since around October (when I first herad about it), why did it take so long to actually perform your first show?

The strategy for releasing this record has been structured completely different than anything else I've worked on. In most cases, a band plays live shows, builds up a fan base, then finally records a record. However, "Time to Begin" was essentially a bedroom project until it was mastered. I spent April 09-July 09 writing and recording the album without ever really knowing how it was going to turn out. I knew I was shooting for a collection of songs that were incredibly ambitious and varied but had no guarantee that it would be performed live. But after the record was finished, I planned out the marketing, PR, live performance, branding, etc., because I knew that the songs were the best I've written.

Why did you pick tonight's show for your debut?

Jill from Knuckle Rumbler reached out about the Digital Love show a few months ago. I thought it was a great show to debut ourselves and an even friendlier bill due to Missions playing after us. In a sense, it's the "Future of Clap Clap" show we had been talking about for months.

With the show on Friday being your debut show, is there anything attendees have to look forward to?

I think in the current musical climate, especially in Austin, that Love at 20 has a very unique energy and combination of elements. I'm surprised that many bands fail to plan their live show. By this I mean, they don't establish a recognizable visual aesthetic and don't construct what is essentially a "performance". I think that Love at 20 does plan, and will have a visual "brand". I hope that people will be able to find themselves in the songs and share the performance with us. It goes without saying that I'm incredibly excited to finally bring this project to the stage.

By the way, you can download the album "Time to Begin" here.

Here's is a Love at 20 music video to the song, "So Bad."

Love at 20: "So Bad" from benberry media on Vimeo.

Missions was created by Josh Mills, the former vocalist of Clap!Clap!. This band is more like electronica space ride of some sorts. I'm interested to see how this translates live.

Josh also took the time to answer my short email interview about tonight's show. There'll be an in-depth interview with missions tonight as well.

How did Missions come about?

Shortly after Clap!Clap! disbanded, Scott and I started to write songs for a project we were going to call Purple Magick, but as it tends to do, life/work interrupted that dream. We could never meet enough and eventually Scott could no longer continue doing music. I kept writing songs and started to notice that most of them were very dark sounding and reminiscent of a feeling I can only describe as "doomed-to-die-floating-alone-in-space", especially this song I tentatively named "Shuttle". I actually wanted to call the project Shuttle, but the drummer of Passion Pit has that moniker already. I believe it was the day I wrote and completed "Darrk/Blakk" that I decided to put this project into action, bring on my friend Markus and my girlfriend Amber and give the project it's rightful name, Missions. That was April 19th, 2009. Missions, using some of the old material I wrote for Purple Magick and some of the newer, started practicing in August to later have our first show in October opening for Junior Boys.

How would you describe your sound in your own words?

I would describe Missions as dark, spacey, serious and electronic with a slow groove. We keep the tempo pretty slow in most cases, but you can still dance to it. We like that.

What can attendees expect at the show on Friday?

Attendees can expect to feel to the energy of the dance floor and the emotion of the music. They'll hear a lot of the songs we have available online mixed with some newer songs not many have heard. Hopefully they'll be able to hear how our sound is slowly progressing and evolving. Opening the night is a band I did a remix for Love At 20 which includes Mike Groener and Louis Lemuz from Clap!Clap!. Amber from Missions is also performing in Love At 20 and this show is their live debut, so attendees can also expect to see a bit of crossover there.

Here is a free tune from Mission called "Wavelength."

Click here to stream or download the track.

And what about a SPEAK interview? Stay tuned. ;)

'Light Speed' is the first single from Twin Atlantic mini-album Vivarium (released on September 14th). The four-piece band hails from Glasgow, UK. This is apparent through vocalist, Sam McTrusty's Scottish accent when he sings. The rawness in his delivery of the lyrics adds more intensity to the already fierceness of this song. The band only gives listeners a short time to prepare before they immediately cut straight to the furious bass and guitar-driven melody.

Currently the band is touring around the UK with Canterbury. Shortly afterwards, they will be heading to the US for thier first tour in the states with fellow bands, The Fall Of Troy and Envy On The Coast, including a stop at South by Southwest Music Festival.

Originally posted at Amped Reviews.

I have a new blog for Accent as part of my editor position. This blog (which is currently nameless) is going to be featuring bands and musicians that have current or former ACC students. Here's my first interview for the blog with The Paper Shapes.

I've known Jason Bearden since his days in the former band, Consider the Source. He recommended I checked out his new band, The Paper Shapes.

