Shiny Diamonds Studio Update #5
It’s 3am and we’ve just finished our second day of recording. Jamie looks pretty tired and Spencer looks near death. We’re back at my place now and the guys are asleep upstairs. Everyone has been playing incredibly and I’ve never been so proud to have these three guys beside me. Spencer, I can’t thank you enough. You are invincible. Thanks to our nameless intern and to Jamie for your enthusiasm and willingness to pull out the gongs. More updates on a daily basis so keep checking back!
-Tim
Here is Julian’s second video, featuring an interview with Calen:
Shiny Diamonds Update – 11/16/09
Once again, this is Julian. I managed to survive the horde of teenaged girls and keep myself alive under the rubble of the once-proud Fadermaster studio.
Well, everyone else survived the ordeal, too, and we made a makeshift studio out of the remains of the studio and our tears. Right now, they’re working on “By Grand Central Station, I Laid Down And Slept”. We have a chart in the studio which lists what we’ve done on it, and it’s becoming nice and colourful. It’s filled with pandas, patriotic Spaniards, mouths and various exclamations “RAW” and “RAWK”. The chart is by far what we’re putting the most effort into out of these whole sessions. It’s already worth millions of dollars.
Below are some photos of yesterday’s session. Enjoy!
-Julian
Calen in Fadermaster
Doctor Jamie At Work
El Searleo
Our Nameless Intern
Shiny Diamonds Studio Update #3
Filmed by Julian Bowers for Kingfisher Bluez
Shiny Diamonds Studio Update – 11/15/09
Hello from Fadermaster, folks! This is Julian. I’m here to update you on your Shiny Diamonds info! There’s a ton of screaming fangirls outside, and about half the time we’re fending them off with bamboo canes, so Tim suggested that I write an update as to distract them for a few minutes.
At the moment, the band’s working on the track, “Empress of the World”. Jamie’s giving pointers, we’re blasting our way thorugh songs, we got some herion, Quinn’s pretty much dead, Calen’s bleeding and screaming, and Spence seems to be doing all right. “I’ve seen it before,” he says. “Back in Nam.”
The songs sound great. They’ve done about three tracks so far. Tim has yet to do his vocals, but we’re considering sampling his dictatorial like commands and changing it to a dystopian hip-hop album.
Well, that about wraps it up for me. The girls have broke the barricade, and it looks like my time is up. I regret nothi–
Shiny Diamonds Studio Update!
Hey so guess what? Your favourite band, The Shiny Diamonds will be heading into the studio tomorrow to record our new album. More updates will be made throughout the week to keep you up to date on our progress. Get ready for some really exciting updates, clips of our new songs being recorded, and all sorts of video goodies too!
Four very exciting facts:
-Julian Bowers will be joining us in the studio to help keep this site up to date with pictures, video and interviews with the band!
-We are in the studio from Sunday the 15th until Friday the 20th!
-Jamie Stewart of the band Xiu Xiu is producing the album!
-The album is titled “A Histriony Of Violence”!
See you soon!
COUNT OAK HOOKS UP BIG TIME!!!
Okay guys Colin from Kingfisher Bluez’s own Count Oak was at the bar the other night and he was totally macking on this blonde chick with tattoos she was looking hot, but was a bit out of his league. After a few drinks he decided to make his move! He slunk up to her at the bar and started to talk about how he is the creative genius behind one of the best bands on one of Canada’s best indie labels. Surprisingly, she was impressed by this, and immediately started leaning on him as if he were a lamp-post or a street-sign. They totally made out.
Way to go Colin!!!!
As you can see, a good time was had by all! Congratulations to Colin and his new friend!
Listen to or buy Count Oak’s newest album here!
Let’s Wrestle from London interviewed by Tim the mute
Let’s Wrestle: Interview 10/09
by Tim The Mute
Let’s Wrestle are a fantastic new band from London, England. They are injected with a youthful vigor and sarcastic humor that set them apart from all the other bands that seem to be pouring out of there right now. Their debut album “In The Court Of The Wrestling, Let’s” is a cheeky reference to King Crimson’s “In The Court Of The Crimson King“. Still in their teens, they make music that is smart, funny and obnoxious in equal measures. How can they have all those great influences at such a young age? How are they so clever and fun while we all sit at home alone playing records? This is a band that will truly make you jealous because you just want to be them but you didn’t hear the Television Personalities until your 20s and you are so neurotic that Woody Allen movies cheer you up.
