OOOOOOOOOH FIZZLE BIZZLE. You know, in the midst of a truly LOL Vice Presidential vetting disaster, it’s harder than Gary Hart to compete for your attention - and we recognize this. But fortunately, some news that will in no way raise to the DailyKos or Redstate radar has come across our desks and it’s with massive relief that we’re able to quit hitting refresh on Huffington and be able to put some actual NEWS YOU CAN USE into your hands. Granted, this won’t make your choice on November 4th any easier, but it will leave you better equipped to pull the lever on your plans for October 11th.

Yessiree, the folks at the Free Press have announced the tentative lineup for their Fall Westheimer Block Party, and as in the past it does not disappoint. Rather than list out the parade of hitmakers, let’s take a moment to contemplate this poster (the less whip ass but more informative of the two crowding out post-vacation hurricane emails in our inbox):

SHAKA! As always, the show will be free except for the final ‘main event’ at Numbers late in the evening, which, at present, appears to be headlined by Austin’s Voxtrot. Party. One day we should send Innoculist up there to headline Jester Jam Fest. Joax. More details, including individual stage lineups and set times (along with additions and subtractions of acts) are likely to head our way over the next month. We’ll keep our researches doing all the due diligence and report it back here faster than you can find Wasilla.

HOLLA!  We’re on vacation through Labor Day.  See you again Tuesday.

CRAP. It’s already Friday. How does that happen? First it’s Sunday and we’re totally ill on the prospect of the return to the punch-card pay-clock, but atleast you’ve got some decent work and a stack of records to write, and then the next thing you know BAM. Friday. And like, two posts? We’re getting paid for this?! What happened?

Oh. Yeah, well, now we remember. Our bad. Anyways, though we’re sorry the collective staff got sucked into the story of Jana Hunter’s current haunt, know safely that we’ve completed the entire fourth season and the writing drought should be over soon cause, let’s face it, they killed off one of our favorite characters and McNaulty has gone from making us feel good about ourselves to making us feel like dirtbag drunks. Faaaahq.

FRIDAY
Rudyard’s 30th Anniversary Party
SAY SAY SAY! What’s the best thing about Rudyards? The burgers? The bands? The bartenders? The Bracelyn? Hard to decide. AHHH! The BIRTHDAYS. YUSSS. Every year they make a weekend of it, and this ain’t no different. Tonight the celebrations kick off with Spain Colored Orange, and Three Fantastic.

ALSO
Shake & Pop, featuring Witnes, Squincy Jones, Gracie Chavez, & more @ Boondocks
DJ Jester the Filipino Fist/Dayta/Ceeplus @ The Mink
Guitars on The Revelry Report (6pm on KTRU 91.7 FM)

SATURDAY
Rudyard’s 30th Anniversary Party: Poor Dumb Bastards, Linus Pauling Quartet and Something Fierce

You Ain’t Grunge @ Fitz
We posted so little in the past two weeks that you can actually scroll down and read what we wrote about this. In summary, like the Hootenanny, but with bands that don’t usually come across our desk. Features the Smoke Eaters (Foo Fighters), Deus Machina, Full Release (The Toadies), Sun Machine (Stone Temple Pilots), Darwin’s God (Soundgarden), Dine Alone (Deftones), Cellcyst (Korn), Numero Unos (Screeching Weasel), Brown vs. Board (Rage Against The Machine) and Meaningless Conflict (Helmet)

ALSO

Saturday Secret Show @ The Shady Tavern (2pm, free, four bands)
Judas Priest, Heaven and Hell, Motorhead, Testament @ The Woodlands
Rad Rich’s Birthday Bash, featuring Machete, Luxurious Panthers, Streetwise, The Takes, UYUS, Smugglaz, American Sharks, Full Contact, more @ Notsuoh

SUNDAY
Rudyard’s 30th Anniversary Party: The Dolly Rockers, The Trian Woodburns and Bring Back the Guns

ALSO
Lucas Gorham (Satin Hooks), Dave Dove @ Avante Garden (6pm)

