feb 2nd

feb 2nd is the semi-official release date for the cd and vinyl of our new record, not that it means that much. we're supposed to get the goods shipped in on the 1st, so that's pretty exciting. we got the test pressings of the vinyl and they sound pretty great, i will put up some pictures later on. CDs will be $10, and VINYL (which includes the a CD) will be $15. we would very much like to be able to sell the damned things for cheaper, but it just doesn't seem feasible with numbers and costs and such.

we're still working on finishing up Buffie's record. six of the songs are finalized, it's just the last three that have been a little troublesome. but we recorded a few things last night, guitars and noise made with the kaoss pad, so everything that was missing should be in place now.

we've been working on some new songs that i think we're all pretty excited about. for the most part its all up-tempo catchy poppy rock stuff. Corey has a lot of new ideas and riffs, and Jimo has been working with his new toys, which include a boss digital delay pedal and an almost-new Orange Thunderverb 200 amp. i've started fucking around with Jimo's q-tron pedal and found a pretty cool sound for guitar, just not sure how or when to incorporate it yet. anyways, we've got five songs picked out to do for an 7" ep, that is if we sell any copies of TINNITUS. two of them are leftovers from TINNITUS, one is a redux of song Corey wrote for his short lived garage band from last year, the Arch-Rivals, and the other two are brand new (one of them exists only as an awesome title so far - BABY, BABY, BABY...BANG! BANG! BANG!). my goal is to get these five tunes recorded by March and if we sell some records, we can have a 7" out by late spring. we'll see!

buy our record in mp3?

so the TINNITUS record is now available on mp3 store across the internet, which is kind of a weird feeling. we paid $50 to a website called TUNECORE (to which we uploaded the album) to distribute the album to all the different MP3 retailers they have available. so it's up on AMAZON, LALA, RHAPSODY, probably iTUNES (i haven't checked to see if it's up there yet, but they do indeed have separate iTUNES stores for different countries, like Japan, New Zealand, Europe, etc. and it'll be available on all of them). what this actually means though is jack shit. here we've got this record that we've worked very hard on, and like it's super cool that it's available to some random person in say Japan, but it's not like some random kid in Japan knows or has a reason to know it exist. and even as such, an MP3 is such a shitty and undesirable format for "purchasing" and "owning" music as far as i am concerned. i just can't imagine EVER paying money for an MP3 file under any circumstances. there was like one time where i almost brought myself to do it in order to get what turned out to be an easily attainable BORIS b-side (floorshaker - that song is awesome), but i routinely mock any of my friends who admit to having purchased an MP3. especially if they could have purchased the CD or VINYL at a real store or online. it just seems like a shoddy disposable product most of the time. it's my understanding that the different retailers tend to offer differing terms of MP3 quality, as what we uploaded to the TUNECORE were the Master Wavs straight from the CDR. from what i know, iTUNES gets away with murder selling low quality files that sound worse than a 2nd generation dubbed cassette tape. i mean, 128kbps just sounds really crummy, no matter what magic AAC crap they claim to do. i really don't know what LALA or AMAZON or RHAPSODY or even whatever the fuck it is that calls itself NAPSTER these days actually offer. but if one is inclined to purchase an MP3 version of our record, i would recommend looking at these aforementioned various retailers and choosing the one that offers the highest kbps. and then pirate it to all yr friends! cuz that's how i find out about new music, shit!

so yeah, buy our record in MP3 for under $8??

or, CD and VINYL coming soon!!

end of recording

we finished recording Buffie's record last night. it consists of nine songs and is about 40 minutes long. it took nine days to get it done, with the majority of Jimo's lead guitar parts being done yesterday and the day before. recording vocals was not too tough, we only made Buffie cry once, so yeah. actually i got to be a bit of a tough slog towards the end, as i was very adamant that we finish yesterday on schedule. unfortunately i ended up a bit grouchy towards the end, as some of the songs presented some unanticipated difficulties. whereas we thought that the simple blues song Movie Star would be one of the easiest to track, it ended up being very challenging to capture the right feel for the tune since it was so structurally limited. i don't know how many damned takes we did of Buffie, Tommi and I trying to play the song through in one take, but it just took forever. Jimo also thought he had the lead guitar parts "in the bag," but it turned out to be far more arduous, as he realized that he hadn't played any heavy blues since becoming part of PARAE. the other song that gave us trouble near the end was Electricity, which actualy was very seamless except for one vocal hook part. Tommi had the brilliant idea that Buffie should spell out the title of the song, which she absolutely refused to do under any circumstances. so after trying a multitude of different things, eventually we settled on her hollering a nasty primal scream each time through the Scrotum Smasher. i supposed it works well enough...anyway, now all we gotta do is mix the damn thing, and we have about two weeks to do that. on the whole, i'm pretty proud of it and happy to have been involved with facilitating the recording process.

we're gonna be redesigning the website a bit in an effort to streamline some of the useless areas of it and make it look more in line with the artwork for the new TINNITUS record. we should be getting our test pressings of the vinyl any day now, and it should start popping up on MP3 retail sites after tomorrow (for whoever uses those things).