Shows This Week!

Thursday 1/31:
Boxed Wine / Hilly Eye / Melissa Lucciola / Blud Diamond @ The Lampost - Jersey City 9pm. Free!

Mikey Erg! / Who Needs You / Fox Reactions / City Limits! / Jared Hart of The Scandals @ Paradise Lost 7:30pm - Free!

Friday 2/1:
Emetic / Polyphony / Feudalism / Dead Wurm / Rob Miller / Based On a Novel / All Good Children @The Meatlocker - Montclair 7:30pm  $7

Neur / For Sleeping Or Jumping / Grass Is Green / Sara @ The Court Tavern - New Brunswick 8:30pm. $5

Saturday 2/2:
They Live / Awkward Girls / Eastern Anchors / The Incredible Pits @ Maxwell's - Hoboken 8pm $8

Keep Em Low / Heartstrings / Graveyard State / The Only Way @ Le Grand Fromage - Atlantic City  8pm. Free!

Album Review: Tijuana Bibles - Lies

By: Mike Mucus

NJ's Tijuana Bibles have released a couple digital E.P's over the past year. Lies, the most recent effort by the trio has been a particular standout. It straight up sounds like the Ramones meets The Minutemen. At first listen the songs almost sound like incomplete thoughts, but they say what they intend to say with an economy  of words that suggests you don't need any other frilly bullshit to make a punk rock song. Most tracks clock in under the :90 second mark and are often book ended by audio clips of whacked out conversations. This just adds to the ADD-ness of The Bibles. Their frenzied live show isn't much different, singer/bassist Kopp sweats and spits his way to the mic behind a scowl  but its the hooks of the songs that are the real selling points. They'll catch you and just as you start to nod your head they'll be over. The traditional verse/chorus, verse/chorus song structure gets turned on its head. When Kopp sings "I gotta shitty tattoo on my arm", and you realize that one line is the whole song, it makes you think that sometimes, that's all you fucking need.

Listen to the record for free here

Screaming Females Set To Release Home Recordings

NJ darlings Screaming Females have had to put their grueling touring schedule on hold due to singer/axe shredder Marissa Paternoster's battles with illness. However, the band has put together a set of home recordings for a cassette-only release on Don Giovanni Records called Chalk Tape which will be released on February 10th. You can check out the track "Poison Arrow" on their Soundcloud page.

The Surf Punk Mayhem of Night Birds

By: Mike Mucus

photo by M. Mucus

They call themselves “thoroughly modern morons” but these guys from NJ and BK just put out a brilliant record. Midnight Movies is a 7” (No Way Records/2011) that features the A–side “Midnight Movies”  a surf/punk gem.  Mike Hunchback’s guitar sounds like Satan performing a root canal with a rusty dental instrument from the very first second of the record.  From there Night Birds’ ode to trashy horror/gore films is a powerful burst of excitement, its like an excitement boner of what seems like singer Brian Gorsegner’s favorite pastime, watching midnight movies.

Photo by M. Mucus

The B-side to Midnight Movies has three raucous catchy tracks "No Way Home", “Bad Biology”and "Triple Feature" which sound like D.R.I or Agent Orange or a slew of defunct punk bands save for one thing, this is happening now and its awesome. Their show at the Kearny Irish on February 20^th was a great big explosion and release of negative energy. They played with the fantastic Deep Sleep from MD as well as Chronic Sick and Government Warning. The kids danced, everyone went nuts and it was a true testament to where these guys are going. Bringing people together through sophomoric punk rock should never go away and with these guys around it doesn’t look like its going anywhere anytime soon. 

 

Night Birds Bandcamp Page

Get The Record Here!

Shows This Week!

Saturday January 28th @ The Lampost - Jersey City: The Everymen / Creepoid / They Had Faces Then - 10pm - Free

Saturday January 28th @ Hell's Kitchen - Newark : Invisible Lines / Their Planes Will Block Out The Sun / The Micks - 9pm

Saturday January 28th @ Maxwell's - The Front Bottoms / Brick And Mortar / Mansions

Album Review

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists
The Brutalist Bricks (Matador)
03/09/10

by: Mike Mucus

It’s not that Ted Leo isn’t pissed off anymore, because on songs like “Woke Up Near Chelsea”, he sure is. What The Brutalist Bricks is more focused on talking about is, change. Ted and his revolving door of band mates have been writing songs in response to the political landscape created by the Bush administration since good ol’ “W’s” time in office started. Now that Mr. Leo’s muse is back on some ranch in Texas, in his underwear and a ten gallon cowboy hat, sipping Dr. Pepper out of a plastic kiddie cup with a lid on it, what else can we expect from a new Ted Leo/Rx record?

With the new Presidency, and a new social climate in America, the notion of “what’s next” for Ted Leo is exactly what makes The Brutalist Bricks such a great record for the spring. What is next for Ted Leo and his Pharmacists to write about now that the topics of conversation have shifted? That is exactly what Ted is getting at on this record. If you are anything like me, lots of records just attach themselves to seasons, places, memories, etc. They create a timestamp in your mind and you can instantly associate part of your life with a record or song. This record makes a hard case to be this spring’s record of choice. It is littered with indie pop gems and punk rock fire, but this time around the “pops” are poppier (“Bottled In Cork”, “Even Heroes Have To Die” and the “punks” are punkier (“Where Was My Brain?”, “Gimmie the Wire”).

If it's springtime metaphors weren’t already so obvious, the record has a bright yellow record jacket featuring a solitary bumble bee on the cover; songs about swallows, there are even samples of crickets chirping at night (“Tuberculoids Arrive In Hop”). “Avitan Eyes” is a perfect, windows-open-wind-in- your-hair driving song, and lyrically on songs like “Even Heroes Have To Die”, using phrases such as “What do they know about the spring time, of me and you.”, hammers the point home; this is a record about change, about the spring, about looking at the world with renewed values, about giving you the feeling that anything is possible. Oh yeah, and its stuffed with more punk rock than ever before!

Key Tracks :
Bottled In Cork
Gimmie The Wire
Even Heroes Have To die