The City Veins

Charles may be in a better position to express our recent folly, but I’m going to let the cat out of the bag first. 

For the full duration of this band thus far we have used a certain unnamed duplication company to handle all of our CD duplication, from the 1st EP completed a year ago to the new EP we just completed.  Admittedly, we were intitially drawn to this particular company because it cheap.  At first, we were quite happy with their work.  We sent “Weekend Affair” to them to duplicate and add minimal artwork on the top side of the CD, and they did a solid job.  Really, how hard can this be?  They even got it right the second time we ordered.  So at that point we’re into them for $1,000 and they’ve done.

Right before we played with Robbers on High Street at the Rock and Roll Hotel we ordered another set of CD’s.  We opened the box at the club, and handed them out for free as we always do.  We noticed that the printing on the CD was not of the quality we had seen in the past, though we paid the same amount.  We collectively thought,”well, this is sort of shitty”, and moved on.  Now the artwork is actually fading straight off of the CD covers.  Not great.

It also never occurred to us that we should listen to the CD’s to MAKE SURE IT WAS US.  As it turns out, we’ve been handing out free CD’s for the past few months that are actually the recordings of some other band.  These peoples jobs are not hard…it boggles the mind that they could screw it up like this.

Unfortunately, none of this came to light until the past few days, well after we had sent our new EP–complete with deadlines and real expectations of quality–to the same company to have them reproduced.  Their web-site claims a 10 business day turn-around for the CD’s, and it was only yesterday on day 9 that they made the artwork we had sent them available for confirmation.  It is an understatement to say we are concerned. 

Since everything written in a language other than English seems to carry more weight with it, and I’ve seen this written many times in the last few days in my native tongue, I decided to try to describe my Radiohead experience con my limited vocabulary de Espanol.  I feel as if I’m beating a dead horse because everyone and their grandmother has a story about their Nissan Pavilion experience from sunday night, but we need content.

We (me, girlfriend Rachel, and friends Joe and Sean) left for the concert at 5:30 and got there at 7:30.  That was very good time compared to others, and I will credit exit 43b off of I-66.  I hear 44 was very, very bad (www.pastaprima.net for reference), but getting there for us was relatively easy.  We got to the show in time to see Liars.  I hate them.  I hear they are an acquired taste, but I’m not there yet.  And this relates to a general problem I have with Indie bands that base their music around beats; that just because beats happen to be the focus of your music (as opposed to vocal melody or guiatr work) does not mean your beats are good or innovative.  The guy sitting on South Capitol beating on a trash-can lid writes beats that trounce Liars, and he is not getting paid for playing in front of 8,000 people.  So for me they had nothing.

Radiohead was awesome.  (Don’t believe me?  Go here: www.radiohead-notforprofit.com) Paranoid Android is the best song ever.  ever.  Light show was very good, and the deep red lighting made me feel as if it was very, very warm.  I was in the Radiohead womb.

Getting home took 4 hours.  We got back at 3:00, which is about 3 hours after I wanted to be home.  I did not like that at all.  Oh, and I woke up the next morning to find that my car window was smashed in, but I drove to work anyway, with rain gushing in the window.   

We trekked up to Baltimore on Saturday to play at Mum’s with The Stalking Horses. It was good to get out and play live. We have been in a studio mind set for way too long, and we enjoyed getting up in front of a few people and making some noise. It is nice to be able to play a note, and then forget about it. Also, the Stalking Horses are great to play with, and are quickly becoming one of our favorite bands. Also, my friend Spencer from The Surge showed up, and sang “Death or Glory” with us. It was pretty great, well it was great after Aaron decided to play the song in the correct key. Unfortunately, the evening was cut short when both of toilets at the bar broke.

In other news. Head over to our MySpace page to hear “Freedom After The Fall.” I guess this is the first single off of the album, but given that we have no hope of making it on the radio I don’t really know what a single means for us anyway. You can see this confusion in the choice of song. Were we to have a traditional single to promote the album, I doubt we would pick a song in 5/4 with Spencer and I clapping difference syncopated rhythms. The song sounds great, and we are really proud of it, but it just isn’t something that would get an A&R man all excited.

I just placed the order to produce the CD.

So my friend Darren came over to Aaron and Spencer’s place on Monday to get pictures for the cd. As discussed here, we did get our 8×10 taken. Basically, Darren just set up a camera and took pictures while we messed with each other. There are a lot of pictures that, while hilarious, should never be seen by anyone outside of this band. One involves Aaron putting a weird stick ball thing down his pants. Strangely enough, most of these pictures capture this band perfectly, from the way we interact with each other to the general level of stupidity that surrounds us. That is why they can never be shown.

So things are quickly wrapping up for this project. I hope to get the whole thing mailed out to get produced by the end of the week. If it goes much later, we are really pushing up against our June 6th deadline.