Serious Business Holiday Party + a new song from Benji Cossa.

SERIOUS BUSINESS Holiday Party and Revue!
starring…
The Homosexuals
Benji Cossa
Secret Dakota Ring
The Unsacred Hearts
Higgins
Rocketship Park
Jack and the Pulpits
The Octagon
Boshra al Saadi of Looker
but not the Two Man Gentlemen Band!

SATURDAY DECEMBER 20 2008
7PM-10:30PM don’t be late!!! * REVUE BEGINS AT 7:30 SHARP!
@ THE STUDIO @ WEBSTER HALL
125 E. 11th Street between 3rd and 4th Avenues
NEW YORK, NY
A three hour tour of non-stop music from your favorite Serious Business super-friends.

There is no better time than the Holidays to celebrate togetherness! Community! Feeling good! Serious Business dares to get happy on Saturday, December 20 with its now-annual Holiday Party and Revue. We’re cramming everyone we know into the new Studio at Webster Hall, we’re cramming nine acts into three hours, we’re cramming multitudinous musical gifts into your tender ear-holes, we’re cramming love in your hearts!

Its an old school 60s styled REVUE with the Serious Business super-family sharing the following: equipment, points of view, an evening of revelry and celebration! Your best Christmas party! No egg nog! Your first New Year’s Party! Yes!! SERIOUS BUSINESS!!! Bring it on!

Some fun facts—
–Gift giving!! We’ll be giving away lovingly crafted CD copies of The Year In Business: 2008, the second annual installment of our all-free year-end hits compilation series.
-The show starts EARLY! 7PM SHARP! COME EARLY!! Make a night of it! Dress nicely! Don’t roll in late like a jerk! You’ll miss everything! People will leer at you! Its Christmas! Be nice! Make it nice around the TREE!
-Benji Cossa will be performing all Christmas numbers!
-Jack and the Pulpits make their first ever official public appearance! Hopefully they’ll play “Dance Area”
-Sadly The Two Man Gentlemen Band will be absent. In their place they send new recorded music, their 4th album Drip Drying with the Two Man Gentlemen Band, which we’ll listen to some of!
-In the absence of Andy Bean (see previous fun fact), the Unsacred Hearts will reunite with original bass-man Andy Ross who will also be fronting his band Secret Dakota Ring (which features members of the Unsacred Hearts, Rocketship Park and Higgins…and the Homosexuals…and Jack and the Pulpits…and more.)
-The Homosexuals play their last show until spring 2009!


Was it mentioned that this shindig is free? That The Homsexuals are headlining and that Secret Dakota Ring will be playing their second show like, ever? Yes? Well, I just mentioned it again.

In other news, Benji Cossa, who put out a free Christmas record last year, recorded a new, original Christmas song, "Christmas (It's The End of the Year)," for TimeOutNY. You can listen to it and a few others over here.

I woke up by the sea : songs for turning 23.

Photo taken by this lovely person, not I.

My 23rd birthday was two weeks ago.

I'm actually a little weirded out that I'm 23. I liked being 22, the evenness of it and the fact that it was my "Golden Year." (I guess that's what you call the year that follows your Golden Birthday...?)

23 is odd. 23 is how old some of my friends were, or were about to turn, when I met them and those are the friends I generally look to as "older" and "more mature," I guess. It's weird to describe.

And after 23 comes 24 and then 25, and so on, to the finish.

My friends have said you're so young, 23 is a great age, it was the best year of my life, that's when life really began for me, you're never as old as you think you are. And they're all right.

But it's still a little weird.

Here's a small handful of songs I've culled together for the occasion.

1) "Lucky 4 You (Tonight I'm Just Me)" - SHeDAISY
SHeDAISY is one my friend Rachel's guilty pleasures. This is a song about a bunch of exes, from what I can gather. Number 23 seems particularly vindictive. More power to her. Yes, I know it's SHeDAISY. No, I don't care.

2) "What's My Age Again?" - Blink182
What's my age again, indeed. I've read numerous times that Blink182 is actually a severely underrated band and have yet to seek out their later stuff. Enema of the State was a record I borrowed from a friend at age 13, maybe 14, and some of the songs (mainly the released singles, but "Going To College" as well) that have stuck with me. No one likes you when you're 23? That's an exciting prospect.

3) "23" - Secret Dakota Ring [link]
It's no secret that I'm an SDR fan. (lol, did you see what I did there? "Secret"? I didn't even plan that.) "23" is easily my favourite song of the lot, and probably one of my favourites ever. Cinematic and heart-wrenching and terribly pretty, it ever reminds me of cold snowy January in Massachusetts, 2006, sophomore year, which feels a world away, and a movie that has nothing to do with the song - but such is that funny thing called "memory." The far-off day when I turned 23 was going to feel weird, indeed.

Now I'm just glad that I bought Baggage when I did.

Nothing's On Telly : And now "Fade to Black" is on YouTube.

That's pretty fucking adorable, if I do say so myself. It's also currently in YouTube's New Music Tuesday spotlight.

You can download the song here. You can pre-order it here and here.

SDR's "The Fade to Black" up for download.

You can get it here.

New video soon, or so I'm told...

New Song / SHOW TONIGHT! : Secret Dakota Ring, "The Fade to Black"

I love Andy Ross' solo project, Secret Dakota Ring. Love love love. His debut LP, Do Not Leave Baggage All The Way is one of those records for me. One that I've been listening to, on and off, for what feels like ages, and yet I still find new layers and intricacies that I've never heard before each time I go back to it, and find that I appreciate it more and more as time goes on.

