SD News

Value Village is the greatest place ever - today I scored two of my favourite records from the mid-'90s, when high school was awesome:
This!

And this!

I don't care who says what - a lot of '90s music was awesome. Sure, Bush sucked, but one can get past that. "I am still dreaming of the weeeest coaast..."

Comedian/impressionist Frank Caliendo is a freakin' genius.

I have a sinking feeling it might be a long-ass 2008-09 hockey season for my beloved Ottawa Senators; after a third straight loss tonight(to the hated Ducks, 4-3 after a third-period charge from the Sens was thwarted dammit), things are not getting any better either on the blueline or in the net. *sigh* But hope never dies!!!

Speaking of hope, there's always hope(for killer music!) if my friends Always & Forever are lurking on the scene; Boston's finest(with apologies to my roommate's beloved Red Sox) had the honour of partaking in part of my summer-'08 vacation(basically a mini-tour with these clowns), and they've put up a new video for their tune 'Glory Be to Man' over here. Plus, they have awesome hair and duct-taped axes:

(Photo: sweetdisaster)

One of Ottawa's longest-running bands of any stripe, local punks The Riptides(hi Andy!) have scored a song on the soundtrack for EA Sports' new Skate 2 title! 'Return to Blood Beach'(from the Mental Therapy EP) is among some huge names including Sabbath, Rage Against the Machine, Public Enemy and LL Cool J. The full soundtrack can be checked out over here. (Thanks to Andy Riptide, and theprp for the reminder.)

Go Rays!...I still can't believe I'm rooting for an American League East team.

Word from Montreal tonight is that one of our all-time absolute faves have been jacked: Comeback Kid woke up in their hotel this morning to find their van and trailer missing; total loss is around a hundred thousand dollars, from what we're told. Be blessed, guys - we love you. Good luck!

Well wishes, of course, can be sent to the band's myspace.

They're certainly not as high-profile as they should be these days, but that doesn't for one second change how hugely influential they were a decade ago: check out Buzzgrinder's sweet look back at Zao's set at Cornerstone Festival 1998; the summer Where Blood and Fire Bring Rest became an instant legend, and everyone from the Christian underground to mainstreamers like Deftones and Lamb of God took notice. Plus, check out Brett's pompadour!

This was about a year before Brett left to form The Juliana Theory - a bittersweet decision for fans of either band, I daresay. And vocalist Dan Weyandt looks about sixteen in this picture. Somewhere in our Interviews section there's a story on him. Go read it. Zao blow minds. The end.

Anthrax are gonna cover a Refused song on their new album. Wait, Anthrax still exist?

Dustin Kensrue(Thrice) is offering us more solo stuff, this time a Christmas album comprised of eight covers and two original tunes. The album will be released digitally in November.

Maybe he is Johnny Cash' spiritual descendent!

Any excuse at all to throw up a Killswitch Engage video is excuse enough for us!

Fifteen years ago tomorrow(October 23rd):

It was the best of times, after eight years of winning division titles, an American League pennant and the Series the year before, but somehow, Joe's Series-winning bottom-of-the-ninth shot remains the most indelible image in my lifetime of being a Toronto Blue Jays fan.

"Touch 'em all, Joe - you'll never hit a bigger home run in your life!" - Tom Cheek, the radio voice of the Jays (RIP)

Our friends at punknews are streaming the new - and punky! - tribute to the Man In Black over here. Included are one of my all-time faves, MXPX. Reason enough to get it right there. [IVM]

Copeland are doing pretty well for themselves with their new album You Are My Sunshine, which was ranked number-one on iTunes for a brief spell there. Their myspace has a couple of the new tunes, and you can download various others hither and yon. What a great band.

Check out some video of our boys in Anberlin fooling around with the new video for 'Feel Good Drag' and some antics from the set of Jimmy Kimmel Live over here!

