The new issue of Under The Radar is out (Summer issue? Come on guys…), and it’s been dubbed their “protest issue”. What this entails is a bunch of very cool photos featuring indie-rati luminaries hoisting protest signs. There’s Sam Beam urging people to vote, Death Cab petitioning for the dissolution of the Senate, Dean Wareham wanting the USA out of Iraq’s pants, Bright Eyes wishing for a President who can read and Ted Leo just wanting health insurance.

In addition to providing an excellent photo spread, all the signs (which have been autographed) will be auctioned off on eBay starting October 1 and the proceeds donated to Music For America. I wonder if Hope Of The States knew about this part of things before they hoisted their, “Fuck E-Bay” sign for the camera. I think they’re just bitter about how much more it costs to get things shipped to the UK. But never mind the signs – I’d rather have high-res copies of the photos! Oh well, cheers to UTR for putting together a very cool idea for a good cause, but your website is still a mess. Please fix it. Thanks to Donewaiting for the link.

Thanks to Eugene for sending these links (and I found this one myself) to sample clips of Matthew Sweet’s new album Living Things, out Tuesday. It sounds… different. It’s a wise move on Sweet’s part to be releasing the electrified Kimi Ga Suki just a month later (October 5) for his fans who want the guitar-driven power pop because it sounds like this record is going to leave them scratching their heads.

Man, I cannot remember the last time I was drinking for three nights in a row. My poor head.

np – Ride / Carnival Of Light

The Chicago Sun-Times finds out why the Old 97’s are so fond of the Windy City. I find the fact that Rhett Miller is only eight months older than me troubling for some reason. I had thought he was older. From LHB.

Billboard reports that the CD and DVD culled from last year’s Tell Us The Truth tour will be coming out October 5 and 19, respectively. Featuring performances from the likes of Steve Earle and Billy Bragg, the tour was held to raise awareness on issues of media consolidation, freedom of the press and just generally bring attention to the fact that some really underhanded shit was going on amongst the power brokers of America. A noble cause, but it’s disheartening to look around and see that things are just as bad if not worse than they were a year ago.

Things are getting freaked out and loud at the El Mocambo on November 3 with Dead Meadow and The Warlocks.

So you may have noticed the appearance of a none-too-subtle “Top 5 Picks” banner thingee off to the side there sponsored by the good people at Filter magazine. Why is it there? Simple – they offered me stuff, I chose to accept their stuff and I am now part of their “Filter Music Alliance”. I hope we get decoder rings. As for the banner, I find it fairly unobtrusive and it even matches my site colours. Plus, I genuinely like their magazine. And for anyone who’s going to start crying, “sell out!”, I say to you – you ain’t seen nothing yet.

I say that partly in jest and partly not. Running this site isn’t without overhead costs, and while I could certainly eat them all without it really affecting my personal budget, if I can subsidize it in some part I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t. Maybe I’ll set up some of those Google adwords things. Does anyone really make any money off of running those things on their site? But in all seriousness, nothing you may see showing up over the next little while will have any effect on the editorial content of the site. Hell, I don’t even really know where I’m going with this thing. Sufficed to say, there’s some changes afoot, but I will announce each one as I go just because I feel it’s appropriate somehow. And for those of you who only read this site through my RSS feed, you probably won’t notice a blessed thing.

Part and parcel with these ‘changes’ will be a long-overdue site redesign. I intended to set up a development site on my local computer but for whatever reason, my install of Apache no longer seems to work. If I try to open up a PHP page even with everything running, it doesn’t recognize it as a web page and it asks me where I want to save the file – not a good development. I swear my server install worked fine the last time I used it several months ago. I don’t really know how any of this stuff works, so I’m probably going to have to call in professional help before I can move forward… VIC! Get your ass over here. Never mind, I’m an idiot. Localhost. Yeesh.

Oh, and on the topic of selling out – if you’ve never read Yo La Tengo’s stories about providing the music for a cellphone commercial and a no-smoking PSA, you should. Mp3s and everything!

So you know how my bike got a flat tire a couple weeks ago? Turns out it wasn’t just an accident. When I went to get my brake cable replaced yesterday, the repair guy noticed that my front inner tube was bulging out of the tire on account of a long, perfectly straight slash across the tire. I can’t believe I hadn’t noticed it before, though it does explain why when I pulled the old inner tube, the point of puncture was also a long straight tear across the width of the thing. Some asshole actually slashed my tires, but did such a lame job of it that the thing didn’t burst for Lord knows how long. Who goes around slashing peoples’ bike tires? I swear to God, sometimes I just hate people.

np – Lucinda Williams / Essence

New York’s Versus went on semi-permenant hiatus at almost exactly the moment I discovered them. Which just figures, really. Fairly seminal figures in the indie scene of the 90s, they traded in fairly intense jagged chunks of rock (their name was taken from the Mission Of Burma album) with sweet pop nougat centres. Prolific in their time, (five full length records and numerous EPs over the course of seven years), I thought they really hit their stride with 1996’s Secret Swingers and much prefer listening to their later stuff over the earlier, rougher material. The band was very much a family affair featuring three Baluyut brothers in their lineup at various times throughout their career in addition to constant bassist and vocalist Fontaine Toups. While they’ve all gone on to concentrate on other projects, they still reunite as Versus every once in a while for special one-off live shows. Odds of a new record or proper tour, however, are slim to none.

