We are playing tomorrow night (Thur May 24th) at Otto’s Shrunken Head on 14th St. in NYC as part of the Streetwave throw down going on there. We’re on first at 9:30pm. The Invincible Gods were already awesome to begin with, but they are doubly awesome for asking us to play.

And don’t forget about the Brooklyn mayhem on Friday night. We’re playing at Luna Lounge at 7:30 (this is THE show to come to if you can only make one or the other), and we’re throwing an after-party nearby. Hit me up via e-mail for info on the after-party.

Adam sent me this link today at work, a new tune from Smashing Pumpkins (aka Billy and Jimmy and no one else) called Tarantula. So, I learned to play every note of Siamese Dream back in the day. I used to be a retarded huge fan, the band could do no wrong all the way up until Machina when things were just not so great (but the tour was fantastic).

But I mean, this just sucks. And I could really use some good blistering pumpkin metal a la some of the crazier stuff on Mellon Collie. Adam says he’s not sure if it’s half-assed or spontaneous, but my ball is firmly in the former court. I do like the absolutely crazy long bends near the end, but honestly I’d rather go see Megadeth last Saturday than listen to an entire record of this.

But, “Hip Hop Is Dead” is the hottest fucking song ever.

“Why’s that? Cause NAS rap is compared to legitimized crap”

NAS has thrown some real bricks over the years, but that song (which is as self-criticizing as much as it is self-aggrandizing) is a fucking monster and I don’t quite understand the need for entire records to be made in refutation of the title. I mean, it’s fucking IRON BUTTERFLY and it’s dope as hell. KRS and Marley Marl’s response track (streaming) is nothing so impressive.

In today’s Washington Post there’s an editorial from a former Marine Corps commandant and a former commander of CENTCOM that really underscores the grave situation we are in as a people, as a culture.  Here’s a brief bit of it:

Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld once wondered aloud whether we were creating more terrorists than we were killing. In counterinsurgency doctrine, that is precisely the right question. Victory in this kind of war comes when the enemy loses legitimacy in the society from which it seeks recruits and thus loses its “recuperative power.”

The torture methods that Tenet defends have nurtured the recuperative power of the enemy. This war will be won or lost not on the battlefield but in the minds of potential supporters who have not yet thrown in their lot with the enemy. If we forfeit our values by signaling that they are negotiable in situations of grave or imminent danger, we drive those undecideds into the arms of the enemy. This way lies defeat, and we are well down the road to it.

This is not just a lesson for history. Right now, White House lawyers are working up new rules that will govern what CIA interrogators can do to prisoners in secret. Those rules will set the standard not only for the CIA but also for what kind of treatment captured American soldiers can expect from their captors, now and in future wars. Before the president once again approves a policy of official cruelty, he should reflect on that.

We’re recording the single for Club Sedition right now.  We have as a band been reflecting on these issues quite a bit (who hasn’t?) for the past few years and we’re trying to find ways to express it in our music and make our voices heard.  We have a bit of fun, too, there’s the dance and all that, and the song is funny in a dark way, but I just want to say out loud and in public that all four of us individually take these issues very seriously.

During the break down, where we do the dance and such, we’re adding a lot of music that we don’t have the chance to in the live setting, and we’re going to try and layer in this cut of former CIA Director George Tenet speaking about torture.  Or, “not torture.”  It’s just fucking ghastly and it makes me want to hurt people.  We’ll probably have to get our man Dr. Laurie to clear the sample for us.  But I wanted to share that with you, too.

We should, as a people, be very concerned with what these bastards have been doing in our names.

Well anyway, back to work for me.  Tonight we finish the over dubs.

Saturday night we’re playing in Trenton at the 449 Room with our good friends Heatsleeve and Velvet Crayon (and a band called Rape Babies…lolwtf?)

So, we got ourselves a gig on a Friday night at the new Luna Lounge in Williamsburg (Brooklyn, not Virginia, although VA is excellent and we will go there this Summer)!  We’re opening up at 7:30 on Friday the 25th of May, which is really pretty awesome.  After reading about the place from Tris McCall and Jim Testa, and seeing as how we have some good friends out in the burg, I had to get us a gig.  We lucked out - Rob who books the Luna tends to be fairly selective of who he puts on, has a good reputation, and giving us this slot he’s expecting us to bring heads!  So you should come out and kick it with us, and bring all your friends.  We’ve got a whole show planned out, including, yes, The Dance, which I swear we will YouTube soon, due to popular demand.  Or you can bring a video cam and do it yourself!  We have something special planned or later in the evening, too, for those among you who don’t want to stop dancing with us.

In other news, we’re currently cutting a single for two of our new tunes, Club Sedition and Shelter.  We tracked it live, we have a couple of things to dub, but it’s almost done and it’s already as a rough mix ten times better than anything we’ve done before.  It’s really nice working with a producer who’s been at this a long time, “gets” our music, and works with us so well (Gerry Griffin the Fourth, Temple of Tuneage in Verona).  It’s a home studio, we’re getting a free ride, and the quality is top-notch, so we’re quite grateful.  Hopefully we’ll have it mixed, mastered, and pressed by late June.  Even sooner, if physically possible.

Tonight we’re moving in to our new rehearsal space in Jersey City which we are sharing with the good gentlemen from Water Under Water.  It doesn’t smell, we can play late, it’s like we’re a REAL band!  Like everyone else we know, we’re out of Montclair and moving on to the next chapter.  Last Saturday we got our mugs shot by Ms. Colleen Gutwein, who won’t let us see the photos.  Colleen helped us choreograph The Dance (which we will teach you, it’s easy!), is helping us coordinate the after-festivities for the 25th, and will be taking care of the scheduling for the short tour we’re going to do.

We have a number of good gigs coming up this Summer (Asbury Lanes!), we expect to be doing some short mini-excursions into the South, and it looks like the tour will be a x-country thing in the beginning of August.  I’ll let you know as events unfold, but it’s definitely an exciting time for us.  Stop by our myspace page which tends to get updated with the gigs sooner than the actual webpage, which tends to be more inane rambling and funny pictures and such.

So, to recap:

The Meltdowns
Friday May 25th 7:30pm
Luna Lounge
361 Metropolitan Avenue Brooklyn, N.Y. 11211

Let’s show the Brooklynites and what kind of crazy we’ve been working on here in New Jersey!

Looking forward to seeing you soon,
Billy Meltdown