Upcoming Gore Girls FundRager!

The last one was a blast!

APRIL 12. Redscroll Records Opens. Mark it on Your Calendars.

Redscroll will be to Wallyworld what Metropolis is to the Northwaste Corner -- which is to say, the hub. The center. The everything.

CD CONTEST!

That's right -- it's going down!

The wonderful folks at The Space have recently put out an AMAZING CD compilation featuring 20 (!!!) local bands who have crushed their stage. Among the many bands features are Local Motion favorites Call it Arson, Welcome, Shadowgraphs (ex-Eschellon), and Mile Marker Zero. The great thing about the comp is that it has so many different genres of music, you're bound to discover a band you like (even if you haven't heard of them before).


HERE'S THE DEAL. I have THREE copies of this disc to giveaway. To enter, all you have to do is post a comment on this blog entry (see link below) telling us about the best concert you ever saw at The Space. Haven't seen a show at The Space? That's fine -- tell us who you'd like to see play there and why. (And yes, I'll know if you're promoting your own band, so don't bother.) The best entries get the goods!

A quick note: you don't have to sign up to Blogger to post comments (there's an "Anonymous" option), but if you go that route, please sign with your e-mail address so I have a way to contact you if you're a winner.

Hehe, "if you're a winner."

GOOD LUCK!

CBGB Closes. In Other News, Punk Has Sucked For Years.

Sigh.

If not for Kitty Kitty Bang Bang, I might never have seen the crusty, poster-slathered inside of CBGB. And now it's gone. Check out Yahoo News' article on its final show:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061016/ap_en_mu/music_cbgb_finale

I like that Patti Smith and members of Blondie were there to close it out.

But I gotta tell ya: Hilly Kristal? I'm not a fan.

Don't let the fluff in this piece fool you. Kristal let this happen. To some degree, he even wanted it to happen. CBGB's last gasp as a culturally active institution was sometime back in the '80s, if not earlier. Since then, it's pretty much just been a t-shirt. Kristal never really grasped the cultural significance of his own venue or its meaning in the birth of punk -- he merely wanted to make a buck. So when it began to look like CBGB was going to bite the dust a few years ago, he immediately started talking about moving to New Jersey or Las Vegas. He didn't understand that it wasn't the name CBGB, or the awning, or the logo that made CBs important -- it was the space.

It was the disgusting, awkwardly-shaped, piss-infested, sounds-like-shit space. It's a space only a punk could love. It's a place you can only enjoy if you don't give a fuck about anything, drink hard, and prefer physically intimidating your crowd over performing for them. Kristal, ever clueless, recently said, “For some reason, they want us here. I don’t know why it matters to them, but it does.”

[Read more of that interview here. It's excellent.]

As the interview makes painfully clear, Kristal does not care about the space. It was filled with numerous code violations (a big no-no after the Great White show fire in RI); he didn't pay his rent; he's long viewed the place as an instution to museumify, rather than a living place that can transform music and culture.

CBGB is dead. Long live CBGB.

Holy Shit, Sugarfist!

HUGE and bittersweet news from the Sugarfist camp. Jenn Jacobs has parted ways with the 'Fist! She's been around since the beginning, and to many of us her awesome voice has come to represent the band just as much as the goofy stage antics and the jambalaya clusterfuck songwriting. Meanwhile, they've already found a replacement!

Here's the announcement from the band:

"We would like to take this opportunity to extend a gracious and sad farewell to one of Sugarfist's own- Jenn Jacobs. Beginning in 1999 and one of our founding and core members, Jenn has decided to depart from the band. She has been a part of the Sugarfist family for many many years and we all wish her the very best in her future creative endeavors to come. Her last performance with us can be seen at a free show this Saturday September 9th at The Haddam River Days Festival in Haddam, CT.

We would like to give a new toasty welcome to the always entertaining and extravagant...Krizta Moon!!!! Joining the band now on vocals!!! Krizta will perform our last song of the evening on Saturday night and can be seen with us thereafter at the following locations of mass media cronyism..

FRIDAY October 6th The Beanery Old Dam Road Fairfield, CT ALL AGES
SATURDAY October 21st The Colony Woodstock, NY"

Ramallah's "Kill A Celebrity": Officially REQUIRED LISTENING for Readers of Local (Com)Motion

You may or may not like heavy music. You may or may not like punk. I don't care. You need to hear the messages on this album.

Normally I would be racing to write a CD review of this so it could be published in The Advocate and reach thousands of readers. Unfortunately, I slept on Kill A Celebrity for too long (it came out in late 2005) and The Advocate has a policy of publishing CD reviews that are fresher.

So I'm sitting down at 2:30 in the morning, after 2 and 1/2 glasses of wine and exactly two listens of this CD, to tell you that you need to hear this. Why? Because, quite simply, Ramallah's latest disc is the kind of music that compels you to act. You can't fucking listen to this and sit still.