We just got a note on the DL that tonight’s Free Press Recession Thursday Show at Numbers has been canceled due to “one band calling in sick and another one breaking up.”  Bummer.  Double bummer because Something Fierce was going to play their set in the tiny upstairs room, which is MAYHEM like MILES.  We don’t know which is which as far as bands who got sick, but we do know that Television Skies split like bananas (the other bands on the lineup were Generation Landslide and Alkari).  So, if you were going out there tonight to catch one of Alkari’s fairly rare shows, you’ll have to wait until October 10th when they share the stage with Hearts of Animals and Orents Striner at Rudyards.  Barring further Illness (ATTN PAOULA: time for an Illness reunion show) or breakups, Recession Thursday’s will continue next week.  Peep the poster:

It’s nearly impossible to talk about music in Houston without delving into hip-hop, yet somehow we’ve managed to do a pretty good job avoiding the genre until now. Truth is, we love the rap in town, we just think it gets plenty of press everywhere else, and would never describe our taste in it as anything but purely celebratory and driven almost entirely by the enormous media culture that has made hay off of it for years now. We can’t listen to mainstream rock radio for more than few minutes without getting very frustrated, but at the same time there isn’t a sound system loud enough to express our guiltless love of Kelly Rowland’s “Like This.” While we may spend nearly all our listening time pouring over the latest releases from the indie scene, to us there is still no more essential (and, ironically, removed from our own experience) artistic statement summarizing Houston than Scarface’s “My Block.” Take a second and let it sink in that the excitement of finding a copy of H-town punks The Freshmaker’s 1996 7″ at Trader’s Village on Saturday was completely undone by our not being able to locate a single Pimp C shirt at Sharpstown Mall in a size smaller than XXL that same afternoon.

So, while we’ve spent more time than we would care to admit digging ever deeper into the guitars hiding in Houston’s Bayous, aside from an unintended live encounter with folks like Perseph One or Noasprise, we’ve entirely taken what the mainstream has served us up from the rap game. We freely admit that this is probably a mistake; that walling off talent like The F%cking Transmissions or Fat Tony simply because we think Mattsoreal or Lance Walker have a better perspective from which to approach their work was a clumsy combination of apathy and keeping focused on what we we feel we’re better at writing about. Besides, if we start approaching hip-hop critically, it seems like it would take some of the fun out of it. But there is something about B L A C K I E’s work that does hit that MUST RAMBLE FOR PARAGRAPHS nerve inside us. Rather than being all gangster or diva or people’s champ about it, his work approaches the rap game as not just an institutional, but a musical outsider. His latest, Wilderness of North America, sounds nothing like the big Bentley pop tracks we love fom the genre - it’s like nothing we’ve ever really heard and at times pan-handles the question, how far can you stray from the conventional pillars of a genre and still be considered part of it?

Wilderness is rap for the Future Blondes crowd both sonically and structurally. Like the songs on Unity Pure/1111, the sound palette marries up heavily distorted beats, clean subsonics and piercing trebles, washing out clean edges for linty extremities wired into your ears only after a massive deconstruction of the source material. It’s an absolutely atypical collection of pet sounds to be stitched together for a hip hop composition. Even samples of such pop-music heavyweights as Abba’s “The Name of the Game” and Cat Steven’s “Wild World” do nothing to inch their respective tracks closer to the banger club anthem school of hip hop that lies miles to the south of Wilderness. These samples are telling - they’re perfect T-Pain ringtone fodder, but in B L A C K I E’s hands they’re stuffed into the composition jarringly rather than being the hook around which the tracks (”That’s Right” and “B L A C K I E… Is Still Alive”) are built. Indeed, there’s nothing a hook in any of these compositions.

If B L A C K I E’s production is expectation-busting, it doesn’t end with the rapping itself. The rhymes are straightforward and urgent, often pushing forward with little regard for the metronome and generally not delving into the clever wordplay devices that are the hallmarks of the genre. The lyrics have a socially conscious weight to them - this isn’t spittin diction about bitches, riches and syrup. Often whats being communicated is hard to make out, with B L A C K I E’s vocals sometimes finding themselves drowning in too much reverb and echo. But the two parts, the beats and the rhymes and how they are produced, have a unified sound that works well together, even if at times we wish for a little less sonic cohesion and a little little less straining to hear what he’s saying.