Despite the dismantling of Versus, there’s still some very good music coming from the extended family. In 2004 +/-, featuring James Baluyut and Patrick Ramos from the parent band, released You Are Here, their second album of hybrid laptop and guitar pop. I haven’t heard it, but their debut record was quite good and they put on an incendiary live show. Given the success of similar genre artists like The Postal Service and The Notwist, +/- should be bigger than they are. Primary Versus singer/songwriter Richard Baluyut continues to put out music as Whysall Lane – I’ve never heard any of this stuff, so I can’t comment on it. Same goes for Ed Baluyut’s The Pacific Ocean. Finally, Fontaine Toups has gone through a few side projects but is currently concentrating on The Fontaine Toups, which brings the power-pop tendancies of her Versus material to the fore. What I’ve heard is actually as good or better than her contributions to her old band, and that’s saying something. Their self-titled debut record came out this year on Teenbeat.

The Versus link up at the top has links to sample music all over the web, if you’re interested. And you should be. Versus were damn good.

The two new Bright Eyes records have titles – Digital Ash in a Digital Urn and I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning will be in stores sometime in January. I am assuming the former is the rock record and the latter is the country record. How very Osmond of them.

Steve Earle tells Rolling Stone that he and George W Bush have more in common than just being Texan.

Salon’s Scott Cohen recalls being a poetry class with Jeff Buckley shortly before his death and offers a scan of one of Jeff’s poems. Both of the last couple links came from Zap.

The Von Bondies and their new replacement bassist will be at the Mod Club October 6.

Filed under “sorta neat news of interest mainly to me”, a long-lost Lake Holiday track has surfaced on a compilation from Happy Happy Birthday To Me Records. Happy Happy Birthday To Me Volume 3 is limited to 500 copies and features a whole host of bands I’ve never heard of, so we’re in appropriate company. The track, “Awake Too Long”, is pretty old – 3/5 of the lineup on that song are no longer in the band – and the recording is anything but precise but I’ve always liked the recording anyway (though I think my guitar should be a touch louder… gee, never heard that one before). Hell, it even got played on Australian college radio once. Seriously. But this is exciting for me as this is the first recording that I’ve played on that’s been pressed as a real CD (not a CD-R). Baby steps, man. Baby steps.

Lake Holiday – “Awake Too Long”

One of my bike’s brake cables snapped on the way to work this morning. That made things more interesting.

np – Rilo Kiley / More Adventurous

Donewaiting brings us word that The Gedge has resurrected The Wedding Present! Well, maybe not resurrected so much as accepted the fact that the difference between Cinerama and the Weddoes were pretty much two words. Cinerama had started out as a more retro, 60s film soundtrack-sounding outfit, but over the course of time, the fastest right hand in indie rock realized, “we were playing faster and more strummy, so I just thought, ‘I may as well reform the Wedding Present'”. And hey – late 80s/early 90s reunions are all the rage now, aren’t they? Anyway, this means that the sessions that had been earmarked for the fourth Cinerama record will now be coming out as the sixth (approximately, not counting scads of compilations) Wedding Present record in October. Full details here.

Village Voice music critic Robert Christgau likes Rilo Kiley. I don’t know why this surprises me, but it does – I figured him for the sort of guy who doesn’t like anything. Check out his profile on the band and his review of More Adventurous. Links from the lad with the engorged aorta.

Low has signed to SubPop. This has to be one of the signs of the Apocalypse. From Tiny Mix Tapes.

Vancouver’s Salteens are coming to town – they’ll be at the El Mocambo October 1, which unfortunately is the same night as Arcade Fire. It’s a pity, because otherwise I’d be there – the Salteens are super fun and keyboardist Erin Jane is about as crushworthy as they come. Next time, perhaps.

Saturday Looks Good To Me will be at the Silver Dollar October 18 with The Sunshine Fix. SLGTM’s new one Every Night is out September 14, but you can order it from Polyvinyl for $10 now.

