I am in New York. I saw the Dodos and took some photos which I will post real soon.

I’d like to say sorry for the lack of posts recently. I’m in grad school, now. I spend most of my time writing poems and eating $2.00 falafels.

Nick and I are going to discuss the fate of Albondigas! and hopefully return twice as strong and twice as bloggariffic. Until then, peace out.

I had the good fortune to play bass for The Invisible Cities at their show last week, which of course meant I wasn’t able to take any pictures of their set. However, the main attraction that night was HIJK, celebrating the release of their new album The Pen and the Letter. Here’s them doing “Smells Like Cigarettes”:

While Marnie Stern may never be able to fully capture the overdub-happy chaos of her album in a live setting, she did take one giant leap ahead of her earlier playing-along-to-her-iPod shows by bringing an actual backing band this time around: guitarist Robby Moncrieff (Who’s Your Favorite Son God, The Advantage) and, as the cherry on top, Hella drummer Zach Hill (after all, he played on the album— who else could Marnie have gotten to properly play those parts?).









Sholi is taking their sweet time finishing up their debut album, but when it comes out, I have no doubt that it will be amazing. Even though the sound on the video is terrible, I wanted to post it to show just a little bit of the incredible drumming of Jon Bafus. There’s a reason why the band puts him at the edge of the stage instead of in back.

Our friends at the Bay Bridged had a comp release part last Friday at Thee Parkside. Here are some pics of the shin dig.

These are the Lonelyhearts. They played first.These guys play lush, melancholic, folk-pop. They also seemed genuinely lonely.

The Old-Fashioned Way played next.

These folks have a Decemberists–type feel with Magnetic Fieldish vocals and an Arcadefirey stage presence.

Love is Chemicals played a bunch ‘o new songs. Their new album is coming out soon!

We still like the Don’ts.

The Bay Bridged guys are a class act. There new comp looks great and is packed full of good music including; the Dodos, Peloton, and Or the Whale. It looks like this:



(click here to check out the track list and price and all that…)

For most of you this is old news, but And a Few to Break broke up a while back. The hardcore quintet was a local favorite of mine, holding down an all but nonexistent emocore genre in a city in love with new folk, hip hop and indie pop. I’m gonna miss them, at least until they start another project of some sort and I can break out my copy of their album and be all, “I’ve listened to these guys forever!” I’m only sorry I won’t have a AFTB tattoo on my shoulder to flash when that time comes. Good luck fellas!

And a Few to Break @ Bottom of the Hill, December ‘06

I went to the Passionistas record release at Café du Nord last Friday. I missed the first band, the Specs ‘cause I was workin’. The second band to play was the Dilettantes. The lead singer of the Dilettantes is the dude with the huge chops who used to play with the Brian Jonestown Massacre, Joel Gion. This guy has an awesome stage presence. It’s a weird mixture of self-effacing humor, fay gesticulation, and blassaie attitude that is super entertaining. Plus, he is a ferocious tambourinist, if such a thing exists.

The Dilettantes play a catchy brand of throwback rock that recalls some of the less jammmy music of the sixties and seventies. Think Velvet Underground, “Loaded” with a little bit of Roky Erickson.

The Passionistas played next. These guys are interesting for a number of reasons. Number one, even before the release of their first album on Will Benham’s label, New & Used Records, these four fellows have already managed to stir up a fair amount of controversy through their podcasts (check out their Wikipeda entry for more info). Second, they’ve managed to polarize the local indie community with their sound and their “we don’t really give a fuck if you think we suck,” attitude. Opinions on the band range from, “This band is the least talented bunch of booger eaters I’ve ever heard,” to “These guys may be musical revolutionaries.” In any case, they seem to be headed in a very exciting direction. Their first album was produced by Kelly Stoltz and Greg Ashley of the Gris Gris is already slated for their second. The Passionistas have a pared down, straight ahead sound that footnotes bands like Television and the Clash.

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Kelley Stoltz played last. Stoltz is a well known local favorite. I heard most of his set from the back of the room, but he still sounded great. He sounds a lot like John Lennon. I can’t do him justice here, so I won’t even try. Truthfully, I snuck out before his set was done and fell into a deep and peaceful sleep… with my clothes on.

Sorry for the lack of updates recently. We’ve both been pretty busy with other stuff— I started a new job, and Ben is getting ready to move to New York for grad school in a couple of months— and we both sort of lost track of things, albondigaswise. We’re not sure what’s going to happen with the site in the long term, but we promise we’ll try to keep things going through the summer at the very least.

Admittedly, since Mission Creek ended and the job began, I’ve been pretty burned out on going to shows, but I did have some old Mission Creek photos lying around that I neglected to send off to The Bay Bridged for their coverage. So here they are.

The Invisible Cities @ Rockit Room:





The Ebb & Flow @ Rockit Room:





Scrabbel @ Rockit Room:



Society of Rockets @ Rockit Room:





Birds & Batteries @ Thee Parkside:



And then there’s this video— not part of Mission Creek at all— but rather of The Matinees at their record release show at the Make Out:

For the past week we’ve been helping our friends over at The Bay Bridged cover this year’s Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival. We’ve seen, and written about, a bunch of great stuff— here’s what’s gone up on the site so far:

HIJK (formerly Hijack the Disco) has a lot going for them. Not only do they play irresistibly clean, wonderfully bright sounding indie pop (they prefer “art-pop”), but they also have the kind of drive and presentation that can take a band dangerously far into the territory of rockstardom. Everything from their brandspankingnew EP to their easygoing, effortlessly upbeat sound smacks of radio play and heavy MTV2 rotation. Plus, they’re downright pleasant fellows. Here’s a track I keep on repeat.

The HIJK guys just got back from a Northwest tour with Love is Chemicals. They’re playing the Mission Creek Music Festival this Sunday with the Don’ts and the Junior Panthers. Check them out before you hear them on the radio one too many times.

I stumbled across Touch Committee a while back while wandering through other local bands’ myspace pages and was instantly smitten by their track “Sunshine Suit”, a rush of yearning pop melody and stadium-rock guitar that revives the chimey/epic sound of all those 90s Midwestern emo-indie bands that I still remember fondly (Promise Ring, Sunny Day Real Estate, Mineral, etc.) Sadly, “Sunshine Suit” is not on their myspace jukebox anymore, so here’s Touch Committee doing it live:

Shinobu initially struck me as an all-too-familiar flavor of thrashy sneery punk-pop, but when their songs kept breaking free of the three-minute verse-chorus-verse ghetto and incorporating some Pavement/Archers of Loaf noisy slack-rock moves, I had to give them credit for being a bit more ambitious than I first thought.