The album is consistently inconsistent, but deliberately and not halfassedly. There are four tracks that clock in under two minutes, and two instrumentals. On some of the tracks, the beats are regular, even they vanish entirely into the whirl, while on others you find a dizzying irregularly, like “Caught Lost”, who’s synth pad, sine waves, staccato snares and big crashing cymbals bring to mind the approach to songwriting of Endtroducing era DJ Shadow. It’s a short album, clocking in at under half and hour, and one that will likely give you that shotgun butt to the head reminder than rap is not a monolitic genre - that there is an underground there as well doing interesting things periphery. Things you might find yourself surprised to be recommending.

Catch B L A C K I E at the Free Press Recession Thursday show August 28th at Numbers. Also on the bill are The Mathletes, Giant Princess and The Goods. In the meantime you can order a copy of Wilderness In North America from his MySpace.

FAAHQ. We can’t seem to write anything today. FAAHQ. So, rather than try to lure you in with some sort of metanarrative that we connect to the events of this weekend in a way that makes you think we have too much time on our hands, we’re going to surrender to log-jam in the creative part of our minds and just be all typy type about it. BRONCO!

FRIDAY
Todd the Fox EP Release House Party
We first caught wind of Tod the Fox when they were participating in one of those Gorilla Productions battle of the bands a few months back (see – they get you media coverage after all). Since then, we’ve been playing their song “Asteroid B-16” for just about everyone that would listen, including the collective audiences for KTRU, the Sharks and Sailors CD release show, and everyone still sticking around at the end of the Old Farts Early Show. Oh yeah, them and every unfortunate visitor to The VIP Skyline Network Beergarden BBQ Ranch, where the only three other CDs available are by Roy Orbison, Girl Talk and POWERHOUSE!

And tonight is their EP release show. Way out in Katy. It’s a house party pot-luck, no less. Get the details on their MySpace. Starts at six, over at ten with three other bands that we haven’t had the luxury to check out yet, but we can tell you that it includes at least two of the following three: Amanda Tankersley, Gabe Montoya, The Radiant Mind. Note: Standard ANGRY DAD house party pre-lecture invoked – be respectful of people’s homes, don’t steal or mess with their shit and generally carry yourself like you’re not a fucking idiot.

Avant Disco@ Avant Garden
This monthly headbopper by Reprogram Music (and friends!) features music just slightly off most of our collective radar, but likely to pop up on it in the future. Featuring a blend upbeat sounds, from italo disco to leather jacketed rock n roll, and this month a second listening option on the upstairs stage (let’s take a minute to remind our readers that, if you haven’t been to Avant Garden since it was redone after Helios, you’re missing out – it’s quite spectacular now and out of the Avis camp). Upstairs sounds are curated by Esthetic Noise records, and includes performances by Studemont Project, San Antonio DJ crew Radscarsssss and lady rapper Uzoy. Downstairs the beats will be serviced by the Skull Gang Disco, which features Ceeplus Bad Knives, PRKL8R, Juan the Terrible and special guest Michael from Danseparc. PS – Free Patron Coffee shots from 10-12. Yuss.

Warehouse Party with Riff Tiffs, The Eastern Sea, Wild Moccasins @ 2220 Commerce
Get’s kicked off at 9pm and, as we pointed out yesterday, is the last chance you’ll have to catch the Riff Tiffs over the summer. Free show, BYOB. Into it.

ALSO
CEX, Stove Blow, Best Fwends @ The Mink
Nate Singleton & His Sideshow Tragedy, The Literary Greats @ Rudyard’s

SATURDAY
Left Alone @ Art Storm Gallery
If we get another fucking reminder from Facebook that we have been invited to this event, we are going to lose our freaking minds. Does anyone know how to turn this shit off? Free SKYLINE T-SHIRT to the first person who makes a Facebook app that auto-replies to ‘event invitations’ with thousands of requests that the sender join the JEEP BRAH SOCIETY BRAH. Actually, this event has some Rachel Hewlett works in it which we’re sure are good cause she’s wicked hot for real. DETAILS.

