A week ago tonight we played at the Mews. It was cool as always to see North Of Grand again and we brought back the old classic “Eyelets In The Rabbits’-Feet” just for Ketelsen.
Story Of The Sea is a delightful new discovery for us. They were simply great. Came down from Minneapolis and I hope we see them again. I had a minor panic when I opened the bass guitar case I had brought back behind the stage and leaned up against my cabinet only to find it was not my bass at all. I worried it had gotten mixed up with some bro-core band from the early show. But turns out it was the guy from SOTS’s back-up and mine was quickly located nearby. Said guy from SOTS seemed really fascinated with my P-bass, and surprised at my answer when he asked me what year it is (‘66), which got him talking about basses in general. It’s a nice bass (both of his looked nice too); I bought it from Kevin Jass of The Mittens a few years ago and consider it one of my all-time lucky scores. But I’m not much for gear talk.
I put a mailing list signup thing over on your left there. I think a lot of bands really under-use their email list because they think they have to reserve it for the Big Official-like Announcements. They should probably just be more friendly about it and just write to people to say hi. Anyway, we hardly ever write to ours either, but maybe if we got some more sign-ups that would change. In fact, you should go over there and sign up right now.
We’re planning to work on songs for the next couple albums, play more shows, and all that kind of stuff bands do. We’ll be back at the Mews on March 7 for an early show with Ely Falls and Fortnight.
Last month Dan had this fun idea for each of us to do our own “Top 10 albums of 2009″ list. Everybody does it. Laying aside for the moment the possibly fading relevancy of the album as a format; I’m not totally buying into it yet, and anyway we like albums. Well, we’ve been stalling on posting them because Will hasn’t got his in. Three weeks into the new year I think it’s time to let him off the hook.
Dan’s (in order):
- Weinland “Breaks In The Sun”
- The Black Heart Procession “Six”
- Morrissey “Years Of Refusal”
- Polvo “In Prism”
- Sonic Youth “the Eternal”
- Dinosaur Jr. “Farm”
- Do Make Say Think “Other Truths”
- Jason Lytle “Yours Truly, the Commuter”
- Katatonia “Night Is The New Day”
- Isis “Wavering Radiant”
Chuck’s (in no order):
- Sonic Youth “The Eternal”
- Dinosaur Jr “Farm”
- Kowloon Walled City “Gambling On The Richter Scale”
- Black Pyramid “Black Pyramid”
- Magnolia Electric Co. “Josephine”
- Morissey “Years Of Refusal”
- Zoroaster “Voice Of Saturn”
- The Disciplines “Smoking Kills”
- Boston Spaceships “The Planets Are Blasted”
- Mastodon “Crack The Skye”
Honorable mentions:
- Neko Case “Middle Cyclone”
- Wilco “The Album”
- Pelican “What We All Come To Need”
- Built To Spill “There Is No Enemy”
- Baroness “The Blue Album”
- Om “God Is Good”
- The Sundance Kids “The Excellent Sundance Kids”
Making a list like this is kind of funny because there are so many releases you’re aware of but never really got around to getting or listening to very much that you suspect might make the list, but it feels wrong to put on albums that you suspect you might like a lot, but don’t really know very well. I really don’t know how music critics do it, because they also have to think of a bunch of interesting stuff to say about each album. Even with the amount of music that Dan and I are able to listen to (we both tend to have jobs where we can pretty much listen to music all day while we work) it’s hard to get to everything that strikes you as interesting. Especially when you suffer lengthy bouts of unemployment that hamper your ability to buy tunes.
Hopefully you are working your way out of hibernation from this weather. We’ve got a hell of a show coming up on January 29 at Vaudeville Mews with North Of Grand and a really cool Minneapolis band called Story Of The Sea. Hope to see you.
Why Make Clocks is back at it. Saturday we went up to Omaha to play at O’Leaver’s. Bazooka Shootout sounded great, we went on second, then Nick from Little Black Stereo pulled double duty after that, playing piano in the Matt Cox Band before Little Black Stereo capped off the night. One thing is for sure, Nick can play the fuck out of a piano. It was a great show. The band selection was appreciably eclectic and all of them good, and a good turnout and fun all around.
