Saxon Shore’s It Doesn’t Matter is now available for pre-order from the band’s Web site – $15 postage paid. If you’d like to preview it before you hand over your credit card number, you can do so at the band’s Myspace page.
Here’s a description of the record from the Philadelphia-based band’s Web site:
We’ve spent the last few months working away on the new Saxon Shore album with producer Dave Fridmann (MGMT, Tapes n Tapes, Clap Your Hands). The album will be running about 55 minutes in length and also includes vocals on one of the tracks courtesy of Caroline. First time we’ve done that. Probably not the last. We are all very happy with the way everything turned out and we’re very excited to share this with everyone. Just figuring out the oh so important timing of it all…
The two teenagers who killed 13 people and themselves at suburban Denver’s Columbine High School 10 years ago next week weren’t in the “Trenchcoat Mafia,” disaffected videogamers who wore cowboy dusters. The killings ignited a national debate over bullying, but the record now shows Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold hadn’t been bullied — in fact, they had bragged in diaries about picking on freshmen and “fags.”
Their rampage put schools on alert for “enemies lists” made by troubled students, but the enemies on their list had graduated from Columbine a year earlier. Contrary to early reports, Harris and Klebold weren’t on antidepressant medication and didn’t target jocks, blacks or Christians, police now say, citing the killers’ journals and witness accounts. That story about a student being shot in the head after she said she believed in God? Never happened, the FBI says now.
A decade after Harris and Klebold made Columbine a synonym for rage, new information — including several books that analyze the tragedy through diaries, e-mails, appointment books, videotape, police affidavits and interviews with witnesses, friends and survivors — indicate that much of what the public has been told about the shootings is wrong.
Something tells me the 19-year-old who spent $20,000 to hang out with a rock star for a week wasn’t exactly spending money he saved up delivering pizzas or working the register at Target.
I wonder if the reporter even bothered to ask where he got the money. Or better yet, whether it was his mom or dad’s name on the check.
Yes, if we were down there, if we were the damned of the American cities, we would not fail. We would rise above the corner. And when we tell ourselves such things, we unthinkly assume that we would be consigned to places like Fayette Street fully equipped, with all the graces and disciplines, talents and training that we now possess. Our parents would still be our parents, our teachers still our teachers, our broker still broker. Amid the stench of so much defeat and despair, we would kick fate in the teeth and claim our deserved victory. We would escape to live the life we were supposed to live, the life we are living now. We would be saved, and as it always is in matters of salvation, we know this as a matter of perfect, pristine faith.
-From the book “The Corner” by David Simon and Edward Burns
Good, bad, unnerving and tragic, these are some of the topics that made frequent appearances in my RSS feed this week.
The Palin family circus. File under: stories that should be left to the tabloids and Jerry Springer.
Nick Adenhart. The Angels pitcher and three others were killed by a drunk driver in an accident shortly after the rookie pitched six shutout innings. Utterly senseless and sympathetically commented on in just about every corner of the Web I frequent this week.
Everybody poops trailer. A clever take on the massively popular trailer for a real film adaptation of a popular children’s book. I don’t know about you, but it hasn’t gotten old for me yet.
At 22, he was growing so fast. And now he is gone in an instant — the victim of some idiot on a Southern California street.
The alleged perpetrator of the hit-and-run drunken-driving crime that killed Nick (Adenhart) coincidentally was 22, too. But that is a young fellow going nowhere. The opposite of Nick, a perfect name for the kid who beat time.
A 14th-round draft choice, Nick came along so fast he was starting the third game of the season for the Angels, heavy favorites in the American League West. Nick was one of the youngest pitchers in the major leagues. At 22 and a rookie, he threw six shutout innings Thursday night, only hours before he was killed on the road in nearby Fullerton, Calif., the victim of a senseless crime. (A senseless crime that led to the arrest of that 22-year-old from Riverside, Calif., who plowed into Nick’s car, killing three innocent victims, critically injuring a fourth and bringing untold heartache to all those who knew and loved the victims.)
There was something magical going on long before Peter Jackson transformed the rugged wilderness of New Zealand into Middle Earth. In the early 1980s, Dunedin music impresario Roger Shepherd founded Flying Nun Records. The rest is history, although it’s history that is surprisingly little known in the U.S. Perhaps it’s time to change that. Because from the mid ’80s through the early ’90s, Flying Nun Records put out the best music on the planet. And yes, I’m looking at you, Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder.
Tangzine 