VII

Got my first real good beach day in today. My pale irish skin is burnt to a crisp due to my insistence on forgoing sunscreen in favor of the 'ol au natural. We're still about a month away though from water temperatures high enough to take an extended dip. Until then it'll be drinking beer and falling asleep in the sun until work.

"Well life is a bitch/and life is a beach/you've got the sun and the sand and your shoes all within your reach"


Piebald - "If It Weren't For Venetian Blinds It Would Be Curtains for Us All"

VI

The same summer down here that I spent most of my time shoplifting, we spent the rest of the summer watching a summer's full of new videos on MTV. The videos for the Prodigy's songs "Breathe" and "Firestarter" were in heavy rotation after their first single, "Smack My Bitch Up" was relegated to late night spins because of the content. It took us awhile to actually catch that one, which depicts a pretty heavy night for what seems like a dude but turns out to be a 10. The spice girls had some video that haunted us for days. Blur's "Song 2" was our jam. The shit that really blew our minds though was the video for Radiohead's "Paranoid Android". The video was a swedish cartoon called Robin, with limbs being chopped off and dudes kissing. We must have watched it 25-30 times and it never got old.



Radiohead - "OK Computer"

V

It appears the weather has finally turned around down here. Though it's supposed to pour tomorrow, we managed to string together 4 nice days in a row. This limbo period kind of weather for some reason seems to be particularly jarring mentally, and I'm always thinking about similar days in the past. One in particular comes a few years back, when a girl I had been hanging out with was on her way over to my apartment. It was nice out, so I sat outside on my car listening to music and waiting for her arrival. As I saw headlights turn onto the street, I sat up, and watched as she pulled up behind my car, and then continued, pinning my legs between her front end and my rear bumper. For some reason she didn't understand why I was angry, which I guess should have been a sign of things to come. The record I was listening to is the post today: "Gentlemen", the stellar fourth LP by the Afghan Whigs. It's a great album from start to finish, but the highlights for me are "When We Two Parted" (New Amsterdams has a good cover of it on "Never You Mind"), and the opening riff of the closing song, "Brother Woodrow/Closing Prayer."


Afghan Whigs - "Gentlemen" (1993)

IV

I just woke up drunk after a 2 hour nap following an afternoon of celebratory drinking, and I couldn't think of any better way to underline that than by posting Raw Power by the Stooges, the greatest album to drink to. I have absolutely no story to tell that I can tie into this. My uncle does, he used to go see them at CB's back in the day, many years before I was born. Fortunately for me, by the time he was done with the club scene I was lucky enough to see the Bank Robbers many times. Seems like an even trade to me.


The Stooges - "Raw Power" (1973)

III

During my first vacation to the Outer Banks, my cousins, my brother and myself spent a good portion of our time roaming around stealing fireworks and then walking past houses, tennis courts, and pools throwing them at the inhabitants. The terrified screams of families enjoying their day then suddenly eying smoke and flame hurtling towards them brought us an immense amount of joy. The climax came when we were sitting on the porch watching as one cousin made his way to the field of sand and bushes between houses and threw a few smoke bombs into the neighbors pool with them inside. We were jealous of the pool they had, a luxury we were not afforded during the trip, and thus had to ruin their fun. He lit the smoke bomb just in time for his mom to walk outside, see him out there and wonder aloud, "What's Mitch doing?" Screaming ensued, and he fled through the backyards, out onto the street behind ours and then made a big loop to get back home. Needless to say, our parents were not impressed, and we were forced to apologize, a small price to pay for being able to torture strangers for a few days. Afterwards, my dad nicknamed him Smokey, a moniker which stuck for many years.

Anytime I see fireworks, it reminds me of July 4th and driving around blaring Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." We're still a few months away from the big day, but it's never too soon to listen to the Boss. I'm throwing up the first disc of Tracks, a box set of rarities. It's the best one of the four. There's also a thinned down version of the box set called 18 Tracks, a selection of some of the better songs.


Bruce Springsteen - "Tracks" (Disc One; 1998)

II

Around my junior year of high school I went to a show at Montclair State University which I had forgotten about until a conversation I had the other night with someone else who went, though I didn't know them at the time. Alkaline Trio and Piebald were headlining. The stage was outside and it was a beautiful day that we spent sitting on the grass watching the openers, and eating at the Six Brothers, a diner down the road. That meal resulted in me being introduced to the wonders of Tums, which I now swear by.

