Former Meltdowns Adam N. Copeland, Lloyd Naideck, and Gerry Griffin have reformed after a several month hiatus to create Black Water. They are in the process of recording their as yet untitled debut album, which will be ready before the end of 2009. You can keep tabs with Black Water at www.blackwater.tv

Former Meltdown Billy Gray has teamed up with Eddie Garcia Garza (the Imperialists) and Sarah Tomek (Cavalier Rose) to record the debut album for Ben Franklin, entitled The Optimist. I suspect that it is going to be out Sept 3, with a release party happening up in Piano’s. You can keep up to date with Ben Franklin at www.wearebenfranklin.com

Pre-breakup, we had talked about putting No Authority, Direction, or Control up here on the site for free download. Since I am an asshole I decided instead to go behind everybody’s back and employ another strategy. I put together “01/07-09/08″, which refers to the epoch since Gerry joined up — the definitive Meltdowns line-up, if you will.  It is every proper recording we’ve finished, gathered chronologically by release date in one handy ZIP file. That includes all of No Authority, the “Yule Tide” digi-single, Them Letdowns, and one new track. You can also grab each track individually if you’d like.

Just head on over to the front page at www.themeltdowns.com to get your fill.

The new track, “Morning News“, is from recording sessions intended for a third EP. I carefully reviewed these sessions (we had six tracks worth after a few days work) and it was the only song that was complete enough to mix. Then I stayed up way too late last night mixing the shit out of it. Despite engineering that session in our tiny hole in the wall studio with inexpensive mics, I am pleased with how it sounds.  The performances were spot-on and there is definitely shit loads of energy. We’re unlikely to ever play the song again, as it wasn’t even in our recent live set, so I couldn’t help myself but give this away for free. So, there it is, the last Meltdowns recording. 

The picture was taken during our trip to North Carolina. The van is all packed up and we’re ready to drive back to Jersey. 

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.  

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

Here’s a special treat for our blog readers. We were very inspired on 08/08/08 and worked on new songs. Since we record pretty much every practice session, I figure it’s high time we start sharing some interesting new stuff.

ARIZONA
Another song about terror! This minute-long clip is cut out of an extended jam we had over the middle part.

RICHARD
Sentimental! Lead in by interesting practice banter from Gerry. I spoke of it briefly over at my personal blog, and I brought it over to the other guys who managed to whip up a healthy racket for it.

If you’ve visited our website today, you may have noticed that something is different. I spent all night sprucing it up. The point overall was simplification. You’ll find that the main page here is a lot less cluttered, and only displays news items on the left that have been given the magic category “Main”.

For those of you who still wish to be inundated with our views on politics and Internet Memes, do not fear, you can click the link for “Blog” up there on the right and all of our blogsome goodness will come pouring hither. Those of you following us via RSS should see no difference, except perhaps a short blip in your RSS client because of something I had to do on the back end to get RSS to cooperate again.

If you find anything wrong, any blips, please let us know at band@themeltdowns.com and we’ll get to it.

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.