Ian (of Thunder Power) offered us his place to crash at, but we experienced car trouble on the way to his place from O’Leavers. The “brake” warning light was on and the steering was really stiff and something smelled funny. So we didn’t know if we were going to end up stranded or what. In the morning Ian recommended the garage at the BP shop a few blocks away which besides having been good to him in the past had the distinction of being open on a Sunday. Turned out the idler pulley had gone out resulting in loss of the serpentine belt. On the drive back to Ian’s, he and Dan had the fortune of finding the belt itself in the street, and took it back over to the garage. So for not much more than a hundred bucks we were back in business and headed home by noon. Huge thanks are due to Ian and that garage. You guys are lifesavers.
Weekend after next we’ll be on the hometown scene with a show at the Mews on the 29th with North Of Grand and Story Of The Sea. Also plan on us at The Maintenance Shop in Ames with Bowerbirds in March.
Good times. Busy times. For me, anyway. We had a really cool show at Vaudeville Mews on Sunday. It had been a while since we’d done an early/all-ages show, and the sets ran a bit long so by the time we went on we were past curfew. There didn’t seem to be anybody underage in the place anyway. Apart from us, it was kind of the quintessential Ely Falls bill — all of the other three bands had big lush walls of sky-sound from guitar effects and an abundance of auxiliary instruments. Up to and including use of two xylophones simultaneously, by the opener, who was not Druids, but rather Wind & Sail. Some of the nicest bunch of musicians I think I’ve ever been on a bill with, camaraderie and positive vibes in abundance. I wish I’d gotten around to posing this earlier just in case anybody from around Springfield, MO is reading, as they just played there the other night. Flashbulb Fires have a bunch of shows coming up however, touring for the release of their new album Glory, which I got at the show but haven’t got around to listening to yet. Definitely will tomorrow at work.
We’re coming back to Omaha on January 9, a Saturday, to play at O’Leavers with, among others, a favorite of ours, Little Black Stereo.
I’ve been meaning to bring this up on here for several days now but things have been busy.
It’s easy to get a little blase about the local bands you’ve known and loved for years, no matter how great they are. You hear about a local gig they’re playing and you think, meh, no big deal, I’ve seen them lots of times, it’s always pretty much the same show, and I’ll probably get another chance to see them before long. You let yourself get kinda complacent. It’s totally understandable. I used to be that way about House Of Large Sizes years back when I lived up around Cedar Falls.
But we here at Why Make Clocks want to encourage you to not listen to the part of your brain that talks that kind of nonsense. We want you guys coming out to our shows because we have more fun with you there. So here’s the thing: We’re working on tons of songs for the next few albums, EPs, singles, or whatever we end up doing. We’d like to keep our hometown crowd in the loop about what we’re working on. We’re going to make a point of working new stuff into our local shows. If you come see us in Des Moines you will have a very good chance of hearing at least one Why Make Clocks song you have never heard before. We hope that will pique your curiosity enough to give you just enough of a push to brave the weather and come out to see us.
Specifically, tomorrow night (Sunday December 13) at the Vaudeville Mews, where we’ll be unveiling “Christmas Is Ruined” (which previous lineups have actually performed in the past, but not often) and quite possibly also “Palace Of Ash.” These are a couple really great new songs. Yeah we know a lot of you will be suffering rock hangover from the Cursive show tonight, but enough with the excuses. It’s a nice early show (starts at 6pm). Ely Falls, always a treat, will also be playing, as well as Flashbulb Fires and Wind And Sail. We hope to see you.
Had a good time in Waterloo, playing at Spicoli’s. We’d had a chance to play Little Big Fest that same night, but we had already lined up the Waterloo gig when they told us. Plus they wanted us to play acoustic without drums, which isn’t really how we roll these days. But it is a pretty big event in Des Moines music, and from what I’ve heard, it was pretty cool.
It was good to see some old friends in Waterloo. The order had gotten shifted around a bit though, because Teddy Boys had to go one second so that Graham could leave for Texas to visit his parents for Thanksgiving. We ended up going on first, and a couple people who thought we were going on later got there late and missed our set. So all the more reason to come back and play there again soon now.
Here’s some fun, though: I just ran across the photograph that we found lying in the parking lot behind Barley Street Tavern back in July, and I just happen to have a working scanner right now. As you can see below, the description I gave of it back then doesn’t begin to do it justice. Maybe I should send it to Found Magazine.