For some reason during Alkaline Trio's set, a fight broke out, by which I mean the MSU rugby team had all jumped one dude. That was my first introduction to Charlie Shelton, then singer of AllxHell ("we kiss, you spit, we kiss").

Amidst the chaos, a romance had budded that day, one which produced many mixtapes. The first one was the best though, and it included the song "December 27, 1990" by Appleseed Cast, a song consisting of a few sparingly plucked notes and a vocal track that sounds like a drunk wandering the streets and trying to piece together the lyrics to a Tom Waits song. Here's the album in which said song is contained, "End of the Ring Wars." It's their first, and admittedly the only one I've actually listened to.

Stay tuned for an America Rules post this weekend in recognition of Memorial Day.



Appleseed Cast - "The End of the Ring Wars" (1998)

I

For better or worse, I've had a lot of free time on my hands lately. The week after easter saw my return to the dirty south and to a rainy climate which apparently had no need for the mediocre services I provide in exchange for a generally undeserved gratuity. After spending the last month and a half mostly horizontal save for the 3 minutes a day i stood to "cook" a package of ramen, I figured I should find something to do with myself to keep my brain from melting. For awhile, and really, I still do, I thought this whole thing is kind of corny, but unfortunately I've completely run out of ways to occupy my time. So here we are. I guess the way this is going to work is, I'll recount tales of the both distant and recent past to provide a backdrop (see: facade of legitimacy) for illegally shared and more often than not illegally obtained music. I don't anticipate most rambling off as much as this first one, but as previously mentioned, I've got nothing better to do.
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I had some long-winded diatribe about my introduction to the Movielife and pop-punk in general down on paper, but left to go grab some North Carolina pizza from the New York Pizza Pub and enjoy a few red stripes. Upon my return I realized it was utterly pointless, so I'm gonna give this another go.

With the unfortunate passing of the Movielife in the fall of 2003 came the forming of I Am the Avalanche. A few demo tracks surfaced on the internet, and I was immediately sold. The songs seemed a pretty good representation of what the next Movielife record would have been had they not broken up. I first got to see them live at Maxwell's in Hoboken, in March of 05. My boy RJ and I sat outside paper bagging 24's of Coors Light bought for us by a responsible adult. That June, after a 3 week tour of Europe, I Am the Avalanche returned to their native NYC for a headlining gig at the Continental, an east village bar that has since stopped showcasing live music, but still has really cheap drinks. A few friends, fresh off their sophomore year of college, and myself thought it a good opportunity to see some other friends that lived in the city, and go see the band we'd all become fans of. Arriving a few hours early for the show, we killed time by going to Corner Bistro in the village, sellers of my favorite burger, a delicious 8 oz monster. $3 McSorley's pints are also a big selling point for me. After eating to the point of regurgitation and throwing a couple back, we started the 5-block walk down 13th st towards the club. Along the way I suppose we deemed it necessary to pick up a pint of Johnny Walker Red, and kill it as we walked, again cloaked by a brown paper bag. Something about this band makes we want to drink like a homeless man. I don't think my comrades were as eager to down the low-grade scotch, but at the time it was my drink of choice, so I was more than happy to do work. The bottle was finished just in time to walk in the door without a problem from the bouncer, and alcohol coursed through my veins and into my brain, confused by the din of a crowded bar full of noisy teenagers. Though I know there were other people with us, the only two that came inside were Lorenzo and Mark, and I'm not quite sure why. We arrived just as the band stepped on stage to a smattering of applause from the slowly dwindling crowd, apparently there to see whomever had played prior. With the booze doing its job I resigned myself to a dark corner near the side of the stage so I could drunkly sway in anonymity. The band played well, and I eventually left the shadows to join my boys in a sing-along. I don't really remember much after that, but I think I can say I left feeling good that night.

Here are three tracks from an acoustic recording they did for Purevolume. The first two are tracks from their upcoming album ("Brooklyn Dodgers" is great; "Mrs. Green" is a song they've been playing out for awhile) and the last, "Green Eyes", is off their self-titled, a song that lends itself well to an acoustic interpretation. Enjoy

I Am the Avalanche - Purevolume Acoustic Sessions (.rar of audio track rip)

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