ANGELS AND MINISTERS OF GRACE DEFEND US FROM THIS EPIC EVENT!

HOLY CALAMITY! BEATS OF INSANITY! ARE YOU READY FOR THIS! Like adding a mustache to your dasheeki, the folks over at the Free Press have taken the delicious pizza that is their twice annual Westheimer Block Party and have sprinkled a metric ton of fresh grated awesome on top. Stoked. And things are a brewin, here’s a quote from organizer (and Free Press editor) Mr. Omar:

We hope to snowball the block party into a legitimate arts and music festival and marquee event for the city. Ambitious? Yes. Risky? Yes? But we have an undying faith in this city, our community, and the potential for big, wonderful things to happen.

Now, snowballing anything other than snow takes time, effort and most of all money. But how to bring in income from something that has had, traditionally, being free near the core of it’s whipsistentialism? You do it by being smart, which is what the Free Press has done. They’ve kept the day part of the event free, so you still can have big bonanza fun in the sun for $0, but then they’ve added an impressive lineup of evening acts, playing at different venues, that will require (and are worth, in our calculation) buying a wristband to see. Peep the lineup:

Advance wristband sales have already started, get them online here. We’re sure we’ll have lots more to say about this in the run up to the event, including how our efforts to move a conflicting wedding will go. YUS.

The crowd at the Wild Moccasins CD Release Show. Photo by Ramon Medina

We had a pretty good weekend, all told.  Kicked things off Friday at the Wild Moccasins CD release show.  We have to hand it to the Mocccasins, they put on quite an event.  We’re sure it didn’t hurt that they offered so many freebies on the side (pizza, cupcakes, on-site t-shirt screening, a copy of their EP with your cover charge), and we love the fact that they decorated not just the stage, but the merch area too in moon-river promonade fantasia.  But really what they (along with bill-mates the Teenage Kicks and Buxton) should get the biggest of Kudo bars for is the fact that they not only played their hearts our, but managed to get Walter’s over capactiy.  There was a crowd both inside the doors and a big bunch turned away and just hanging in the parking lot.  They were smart enough to schedule a show so that kids with midnight curfews in the suburbs could see the whole thing and then make it home without being grounded (and so us old folks could go have a night-cap at our favorite suds spot if we so desired).  Though it’s not practical to do this everywhere (especially considering most clubs are 21+ now anyways), we give them a gold ribbon for their achievement, and hope more folks follow their example (you can see the rest of Ramon’s pics of the event here).

Your live outlook this week looks equally solid, with a great free show at Boondocks opening things up:  Flowers to Hide and Dizzy Pilot.  Walter’s is really kicking things into overdrive this week, with Los Campesinos! on Thursday, Fucked Up, Iron Age, the Jonbenet and Black Congress on Friday and Ume, Bring Back the Guns and Woozyhelmet on Saturday.  Both Black Congress and Ume are debuting releases at these shows (Black Congress on cassette tape, previewing a sudden release trend – more on that later this week).  And yes, you read that right, Bring Back the Guns have been Broughten Back.  It’s been the better half of a year since their last show, so be sure to get in on this one cause you never know when their next will be. Elsewhere, Gold Sounds, Linus Pauling Quartet and a Saturday Secret Show Event Saturday with The Mathletes, Guitars, Time Machine Veterens and others complicate your weekly choices.

Final thought: We went to one of those record dealer conventions Sunday morning.  If we had to throw an estimate out, we’d say that better than 80% of the records there were of the classic rock variety:  lots of dull boomer crap that you occasionally score at Half Priced Books, plus lots of stuff that is almost assuredly always there.  We were expecting to find a greater treasure trove of punk, indie and alternative stuff from the 80s and 90s, certainly when we think of collectable or desirable records, we think of that and not what we ended up finding.  So we ask:  where are all those admitedly limited in number records hanging around?  Is it possible that sow few of them were made, and they are so beloved by their owners that they are unlikely to find themselves into the inventory of dealers?  Would these dealers even know what they had if they came across them?  What are your fantasy record finds?  Kick it off in the comments.

Underwater Staggie – The Mathletes
We’re the Mathletes and We’re From Houston so How About That Vol. 1 (All Star Power Up Records)
From their disc of covers of H-Town compatriots, this re-imagining of the Hearts of Animals original mines the furthest reaches of HOA’s occasional delicate shoegaze tendencies. Beginning in a reverberating warm lake of fuzzy guitar delay and harmonics, it suddenly quick shifts into a slide-acoustic and tippity top drumming that hews more closely to the spirit, if not the sound, of the original. Again, for all the goof in their collected recordings, it’s sometimes easy to wonder if the Matletes intend to be taken seriously or if it’s another Guilloteenesque example of one original sin joke playing itself out over a rather extended period. But to hear Joe Mathlete cry out “you stop singing, shush shush shuhs, I’ll stop stop singing” we know that his heart is as invested in those words as if he was the animal that wrote them and that’s a beautiful thing.

