SXSW is now over and with that – barring some super awesome show we can’t turn down – we’ll be taking a break from playing live. We’ll be spending less time posting here as a result because we really do have a lot of stuff to work on and prefer to spend all our energies in polishing these ideas into new material. Hopefully, the next time you see us live we will have a set filled with new songs and Larry will have his massive Tesla coil assembled and functioning over the roof of our secret laboratory. SCIENCE!
Now, How these will these new songs be released? Well, that is an interesting question.
We have had a lot of fun making videos to go along with the songs and also we have come to abhor the long breaks between albums. It seems we build all this momentum only to lose all of it as we hunker down for another three years working on the next album. So we thought about it and have come to this crazy scheme to move past the album every three years or so cycle.
The idea is to release a few songs – two or three at a time – every three months as a digital single and one song would be picked as a video. Which means you’d get a few songs and a video every three months. Then, the songs would be compiled as one album – kind of like say in the “Singles Going Steady” mode. Inspiration for the video idea should go to Jef Withonef of The Ghost of Cliff Burton whose early critique on the rough edit of the video to “Crom” was indispensable. His ambition for his own band was to make a video each month but that’s a bit too ambitious for us so we took his idea and scaled it back a bit to something more workable for us. It should prove to be a lot of work but also a lot of fun and we wouldn’t disappear into the studio for years on end.
So what do we have on the plate right now?
Well first up, I have three songs that are thematically linked that I am shooting to have released by July 8th. They range from pop-punk, to pop-psych, to the folky. So, don’t expect heavy-ass Stoner Rock from those songs – it’s the kind of stuff Steve jokingly calls “The Many Moods of Linus.”
After that, the big one is Clinton’s epic “C is for Cthulhu.”. We have it planned for the fall because I’m looking at some stop-motion animation and a lot of crazy stuff for the video. Not only would October give us enough time to do it right but we’d also release it just before Halloween which would be pretty appropriate. Clinton has another untitled rocker we’ve been working on which has some resemblance to GRRRL! from “Ashes in the Bong of God.” Charlie has one called “Ghost Witch” as well that is pretty RRRRRRROCCCKKKK! So a mellow summer release and a heavy fall release. Of course, we have a lot of stuff kicking around the floor in various stages of completion as well that we are busy trying to assemble but those are the ones I can remember at the moment.
Short of it is that while we may be posting less here and on our Facebook, it will be merely a hiatus. If our plan works out as we hope, you will see more frequent releases each year and shows with a more varied set-list.
In the meantime, please enjoy Clinton’s lyrics to “Dwarf Planets.” We were joking about doing a show at the planetarium and the discussion turned to a song about the dwarf planets and well this is kind of what we end up when we get into these discussions. The sad thing is that stuff like starts off as a joke then actually becomes a real song.
Eris
Paranoid Asteroid
Discord is thy name
Astronomers
Gutting one another in their labs
PLANET? NO! DWARF PLANET? YES! DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE
Haumea
What the hell are you
You are shaped like a potato
A Space Potato
SPUDNIK
You have two moons but why? They are not moons.
BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT REALLY A PLANET SO HOW CAN YOU HAVE MOONS BITCH?
Pluto
You used to be one of the Nine
Now, fallen, you wait upon your icy throne
to wreak vengeance on astrophysicists
by confusing people eternally
Ceres
You are named after cereal
That isn’t really that cool
But like the Death Star, you are no moon
And that is cool
But you don’t have Darth Vader or a superlaser
So you are not cool any more
You are just a big piece of rock