Here is their myspace if you’d like to listen to their music while you’re reading this!
Buy their record here from Stolen Recordings (Only 300 copies on vinyl!)
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KFB: Please introduce yourselves.
LW: I am Wesley Patrick Gonzalez I do the singing and that with my trusted guitar who’s name is Harriot St James Gonzalez the other 2 are Mike Lightning who is the bass wizard and there is Rev Darkus Bishop who has 2 sticks in which he plays drums with and he also has a PHD in Geology so he knows a lot about ROCK.
KFB: You guys look pretty young, how old are you?
LW: We are 18 years of age all 3 of us.
LW: Nope never worked a day of my life I’m a moocher the other 2 have no occupation either Mike has a bit of cash in hand work at the moment he’s building a house in the country.
LW: Well I don’t buy Vinyl anymore mainly because I was too lazy to change the needle on my record player its a whole bus ride to the shop to get another one so I buy CDs but I don’t download stuff, that’s immoral. Mike and Darkus are both collectors of the old black plastic.
KFB: Do you have any interesting records in your collection worth bragging about?
LW: I have the original mix of Raw Power by Iggy And The Stooges which is almost impossible to find on CD, Pavement’s first single as well as a tape of Vic Godard and the Subway Sect’s unreleased first album but unfortunately don’t have a cassette player so have never been able to listen to it.
LW: Seinfeld is a big one I love Seinfeld my other favourite is Reeves And Mortimer two English comedians and they did a lot of programmes in the 90’s and I’ve collected everything they have ever done on VHS. There’s a programme on at the moment called Loose Women which I’m obsessed with at the moment its just a panel of middle aged women talking about how funny their husbands act and the like, it sounds awful but its my main way of finding out what goes on in the world and I hope it will make me a bit better with the ladies.
KFB: Tell me a hilarious anecdote that ends with someone puking.
LW: A few weeks ago we played a festival and I went to see my new favourite band Male Bonding after drinking about 12 beers jumped on stage, dived off, smacked my head on a railing, accidentally kicked a girl in the face (apparently she didn’t mind!) left the tent, insulted nearly everyone I talked to and then threw up on myself. This was at about 7 in the afternoon and then I had to go home and whilst having sick on myself went up to all the girls around me who were also walking back and invited them back to my house the next morning I phoned Mike up and asked what happened and once he told me I realized I was wearing the same clothes and hadn’t even noticed there was vomit on them! What a great day!
KFB: Tell us a bit about your new record and how/where you made it?
LW: It’s called In The Court Of The Wrestling Let’s we made it in the studio we’ve always worked in underneath a ukulele shop it took 21 hours I think, I calculated it a while ago and cant remember for sure. It is a pretty good record very poppy whilst being scuzzy at parts, the next record I think will be better there is already something like 29 songs but we are going to pick and choose the best ones. we have about 7 tracks rehearsed and ready to go that will definitely on the 2nd but we are working out the rest and the 2nd album tittle is Trought Mask Wrestlica as you can tell we prefer stealing other peoples titles than coming up with our own.
KFB: If you were driving on tour and you ran over an old man by accident, what would you do with the body and would you turn yourselves in?
LW: I wouldn’t do anything with the body or turn myself in hit and fucking run dude!!!
LW: Thank you and you’re welcome I hope we can come to Canada soon but we have no immediate plans to. Fuck Morrissey I got up to his house and kill animals in protest in regards to him being a big pussy. Not really Morrissey is ok its his dickhead friend Johnny Marr who I have a problem with whats he doing joining all these new bands what a loser he’s like an Indie Pedophile.
KFB: Thanks guys!
Let’s Wrestle are playing at CMJ so check it out!
Brooklyn Band WEREWOLVES Interrogated By Tim The Mute
Werewolves Interview
by Tim the mute
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Werewolves are a very cool young and talented band from Brooklyn, NY. They play a very NYC brand of danceable rock and roll with all the right influences from the last few decades in the city and overseas. They are one of the best new bands I’ve heard in years, only they seem to spend so much time making great music that they can’t fill mail orders to even the lowest of standards. Let’s see what they have to say for themselves.