Awesome show last night. It was one of those once-in-a-great-while gigs where everything was awesome. The place was packed with people, who were getting really into the bands, all of which played beautifully. Thanks very much to all who came out, thanks of course to Meat Puppets and Squidboy, who in my mind rank at or neat the top of Iowa’s veteran punk/postpunk bands still regularly active today, and always put on a ferocious set, making it always a treat to see them. Their only close contender would have to be House Of Large Sizes, who these days don’t gig quite as often. I don’t have to tell you Meat Puppets rocked the hell out of the house.
We’ve got a ton of songs to lay on you that you haven’t heard yet — when exactly we’ll be doing that I have no idea, except that I think we’ll be playing “Christmas Is Ruined” in our show with Ely Falls next month. I divide them into the new-new songs and the new-old songs, and my classification of some of them may be arguable, but I count six new-new songs (two of them borderline, having been recorded during the These Things Are Ours sessions but unreleased, only one of those we play live with any regularity) and an impressive nine new-old songs, plus maybe one or two more on a to-do list. Maybe we’ll do a double album. I think it might be fun to release mp3s of demos of some of them, like one at a time maybe every couple weeks or so, through this website. Comment here and let us know what you think of that idea, plus that will also let me know if anybody’s actually been reading our web site.
Saturday November 21 is Why Make Clocks’ first Waterloo show in a few years and my return to my hometown to show old friends what I’ve been up to lately. We’re playing with two of the best bands in town (Teddy Boys and Give Away The Plot) plus a band from Iowa City that I don’t know much about (Dead Larry) at The Reverb Rock Garden, otherwise known as “the stage in the back corner of Spicoli’s.” Hope to see a lot of familiar faces there.
Well, we finally got us a Waterloo/Cedar Falls gig put together at the venerable Spicoli’s/The Reverb on the 21st of this month. It’s a heck of a bill, with two of that area’s best bands, The Teddy Boys and Give Away The Plot, and Iowa City’s Dead Larry. We’re playing third of four, just before The Teddy Boys headline. I highly recommend staying to check them out, if by some freak chance you haven’t seen them yet. If you have, you already know you’ll be staying for their set.
We’ve been working on new songs like crazy — some completely new stuff, others resurrections of old Why Make Clocks tunes you maybe haven’t heard in a while. I’m really liking the way some of the old songs are sounding with this lineup, especially slow songs with the big sounds of the gear we’re playing on. It’s one of the things I really like about this band right now, that the songwriting has this introspective thing that’s usually given more of a folky treatment, but we also love the power of electric guitar and a bigass drum. It makes for a really great combination of muscle and heart. Also, I love loud and slow, and Will does slow better than any drummer I’ve played with before. Playing slow is harder than you’d think. The new-new tunes are a bit more rock oriented, with some Sonic Youth like qualities. Smack in the middle of the holiday season we’ve got a show coming up, at the Mews with Ely Falls, where we plan to unveil one of the new-old tunes, an epic soul-crusher called “Christmas Is Ruined.” Some earlier WMC lineups have demoed it, and played it live occasionally in some of those test-the-audience moments, so you might have heard it before.
And don’t forget, we’ve got a super awesome gig this weekend (Sunday evening, in particular) at the Mews with The Meat Puppets and Squidboy. It’s going to be nuts. If you don’t come, you’ll wish you had.
Couple more shows down. Dubuque treated us well yet again. The venues we’ve played there are these nice places. There’s some chatter that the Silver Dollar Cantina, where we played, is going under new ownership and no one is sure if they’ll still do live music. Kind of a bummer. Map Of The Woods was awesome, and we had fun hanging out with them and others at Melanie’s afterwards, where we slept, and were treated to breakfast and friendly conversation on Sunday. I’m thinking we should do Dubuque again any time we can.
Big V’s in St. Paul on Sunday, what can I say about that… well, we played well, the sound man was great, and Mahogany Frog, a band from Winnipeg in the headlining spot (Demoiselle dropped off I guess), were amazing, and super nice cats. I’d better leave it at that, so as to stick to the positive stuff.
We might hook up a show in Waterloo/Cedar Falls yet, but apart from that, we’re probably done with road gigs for a couple months. We’ve got a couple great shows at the Mews planned (most notably the one with The Meat Puppets on November 8!) and plan on doing some writing, recording, and scheming.
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