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!

Friends, The Meltdowns are no more.

It may come as a surprise to most, but some irreconcilable differences came to a head at last. Billy and I will be enlisting the help of the wonderful, talented, and kind Joe Borges and Eddie Garcia Garza of The Imperialists to help us finish up the remainder of our scheduled shows. I will probably introduce us as the Meltperialists, or Terrorism, or something equally ridiculous.

It has been a fun and wild ride, and without a doubt the most rewarding experience I have embarked on in my life. The four of us will continue to play music - but no longer together. At the outset The Meltdowns was the baby of Billy and I, and had seen three line-up changes in our four years. Yet, the addition of Gerry and Lloyd brought something true, uninhibited, and grounded to the mix. To me, The Meltdowns will always be the four of us.

As sad as I am, this is still a life of possibilities. The future awaits.

I will keep this spot updated to let you know what we are all up to.

With Love,
Adam

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.  

This review by Jim Testa in Jersey Beat could make me cry.  I was a huge Dismemberment Plan fan.

Yes, it’s an anagram, almost worse than a pun, and all too typical of this band’s self-deprecating sense of humor. But don’t believe the title of this 4-song EP for a second. Far from a letdown, these tunes actually mark the first time that the Meltdowns have managed to capture all the manic live energy of their stage show on disc. More than that, these four tunes showcase the range of talent that this young Brooklyn quartet musters – a freaky, frenetic funk workout, a post-psychedelic wah-wah fest with guitar and bass solos that absolutely shred, and to top it all off, a bouncy pop tune with a strutting temp and tongue-in-cheek lyrics. The humor, the funk, and the musicianship can’t help but bring to mind the Dismemberment Plan, another band that existed outside of any scene other than its own eclectic awesomeness. Bands today don’t show off and they don’t get down often enough; the Meltdowns do. And I haven’t even mentioned the choreography yet. You’re going to have to wait for the live show for that; in the meantime, download this now and have yourself a party.

You can download the whole EP for free over here.

We just found out about this mostly-positive review of our first EP, No Authority, Direction, or Control, over at AbsolutePunk.net:

The Meltdowns will be someone to look out for in the future. With a bit more organization in some songs, and more honing of some of their instrumental crafts that shine on “Club Sedition” and “For Tomorrow,” No Authority, Direction, or Control is the club you’ve been hearing about, and should check out if you have the time.

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.

Up until this point, our mailing list has consisted of me clicking through my address book in Gmail.  Not so awesome.  Now we have a real mailing list!  There’s a sign-up form in the sidebar here on the site, or you can just go to the link and join.  

Hooray, internets!

okay so apparently if the money isn’t raised pronto this weekend, toy eater’s, the only underground show space in jersey city may have to shut down. no details yet on what the fundraiser will be but I think it will be friday night, there’s a hip hop party planned. if we lose this space it will be an awful loss, so we’ll be there to support however we can.

This is the first review in for our new EP, in Jim Testa’s Jersey Beat!  What a neat/strange thing to read.  It’s really positive, quite complementary, offers a lot of constructive criticism, but it’s always a kind of trippy thing to hear/read what someone takes from your music.  Not bad, and disorienting isn’t the word, but, like woah man.  Far out.