Scripted Failures

Death Cab revealed the art for Narrow Stairs.  I don’t know what to think, really.  Anyone else?

Straight from Starflyer’s Myspace Blog:

“The new Starflyer 59 album “Dial M” has just been completed and is off
to be mixed next week by JR McNeely. We are looking at a late summer /
early fall release with select tour dates to follow. We are very
pleased with the results and hope you enjoy the new record. More info,
new songs, etc. coming soon.”

I guess I’ll be finding out soon if my supposition was correct that all the A-sides of “The Ghosts of the Future” 7″ boxset are an album to themselves and not the next true album Starflyer 59 was recording.  Either way, I’m excited and you should be too.  After all the release of a new Starflyer 59 or Joy Electric album is always a monumentally exciting event.  Speaking of that, don’t forget that the new Joy Electric record “My Grandfather, the Cubist” comes out May 26th!  Hopefully we can get some rad coverage of that leading up to the release.

Okay kids, it’s finally available to order!  You know you want it!  So go order it at Velvet Blue Music!  Of course you can order it from CDbaby, but I’d rather give Cloud my money!  That said I just ordered it!!  Oh yeah, for those of you weirdos who don’t like owning actual copies of the album and would rather buy mp3s you can get it at the iTunes store.  I just used it to find out that the name of the song in the video we posted months ago is called “Strength Early”.  I guess I may as well give a tracklist, while I’m starting at the iTunes store listing. Here you are:

01. A Concealed Weapon
02. Strength Early
03. Business Casual
04. The Life Highrise
05. The Mayflower Compact
06. It’s Not Effective
07. That’s Getting Personal
08. Love My Way (Psychedelic Furs Cover)
09. Don’t I Know the Way
10. The Pure in Heart

Death Cab for Cutie released (streaming from their MySpace) the first single from their forthcoming album, Narrow Stairs.  It’s an 8 and a half-minute jam called “I Will Possess Your Heart,” where the at least the first half is a bass-infused groove reminiscent of a more mid-tempo, jammier, “National Anthem.”  It’s pretty good.  The lyrics strike me as typical Gibbard fare.  I think it could’ve been shorter, but they warned us.  People are already preemptively calling this Album of the Year, which is a bit far to go after one single, but it definitely has promise.

Honestly, though, it’s not quite as much of a change as I was expecting, given the original promises/threats.  Take a listen:

I’ve been seeing the newest Fair to Midland album, “Fables from a Mayfly: What I Tell You Three Times Is True,” at Best Buy for a long time, and while its artsy cover and long title always intrigued me, I never bothered to take a listen to it.  Not too long ago, I stumbled upon their earlier “Drawn and Quartered EP” for $1, and so I picked it up.  It contains older demos and a few live tracks from their independent releases.  The reason I’m writing all of this is because the first track on this EP is killer.  I can’t stop listening to it.  So I thought I’d share.

Fair to Midland, “Orphan Anthem ‘86″

I’ll admit, upon listening to this song, one of my first reactions was that they were a Christian band.  The following lines piqued my curiosity:

Instilled in us ethics, not by god, but by our choice
I can’t even imagine, but I can see it
and
Encompassed by standards, and we give ourselves all of the credit
Can’t put my finger on it, but I can see it

I did a quick Google Search and came upon an interview that the lead singer, Darroh Sudderth, did with Mp3.com.  Here’s what he had to say on the subject (I thought the interviewer was not-so-subtle in his questioning):

Chris Rolls:You said you were out on the road with…who did you say, Flyleaf?
Darroh Sudderth:Yes.
Chris: Not now, but before…the Christian hardcore band?
Darroh: Yes, sir.
Chris: Now, I have to ask: Do you have any particular religious affinities?
Darroh: It all depends on which one of us you ask. I wouldn’t say we’re a Christian band, but some of us are Christians in the band.
Chris: I see. I see. But it’s not something that you’re promoting as a band?
Darroh: No. No.
Chris: OK.
Darroh: It may be something that subconsciously comes through at some points, with one or more of the members. But…yeah.
Chris: But is it something that you work into your lyricism?
Darroh: Well, I grew up…me personally…I’m sure it works its way into a lot of the lyrical content because I grew up in the Bible Belt.  So it’s almost…  But I won’t say which ones of us are Christians and which ones aren’t and which are atheists. But it’s about a 50/50. We’re cut in half.
Chris: Well, that must make for some interesting conversation on the road, especially if you’re doing a rock tour.
Darroh: Oh, yeah.

The whole interview is worth reading, actually.  They sound like an interesting band.  I’ll have to give their latest endeavor a listen.