Within the legendary Boston hardcore scene, there has been one band that has been consistently hailed over all others: Blood for Blood. If one were to liken them to Connecticut's Hatebreed, it wouldn't be too far off the mark. Blood for Blood (who have since broken up) had a dubious reputation for shedding, um, blood (imagine that) at shows, and for generally attracting working-class thugs who needed an outlet for their pent-up frustrations. To quote from the Victory Records website:

"Their ‘white-trash working man’ ethics and ‘no holds barred’ attitude have garnered Blood For Blood a following that is among the most fanatical and dedicated of any fanbase in the music scene today. In a scene currently lacking in old-fashioned angry hardcore, Blood For Blood stands where legends Sheer Terror and Killing Time once reigned."

Yeah. There's violence here. But it goes deeper than that.

Class lines have always clearly divided the hardcore pretenders from the real heirs to the scene. Blood for Blood, you might say, were the kings of lower- and middle-middle class hardcore: they ran into problems with society enough to have a political bent, but they were still sonically punk-as-fuck. (Compare to Hatebreed, who, over the long-term, have shown themselves to be eagerly upwardly mobile -- both in business practice [signing to Universal Records and, for their latest release, Roadrunner Records] and musical composition [their increasing metal influence culminated in a guest spot by Slayer's guitarist Kerry King on 2002's Perseverance]. Hatebreed's lyrical material has always stayed squarely centered on abstract values, whereas Blood for Blood were always eager to grapple with real-life issues.)

So enter Blood for Blood's "White Trash" Rob Lind, the mastermind behind the Ramallah project. Their first disc, But A Whimper, was a wicked taste of things to come (it clocked in at just 13:53). On Kill A Celebrity, White Trash Rob takes the time to unpack and expand his views, providing what one might dub a "working class progressive" stance on international politics and domestic affairs.

At least, that's the scholastic way to put it. Another way to put it: far-left liberals (as opposed to centrist Democrats) and progressives have always struggled with giving their beliefs an artistic voice. The effortlessness with which Ramallah does so suggests that we (I say "we" because I count myself among the ranks) have all been overthinking, overarticulating, and self-censoring too much.

White Trash Rob cuts straight to the fucking chase, and it's magnificent. One can only quote.

"What a beautiful rage/what a noble crusade/what a beautiful hatred ... I wish I was as strong as you." -from "Brother Malcolm"

"I'd love to... put some sarin gas/in the central A/C at the VMAs/and watch those beautiful faces/turn ashen gray... Kill a celebrity, and you will find you can strike down a god." -from "Kill a Celebrity"

Watch in awe as Rob quotes from the Sacred Cow themselves, The Beatles, by covering "A Day in the Life" and translating it into hardcore-ese as though the song's original authors were just, y'know -- people. (As someone who resists the canon [and canonization] of The Beatles as one might resist Titanic, The Da Vinci Code, and the Harry Potter books, I knew from the opening notes that Ramallah was covering a song. But, ignorant as I was of the source, I have to say that I enjoyed knowing that Rob was making an old song relevant in the first half, and explicitly updating it in the second. Such audaciousness could only be punk. Doubly so upon realizing [a Google or two later] that he was fucking with the holiest of rock's holies.)

But the high point of the album, for me, had to be "Heart Full Of Love." Reading is good, but listening is better. Shit, if you want an MP3 of this, e-mail me.

"I want to cut the brakes on every SUV in the world. And I'd love to burn down to ashes every jewelry store in the world. I'd love to drown in crude oil every 'spring break' beach in the world. I'd love to slap awake every sheep that puts their faith in the monsters that run our world. My heart's so full of love... I'd love to rape a Hilton sister or kill an FM show director and piss on the illusions that you hold so dear. I'd love to silence all the liars preaching what they know is poison; piss on their illusions and show you true fear. I want to grind into dust your American Idols, all with a heart full of love... My heart's so full of love that I would save you all if I only could. My heart's so full of love, I'd even die for your sins than watch it all fall... My heart is so full of love... Blood. Terrorist, is your heart also full of love?"

Incredible. Incredible. Finally someone is able to step up to the plate and say: no, no, my dissent, my qualms, all the times I've disagreed with you and freaked out and told you you're full of shit -- they're not because I'm neurotic and not because I'm weak and not because I don't have anything better to do. They're because I am so fucking full of love that cold assholes like you could never even comprehend it. They're because I love this country and this world and its people so much that I can't do anything but point the finger and call "bullshit" on your lies. And you -- you're not even from the same planet.

Ramallah's dreams of MTV-destroying, SUV-disabling violence may be short on real-life solutions -- but they're long on giving pent-up frustrations a voice and a purpose. For once, here's an aggressive disc that does the real thing: by articulating and advocating extreme solutions, it gives those of like mind the impetus to seek realistic changes.