Photo © Colleen Gutwein

The Meltdowns have been booked to a wicked little basement show in Center City, Philadelphia, for Saturday, November the 11th. Address, time, directions, all coming very soon. We’re playing with Meets West and SOMEBODY DIES! This is going to be a PILE of fun, and we’d love for you to make the trip down with us, thus the advance notice. E-mail me if you want to get in on the caravan: billy@tankcrash.com , I’m going to try and coordinate rides. These basement shows tend to be quite the party, especially when you’re in with the people putting on the show. And we are all so totally in.

This will be one of the few shows we do this fall. Looking to book one in December in North Jersey or NYC (Brooklyn!), but that’s it. We have this record to finish, and we have to put the time into it.

Also, a reminder: we do have a new single, Fang, over here, and a new EP for sale, Come Closer, over here (online over here, too).

I spent some good time wiring the studio last night for the PA, putting things into place, cleaning things up. I think that I do want to call it The Furnace, as Adam suggested.  It’s small. I hit my head a few times on the crossbeam in the middle. This will become the running joke of the place. Some hot pics:

So, I’m at work waiting for a server to finish doing something.  Time for a band update!

I’ve moved into a new apartment two weeks ago, and it turns out that the place has a sizable basement that’s ALL MINE!  By sizable, I mean JUST big enough for the three of us to work, possibly jam another two people down there.  So we put a pile of carpets all over the floor, and Lloyd and I have rocked in it twice with decent sound response for rehearsing and ZERO complaints from neighbors.

I can’t begin to tell you how relieving it is to have a place to work again.  We’ve already started forging ahead on the new material in the new space.  Records are definitely getting made here.

We have no shows in the immediate future and Adam is getting hitched today (Congratulations Adam and Shannon!), so it’s just me and Lloyd in the basement for now.

If you’re looking for a hot show, I suggest you go see Meets West and the Chilling Details at the Indie showcase for the Asbury Music Awards tonight at Asbury Lanes in Asbury Park.

Also, especially if you’re in the Asbury Park area, go to see Screaming Females rock the Lanes this very Wednesday!  Those are two stomping shows in our favourite venue on the shore.

So. We have embarked on an ambitious plan to hunker down and finish the record by February 2007. That’s the release, so it’s got to be printed by then. We have six songs ready to record, and we can definitely finish six more of the pile of songs in the hopper. But there’s a trick to all this. We recorded the Come Closer EP and the Fang single over the course of quite a few months, slowly, one session at a time, one take at a time. This next set of recordings will be done about as live as possible with maybe the exception being the vocals and some overdubs. We have a new interface, we’ve got some sweet mics, gonna do it.

And then, Adam’s asshole neighbor pulled the plug on our operation. He’s threatening to *sue* Adam if we keep playing in the basement. He won’t call the cops (funny thing about people who beat their wives, they are loathe to call the cops), and he won’t stick to the schedule we agreed to with him so we weren’t playing when he was home, and since the land lord doesn’t give a shit when he complains, he is threatening to sue Adam.

So. We need to find a new place to do this. Which blows. Even though this guy probably won’t sue Adam anyway, it’s not worth the aggravation and interruptions (he keeps writing Adam nasty letters and pretending to CC his lawyer who he probably owes money - this dude doesn’t even pay his bills or his rent).

We need to find a new place in a hurry. A place where we can keep our stuff so we don’t have to set up a kit everytime, etc. And now I’m coming to the point of all this. Do you know of a place, or have a place, and would like to help us out? We are quite willing to cough up some beans for it. We’re polite, we shower, we wipe our feet, willing to travel a bit, and don’t mind weird hours.

If you have a lead on a place, or you can help us out, please do sends the electronic mails of love here: band@themeltdowns.com