Weak at Heart – The Sour Notes
The Meat of the Fruit (self released)
This song makes us think of summer of senior year, with a class ring still on your finger and a stupid jacket on your back, uniwttingly falling in love late at night in chain diners and fast food resturants under flourescent lights too bright and diffuse to catch the glimmer in an overlooked beau’s eyes until it’s much to late. Before your lungs were blackened and your liver curdled and heart greyed with bad decisions, you were in a place where the world sounded like this, where aquas and pastel pinks were sincere and most of your major decisions involved deciding which t-shirt to wear. Only art can take us back to places like this. Thank God for it.

Westward – Buxton
A Family Light (Mia Kat)
This whole romp sounds like the entirety of Buxton is riding on the back of a bucking bronco that’s fleeing the ghosts of Eddy Arnold and Marty Robbins, who are both giving chase because they think these city kids have figured out how to bottle lightning and the new sound of the Old West in a sarsaparilla flavored elixir. Never has a song about ditching friends and family been so much fun, and then suddenly they round a corner and Charlie Daniels is there shouting THEY’VE STOLEN THE SECRET TO WHIPS USE OF THE FIDDLE! GET EM BOYS!

Who We Are! – Powerhouse
Yeah! (Self Released)
If there was never a time in your life when you knew which of your shoes were better for dancing than the others and part of your Saturday pre-party ritual included swapping out ties with your boys and strutting around the house you were all getting reading at as a gang listening to your favorite jams and feeling like the most insider outsiders in the whole world and then hitting the club and raising your outstretched hand to heaven at the climax of your favorite song and not giving a fuck and dancing with your boys instead of girls cause who needs them, then you should probably try listening to this song a lot and if it doesn’t give you that kind of a feeling then we wouldn’t worry about it because you’re likely already dead and so you should practice your harp.

503 – Flowers to Hide
Down the Stairs (Self Released)
After what seems like forever (and lord knows how many lineup changes, brief hiatuses, and aborted attempts in the studio) Flowers to Hide finally put out a record this year that captures the primal vision of who they are. No mater how good the live acoustics, they’ve never been able to get across the nuanced swirling of their guitar assault as effectively and beautifully as they do on this and all the other tracks on 503. On the stage, it often is just loud, here in beautiful headphoned comfort, available in your pocket whenever you need it, it comes across as intended – layer after delicious, devilish layer.

SPECIAL INELIGIBLE BONUS TRACKS
OK. So, we like to break the rules, and one of them we are breaking this year is including a few tracks that didn’t really meet our requirements to get on the countdown, either because they previously appeared on recordings covered in our countdown or never made the jump to a physical artifact. We’re also going to take this opportunity to stop writing because we’re just chock out of ways to be endlessly self referrential about our past and kinda need to go out and have some new stuff happen to us so we can have memories to mine for next year.

A Day in the Life of Walter Price – Piano Vines
Unreleased

Asteroid B-16 – Tod the Fox
Unreleased

Doctor Doctor – Young Mammals
Young Mammals (Self Released)

Underwater Staggie – Hearts of Animals
Hearts of Animals 7″ (Dull Knife)

All My Love – Kidd The Great
Unreleased
OK OK one more. One night we caught a cab from our place to Walter’s to check out a Golden Axe show and we got to talking with the cabbie about music and he revealed to us that he was an MC himself. So he popped a cd in the deck and we started seriously feeling this song, and we kinda recognized the sample but couldn’t really place it and weren’t terrible worried because after all the beats were sticky and his flow was good and then suddenly he (on the track, not behind the wheel), put the punctuation on a verse with the lyric “and thats all of my love” and then suddenly Robert Plant cried out “All of My Love” and we lost our freaking minds cause it was so good. So yeah, the only way to hear this track is to catch a ride in his cab (it’s not even on his MySpace) and ask to hear it and did we mention that his business card also outlines the fact that he offers voice lessons, studio time and that if you want to book him for a show he needs at least one hour notice. No joke.