Arthur Yoria, Pale, Glasnost @ Rudyards
While Yoria continues to drop a new preview track from his forthcoming every week or so, the folks in Pale recently put out a new video for their song Glowing Black. We think we remember catching the premiere at Etro, but we can’t be certain of anything anymore given that we’ve remembered how hot Rachel Hewlett is. Can you tell we’re riding the horse down the writer’s block trail today? Good. Glasnost opens, their first show in a while.

ALSO
Saturday Secret Show @ The Shady Tavern (4 bands; 2-5pm; free)
Nine Inch Nails @ Toyota Center

SUNDAY
Ghost Town Trio, Tin Armor, O Pioneers!!!, Bright Men of Learning @ The Mink
Um. Rachel Hewlett is hot?

ALSO
Super Happy Fun Land Annual Leo Party, featuring Poopy Lungstuffing, The Annoysters, Acoustic ?, A Bubble in the Sun, Michael Fletcher, Concrete Violin, The Delta Block, Lluvia Dreams @ Numbers

Summer lovin’, it happens so fast. Summer lovin’, we wish it would last. But alas, the calendar waits for no one, so even though the cool crisp refreshment of fall is still many many Mad Men (vote for Ty, btw) episodes away, school is starting back up again soon. In the next few weeks, just as many tears as people will spread, and the Houston diaspora will fan out across the states to resume their KNOWLEDGE QUESTS. Godspeed young seminarians. Among those leaving is the fine folks of the Riff Tiffs, who are otherwise in our dog house for making it so difficult for us to get our hands on their new EP.

Starting tonight, the city is in store for two final SUMMER 08 4 LYFE evenings of their glistening chandelier of sound, starting with a slot at the weekly Free Press Recession Thursdays event at Numbers. They’ll be sharing the stage this fine evening with a cadre of contemporaries including The Eastern Sea, Earnie Banks, Electric Attitude, Old Coyote, ALARMA! and Lazy Horse. Always looking to improve the event, we’ve caught word that there will be a new PA in the house tonight, so expect less of the sound issues you may have encountered in the past. Party. If you’re not the out on the weeknight type, The Riff Tiffs will also be playing a warehouse party show Friday at 2220 Commerce with the Wild Moccasins and (once again) the Eastern Sea. Double Party.

In other Riff Tiffs news, they and the already done for the summer folks in The Tontons recently encountered one another on a distinctly urban field of battle - the basketball court. No doubt inspired by the then upcoming Olympic Games, it was, as Tom Tonton recounted to us, a clear victory for the athletes from Shoegazistan over those from Summerbluesagonia by a score of 30-21. Let’s take a gander at some pictures

ACTION! SHOTS!

ACTION AFTER THE SHOT!

STUFFED ACTION SHOT?!

Tom tells us that he’s looking to maybe setup a full on indiemural tournament, and why not - it’s not just the rap game here that is full of ballers. If memory serves, even By The End of Tonight has been spotten in press photos in full full-court regalia. If you’re interested in getting your double dribble on, head on over to the Tontons MySpace and drop Tom a line. WHISTLE!

Highlights of being an American: the most powerful and wealthy generation in the history of mankind is retiring and entering the golden years. And they need to buy stuff. It used to be that youth was king and all that, but let’s face it: AARP is going to make more money in the next few decades than Hannah Montana could ever dream of. Party. But you don’t need to be close to cashing-out the 401(k) to start to feel the pull of old age stronger than the push of youth - all you really need is a 9 to 5er and an uncontrollable urge to still go see shows even if they fall during the week.

That’s why (in part as much as in party) The Skyline Network and ben murphy put together tonight’s Old Farts Early Show - to make possible both our love of good music even during the week and our love of not feeling like an Olympic shuttlecock the next morning.  Consider it Head On (APPLY DIRECTLY TO FOREHEAD) for the earst. You love our product, here is our commercial:

Doors for the show are at 7pm, with the whole thing over by 10pm. All ages. That’s plenty of time to rush home and watch the Olympics, or rush on down to Richmond to catch the show at the i.am.we.comUNITY house featuring Buckeye and By Tomorrow. Or just saunter down to the mink and have a few classy cool ones before proceeding to massacre your hunger and mad-money budget at Tacos a Go Go and Sig’s Lagoon respectively.

