While on tour in October our friend Alan came along with us a for a few days. He took a lot of pictures and put together a multimedia slide show.

Check it out

We've got a show with Maps & Atlases and Say Panther on Friday at the Billiken Club (St. Louis University) .
This is going to be a great show.
It's all ages but there is a bar for those of age.
It's also free!

I get up, I get down

In the past five months making a record has gone from something that we worked on for 10 to 12 hours a day to more of a weird abstract, some distant idea that will come to fruition eventually but is still far off and totally intangible. After deciding to cut a song and write another this sense of disconnect only increased (especially since I heard about it from a friend and later got the details from the f-ing internet. WTF, I know, right?).

But that's boring and old news. This week has brought us significantly closer to the completion of our record.

On Wednesday we finished writing what will be our 10th and final song on the record. With Close to the Edge by Yes in mind, we churned out our longest song yet (ever?).On Thursday the disc containing the 9 mastered songs arrived in the mail. Although nothing is confirmed, plans are being made to record this last track. Once it is recorded, mixed, and mastered our record will be D-O-N-E!

Of course there is much more to it (artwork, finding someone to release it, etc....) and there are surely more stalls and road blocks ahead, but for the first time the idea of our record being complete seems very real and very close.

In the meantime I've got plenty of things to keep me occupied:

- Barak Obama's presidential campaign

- upcoming Spring tour

- In Rainbows discbox

- Boss PS-5 Super Shifter

- an enormous stack of books that's been piling up for about a year and a half.

I am pretty excited.

Best bands So Many Dynamos played with in 2007 that we didn't know were going to be awesome before we played with them

So i guess the Beatle Bob rant was a lot of negativity, so I felt like making up for it by doing something positive on here. We didn't play a TON of shows in 2007, I think our final count was 75, but we had some really great ones and made some new friends and blah blah blah. Here's a list of the best bands we played with last year that we didn't know were going to be awesome, but were. This doesn't include bands that we played with that we KNEW were going to be awesome and were. That list is (in order of performance): Ad Astra Per Aspera, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, HORSE the band, Russian Circles, Maps and Atlases, We Versus the Shark, Cinemechanica, Octopus Project, Ho-Ag, Enon, and Bring Back the Guns

The New Trust
We drove straight to San Francisco to play the Noise Pop Festival in February, and immediately afterwards almost all of our shows fell through on the west coast. Luckily, we got added to 2 shows with these dudes (technically a 2 dude, 2 dudette hybrid). Unfortunately, one of them was in Salt Lake City, UT. There's nothing like playing the most miserable place in America to make 2 bands bond. Musically, they play straight ahead indie rock with no bullshit and they have a song called "You've Got to be Fucking Shitting Me". That's awesome.

Pattern Is Movement
This has to be one of the weirdest bands in the universe. We officially met PiM this year, and wound up playing with them 4 times with 3 different lineups. It sounds like somebody turned Kid A up too loudly and sang opera-style over it. They played a house show in Pittsburgh with us and 6 hardcore bands and tore the house down when they covered "Everything in its Right Place". Wow.

Heavy Heavy Low Low
I didn't know what it meant to not give a shit about anything until i met these dudes. They're some of the sweetest, weirdest guys in the universe, and I would have never appreciated them musically if we hadn't toured with them and heard 50 bands try to do what they do but not nearly as well. Seeing 300 kids in North Carolina jump over each other to chant "Oh Shit Fuck" along with this band brought a tear to my eye.

Light This City
When HHLL dropped off our tour with HORSE the band, this band picked up. I never thought i'd love a metal band the way that i love Light this City. Megadeth style riffs, Iron Maiden style solos, and vocals by a girl that sounds like a really tough dude. The breakdown to "Exile" was in our heads for about 2 months.

Powers
Powers is to Athens what Thor Axe tries to be to St. Louis (or at least Edwardsville), but they're a lot less ironic more conceptually righteous. It's 4 guitarists (including Bryant from Cinemechanica and Luke from We Versus the Shark) and one drummer (Mike from Cinemechanica), and they set up the amps in the corners of the club, throw the drums in the middle and play quadrophonic math rock. Seriously.

The Bronzed Chorus
These dudes from North Carolina do what Explosions in the Sky do, but better than Explosions in the Sky and with half of the people. It's 2 people sounding like 8, and they're one of the most intense live acts i've ever seen.

We'll be touring again soon and i can't wait to see what sweet bands we get to play with this year.