July 28, 2010

Whoo!

Filed under: general news — chuck @ 8:43 pm

The Fetal Pig & Going To Grandma’s reunion was awesome! So awesome that we’re going to do some more shows, and are likely to do bit of recording too. Jeff plans to make Facebook fan pages for both bands, so if you have any photos from the show, get in touch.

Fetal Pig is going to play with Mahogany Frog at the Mews on August 31; Why Make Clocks played with them at Big V’s in St. Paul some months back and they blew us away, so don’t miss it. And we have a bunch of Why Make Clocks shows coming up soon too. Rather than laboriously list them here, I’ll just mention that a couple of them are in Omaha and Marshalltown, one of them is with Retribution Gospel Choir, which involves Alan Sparhawk of Low, so thats awesome… and you should go to the shows page to get that all sorted out and stick all those on your calendar.

July 19, 2010

can you hear the chitter-chatter

Filed under: general news — chuck @ 9:32 am

Saturday’s show was great despite the lack of Will Tarbox. We tend to end up playing a lot more stuff from Midwestern Film when we strip it down and acoustic and/or drumless. Andrew Weathers Ensemble made some gorgeous ambient sounds, Stubborn Tiny Lights played epic mostly instrumental rock compositions, and Autumn Project hit us with their trademark wall of sound. We got to hang out with Austin and Jeff and Jim.

This week we have the Fetal Pig and Going To Grandma’s reunion at Vaudeville Mews on Friday night! That’s going to be awesome! And before that, I (Chuck) am doing a solo show for my new project Distant Trains on Wednesday night with The Bassturd, S.E.R.F., and Todd On Acid, also at Vaudeville Mews. Both shows get going sometime around 9 or 9:30 I think. Between the two I’m a bass maniac this week.

Also really excited for our show with Electric Leaves and Map Of The Woods on August 3. I really love Map Of The Woods, super good guys making an epically droning psychedelic blues noise. That’s also at The Mews. And just in case you start to thinking we never leave town, August 6 has us going to Omaha to play with Noah’s Ark Was A Spaceship at Barley Street. They’ll be returning the favor by coming to Des Moines later in the month.

July 8, 2010

the little moon face cried to me tonight

Filed under: shows — chuck @ 9:03 pm

Just popping in quick to mention out upcoming July 16 show at Vaudeville Mews with The Autumn Project, Stubborn Tiny Lights Vs. Clustering Darkness Forever OK?, and Andrew Weathers. You may already be coming to the realization of what a cool lineup of epic post-rock and songwritery sounds. For our part, since Will will be unavailable due to a wedding, Dan and I are going to kick it low-key, a bit like we did at Mars Cafe. Maybe some gentle drum-machine patterns thrown in, if I can get some put together. We’re a pretty versatile outfit I guess. Anyway it’s the late show next Friday, and we’d love to hang with you there.

June 3, 2010

erratum

Filed under: shows — chuck @ 1:59 pm

Oh my gawd this stuff is getting hard to keep track of. What’s with shows lately? Everything seems to get canceled, re-arranged, and confused. Here are some changes to the information that’s been presented here thus far.

  • Serf is actually called S.E.R.F.
  • S.E.R.F. is playing the June 28 show with us, Giant Radio, and Pink Kodiak. Which I presume means they’re not playing the August 3 show, and that I just got it mixed up.
  • That show is an early, all-ages show at 5 pm
  • The early July 16 show having Distant Trains and Blutiger Fluss on it has been scrapped because the interesting guy with an Echoplex and his tourmates cancelled.

I have a feeling here will be more revisions to come, so keep in touch.

even though you’ve got it all planned out

Filed under: general news,mailing list,shows — chuck @ 11:14 am

Yesterday was a pretty exciting one as the new issue of The Big Takeover arrived at Why Make Clocks HQ. Because These Things Are Ours was reviewed in it. Normally you don’t want to take reviews too awful seriously (but still appreciate them), but when it’s a publication you respect this much, it means a lot when they say your album is pretty cool. For those not familiar, Big Takeover is a really great magazine that we’d recommend to all music nuts. It only comes out a couple times a year, but the issues are so thick and jam-packed that when it arrives you’ll still be enjoying your battered copy of the previous issue. Check out what they had to say about the album here and check out the magazine and get yourself hooked up with a subscription here.

As for what we’re up to, well, to quote a line from the new Poison Control Center album, if you haven’t seen very much of us around, well, check the shadows. I myself have a digital album from my “solo” project Distant Trains coming out on Sleep On The Floor late this month, and will be attempting a live performance during the early show at Vaudeville Mews on July 16, with Blutiger Fluss and some other interesting fellow who probably has an Echoplex. Then, that same night, Why Make Clocks plays the late show with The Autumn Project, Andrew Weathers, and a cool post-rock band from Cedar Falls called Stubborn Tiny Lights vs Clustering Darkness Forever OK?. I think there may be former members of the excellent Giants and some people from Former Thieves involved in that, so expect big epic sounds.