Mood Mix

1. Mew, “Am I Wry? No”
2. Radiohead, “Lucky”
3. The Junior Varsity, “Get Comfortable”
4. The Cure, “Homesick”
5. Jeremy Enigk, “Been Here Before”
6. Circa Survive, “Act Appalled”
7. Foo Fighters, “Up in Arms”
8. Armor for Sleep, “Remember to Feel Real”

Friday Mixes is a weekly feature that showcases a mix of songs from various genres that usually share some common theme.  If you have an idea for a theme, email us at feedback@scriptedfailures.com and maybe we’ll use it.

So I’ve been listening to a lot of Cursive’s Domestica lately.  It’s one of those records that just seems to go through frequent cycles of high-rotation.  This time around, however, I paid attention more to the themes of the record and noticed more than a couple of parallels, so I decided to figure out once and for all what the common threads were in these songs and share them with you. The following table illustrates my findings:

As you can see “The Radiator Hums” exemplifies the most of all of these common threads.  I should do this for all of their albums (that is neither a threat, nor a promise).

EMI is still sore about In Rainbows, so they’re doing the only thing they can do: trying to milk as much money from the Radiohead properties they do control as they can.  They’ve already released all the old albums in a box set.  What else can they do?  Oh, yeah, a Greatest Hits album.

How can you blame them?  If I owned stock in a major record label, I think I’d be on the phone with my broker right now.  Granted, not everyone can afford to take the Screw You approach that Radiohead did, but it’s definitely becoming less and less important to have a deal with a major.  The music industry is in a tizzy over the fact that technology is just plain making them unnecessary.  It makes sense.  Home recording software has been lessening the cost of getting quality recordings, and the internet/digital media have made distribution methods cost nothing.  Scripted Failures has been recording pretty good DIY recordings for years, and we have practically no funds.  With just a little money spent on the right equipment, we could probably make a pretty good sounding album at home.

So this Greatest Hits thing.  It’ll sell.  It’ll sell well.  If you casually like Radiohead, you’ll probably pick it up.  If you’re a die-hard fan, and you own all the original albums, you might still pick it up, as Justin says, “just to have”.  Radiohead can’t do much about it, but drummer Phil Selway doesn’t seem to pleased about the prospect: “It’s well within their rights to do it. *sigh* So we’ll have to see.
But as I say, for us the main thing is that we’re excited about the
process of releasing In Rainbows and what we’re doing, around the
touring, around the way we’re able to release it, and most importantly
around the music itself.”

(Read the full interview with Analogue here)

If you’ve been reading our blog you know two things: number one, we haven’t updated in a long while (sorry, things have been hectic in Scripted Failures land cause we’ve been writing new songs), and number two that we’re quite stoked on The Foxglove Hunt.  A quick recap: The Foxglove Hunt is Rob Withem of Fine China writing all the songs, playing guitar, and singing, and Ronnie Martin of Joy Electric doing all the programming and synth work.  We’ve known for awhile that the album would be out sometime this year, but now we finally have a month, an album title, an album cover (obviously since you can see it right here), and some other rad news.

The Foxglove Hunt’s debut album “Stop Heartbeat” will be out in March on Common Wall Media which released Fine China’s amazing last record ever, “The Jaws of Life”.  If you head over to the Hunt’s myspace, you can hear the finished versions of the two demos that have been up for awhile (”That’s Getting Personal” and “Business Casual”), as well as a new song called “The Life Highrise”.  If that wasn’t enough you can also buy an mp3 single of the, I assume, album track “Don’t I Know the Way” that comes to you on an old school 1.44 MB floppy disk.  How fucking cool and retro is that?  Hell, it’s so retro I’m going to have to use my older PC in the garage just to get the damn mp3, since my laptop doesn’t have a floppy drive.  And if I read the picture right it looks like they might be only making 300 of these, so you better jump on it.  I’ve already ordered mine.

As for the three songs up, I’ve only allowed myself to listen to about thirty seconds of each, which was enough time to find out that “That’s Getting Personal” and “Business Casual” were the finished album versions, and that “The Life Highrise” sounds good.  If you read Ronnie’s blog on the Joy Electric myspace, you know that he is incredibly stoked about the record.  He said that these were Rob’s best songs ever and that it was the best project he had ever produced and worked on.  If Ronnie’s that excited you know this record is going to kick ass.  Now all they need to do is post a tracklist and a link to preorder and we’ll be set!

This would have been up sooner, had Yahoo mail’s spam filter not thrown the Joy Electric newsletter in the spam folder, but the new Joy Electric album is entitled “My Grandfather, the Cubist”, and is due out on May 27th on Tooth and Nail Records.  Also the Joy Electric website has been updated with a sort of cubist influenced look and a rather lengthy interview with Ronnie.  Unfortunately there’s not a new track to listen to or a tracklist up yet, but hopefully both those will happen soon.  We’ll report it here as soon as it happens.  Get excited!