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

http://themeltdowns.com/yule/

Our friends The Frozen Gentlemen (as The Putzes) likewise recorded an amazing Christmas mash-up album way back in 2K4.

It’s appropriately called A MISTLETOE FANTASY, and I highly recommend that you get it from their MySpace page.

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. 

Ben Franklin

This tickles us to no end.  See you Saturday!

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

“I was ready to say ‘YES’ to EVERYTHING!”

I find film in its modern form to be quite bullying… It spoon-feeds us, which has the effect of watering down our collective cultural imagination. It is as if we are freshly hatched birds looking up with our mouths open waiting for Hollywood to feed us more regurgitated worms. The Watchmen film sounds like more regurgitated worms. I for one am sick of worms. Can’t we get something else? Perhaps some takeout? Even Chinese worms would be a nice change.

Mer writes in response:

We’ve entered an era ruled by scavengers. We are starving for substance. Obviously, we can’t look to Hollywood schlockbusters to nourish us. Still, the platform of narrative movie making has its own profound and distinctive magic. Here’s hoping that somehow, thanks to the increasing accessibility of equipment and relative price decrease in digital film and editing software, more and more storytellers standing beyond the gates of the sausage factory will be goaded, either by hunger or the pure urgency of inspiration, into making their own moving pictures.

Let’s hope, indeed!  In fact, I’m not even sure we have to hope, I think it’s kind of inevitable.

On a related note, I recently finished Warren Ellis’ Crooked Little Vein, and one passage that has struck my brain with his cane is this:

“Now holllld on.  A seventy-year-old serial killer is gonna lecture me on the intynets.”

“Seventy-one.  And I think it’s important you learn this for the future of your enterprise.  We agree that if something is available on television and in bookstores and the papers and all, it’s mainstream, yes?”

“Sure.”

“Well, then, how can something on the world’s electronic mass-communication net not also be mainstream?  It’s easily found.  You told me your friend there saw acquaintances of the gentlemen from Ohio on the Web.”

“Did I?  Okay.  I’m a little drunk.”

“There you are, you see?  It’s not that strange a world, when you can see images of men with testes full of saline just as easily as you can visit the wonderful world of Disney online.  That’s not underground.  It’s mainstream.  Just like me.”

That is a striking idea.  As an artist, if you put your work online (your music, for example), and you are now certifiably Main Stream™.  Huh.

Just like every force must have an opposite and equal reaction, I wonder if the reaction to this mainstream-i-ness, if the opposite of the democratization and ease of access to tools that Meredith is talking about, is the willful abdication of communication?

Can you keep something off the internet?

Can you really have an underground art project or band now?

I’m actually thinking about trying.

Next on the reading list: A Picture of Dorian Gray. 

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

When I was a file clerk temp in a summer job once, I, too, had thoughts of burning Burning BURNING

LOTS OF BURNING