Maybe it was my tiredness of the same formulaic, predictable indie music I had been covering for the past year or maybe it was what I needed to perk me up that morning, but once I heard this aggressively melodic post-punk band on the bus ride to class, I was instantly hooked. Either way, this band has my attention.

The Paper Shapes were formally known as the band Prom Nite, but after noticing the new direction the music was taking, the five guys decided to start completely fresh. A new band name and a new genre. This band is pretty new to the music scene. However, I'm sure there are fans out there who feels just like I did and are ready to embrace their refreshing vigorous sound.

But hearing the album isn't enough. This band is definitely one that needs to be seen live. One memorable time I caught one of their shows was during Transmission's Free Week at Red 7. The temperature at the outside stage was a freezing 17 degrees that night, but that didn't stop the band from performing with as much as energy as they would have given if they played on the inside stage. In fact, the guys claim to this day that that was their best show they've had so far.

I had a chance to sit with the band during one of their practice sessions at Music Lab. It was that night I learned that vocalist, Aaron Pearson-Jordan is a currently student at ACC as well as that guitarist, Hector Guerra, is a former student.

At this meeting, the band chatted with me about how the band got together, the recording of the EP they are currently working on and why there is a guy in the band that just works the lighting during the shows.

Click here to read the rest at Accent.

Campus News Briefs for the first issue of Accent:

New semester of Austin Java Lit Gatherings starts this month

Gospel Extravaganza to be held at Eastview

Student Life wins International Gold Award for ad campaign

Former mayor, Reps, speak at CSPS welcome back event

Noyce Scholarship offers $31,000 for math and science

Then I wrote a short recap of Welcome Week.

Welcome week offers help and s’more

For Austin Vida, I wrote an in-depth profile on local artist, Alonso Reyes.

Painting for the future; local artist Reyes on his risqué oil paintings

photo by Jorge Solares

Spoon has been one of Austin’s hometown heroes for years. After vocalist Britt Daniel initially teamed up with drummer Jim Eno in 1993, the band quickly started earning critical praise from press and music fans for their easily accessible hybrid of indie and post-punk rock.

Spoon achieved commercial success as songs from their 2005 album, Gimme Fiction, provided the soundtrack to a variety of movies and TV shows. The involvement with popular TV shows like The O.C. and Veronica Mars, and movies such as 17 Again and Cloverfield attracted even more aficionados to Spoon’s minimalistic rock.

Click here to read the rest at Accent.

It made me sad when I read that The States played their last show this past Thursday. Especially since I couldn't be there.

I met this Brooklyn band during South by Southwest in 2006. I happened to walk into one of those free night show because I wasn't sure what time the band I wanted to see was performing. Luckily for me, The States was already onstage. Even though I only caught the last songs from their set, I instantly became a fan.

After their show, they started striking up conversations with the crowd and handed out free demos from their record that was released at the time. I saw this as my chance to introduce myself and ask for an interview. They were game and the rest is history.

I kept up with this band through the years, catching them every time they played in Austin. They even contributed a track for one of my compilations. I have all the albums and recently I wrote a review for the newest one “We Are the Erasers” for Accent, which you can read here.

So farewell guys, I'll miss ya and your shenanigans. However, don't fret. Turns out Chris Snyder, the vocalist/guitarist, has been working on a little project called “ThreeSixFive Project.” His goal is to write, record and post a song every day for a year.

You can check out his progress here.

Now to share with you the last interview I ever did with The States during 2009's South by Southwest's Music Festival.

Introduce yourself and what do you play in the band.

Chris: We're the States. We're from Brooklyn. My name's Chris.

Joe: I'm Joe.

Pete: Peter.

How's South by Southwest treating you so far?

Chris: Friendly as hell. Hot. Wonderful weather. Hot wonderful women. Yeah, it's been great.

Pete: Beer, food, barbeque, sleep, sleep.

Chris: Yeah, it's great. It's our 3rd time down and probably the best one of the ones that we've been so.

Did you tour on the way over here? How did that go?

Joe: It was great. We drove first to Nashville. We did our last record over there with Chris Grainger and just did our mastering, final mixing session with them. That record got mastered like a day after we left so we played a show and finalized the record. All of it. Everything's done so third record's in the bag and we went to where?

Pete: Mobile, Alabama. We got to meet some of our fans down there from the internet. Came to see us for the first time.

Joe: The interwebs.

Pete: Then we drove to New Orleans and that was vacation day.

Chris: St. Patrick's Day.

Pete: St. Patrick's Day and so we went to a St. Patrick's Day parade. Got to see the sights. Eat the eats. Drink the drinks. Stayed in a scary hotel.

