With one day left before I leave Perth for five weeks I write this as a bridging post before the craziness of Home Alone 2 happens and I end up in New York whilst Leah arrives in London and I can't post for a few days.
If you missed the brief announcing post head here for a quick heads up on what's going on around here for the next few weeks as and when we have enough free time (and energy) to post some pics etc.
Amazingly it seemed to reach 30 degrees in Perth yesterday, a really pleasant Spring day that managed to surprise my delicate skin with a coating of redness, the weathers idea of a "fuck you buddy" as it laughs at our trip in to the last days of a European Summer that only reached these highs in its wildest dreams.
Spending the afternoon with friends in a beer garden is possibly the greatest way to spend a day like this and we have Esther and Beau to thank for a lovely afternoon of cold Heineken and good company. Gratuitous mentions as they tell me they will be deigning to read this blog in the next month.
So we've packed with a few days to spare, one suitcase for the two of us on the way there will almost certainly turn in to four on the way back with all of the shopping we intend to do. Not least with the vast array of bookshops on our itinerary. For all you fellow bibliophiles I hope to provide many a snap of what my Goodreads friend Richard might call "book porn."
On the movie watching horizon I hope to avoid the potential disaster of missing Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master in the cinema with a relaxing evening in London. There's a film museum on the South Bank too, if I find time. My mac is loaded up with some interesting and hopefully great films I am yet to see so I may even throw a review your way.
For now I leave you with my decisions for hand luggage reading. Of the 611 books on my shelves that I am yet to read, these six made the final cut to entertain me on the 24 hour flight to London via Doha on the award winning airline Qatar Airways. How do you pick one percent of your books to take with you? In this case it was easy, Hard Case Crime have been reissuing some vintage pulp crime novels for the past few years, by all accounts the majority of these are brilliant reads and aside from #001 Lawrence Block's Grifter's Game I am yet to read any of them.
Last night you ended up in Palm Springs dancing on tables...what am I supposed to be, impressed?
Disclaimer up front, Pierce The Veil are an American post-hardcore band. This is the story of me and Pierce The Veil.
It takes a lot for the jaded emo hearts of Leah and I to get excited over hearing a new band these days. At 25 and 29 respectively we've been there and done that and bought countless t-shirts since before the scene exploded in to teenage haircuts on a high street near you, we witnessed the rise of the mediocre and quite happily dump most bands with a similar sound to Pierce The Veil in to the third rate 3rd generation category. And dump is definitely the correct word, anything smaller than a landfill wouldn't be able to contain the sheer volume of mediocre to shit.
Have you ever heard the "Punk Goes..." compilations? Up to two dozen punk, emo and hardcore bands cover songs from a selected category, classic albums include Punk Goes Pop (giving the world the incredible Stretch Armstrong cover of the Pink song Get The Party Started) and Punk Goes Crunk (the All Time Low version of Umbrella is the definitive version if you ask me.) Well, Pierce The Veil covered the classic Blue Oyster Cult song Don't Fear The Reaper (no cow bell unfortunately) on Punk Goes Classic Rock and I guess you might say we were infatuated.
Summer 2010/2011 featured almost non-stop play of their second album Selfish Machines (2010) thanks to some infectiously catchy melodies, the combination of Vic Fuentes unique vocals and lyrics and so many sing-a-long, heart on your sleeve moments you're forever declaring "this is the greatest emo song ever" which is topped off by actually the greatest emo song ever, complete with most definitive emo song title ever, Bulletproof Love.
We live in one of those cities that are never visited by bands that you want to see, merely endless streams of pop megastars and stadium rock (hey Perth is the home of AC/DC you know) yet by some small quirk of fate Pierce The Veil chose the moment we fell in love with them as the moment they would tour with one of those mediocre piles of shit I was discussing above and play a Perth show whilst they were at it. Happiness rained down upon us, tickets were bought and we attended what has to be the strangest gig we've ever experienced.
The Astor theatre (below) is a beautiful old Art Deco building that is the home of the Perth Revelation International Film Festival and also double as a concert venue. I have two words, no three words that sum up our experience: PARENTS, SEATS, POPCORN.