Devendra Banhart is in town at the Music Gallery on November 12, tickets $13. Is it just me or does this guy look a lot like Jim Caviezel in that one movie he was in? You know, the S&M period piece with all the whipping.

The title of this entry should probably read “A Year In The Life”, or two years if we’re being precise. Two years being precisely how long this blog has been kicking around on this crazy merry-go-round we call the internet. I was cruising some of my entries from 2002 and was amazed how much it’s changed – hell, even compared to 2003 I think it’s come a long way. When I started out, there was no theme – just rantings and musings and whatnot. That was boring to even me, to be honest. So since them I’ve moved away from the personal side of things and consider this site to be more of a zine in blog format than a journal of any kind. Percentages of things that relate to me, besides “I bought this record” or “I saw this film” or “I went to this concert” are probably less than 10%, if even that. Know why? Cause I’m boring. Unbelievably boring. I’m serious – go back and read some of the early posts. Excruciating, aren’t they? And even two years hence, I’m not doing much better. Oh, except for a wicked-ass cocaine habit I’ve picked up.

I’m not running this site in my downtime as a crime-fighting astronaut, it’s pretty much a second job but I don’t get paid and it cuts into whatever time I would normally be trying to cultivate a social life, so that’s okay. But honestly, I don’t mind – the fact that I can consider this site to be a modest success by whatever yardstick you can measure blog success is enormously gratifying to me. Seriously, it means a lot to me that people seem to like coming here. You validate my existance – Thanks. Now send me money, bitches. Daddy needs a new pimp hat.

np – A.C. Newman / The Slow Wonder

Splendid had a final interview with the now-defunct Beulah on the eve of their farewell tour and finds Miles Kurosky exhausted and sounding more than a little grumpy at answering the same break-up questions for the umpteenth time. It’s funny how they make a comparison with Guided By Voices, as I think this interview was done before GBV announced their farewell. While GBV’s importance in the grand cosmos of things is undoubtedly greater than Beulah’s, I think I’ll miss Beulah more. There is something to be said for consistency – for being able to pull any one of their four albums off the shelf and have it be solid start to finish… okay, make that three. Handsome Western States has it’s charm, but it was a quantum leap between it and When Your Heartstrings Break. But yeah – consistency. It’s an underrated trait. At least the sting of their passing is eased somewhat by Miles’ forthcoming solo record, which will essentially be the fifth Beulah record, and the A Good Band Is Easy To Kill DVD out this Fall which was filmed during their final tour. The title of the DVD is sadly accurate – you just have to wear them down long enough. Splendid has a long history with Beulah – check out their past interviews here and here.

Some more whoop-de-doo from the offices of The Wilco Book – some Quicktime clips that are tangentially related to the book. The one I found interesting was the interview with producer and studio owner Walter Sear (Wilco did some recording for Ghost at Sear Sound). I just finished reading an interview with him in TapeOp and the man has some VERY strong opinions about digital technology, recording and music in general, but he seems like a fascinating character. I particularly liked his championing of the key change, ’cause it’s true.

Stomp And Stammer reports that a biography on Belle & Sebastian will be coming out next Summer at around the same time as their next album. More than just a hack job cobbled together from old interviews and press clippings (mostly because there ARE no old interviews and press clippings – they barely ever talked to the press before Dear Catastrophe Waitress), the book by Andrew Whitelaw was produced with the full cooperation of the band, who provided extensive interviews and photos, and to top it off the cover art will be done by Stuart Murdoch.

The official schedule for the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival is out, and I have less than 48 hours to make my selections. At first I thought that I was going to have too many tickets, but now I’m almost feeling like I don’t have enough. There’s a lot of interesting-sounding stuff to see. I had thought I’d get pairs of tickets for five films, but now I’m thinking I might just get four and hit the two others solo. I mean, am I really going to find anyone else who would actually want to see a documentary on Townes Van Zandt? No one I know, anyway. I have a question for any TIFF veterans reading this – what’s your strategy to selecting second choices? Would you select one film as a second choice for one night, but put it as a first choice another night? Or would you have two wholly discrete lists of films, one for first choice and another for second choice that you really don’t care about one way or the other? And how do you choose a backup for, say, a Midnight Madness film if there’s nothing else playing at the same time? This is a lot of pressure.

Holy shinola, how did it become September already? My street is overrun with moving trucks as the U of T kids come back to roost… and wassail and carouse. I don’t mind the wassailing – Lord knows I like a good wassail once in a while, but the carousing really gets to me. You damn kids. Get off my lawn. Still, I should go easy on them – I remember Frosh Week. After all, mine was only… a decade ago. Okay, I’m going to go crawl under a rock now. And speaking of anniversaries – guess what tomorrow is?

np – Beulah / Yoko