Joe: Yeah, it was a crack house. It was awful.

Pete: It was prostitution, cross dressers, roaches, rats, the whole thing. And then from there, drove down here.

Chris: That's right.

Pete: Across here, I guess. Got to see the Mississippi. Was that Mississippi we went through? Where'd we go through?

Chris: *shakes head*

Pete: That was all Louisiana all the way across, I guess.

Chris: Yeah I think so.

Pete: We've been here since Wednesday night. Played a show Thursday.

Chris: Yes and two today. That's it.

Pete: It's been great.

Have you seen any good bands since you've been here?

Chris: Birds and Batteries from San Francisco. We're sort of like friends of friends and it was way across the river and it was really awesome. I can't describe it but it's really awesome. I think they should have a website if you google it. Birds and Batteries.

Joe: I think it's birdsandbatteries.com

Chris: That's likely yes.

Joe: And then Planeside. We saw our friends from Planeside down here and a bunch of other people we've bumped along the way.

Chris: We stopped in Nashville with a group called Luna Halo who are from Nashville. Great guys. Awesome band. We saw them probably two or three times. So far so all good. All good shows.

Joe: It's great.

So when do you think the album will come out?

Joe: Don't know. Right now we're figuring out our next six months. We're going to try to see if somebody's going to pick it up and pay for it or we're going to do it ourselves. That'll be decided in the next three months probably. Then our back up plan is to do U.S. touring by the end of early summer, late spring.

Chris: Long story short though. Record will probably be out at the end of this year. It'll certainty be available online very shortly. A month. Maybe a month. Yeah, we're excited about it.

Joe: We're going to leak it. We're going to leak it all.

Chris: Yes. We're going to leak our own record.

How do you feel the music has changed since Pete took over the bass?

Chris: Well, I don't know if it was because Pete took over the bass or the direction we were moving anyway, or some combination of the two, it's probably that but the music is more band music now. It was very produced before the last record, the last time we talked to you. And this one, we really wanted to focus on three guys in a room. I mean, trios are special for a reason and so we were trying to focus on that. I think that came across. It's got a lot of space in the record. It's not shock full of stuff.

Joe: Extra stuff. It's basically us playing in a room together and that's really what we went for. Pete is really good at seeing the fat in parts and taking it out and helping the groove of the beat and the groove of the song flow. So it was something we were never able to do before. Just like look at something as it doesn't need all this shit to be in the song. Pete was the catalyst to help everything kind of move along in a better direction.

Pete: It's kind of like same band, different process. More or less. It still sounds like The States. It was just a different way to get there.

Yeah, it's kind of simplified but not really. I don't know how to explain it.

Chris: The last record, we just couldn't play all the stuff live. There was just three guitar parts all the time. It doesn't really make sense. I mean, it was fun to do and we liked obviously our record, but we wanted to do things that we could play together. And yeah, that does mean that it's simpler but it also means that the essence is more pure.

Pete: Definitely more of a spiritual record. At least it felt like for me. The way we collaborated was very personal. Where I know where the last two records kind of came from, this felt like it was like therapy for me. Some of the content Chris talks about kind of hits me in certain ways. Almost like I'm outside of it but within it. This record just took me to a different place than anything I've ever been in.

Every year before South by Southwest, I take time out to sit down and sort through all the bands I have befriended on MySpace, visit various websites such as www.showlistaustin.com and Red Gorilla Festival, and make a calendar of all the free shows I want to see.

This normally follows with me printing out this list so that I have a schedule of where I need to be during the week, but of course, when the week finally rolls around, this schedule ends up staying in my bag.

While I did catch some bands that were originally on this schedule, the majority of bands I saw this year were discovered as I was walking down Sixth Street and was intrigued by what I heard. So, without further ado, here is a list of bands not on my schedule, but that I was fortunate enough to see.

Click here to read the rest at Accent.

Emo's Lounge
603 Red River St.

Emo's definitely lives up to its reputation during SXSW and I don't blame them. What other venues provide great lines every day of the week for all ages? I especially like the Emo's Lounge shows. They mainly showcase local bands that are trying to get their name out but have great potential. It's a great place to check out those hidden gems people will be talking about in a couple of years.

Click here to read the rest at Accent.

Here's a review I did for Frantic Clam's album Anatomica. Tyler Groover from the blog TwoGroove asked if I could give him my 2 cents and here you go.

Yes, I liked this album. But you gotta read the review to find out why.

Click here to read the review at Suite101.