Mr. Ross has been working on a follow-up to Baggage for a while now, the nine-track Cantarell, and it'll be out sometime in October or November. Meanwhile, lead single "The Fade To Black," has finally been unveiled. I heard this song for the first time several months ago and it blew my mind. Really. It did. And now it's gone and lodged itself in my head and will not give up. It's a brilliant powerpop song that's peppy but not overly-so, joyful and joyous and loaded with tambourine and handclaps, but is never twee or saccharine. Pop songs like that, that make you want to dance but don't make you scrunch your nose at the silly lyrics that just don't work, can be a little hard to come by.

Oh, and Secret Dakota Ring (being Andy backed up by pals Josh, Travis, Kevin, and Eytan) is playing its first (and possibly last and only) show tomorrow night at Rehab. Details as follows (or you can just check out the poster):



September 24, 2008 @ Rehab
25 Ave. B New York, New York 10009
21+
$3

If you can make it, I strongly recommend you go. This may never, ever happen again.

I was going to write about this sometime last week, when "The Fade To Black" was first posted, in hopes that I'd get a downloadable mp3 version for y'all, but that hasn't happened yet. There are all sorts of shenanigans going down with this release (a contest, a video...okay, maybe that's it), so I'll be sure to post about this again. Whether you want to hear about it or not.

In the mean time, check out "The Fade To Black" via this little imeem thinger below:





PS: Sorry for the lack of updates that aren't like, "Go check out something from the same ten bands I always mention!" My computer, which has most of my music and my list of stuff I need to post about, has decided to wig out on me and I've been working off my mom's desktop for the past few weeks. Plus life is crazy right now. Hopefully I'll post some other stuff in the near future. (I always say that, don't I? sigh.)

Muxtape 1 : Coupling, v. 1.0

Yeah, I stole that image from Muxtape, you all know it.

So I've gone and joined up with this Muxtape business. Just because I like mixtapes/lists and such. Haven't actually listened to anybody else's mix, but. Whatevs.

I posted my first mux*, which isn't anything hugely special - I just wanted to get something on there. Feel free to go and enjoy while I scramble to get that Fall '06, etc. playlist together.

Coupling, version 1.0

Mux to be found here.


The whole point of this list is to put together songs that, for whatever reason, go together: because of a common theme or story, because one is a “remake” (and not merely a cover), because they remind me of each other, etc.

You can tell I started this a while ago (two years, I think), as there are three OK Go songs (and an SDR song, to boot). This is still a work-in-progress. There are a few more songs on this list on my iTunes (I cut it down to the more important ones, as Mux doesn’t allow you to post more than 12 at a time), and I continually add more as I go along and find more musical “couples,” so to speak.

1) “Maybe This Time” – OK Go
2) “Down For the Count” – OK Go

“MTT” is on OK Go’s second major label effort, Oh No, and has long been one of my favourites due to its simplicity and…well, snarkiness isn’t really the right word, but you get what I mean. I’ve always wanted to strip it down even more, and get a version that relies purely on the glockenspiel (or “rockenspiel,” as Tim Nordwind would put it) and vocal harmonies done in a round. Maybe a tiny bit of percussion. Maybe. “DFTC” came out as a b-side on the UK single for one of the songs from Oh No (though which song that was escapes me at the moment), and instantly became one of my favourites from the entire OK Go catalogue.

I’ve long wondered if these songs had anything to do with each other. They’re like bookend s: “MTT” ends with “Maybe, this time, you were wrong” and “DFTC” opens with “Maybe I’m wrong.”

3) “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want” – The Smiths
4) “Please Please Please” – The Lashes

The Smiths one is a classic that I originally discovered because, surprise! OK Go once did a cover of it. (I told you, I started this thing aaaaaaages ago!) The Lashes version is in no way like the original, other than the refrain repeats “please please please let me get what I want” a few times. Think of it as a remake. Whether or not you consider remakes to be bastardizations of originals, that’s up to you, but I like it.

5) “My Window” – Secret Dakota Ring
6) “Thomas Window Paine” – DraculaZombieUSA

Witness the beginnings of my love for Serious Business. “My Window” is one of my favourite and one of the most infectious SDR songs. “TWP” is the DZUSA take on that same song, which means that you’ll probably hit the dancefloor in no time.

7) “Timourous Me” – Ted Leo and the Pharmacists
8) “T’s Song” – OK Go

Two very lovely songs, in their own ways, that share one very sad story. Go look it up to make sense of it all.

9) “Lust a Prima Vista” – The Spill Canvas
10) “Lust In The Movies” – The Long Blondes

Fall versus spring. “Prima Vista” is his take; “Movies” is my response. I just want to be a sweetheart.

11) “Jessie’s Girl” – Rick Springfield
12) “Coughing Up Roses” – Scamper

Sorry, loves- had to do it. If you haven’t heard “Roses,” the relation will become immediately obvious once you have. A friend of mine once started singing “I wish that I had Jessie’s girl” in the middle of the song. (Apparently, it’s really supposed to be “Jessie’s Girl” crossed with “Heat of the Moment,” but I’m only allowed 12 songs. And I don’t have “Heat of the Moment.”)

That doesn’t change the fact that I think it’s pretty brilliant, whether or not it needs a third verse.


*I initially typed "furst mux." Srsly.