Maybe the general populace has decent taste after all - Rise Against's new record Appeal to Reason debuted at numero uno last week. How 'bout that! [TruthEx]

Have a gander at the newest video from north-Florida crew Maylene & the Sons of Disaster, for their tune 'The Day Hell Broke Loose at Sicard Hollow.' Ta da! Thanks to the boys and girls at Lambgoat for the link. They do good work.

Check out my old friend Bailey's new band from Vancouver, Gravemaker, on tour with This Is Hell:
11/8 Latham, NY @ The Landing Zone
11/11 Indianapolis, IN @ 1511 House
11/13 Tulsa, OK @ King Of Clubs
11/16 Metaire, LA @ The High Ground
11/17 Panama City, FL @ Beamers
11/18 Orlando, FL @ The Blackbox
11/19 Delray Beach, FL @ Backbone Music
11/20 Jacksonville, FL @ Fuel
11/21 Birmingham, AL @ Cave Nine
11/22 Nashville, TN @ The Anchor
Gravemaker were in Ottawa last week opening a mammoth show headlined by Comeback Kid and despite not playing to many folks - and a week removed from a horrific van-flip incident, and visibly sore - just killed it. In fact, they are today's Essential Listening. Get to it, Skippy.

Various members of Throwdown, Eighteen Visions, The Agony Scene, Force of Change and others have combined forces(no pun intended) in a new project from Orange County called Monument to Thieves. The band has posted some stuff and will debut live later this week in SoCal. I bet they're friggin' awesome.

Our longtime associates at Facedown Recs(speaking of southern California) are set to re-release xDeathstarx's debut album The Triumph, originally put out in 2004 by Life Sentence Records. The 'new' album will be remastered, re-everything, with new artwork to boot. Look for it everywheres November 25th. At one point this band had four(four!) vocalists. And that's amazing.

Because baseball is among my very highest in terms of interest, I must stop here a moment to congratulate my Blue Jays' AL East comrades in Tampa! The Tampa Bay Rays, after a decade of being a punching bag for every team in the American League, are going to the World Series after dispatching the Red Sox in an unbelievable seven-game series. I still do a double-take sometimes. The Rays, in the championship Series. Amazing. Who ya got? Tampa or Philly? Drop a line!

Enough for tonight. My eyes hurt.

It occurs to me just now that record reviews have been sadly lacking the last few months. We apologize for that, and we promise to try and remedy the dearth of quality looks in(hopefully) the near future. Lord knows it isn't a lack of quality tunes coming out. No excuses.

The hotness rocking the headphones at SDHQ lately is a three-disc Motown compilation/audio doc I found at Value Village, released some twenty years or so back, and narrated by Stevie Wonder, Lionel Richie and the immortal Smokey Robinson. The Contours' 'Do You Love Me?' remains one of the best songs of all time. These kinds of diversions serve as a nice respite from the usual slaughterhouse of noise in my headphones.

It's been some years since I truly paid attention to the latest Project 86 record, given the direction the band has taken the last couple of albums, but they have finished their latest full-length out in California - and they're releasing an EP around Christmas time in both digital and physical formats; the shortie will comprise five new tunes and two covers.

If you, like moi, didn't get anywhere near this summer's Stronger than Hell tour headlined by Demon Hunter, you can check out some exclusive footage over here! Openers on the trek included Living Sacrifice, Oh, Sleeper and more. Damn, I wish I'd had a chance to catch that show. [TVU]

Elvis Costello will reportedly contribute guest vocals to the next Fall Out Boy album. What the... [Decoy]

An even more horrific rumour: Alter Bridge frontdude Myles Kennedy fronting the new incarnation of Led Zeppelin? Could this be? Kennedy is said to be joining with Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and Jason Bonham for a "major tour next year." Where's my 'shocked/appalled' emoticon??

Boston heavyweights - and one-time Club SAW headliners! Ah, those were the days here in Ottawa - Unearth are streaming their new album here. Let the torrential breakdowns commence.