–
Note: In case you are confused, KFB means me (Kingfisher Bluez), UW is Unknown Werewolf, a member of the band who didn’t make their name known in this email interview, and Ben is Ben the drummer.
Here is their myspace if you’d like something to listen to whilst you’re reading.
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–
KFB: Hi Werewolves how are you doing?
UW: Hi, we are doing very well.
Ben: We’re doing well! A little burned out from touring and playing and being broke, but we’re sticking with it!
–
KFB: I ordered a record from you at the beginning of May, and it is now October. Why have I not received it?
WW: Ask Plays With Dolls Records. They did the same thing to the Vivian Girls, and currently Soft Black. We put out a record with the label and can’t even get in contact with them. It’s fucked. Once we rescue the records, it’s on.
–
KFB: I think you guys are a great band and I’d like to keep supporting you and buying your releases but this is getting pretty ridiculous. How can I buy anything off your store if I know I may never receive it?
UW: We’re fixing this problem by starting our own mailorder website with some other friends/bands. It will be more reliable- WE will be the ones mailing out the records – we don’t have to put trust in someone else who’ll just take your money and lie to us about mailing it – i.e. Plays With Dolls records. The ‘store’ you bought the record from was not ours, it was of a label we trusted and do not trust anymore.
Ben: Ditto. The best way to get something is to see us play live tho!
–
KFB: What is your favourite food?
UW: This is a very broad question. Let’s narrow it down to breakfast food- we’re never awake during the ‘breakfast hours’ so we’re constantly on the look-out for after hours breakfast joints. Here we go: Brian’s favorite breakfast food is tofu scramble. Kim’s favorite is scrambled eggs with portobello. Turner’s is a bacon, egg, and cheese on a hard roll. Mike and Ben’s are probably the same as Turner’s.
Ben: Ice cream. Sushi.
–
KFB: If you are never going to send my fire/water 7″ will you at least send my ten bucks back?
UW: You got charged ten bucks for that?????? That’s fucked up. We sell it for $5 at our shows.
[Ed- It was $10.40 cnd!!!]
–
KFB: Jainy ordered your record too and she got her copy! What’s up with that???
UW: I don’t know what is up with that, we don’t control the mailorder you ordered it from. I hope she enjoyed the lock-groove on side-b, though. Grrrroooooooovvvvvvvvvyyyyyyyyyyy.
Ben: I don’t know! we’re sorrrrryyyy!
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KFB: What is the funniest thing that has happened to you on the road?
UW: The funniest thing that has happened to us.. probably in san francisco. we thought we lost our van keys and waited for hours and hours getting a new key made. the next day we found them in a cigarette filter box.
Ben: Something funny that happened to us on our last tour is our van breaking down in arizona and we ended meeting some rad folks and got free recording time and stayed in a dope ass house!
–
KFB: Any final words for our readers? A plug for your new album perhaps?
WW: DON’T ORDER RECORDS FROM THE PLAYS WITH DOLLS MYSPACE PAGE. We are having problems with the dude who runs it – he is fucking over our friends and fans and we won’t stand for it. The mailorder we are starting will be up in sept. – it’s called the Magnetic Front. It’s run by artists for artists; a communal, volunteer-based mailorder run out of our house, early Dischord style. Our new album, DANCE RAINCOAT GLASS, will be available from the site on 12″ and CD. lots of cool shit will be up there for all ya’ll to dig. You can download the entire new record for free from archive.org, just search ‘dance raincoat glass’. Sorry you didn’t get your record Tim, we’ll work this out- even if we have to do some dangerous things to rescue the copies of fire/water.
Ben: Thanks for your support! you can download our entire album at: http://www.archive.org/details/WerewolvesDanceRaincoatGlass
KFB: Thanks guys!
…And Don’t The Kids Just Loathe It- Jeffrey Lewis 9/28/09
Jeffrey Lewis
Rickshaw Theatre, Vancouver
September 28th, 2009
To get it out of the way, “…And Don’t The Kids Just Loathe It” is
the new name of my regularly irregular reviews here on Kingfisher
Bluez. I wasn’t going to give it a name, because I don’t name
something that I don’t want to get close to, but seeing how making
doodles, snapping photographs and droning on and on about how amazing
musicians are comes rather naturally to me, I guess I should probably
make them all into a focused commitment.
