I nearly fell over last week when a coworker casually said, “So yeah, it looks like Glassjaw has some new material coming out.” It took a lot of restraint not to ask Beck when new material was coming out, when bumping in to him at a Deftones show back in 2003, along with a monumental amount of self-control not to do the same during my visit to MerchDirect last year. Now that the question has been answered, only one more exists – when’s an LP coming out? I’d literally make Beck a lifetime supply of gourmet marshmallows if a full-length recording comes out before I turn 30, starting with the coffee flavored ones I promised him about a year ago. My bad.

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…

Jaguar Love’s new release, Hologram Jams, is streaming at Buzzgrinder right now. Go.

I haven’t heard the album in its entirety just yet, but it’s immediately apparent how much their sound has changed in Jay Clark’s absence. While I haven’t formed much of an opinion just yet, “Cherry Soda” is pretty sweet. Unfortunately, “Everything is Awesome” isn’t.

Past Lives, another band formed out of the split of The Blood Brothers, released an album last Tuesday, and tracks are available for listening at their site, www.pastliveslife.com.

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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One of the best parts of working in Times Square was the super easy to access to a lot of concerts. When I learned that Latina was moving to a new office space, outside of Times Square, I immediately realized that I probably wouldn’t be going to shows as often as I have been for the past few years. It’s not like it’s terribly inconvenient being a few subway stops away or anything, I’ll just have to pay attention to who is playing where from now on; No more walking down the street for lunch and seeing a schedule of shows.

Once I learned that Streetlight Manifesto was playing a show less than 2 blocks away from the office, I literally ran down 42nd Street to get tickets. I probably looked like a kid on Christmas morning while walking back to work, with a grin from ear to ear, knowing that the last show I’d catch while working in the area would be a great one…

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Every once in a while, I get to do something out of the ordinary for Latina. Something totally unrelated with what I was originally hired to do, which makes working there not suck at all.

Several weeks ago, shortly before Justice Sotomayor’s confirmation, the idea of creating and marketing “Wise Latina” shirts was passed around the office. When the e-commerce component of the idea came my way, it was clear that we had to outsource. Immediately, 2 companies came to mind; MerchDirect and Merchline.

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Have the Sham Wow and Vince become contemporary cultural icons?

As usual, I’m up early on a Sunday morning working on ideas related to personal projects that build up in my head during the week. I like to keep the TV on for background noise since there’s nothing worse than absolute silence. Anyway, I’m clicking away on the keyboard and begin to hear a Sham Wow commercial, complete with a song.

Seriously? There’s something that’s just a bit fucked up about all of this. The Sham Wow is made in Germany though, and you know they make good stuff, so I guess that sort of makes up for some of the absurdity of it all.

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Every time 311 releases an album, a friend named Eli and I end up discussing it online. We’ve been doing this ever since Soundsystem was released in 1999. We bitch about the album constantly for about a month, leading up to a somewhat incoherent rant or two, and eventually decide the album was great about 2 years later. We’ve never met in person and know each other from back in our AOL programming days in the mid-90′s. You know, back when Kill™ and Stealth were runnin’ the game. For those of you who have any idea of what that means (and those who do,) stop laughing at me and read the rest of the post.

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Toots & The Maytals are playing over at B.B. King’s in Times Square in just over two weeks! I may have missed out on grabbing tickets for 311‘s show in the city this summer, but all of these other shows are totally making up for it.

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