Dead and Divine have a) posted a new song, and b) hauled a new drummer aboard(Kyle Anderson, formerly of Sydney). They're also super-rad dudes.

The truly hilarious side project of As I Lay Dying's Tim Lambesis, known as Austrian Death Machine, are said to be releasing a Christmas single - you heard that right, a metal band doing a Christmas song - titled 'A Very Brutal Christmas' on November 25th. The single will also contain a cover of Judas Priest's 'Hell Bent for Leather' and the video for 'Get To The Choppa.' I truly cannot believe this project - a joke!! - has such legs. Awesome.

Serj Tankian of System of a Down and Mike Patton of a lot of weird bands collaborated on a tune for the soundtrack to the new Body of Lies flick - you can now hear it yourself!

I was just commenting to a colleague here at the office that there's just so much wretched music out there - and then came across a headling concerning Beat Junkies/Dilated Peoples decks wizard DJ Babu; the man himself will release the third volume of his Duck Season series October 28th. Babu did all production and mixing on this new album. I was lucky enough to catch Dilated last month at a small club here in Ottawa - the first time the crew en masse was in the capital city. Massive. [Billboard]

We mentioned recently that Naughty By Nature were among the honorees at this year's VH1 Hip Hop Honours program - well, now they're NBN again! The group will reunite to make a new album due out in the first quarter of '09. The record is tentatively called Anthem Inc., and while the group plans to release it indie, they are looking around for distro. Help Naughty by Nature!

Proving yet again that the best metaphors to life can be found in baseball, Replacements' Tommy Stinson, addressing rumours of a reunion after he and Paul Westerberg got together in Minneapolis to jam out recently, said that no tape was rolling at the session because "that's getting to first base. We're sort of still in the dugout chewing gum." Excellent use of allegory!

It sure don't feel like mid-October around here in eastern Ontario - temps are supposed to remain steady around 20 degrees C all weekend long. Love it!

Hey, kids, the majors are slowly coming around - EMI, one of the four big kahunas, is planning to make EMI.com a music store; it's currently devoted to a mix of corporate and artist newsbytes. Word is Universal is planning a hulu.com-like offering of sorts for '09 as well. They're slow - but they're trying! [R&R]

I for one wouldn't piss off Dave Grohl if I had a choice: Foo Fighters are pissed collectively at John McCain's use of 'My Hero' as part of his Presidential campaign. Jackson Browne has also filed a lawsuit against McCain after the old fella used 'Running On Empty' at rallies without permission. What, is McCain old enough to remember when copyright law didn't exist, or what? The Foos had this to say in a statement: "It's frustrating and infuriating that someone who claims to speak for the American people would repeatedly show such little respect for creativity and intellectual property. The saddest thing about this is that 'My Hero' was written as a celebration of the common man and his extraordinary potential. To have it appropriated without our knowledge and used in a manner that perverts the original sentiment of the lyric just tarnishes the song."

Sevendust collaborating with Chris Daughtry? It's true. The charts prove it. I'm gonna go hunked down in my bombproof basement shelter now.

One baby step at a time for Anberlin, I suppose - after scrolling through 39 mostly-horrendous offerings from wretched radio-rock clones, the band's latest single, 'Feel Good Drag,' appears at no. 40 on the latest rock charts. Here's to the climb! Anberlin's latest, New Surrender, is stellar - as was expected.

Today's Essential Listening is an oldie but a very-goodie: I Mother Earth's 1996 album Scenery & Fish was an amalgam of funk, wild guitar histrionics courtesy of axe monster Jagori Tanna, rough, soulful vocals from Edwin - who later went on to have some solo success after leaving IME - and five- and six-minute singles like 'One More Astronaut' and 'Used to be Alright' that still rock hard twelve years later.

Okay then.

