I saw MC Lars for the first time when he opened up for an Aquabats show at B.B. King’s in  the summer of 2007. Lars and his live band put on a great show; I enjoyed the set so much that I took the time to meet the band afterward, and bought a copy of  MC Lars’ 2006 release, The Graduate, from his guitarist for $5. Continue Reading…

I spend nearly half of my day listening to music. My iPod is running during my 3-4 hour commute back and forth to work plus the majority of the time I’m in my office, which adds up to somewhere around 12 hours. Being a bit tired of the music I’ve been listening to for the past few weeks, I decided to take a look through an old box of cds in my closet and found a gem I haven’t listened to in years – City of Caterpillar’s self-titled album.

This is the kind of music you listen to and never quite forget. There’s nothing life altering about it, it’s just one of those albums that makes you wish that the band managed to stay together long enough to release more material, instead of moving on from something so incredible and different from most of the other music in it’s genre.

City of Caterpillar was a band from Richmond, Virginia that created music together from 2000-2003. Their only full-length release is 44 minutes of twists and turns from brooding, dark melodies to vocals that seem to loom underneath the surface and finally launch an attack on your eardrums as tracks come to explosive climaxes.

After disbanding in 2003, members of City of Caterpillar moved on to other projects such as Malady and Ghastly City Sleep. If you’re digging what you hear in the video below, be sure to check out the aforementioned bands, as well as Pg.99.

Ska can be baffling. It’s hard to believe that a genre that is so rich in cultural diversity, talent, and energy, can have such a lack of diversification in sound. Having grown up in the middle of the third wave, this was painfully evident. Sooner or later, everything sounds like Catch-22 and it’s time to move on to something else. Luckily, there are standouts that keep the genre alive and fresh, even if their music was released nearly 3 decades ago.

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