I also started a music blog called The Centipede Farm because I thought that I was doing so many shout-outs to good bands that Why Make Clocks plays with on here, that maybe writing about other bands was something I should do on another site. I recorded some trumpet for a Coolzey track that I have no idea what’s to become of, and Andy from Map Of The Woods keeps talking about he and I doing some kind of sci-fi funeral doom metal side project.

All of us in Why Make Clocks are also involved in one way or another with a “reunion show” of two of Dan’s old bands, Fetal Pig and Going To Grandma’s, that’s going on at the Mews on July 23, to coincide with Kim’s birthday. Old-schoolas of the Des Moines music scene will remember these bands, hopefully fondly, and are advised to come check it out because it will be awesome. Will and I will be filling in for original members who weren’t able to be involved; I’m playing bass for Fetal Pig and Will is playing bass (of all things!) for Going To Grandma’s. So we’ve been rehearsing the heck out of that stuff. Each of those bands, by the way, also has a member of Blutiger Fluss in it.

None of this is to say that Why Make Clocks itself has been inactive. Quite the contrary, we’re simultaneously working on about the next three records; writing, rehearsing, hashing out arrangement ideas in 4-track demos. We think we might still be playing the Mews on June 28 but it’s not on their calendar, but we do know that It’s True backed out of that show and I’m quite bummed out about that fact. And after I went and wrote that nice article about their CD, too. But Giant Radio are still in, and they’re great too. Then there’s the aforementioned July 16 event, then back at the Mews again August 3 with Electric Leaves, Serf, and Map Of The Woods. Of course we want to make it worth your while to come see us, so we still want to bust out a new or rare song each time.

And you can imagine we’re itching to get out of our hometown a little bit too, so there’s talk of a one-week tour in late July or sometime in August. Cross your fingers, and we’ll be sure to let you know all about how that idea is coming along.

I’m also hoping to have the web store here at this site working again sometime very soon. I’ve reinstalled the plugin and am going to give it another go.

May 20, 2010

the dutch are weeping, in four languages at least

Filed under: general news — chuck @ 3:47 pm

Haven’t put up much of an update here in a while, so thought I’d check in. We went to Omaha and played for pretty much nobody except the other bands. Well except for Cat Island, who remained conspicuously absent right up until their set, so we decided to return the favor and get an early move on for home, we’d seen them before anyway. No worries, it happens, it’s the music game. I wanted to mention the other bands we played with, however, because they were quite good. Wighead‘s a quirky fun-loving piano outfit from Oklahoma, and Betsy Wells is a bunch of guys from Omaha working a real nice psychedelic-country thing, who are at Goose Island Wrigleyville in Chicago tonight and The Beauty Shop in Fairfield tomorrow.

We played a really cool semi-acoustic show at Mars Cafe with Finn Miles and a kid from The Atudes, and it went really well. Maybe we should do more of those.

Dan and Will (and Jasper from The Seed Of Something) went to Omaha again last weekend for the Mastodon/Baroness show. Then they and I saw Baroness again at The Mews on Monday night with Druids. Both shows kicked ass.

Last night we played the Mews with Mark Mallman, who was new to me but definitely not so to the other guys. He is quite the showman. Harper Lee Harvey opened, a local band headed up by a guy who was once in Squidboy, then later in The Miltons, a Des Moines band whose breakup resulted in the births of both North Of Grand and The Mittens. Their bar-punk sound was right in line with that group of bands — if you aren’t from around these parts, just picture what it might be like if Radio Birdman had been 30-something dudes with shaved heads and glasses from any major Midwest city along I-35 anytime since the late ’80s. It’s a solid tradition. Squidboy and NOG still do it best, though. Kiriko, another local band that I hadn’t seen before, had a cool psychedelic southern rock vibe about them and sounded real good. I got the idea that they’re maybe one Big Muff pedal away from being able to tour in support of Sleepy Sun. They’ll be playing the Mews again June 8 with Mini Mansions, a band that I guess involves a guy from Queens Of The Stone Age. Somewhat predictably, Superchief is also on that bill. So is Mumford’s, whom you would know as “a band headed up by that crazy trumpet player from Christopher the Conquered” (whose name is Nate), and Mason Cain.

As for us, we’ve got a few things worked up here in Des Moines, check the shows page. And we’re up for more, so feel free to get in touch.

May 13, 2010

i’m crawling to tennessee

Filed under: general news,shows — chuck @ 6:01 pm

If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “Gee, I love Why Make Clocks’s songs, but they’re just so loud lately,” you’re in luck: tomorrow night at Mars Cafe, a mostly-acoustic, mostly-solo version of Why Make Clocks will be playing tomorrow night at Mars Cafe. According to our calendar here, it’s going down at 8pm, but I wouldn’t be surprised if things actually get rolling a bit earlier.