It should go without saying that every Tuesday 8-10pm you should have your hi-fi dialed and locked into 91.7fm for The Local Show on KTRU (or you can stream it online here). This week is no exception, as we are pleased as Guyana Punch to be able to announce that The Skyline Network’s own adr will be guest hosting for the first hour. While he’s wearing cans on his ears and sitting behind the gold plated KTRU microphone, no doubt committing a number of gaffes proportionate to his unfamiliarity with the equipment, Ian, the mastermind and weekly host behind it all will be prepping the studio for a live performance by none other than The McKenzies. Strange brew indeed.

Though KTRU bylaws strictly prohibit any of his personality from shining through, he’s packing up his crate of records now and we can say definitively that you are in for a treat, including OH SO HOT sneak peek tracks from The Wild Moccasins, The Monocles, Tod the Fox and more! Plus, new stuff from all the aces records to come out in the past few months and weeks (including quite possibly the out-today new Jenny Westbury record - sure to cause sizzling no-he-did-unt gossip as adr seems incapable of uttering the words “Jenny Westbury” without following them with “will you marry me.” Now THAT is some news on the march!  Sadly, you won’t get to hear any POWERHOUSE!, a band in adr’s current (and pepetual) top 5 local acts due to their affinity for bad words and the FCC’s distaste for the same.  UNFUN!

UPDATE: Turns out one of our fav POWERHOUSE! songs doesn’t have any bad words so adr ended his set with it.  Brilliant.

(YUSS - TWO FOR TUESDAY REVIEWS!) Sometimes we are concerned that people misinterpret our affinity for the cover song. It’s true, whenever we are able to point one out (or organize a ten band festival where people play nothing but them) we seem to take the opportunity to do so. It’s not because we don’t value or enjoy the hell out of the original compositions folks come up with around town, it’s more like the insight it gives us. Surely the most potentially boring but crucial and frequently riveting part to any story is the tale of how a particular character or person got to be the way they are. What influenced them before they came into a position to influence others. This is part of why we enjoy the cover, the insight it gives us into how a band got the sound, the swagger and the strut (or lack thereof) they ended up with. But its not just that. We enjoy, in a particularly well done rendition, the respect and the reverence an interpreting act shows for the source material. How they take the composition and explore it separate from any kitsch of a cultural context and re-interpret it as something of its own merit (and not just something to earn a buck or get a laugh). The Mathletes once wondered aloud in a public forum (about themselves) “how many songs by other people can a band play before being considered a cover band” - and truth be told their shows contain a liberal sprinkling of re-interpretations of the works of others (to say nothing of last year’s “Own Other People’s Songs”, a compilation of many of their cover recordings over the years). But none of their signed, sealed, delivered renditions of the works of others are as dear to us as the tracks on We’re The Mathletes and We’re From Houston so How About That.

The four stunnahs on this extremely limited (ie - Sound Exchange counter-rack only) release are fresh takes on Houston’s finest: Jana Hunter, Young Mammals, Hearts of Animals and Bring Back the Guns. Each has the trademark quirky take on the classic, (and we bet that if you google The Mathletes, quirky is the top adjective used to describe them) and an injection of themselves into the pen and paper with massive amounts of deconstruction and plenty of genuine respect for the originals.  Indeed, given that an almost open cast of characters have played in the band over the past few years, it should already be obvious that the group has tremendous respect for the music and the musicians around them (members of both Hearts of Animals and Young Mammals have performed with them).  It’s hard to pick a favorite here, but at the moment we’re leaning towards their take on HOA’s “Underwater Staggie” with it’s massive droning shoegaze startup eventually giving way to clip a clap country sounds. It’s so rich. So very Richie Rich. Get you some.

PS - BRING BACK THE GUNS TRACK IS A PRE-TRUE AUDIO RINGTONE. GTFO!

As we mentioned an hour or so ago in the review of their other recent record, they are playing for free tomorrow (Wednesday) at The Mink for free with Something Fierce - early show doors at seven. COSTUME PARTY!