There were kids eating popcorn at an post-hardcore show, they were all thirteen or there abouts so had to take their parents along and the classic cinema seating that is set back from the stage/screen by quite some way was filled with both parents and teenagers looking generally quite bored whilst they ate their popcorn, leaving the "dancefloor" largely empty.
Leah once saw The Wombats in a half empty church basement in Philadelphia but she says this one was much more bizarre.
But on to the new album, it was finally released at the end of last month and initially I was unable to listen to anything else for days at a time so excited I was that it wasn't total garbage as I had feared. Pierce The Veil are not one album wonders! Most bands make an album that gets a lot of attention then feel the need to get even more attention with their next album, in the process they remove everything unique and fun from their sound and hey presto you're back to sounding like Silverstein.
PTV actually got better, they took what they did well on the previous album and crafted an album filled with the sound of a band who has toured consistently for three years; it's tighter and harder, more energetic and there's just as many of those "this is the greatest song ever" moments after singing along at the top of your voice with your eyes closed that all great emo will do to you.
Low points are few and far between, the guest vocals of Jason Butler (letlive.) simply irritate me for no good reason other than he reminds me of that guy from Say Anything, who I hate listening to.
As I said at the top of the post, I'm too old for this but that isn't stopping me. Pierce The Veil are touring the UK whilst we're on holiday in September and you'll find Leah, our friend Kat and myself towering over the sea of kids at Camden Underworld, throwing back the mojitos and wearing skinny jeans. Score!
Been there, done that, still buying the t-shirt AKA I'm too old for this shit
The first single released from the album was King For A Day and featured Kellin Quinn of Sleeping With Sirens, it is available for free here thanks to Fearless Records.
The second single, Bulls In The Bronx, has been embedded below thanks to those great guys over at Soundcloud.
The first in what will hopefully be a series of posts about the music getting heavy rotation on my blahblahblahpod, starts with the belated discovery of an album from 2009.
Once upon a time I was a student in London and found myself at edgy hipster indie clubs playing jerky pop/artrock drinking vodka until 3am, my penchant for emo dwindled in the face of something much cooler and those years of musical exploration have remained with me as an integral part of my musical landscape.
One song that seemed to sum up the time and place for me was Over and Over Again (Lost and Found) by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.
For me it was the perfect combination of upbeat and angular and was completed by one of the most distinctive lead vocalists I'd ever heard and is still an absolute pleasure to listen to six years later.
When the self titled album was released on cool indie label Wichita back in 2006 I rushed out and bought it along with several other albums, it didn't impress me anywhere near as much as I was hoping and it sort of got lost in the mix somewhere.
Fast forward to 2012, I'm sitting in one of Perth's trendy hipster coffee shops, Cabin Fever, and ahis familiar voice comes over the speakers. It's not often that I hear anything I remotely like on any stereo that isn't mine so I fumbled around trying to figure out how Shazaam works whilst trying to remain hip and not be so uncool as to ask the staff what they were listening to.
And so you have it, the story of how I came to listen to Mo Beauty by Alec Ounsworth.
His voice more than anything else is what appeals on these stripped back (at times comparitively almost acoustic) tracks, it's such an important part of the CYHSY sound that I initially couldn't understand why he felt the need to release the tracks under his own name. But repeat listening introduced me to what amounts to a more experimental edge to his sound, complete with brass and strings and not a single angular beat to be found.
The album was recorded in New Orleans, a city which clearly influenced the direction of the album and one of the obvious standout tracks from the album is "Holy, Holy, Holy Moses (Song For New Orleans)," not least because of the simple repetition of the lyric that you'll find yourself humming in the shower, in bed and on hold to Indian call centres. It's a lovely album, a joy to listen to, providing individual moments of beauty amongst the almost ethereal sound of the whole.
I've only had the pleasure of listening to it for the past week or so but it's barely off of the iPod, if only I had heard of it sooner.
Got an opinion? Feel free to share it in the blahs below. Anyone a fan already? I'd love to hear from you.
