KILLING WITH POWER this Saturday night in LA. It’s Dan Oh’s Birthday and the world premiere performance of our very own EASE DAMAN!

Watch him perform his soon to be hit single, “Levitate.” Gina also just told me who the special guest is, and all I have to say is SO DOPE!

DAN OH
GINA TURNER
EASE DAMAN
THEM JEANS

1328 Santa Fe (Enter Thru Hunter)
11-4am!
$5 before 1am
$10 After 1am
Be special and drink!

NO brakes no rules no mercy. Monster Track is in its 10th year and is rumored to be the most brutal yet. This isn’t a kiddie’s race. This is the real deal. February 27th – March 1st. NYC!

Make sure to catch all the events though, even if you don’t race.

The party Friday night is going to be at 3rd Ward. Goldsprints Open Qualifier plus Rad Ride/Hawt Hoopty competition. Prizes for Best in Show, Best Messenger/Work Bike, Blinded By the Light, and Hawt Hoopty. Judges from among NYC’s most knowledgables.

Saturday is the race! Following the race, the goldsprints finals.

Sunday is brunch, provided by Boneshakers, then sprints and stunts!

Even if you’re not a serious cyclist, come out and watch people eat shit all day on Sunday.

Sic Alps – Bells (w/ Tremelo and Distortion)

Sebadoh – Ocean

Thee Oh Sees – Block of Ice

Nodzzz – I Don’t Wanna (Smoke Marijuana)

Guided by Voices – My Valuable Hunting Knife

Socks!?!?? That’s right socks! Introducing the Gristle Ankle Socks in Black with a Charcoal toe, heel and sole. A Sea-Foam contrast stripe and a Magenta tip on the ribbed ankle cuff. Cyrillic embroidery at the top of the foot! Socks come in packs of 3. Soon you’ll be able to have a little Mishka covering every part of your body!

Johnny Ryan’s Angry Youth Comix vinyl figures are finally here! These little bastards are a collab with J. Ryan and Span of Sunset. I swear at SDCC last year I saw some one walking around with a set of these and I have been dying to get my meat hooks on them ever since.

Death – …For the Whole World to See (2009) [Drag City] // Grade: A-

Not to be confused with Chuck Schuldiner seminal Death Metal band of the same name, this Death are 3 brothers from Detroit circa the mid 70s. As the story goes upon seeing an Iggy Pop performance the boys got a new outlook on Rock ‘N Roll and what they wanted to do with their musical careers. They tried to come up with the most badass name they could think of and settled on Death. They got signed by Columbia Records, recorded an album and were then asked to change their name to something easier to swallow. The band refused and the album got vaulted. The brothers did manage to press a 7″ of “Politicians in My Eyes” in 1976, which has since gone on to become a holy grail of sorts amongst record collectors.

Fast forward some 30 years later and Drag City dusts this out of the vault and reissues what I’m sure many will consider a lost classic. A lot has been written comparing Death to Bad Brains, but truthfully outside of the fact that both bands feature all black members, the comparison is hardly on point. Sure it’s there… but only in the general sense that Death, like the stooges were a proto-punk before punk and hardcore existed. Death’s sound is deceptively more complex though than just labeling it anyone thing. They perfectly captures that point in the 70s when rock was rock rather than broken down into more specific genre labels. When the embryonic fluid that would form Metal, Punk, Stoner, Prog, Hardcore were all in the air and the best of bands would pull from.

Death definitely owe a lot to the Stooges & MC5, but there’s also a lot of Kiss and even a heaping spoonful of NWOBHM, and Funk swagger that could be heard throughout this short but oh so sweet album. This is the sort of album that reminds just how good Rock ‘N Roll can be and why you fell in love with it the first place.

Kudos to Drag City for getting this out, along with the equally excellent reissue of J.T. IV’s Cosmic Lightning late last year. …For the Whole World to See goes up their with Gary WIlson’s You Think You Really Know Me? as recently re-appreciated albums should have been classics in their time.

Fixed 3 from Charge Bikes on Vimeo.

Tom and Tony recently took off on a trip around the EU. Charge bikes outta London made a pretty sweet podcast showcasing a part of their trip through the country side.

Nice jacket tom!

So I know this is late. I’ve been holed up in a conference room for about a week now. Something about being a ‘programmer’ or whatever seems to make people think that they can lock you in a room with 14 or 15 computers and a few other dudes and something will just ‘happen’. It’s miserable, really. Especially when that conference room is a thousand miles away and all you want to do is go home, snap your wife’s bra strap, and smell your dog’s farts.

Anyway, on one of my trips to the corporate crapper, I stumbled upon somebody’s newspaper. Whatever. Shitty local news, shitty local ads. Shitty local ad that has to do with Valentine’s Day. Then I read the ad. Yeah, it speaks for itself.

News flash/Attention Romeos: Don’t buy your girlfriend a douche at the 99 cent store for Valentine’s Day. Get her some love cuffs or stay awake pills instead. Or something.

Danny Trejo, aka Machete, has joined the cast of Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables, a movie being forecasted as an homage to 80s action movies that features a continuously-growing list of badasses. LatinoReview reports that Trejo will most likely be playing the main villian; a South American dictator who can only be stopped by Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Mickey Rourke, Dolph Lundgren, and possibly Ben Kingsley. Add a dash of Forest Whittaker and…I must stop here lest my dick explodes. Oh, how can I forget, the Governor of California is also making a cameo. I need to go lay down.

Trail of the Dead – The Century of Self (2009) [Justice/Richter Scale] // Grade: B+

I more or less gave up on …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of the Dead after 2002′s Source Codes & Tags. The two albums and one EP that followed were too much of a hodgepodge of a band embroiled in an identity crisis to hold my interest. So is The Century of Self a return to form? Yes in that this is a great and grandiose album, but also no in that this really is still a departure from their earlier work. So lets call it a fresh start shall we?

Trail of the Dead finally have an identity on this album that not only works for them, but works for the whole length of the album. With The Century of Self, Trail of the Dead have written an anthem of an album that has more akin to U2′s style of the thinking man’s arena rock than anything they’ve done in the past. In the past, Trail of the dead would get stuck in long drawn out lulls, unable to create a successful bridge between stronger composition. On The Century of Self each lull is a calculated move of great songwriting and balance, that seeks to only enhance the overall composition.

A few days ago all of us in the office decided to give Cold Play’s Viva La Vida a full listen and a chance after we realized Brian Eno had produced it. I speak for everyone when I say we were all pretty underwhelmed by what we heard. Upon repeated listens of The Century of Self I couldn’t help but think that this was the sort of album Cold Play wanted to make but were too concerned in getting out a few singles to truly do so.

This is a bonafide album, and not merely a collection of songs labeled as such. Trail of the Dead have undertaken successfully a Pink Floydian type task of making sure each song works together in weaving a tapestry while maintaining their individual identity. Songs like Isis Divided, Halcyon Days, Bells of Creation, Field of Coral & Ascending are all capable of standing alone as singles, but their true strength lies in how well they work with all the songs around them to enhance the experience. At a time when it isn’t commercially feasible for bands to concern themselves with writing albums, it’s refreshing to get one this good.