The Roots - whose latest, Rising Down, is another in the band's long line of consistently far-seeing works - kicked off a co-headlining tour with Gym Class Heroes in Baltimore last Friday. Having finally seen the Roots in a large room earlier this year, let me vouch for their electric live set - and by the way, GCH's Travis McCoy narrowly avoided running me down on a moped at this past summer's Montreal Warped tour stop. Oh, and beyond that, the Roots Tuba Gooding Jr. is amazing! [RS]

What the hell is going on around here? Rock Band and its ilk have truly taken over - and here's proof: now you can rock sweet merch with the name of your fake band on it. That's right! The band you create within Rock Band is now fully accessorized; you can order t-shirts, keychains, etc etc, all emblazoned with the name of your fake band. Don't believe the hype? Believe it.

Remember the good ol' letter to the editor? My dad still writes them occasionally, usually to our hometown newspaper, and he'd probably love this one. Behold: a comedian sticking it to other comedians!

VH1's 5th annual Hip Hop Honours awards ceremony went last week, with five honourees including Cypress Hill, Slick Rick, Too $hort, De La Soul and Naughty By Nature. That's a lotta hip-hop royalty in one assemblage.

Speaking of hip-hop royalty, Wu: The Story of the Wu-Tang Clan will make its television premiere on BET on November 13th, before getting released on DVD five days later. The doc features rare interviews and footage chronicling the rap collective's rise. This is a must-watch.

Could the Big Four major labels finally be getting their heads around the fact that the compact disc is teetering on the brink of the abyss? According to this story...maybe.

Good news for iTunes users! Last week the Copyright Board down in the US of A decided not to raise the royalty rate for song publishers, meaning that Apple's threats to shut down the world's biggest music source are null and void, since it won't cost them any more dough. Had this gone the other way, it might have cost the Fruit Computer somewhere around $300 million clams. That's a lotta chowda.

Working in the radio business as I do when I'm not relentlessly blogging, something like this is always in the back of your mind. This method of leaving your job is always an option, and it's sometimes sorely tempting to those of us manning the microphones in radio stations big and small. Enjoy! Thanks to my radio colleague Tristan for the good word.

I spent my Sunday at the Capital Music Hall in downtown Ottawa - and a lovely metropolis it is, believe you me! - working the Bad Religion gig, with(terrific) openers The Bronx. And now, word this overcast Wednesday is that Epitaph, founded and operated by BR guitarist Brett Gurewitz, has signed Jersey free agents Thursday. The band will release their label debut next spring, and singer Geoff Rickley had this(in part) to say: "One of our biggest concerns was that we find a situation where we could be free to just be Thursday. Epitaph have continually voiced their desire to help us become the band that have always wanted to be." [SPB]

Shortly after their signing with Florida's Eulogy label, Pennsylvania(or 'Pennsyl-tucky,' as I heard it referred to by a native over the weekend) legends Turmoil have lost singer Jon Gula, who did have the decency to comment on the situation. "Turmoil has been a big part of life for many years, essentially half of my life," he said. "I really wish I could, but I just can't devote 100% of myself to Turmoil anymore. I've got too many things to attend to right now, and I didn't think it would be fair to our fans, or to the rest of the band, to delay the inevitable."

Word broke last Friday that one of the leading lights of the Canadian Christian hardcore scene are calling it quits: Regina's Means will tour one last time this fall and by December they'll be past-tense. There's a statement from the band themselves on their myspace, and their label - California's venerable Facedown - posted their own thoughts: "Today Facedown bids a fond farewell to Means, a bright, young band who brought enthusiasm and good spirits to the Facedown family. For now Means will be heading out on one last cross-Canada headlining tour during which they will hit the midwestern states for 5 dates. For the Eastern Canada portion Means will be apart of the Underground Operations UNITY TOUR that features KTO and guests, while the final Western Canada shows will be alongside their friends in Horizons. These will be their final shows together, and Means will be disbanding after a final performance scheduled for November 29th in Regina." What a bummer.

Perhaps the busiest dudes in metal after As I Lay Dying's Tim Lambesis, The Dillinger Escape Plan have begun making new music. Ire Works came out last year. I guess they're bored.