Theme Park Experience

Due to some small surgery on my right hand on Tuesday afternoon (mole removal that required a few stitches), I couldn't type for the past two days. Luckily, my most recent stuff for the Observer was turned in before then. Check Out This Jam has been renamed Staff Trax, a title that I think is better, especially since I joked about saying "Check Out This Jam!" at the meeting where we decided to do the feature. So, here's this week's edition . Also, Killswitch Engage comes town this weekend -- without Howard Jones -- and I have a preview in this week's print edition.

Late last week, I was tagged in a few photos that showed me playing drums in my high school band. Rather than feeling a sense of embarrassment, I was quite happy to see these pictures. I'm not ashamed of playing with that band, and it was the beginning of the path that I'm still on. One of the pictures was of us playing our final show. We didn't think it was our last show at the time, but that's what it became. After two years, people were drifting apart and about to move away for college. So a break-up was bound to happen. I could sense at the show that my heart wasn't into playing this kind of music anymore. When we started, our style was very obviously grunge in the vein of Nirvana. But when the guitarist/singer got more into Korn, Coal Chamber, and Fear Factory, our sound became heavier and faster with a sense of groove as well. Something I listened to over this past weekend brought back a very vivid memory I have just a few days before the final show. Hearing t...

This week's edition of Check Out This Jam is now online here . This post sheds a little more light on my Cheap Trick fandom. Plus, my small feature on We Were Promised Jetpacks is also online here .

I whipped up a nice little write-up on Cheap Trick for this week's edition of Check Out This Jam, and it should run tomorrow. The funny sidenote is, my fandom of the band was helped but also perplexed by asking for (and receiving) a box set a little too early in the stages. Knowing this can help explain my caution towards jumping in with Neil Young's Archives Vol. 1 . Being a kid of the 1980s who watched a lot of MTV in the last three years of that decade, I remember Cheap Trick quite well. Not only was there the "Flame" juggernaut, but there was also "Don't Be Cruel" and "Can't Stop Falling In Love." That was my introduction, no matter how many writers at Guitar World can cry about the tragedy of that. When I started reading Guitar World in the mid-1990s, I heard a lot of praise of the band's first four studio albums, as well as the At Budokan live LP. By the time the Sex, America, Cheap Trick box set came out, I had heard the ch...

A funny thing happened just a few hours after I finished and sent off my Motion City Soundtrack show review: it started snowing. And not just the kind of snowing that evaporates when it hits the ground. There was almost an inch of snow on the ground at 4:20 am, and the snow kept coming until midnight. It's not like I've never seen snow. I've seen it in bits and pieces over the years living in Houston, Fort Worth, and Dallas. But the most accumulation I saw was on top of a mountain in the middle of summer in Wyoming on family vacation. One of the things that I always loved about Dallas when I was a kid was that it was colder than Houston and New Orleans. The chance of snow was greater, and I hoped to someday play in snow. Turns out I got an early birthday gift last Thursday, and it was about ten inches of snow. I didn't sled or make a snowman, but I did throw a few snowballs on my fence, took a few pictures with two snowmen built in an empty lot in front of our house, an...

I saw Motion City Soundtrack last night and it was quite a great show. This morning I woke up and there was snow on the ground. This is like an early birthday present. Motion City Soundtrack, Set Your Goals, This Providence, The Swellers Prophet Bar February 10th, 2010 Better than: sitting at home worrying about the snow's possible effect on traffic Thursday and Friday morning. Motion City Soundtrack played--as expected--to a packed crowd in the big room of the Prophet Bar last night--and they didn't disappoint, either. Sure, lead vocalist/guitarist Justin Pierre might look like a whiz kid spawn of Dr. Emmett Brown, but he's an engaging frontman. And he acted like he was having fun with his four bandmates, rather than look puzzled as to why all these people in the room were singing along to his songs. Read the rest here .

A couple of things to read that I did for the Observer : this week's edition of Check Out This Jam and my review of Maleveller's debut EP.