The loud Why Make Clocks plays Wednesday night, May 19, at Vaudeville Mews with Mark Mallman.

April 28, 2010

and all the world that matters will be on my guest list

Filed under: general news — chuck @ 9:12 pm

This summer looks like it might shape up to be pretty cool, actually. We thought we were playing it cool, not pestering people too much on the booking tip, figuring we’d focus on writing and recording. But some pretty cool show opportunities have found their way to us, including possibly a couple with It’s True, who we love, and who just released their first album like two days ago. We heartily recommend them.

Of course all this means we have a big issue that needs solving soon: we need a van. We missed out on buying She Swings She Sways‘s van by virtue of it being a bit more than we could afford at the time. (We don’t really need one with a TV in it anyway.) So if you know anyone else who is selling one, pleeeeeeeease let us know.

April 11, 2010

can’t be bothered with a title

Filed under: general news,merch,recording,shows,web stuff — chuck @ 10:51 am

Sorry if anyone else has noticed problems with our online merch store. I kinda hate it, frankly. There’s a real chicken-and-egg problem with something like that: I don’t really know if the store works until someone tries ordering something, but nobody wants to try ordering something if they think the store might be broken. And broken it is, at least on the products page. I just noticed today after installing the upgrade for WP-ecommerce that now half the products don’t appear. Instead, it shows the poster, then the shirt twice, then the 7″ twice, then the Fifteen Feet cd twice. This certainly doesn’t inspire confidence in the potential customer, let alone in myself (come on developers, how hard is it to iterate a list of things?), and nothing I can figure out to do seems to fix it, so I’m taking the page down for the time being. I apologize for the trouble. Given that the store’s never had a single customer, however, makes me wonder whether it’s worth my time to even bother with the thing, let alone bother with the time and effort of registering an account at WP-ecommerce’s support forums so I can post there (I’m still waiting for a registration email with my password, and I’m sure by the time it arrives I’ll have forgotten half my question), then waiting to hear a reply. I really wish there was a simple way we could offer our stuff for sale online that didn’t (a) suck, and/or (b) require money upfront just to get something half-working when, as we’ve seen so far, nobody’s buying anything anyway. It’s so depressing. If anyone out there has a suggestion, feel free to offer it.

One thing that’s not depressing, however, is going into an awesome studio and making beautiful sounds, which is what we just did this past two days at Flat Black Studio in Iowa City. We worked on five songs, then took home some rough-mixes to obsess/compulse over for a while. Disclaimer: “compulse” is not a real word, I just invented it because “compulsive” needs a verb form (“compel” seems wrong in this usage).

Another thing that’s not depressing is playing a show with a band as good as Pharmacy Spirits who were just getting their tour started when we had a show with them at the Mews several days ago. They’re at Big V’s tonight, so I encourage you Twin Cities folks to go there. After that they’re heading towards the East coast and then will be back around the Midwest early next month.

We’ve got a couple shows coming up too, though not nearly so many as those guys.

March 28, 2010

love, peace, and harmony, oh very nice very nice, but maybe in the next world

Filed under: general news,mailing list — chuck @ 9:29 am

We had a great time last night playing the Gross Domestic Product festival. Saw a lot of great bands, met a lot of great people. Thanks to all the people who came out!

Before our set I noticed we had some old mailing list signup sheets left lying around in our merch cases that I’d yet to add people from. We’re so organized. So welcome new folks, hope it didn’t take us too long to get back to you.

Best new discoveries of the night for us personally were probably Druids — it was cool to see some heavy stuff at this event, I’d been looking forward to checking them out after having listened to a bit of them on their MySpace, but live they were a whole other intense experience — and Canby, a new project by Envy Corps drummer Scott Yoshimura. It took me a while to connect where I’d seen him before, but later on I caught a bit of him talking with Dan about what an interesting experience it had been for him as a drummer switching gears into guitar and songwriting. It made sense, because I thought his songs and guitar playing had some really interesting rhythmic things going on in them. Christopher The Conquered rocked out, as expected. In fact there were a heck of a lot of good acts in the show, I had a difficult time keeping track of them all.

At the end of our set I tried to plug our upcoming gig at Vaudeville Mews this Thursday (April 1) but Dan got it confused with another show that got cancelled or changed somehow and said we weren’t playing it. So just to clarify, we are playing at the Mews on Thursday, 10pm, with a really cool band fro Lincoln Pharmacy Spirits, and Gabe Cordova who you may remember from our CD release show. And we’re working like mad booking more shows and working on our next couple albums – we’ll be in Iowa City on April 9 and 10 recording. See you soon.

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