An update: as mentioned below, Adam and I are going to finish out a few of the remaining gigs we booked as Meltdowns with our friends Eddie and Joe from the Imperialists.  We’ve arrived at a name for the interim project.

Ben Franklin

This tickles us to no end.  See you Saturday!

We’re playing a fund-raising event this Saturday the 20th of September at Kilkenny Ale House in Newark, NJ.  It’s going to be quite a party, DJ’d by Stephen Dressler in between sets by yours truly and the disco-mad Frozen Gentlemen.  In short, the purpose of this fundraiser is to help fund Colleen Gutwein’s photo-documentary project on the effects of the Khmer Rouge on contemporary Cambodian art.  

So come out and get down with us, it’s a cheap, $8

and everybody you know will be there ;-)

Saturday Sept 20th
The Meltdowns, Frozen Gentlemen, DJ Stephen Dressler
Kilkenny Ale House, 27 Central Ave, Newark, NJ
8pm, $8, Meltdowns at 11.

This is unfortunately a 21+ kinda night

A few things of note:

We’re playing in Brick City on Saturday Sept 20th; it’s a fund raiser dance party to send our favorite photographer Colleen Gutwein to Cambodia. We’ll be kicking it nasty with the Frozen Gentlemen and Stephen Dressler is gonna DJ the dance party.  It goes down at Kilkenny, and it’s $7 to get in.

We’re playing in Brooklyn on Friday Sept 26th; we need to keep playing at Matchless, the show last month was an absolute blast.  This is a free show.  

Thanks again to Zelda Pinwheel for coming and playing their last show with us, Frozen Gents for rocking the party, and The Black Clouds for opening up with some righteous rock and roll.

All show info is here on the website, so get out of your RSS reader and click over!

Also, we’ve been busy with the blog, which we moved off the front page. We’ve been posting radical leftist literature and bedroom demos of new things, and this will likely snowball as we get closer to the election, and to recording.

We’re planning to put out a split 7″ with the Frozen Gents on Tank Crash! later this year, and to start tracking a new full-length which we will also probably release on Tank Crash!, and then in March we’re going to SXSW whether they want us there or not, and then eventually we’ll get signed to ANTI- and live happily ever after.  

I hear you can just “manifest” things to make them happen, so I’m working on that.  

I should mention that we’re reviving the Tank Crash! label, and we’re going to start putting out other artists’ work on it again as we did in the past.  We just needed to take a break for a little while.  

Just so I don’t lose track of this link, all the shows we’ve done up to this point.

We’re playing -==Matchless==- in Brooklyn this Saturday, Aug 23rd.  And it happens to be with some awesome bands (because we booked them!)

Frozen Gentlemen play hot disco rock.  It’s funkier than your father.  I triple-dog-dare you not to dance.

Zelda Pinwheel will be doing a mind-altering, orgasm in pants inducing set.  And I’d say as usual, but this is sadly the last ZP show, so I’m honored that when we finally get to play with them, this is the show.  I’ve kept up with these guys for a long time and they’re simply amazing.

The Black Clouds are a bad-ass grunge rock band from the Jersey Shore.  Don’t lie, you were into it, and these guys will fill that void with which we entered the adult world, horns in the air.

21+, FREE, starts at 8, Clouds, Zelda, Gents and Melts at 11pm.

Matchless: Driggs and Manhattan, Brooklyn NY 11222

Today’s the big day!  Our new EP, Them Letdowns, is available for free for you to download right here.

We’ll have copies for you at our show tonight at South Paw, in Brooklyn, NY:

The Meltdowns
w/ Pale Nimbus & Werewolves
South Paw, 125 Fith Ave, Brooklyn, NY
8:30pm, $8, 18+ (we’re on first)

Come join us, we need dancers!  We’ll have the hot new stickers, and there’s going to be a pretty rad after party after all the great bands.

Something in the works for late Fall.  Right after the election.  It will either be Victory Over Evil Tour if Obama wins, or it’s back to Trail of Tears.  I suspect we are going to go northward into New England and Canada (if they let us in).

We’ve set a date!  Our new EP Them Letdowns will be released on Thursday, July 31st to coincide with our show at South Paw.  It’s four songs, it will be available here for free, and you’ll be able to get CD-R copies at the show.  The show is a big one for us, too, as we’re playing with Pale Nimbus and Werewolves, two really bitchin bands from Brooklyn with a great following each.  In addition, this is actually an 18+ show, which some of you are always asking about (understandably!)

So that’s Win.  Also, there will be a sweet after party hosted by Pale Nimbus, which I hope you’ll attend with us.

South Paw is in the beautiful Park Slope nabe of Brooklyn and it is fairly easy to get to, as it is surrounded by numerous stops on the NYC Subway.  Map.

This is, I think, one of those LVL UP shows for us, so we’re rehearsing quite a bit for it, and it’d mean the world to us if you could make it. (We’re on at 8:30! Early!)

[ any press / blog folks out there who want the EP now for review purposes, hit me up: billy at tankcrash dot com ]

Last night we had a rather excellent gig opening for Vanities and The Sex Zombies in Red Bank, NJ.  There’s a really great scene of people around those bands, a crowd of folks orbiting them.  They go to every show, they know all the words, they jump up on stage and sing along and cover their friends in beer, and it’s just a great time.  The Zombies’ set ended abruptly when someone from the audience took a flying leap into Dan’s drum kit.  It was so rock and roll!  I’m looking forward to playing with these folks again.  All of them awesome bands, and very very different from each other.

Vanities are a monstrous band.  Stomping, dark, riffing, shredding, screaming, they are tight and bitchin.  It almost sounded like someone took the hotter licks from …And Justice For All and used them as riffs for crazy rock songs.

The Sex Zombies are up there in the very short list of bands that don’t give a fuck at all and put on an amazing show as a result.  The antics are endless, the songs are filthy raucous punk sing-alongs, and their stage presence is top notch.  Their bassist Jamie is a tall blonde bomb-shell with a ton of attitude and swagger, their drummer Dan must have grown up watching Dr. Teeth and The Electric Mayhem, and guitarist Pat appears the frontman at first but is probably the most chaotic on stage, setting off fireworks between and during songs.  Last night he spent a good portion of the set with his pants around his ankles.

Comrades, we go forward into the night with hearts full of music!  This week we will finish bringing the Good News to New Jersey.  In two weeks time: Brooklyn.

Our second EP for 2008, Them Letdowns, will be available very soon.  Keep your eyes on our website.

Friday July 11th, 10pm - Clash Bar, Clifton, NJ (w/ Frozen Gentlemen and the McMickle Bros!)

Saturday July 12th, 9pm - Chubby’s, Red Bank, NJ (w/ Sex Zombies and the Vanities!)

Thursday July 31st, 8:30pm - South Paw, Brooklyn, NY (w/ Pale Nimbus!)
(we need you to come to this one, like woah)