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.

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.

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.

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.