No Escape

Started out the day listening to Oyster Boy on my way to Intro to Advertising with the nervously foreign and always sweet Jin Seong Park. Oyster Boy is Zach Lamalfa, formerly of Spider Geometry, and, currently, ringleader of Hoe Avenue Peace Meeting. Hoe Avenue are incredible, but spread across the country. Zach has taken the angry shitgaze he made with Gavin Thomas and Tom Melton this summer and made it personal. His "The Waterfront Cassette Tape Cassette" is a fucking BRASH piece of music; one guy's hate for stupid friends, stupid music, stupid towns, stupid books... stewed in New York City with some elegant literary references. It's Dylanesque like War On Drugs is Dylanesque but instead of offering us a meandering, nuclear but optimistic future, Oyster Boy hands us a stagnant, pissed off present. Choice line: "I'm gone, fuck you." As a human being, Zach is smart and funny; as a musician, I think he uses his talent sparingly and to great effect. This solo effort could easily have been too stripped down for its own good but it's very complete with potential to be timeless. You can download the record for free on the Oyster Boy Myspace right now and John Crodian will be putting "Cassette" on cassette as, I think, the first release for his new label High and Gay.

I had to pick my mood up with the Spraynard demo. It's about a hundred blog years old by now but still holds up. I think they're almost done their full-length. This summer, they toured fucking England which is more than your band can say. I kind of took them for granted the last time I saw them, sometime in June, but I miss them and I'm totally bummed they're not playing many shows until December at least. I had a dream last week that they appeared on TV and the host of the show said they were from Bucks County. Totally wrong.