The complete details are available on the Fun Fun Fun Festival website for those of you going (or on the fence), but if you don’t have a whole weekend to spare and want to take a stab at getting a decidedly more spread-out decidedly less highlight-filled version of the weekend, here’s a guide how (bands playing FFF are in bold):

WEDNESDAY (TONIGHT)
Colourmusic, Flowers To Hide, Giant Princess, The Quietest @ The Mink

THURSDAY
Deerhoof, Dental School, Flying @ Numbers
…And You Will Know By The Trail of Dead, Spain Colored Orange, Heist at Hand @ Warehouse Live
Bishop Allen, An Horse, Electric Owls @ Rudyard’s
Cro Mags(jam), Iron Age, Your Mistake, Roots of Exile, On My Side @ Walter’s on Washington

FRIDAY
Parts and Labor, UME, Black Congress @ Walter’s on Washington
The Cynics, Ugly Beats, Guitars @ Rudyards
Pepi Ginsberg, Airon Paul Dugas @ The Mink
Groupo Fantasma @ The Continental Club

SATURDAY
Minus The Bear, Annuals, 27 @ House of Blues

MONDAY
Chuck Ragan of Hot Water Music, Ben Nichols of Lucero, Tim Barry of Avail @ Walter’s on Washington

Did we miss anyone? Probably. But what this attempt at also-ran points out that:

1. We desperately need a credible music festival. They have three, we can’t have one?
2. If you stay in town, you’re going to miss some great stuff from both back in the day (The Dead Milkmen, ALL, Bad Brains,  Killdozer) and SO HOT RIGHT NOW (YACHT, The National, Black Heart Procession, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, St. Vincent, The Black Angels, Islands, Frightened Rabbit, Neil Hamburger, Dan Deacon, The Octopus Project, Dengue Fever, Clipse, Kool Keith, Etc).

So like, go already. OH and if you do, be sure to keep an eye out for The Skyline Network’s Celebrity Correspondent, Mr. Erik Bogle (Bring Back the Guns) he’ll be documenting all the who who and what what for us. We’ll have his full flavored report sometime next week.

Update: Turns out The National is playing here, but at a private party for Rice Students and what not.  Does being a KTRU DJ count?

FRIDAY
SHARKS AND SAILORS CD RELEASE SHOW W/UME and THE JONX @ WALTER’S
YUSSS. PLUS DJ UNDER WARRANTY. YUSS!

LEAVE YOUR GENRE AT THE DOOR @ FITZGERALDS
Featuring: The Tontons, Perseph 1 & Andacc, Hueman, Kam, Evak 1, The Television Skies, Satin Hooks, Lower Life Form, Babel Fish, Two Star Symphony, Peekaboo Theory, B.B. Aeroplane and Dirty De.
Hey Fitz. We remember when we used to go to you all the time. It was kind of the highlight of our young lives, recently minted drivers license in our wallet and super big gulp Dr. Pepper in the cup holder of our parents’ Olds 88. We heard a rumor that this whole Leave Your Genre at the Door thing might turn into a regular event. If it does, and you keep having APPROVED mash-up line-ups like this, we might need to get a bigger cup-holder.

ALSO

Spain Colored Orange, You(genious), Arthur Yoria, Program @ The Mink

SATURDAY
SATURDAY SECRET SHOW FESTIVAL @ THE SHADY TAVERN
Check out our post earlier in the week for the skinny on this fatty of an event. Five bucks for two days, tons of bands, cheap beer and setups in the sunshine. Helluva lineup, even if who is playing when and on what day is SECRETS. Party

ALSO

TEXAS SKA FEST @ DAN ELECTRO’S GUITAR BAR

You know, ever since a few weeks ago when some friends of the Skyline went to check out the Les Than Jake show and reported back about the epic time they had, we’ve had a bit of the twin tone on the brain. So then, add to that little pique of interest our desire to go give a fresh listen to Los Skarnales, who we thought were no longer a band (we swear to blog we went to a final show of some sort a few years ago at Fitz) and yet somehow bested Fatal Flying Guilloteens, Hell City Kings, Poor Dumb Bastards and Something Fierce in the Houston Press Music Awards punk category (granted, we called it at the time, but didn’t actually think it would happen). So, while checking them out, we stumbled across a poster for this event, which features eight ska bands, including Houstonians Los Skarnales, The Failed Attempt, The Pocket and Molotov Cocktail. Yeah. A band headlining a ska festival beat out all you punks. BANKSHOT. Doors at four. Ten Bucks.

Data vs. Data, Flowers to Hide, Wicked Poseur @ Rudyards

BLACKIE and Giant Princess @ Notsuoh (followed by)
BLACKIE, Cop Warmth, Delta Block, Cheney Young, PWI @ Franciscos (in the basement)

SUNDAY
SATURDAY SECRET SHOW FESTIVAL @ THE SHADY TAVERN
TWO DAY SATURDAY!

LANCE HIGDON’S 25th BIRTHDAY SHOW @ DOUBLE DAVE’S PIZZA
The Tambersauro drummer is taking the opportunity of his turning a quarter century to offer up the live debut of THREE of his musical projects. QUOTE: “B L A C K I E vs. Limb vs. Gray Tapes (weirdo avant-rap jams), Holy Fiction (Acoustic guitars and beats and strong vocals) and Golden Cities” Woah. Starts at 7pm at the DD on Ella near 34th. Free.