Onto the review: Jeffrey Lewis, for those that don’t know, is one of
the players of the anti-folk genre, acting as a kind of folk/punk
historian with humour, great songs and a Jonathan Richman-like
earnestness. He also writes comics (as if he weren’t awesome enough
already).
Tim and I saw on the posters that the doors opened at 8pm and the show
started at 9pm at the Rickshaw Theatre down in the always lovely and
laid back neighbourhood of Main and Hastings. In case you’re not a
Vancouverite, Main and Hastings is a fantastic area to go to. With
the lovely stench of urine following your every step and heroin
addicts and crackheads in their usual rampant whimsy, it’s hard to
pass up going to this cross-section of human misery. Ahh. Dig that
city livin’.
Anyways, we got there at around 8:30, and sure enough, not even the
doors were opened. We asked a guy at the door when Jeffrey would be
on, and he said probably not until TEN MINUTES AFTER 11. Now
normally, we’d love to stay in Main and Hastings for the next couple
of hours, but we felt like a change from the junkies asking us for
money repeatedly, so we got something to eat instead.
We got back at 11pm and one of the opening acts (Ora Cogan, who Tim accurately described as, “someone who listens to PJ Harvey a lot) was still
playing. We went up to the merch table which Jeffrey’s bass playing
brother Jack was running and got Jeffrey Lewis’ fabulous comic “Fuff”,
issue #1. I also managed to snag a copy of Jack Lewis’ 7 inch, “Hero
Worship And The Animals That We Love” which has already been subjected
to repeated plays.
After a little bit, Jeffrey Lewis started playing, and the audience
got up from their seats to the front. There was, and I’m
not exaggerating, only twenty people. Twenty! I knew the show wasn’t
really advertised, but I thought more people would be coming,
especially since the theatre has the capacity for, according to their
site, 1,000 people. Such a huge theatre made the small crowd stand
out more. Jeffrey himself compared the venue to a “post-apocalyptic
landscape”.
The show, however, could’ve easily attracted 300 if people knew what
they were missing. Jeffrey, with his trademark weak, raspy voice
serenaded us with songs which included gentle acoustic numbers and
energetic pop-punk anthems (have you ever seen someone make his
acoustic guitar feedback? It’s a great sight, let me tell you). He also preformed a folk cover of “End Result” by UK punk anarchists Crass, did a rap about mosquitoes and played his “movies”, which were series of drawings that he made with narration and musical accompaniment, including “A Detective Story” and a fantastic horror film called, “Creeping Brain” (the theme of which has been stuck in my head ever since).
The twenty people that were there were made up a nice little crowd. A
little mosh pit of seven guys started up during the last song, and
Jeffrey went down into the audience to perform three more songs for us
(including a preview of his new “documentary”, “The Mayflower”). It
was 1:05am when it ended, on a Monday night no less, but nobody made
any bones about that.
It was an amazing show. I made the comparison to Jonathan Richman
earlier, and seeing Jeffrey gave me the same feeling as when I saw
Jonathan. His endearing stature and charming quirkiness made me feel
quite warm and fuzzy and his school boy crush for punk rock is
infectious. This may be a stupid analogy, but it was a concert that
felt like a delicious meal after a long day. There was just a variety
of flavours, all complimenting each other and even the spicier stuff
settled nicely, giving that warm, satisfying feeling just before
taking a nice nap by the firepla–OH, GOD, CAN’T IT JUST BE
THANKSGIVING ALREADY?
-Julian “Hungrier Than He Realizes” Bowers
Jeffrey Lewis
This is how many people there were!
Jeffrey performs his mosquito rap!
Titus Andronicus at Kingfisher Bluez HQ
Titus Andronicus from New Jersey played a scorching show at the Biltmore in Vancouver about a week ago. We had a sleepover party at Kingfisher Bluez headquarters (my house) after, and they were quite astounded by the amount of crap just lying around. Now there may be a lot of crap in my house, but it’s not all mine! The inside is being redone right now so it’s all asunder. All in all, they were very nice guys and quite well-behaved. Here are some pictures!
Me: “Okay guys just say “Kingfisher Bluez dot com” into the camera. I won’t ask you anything difficult.”
Patrick: “Dot com?”
Me: “Okay well just say Kingfisher Bluez then. Alright, rolling!”
*Camera on*
Patrick: “Kingfisher Bluez…. dot com? or maybe not? This crazy fucking guy he’s got all these… he’s got way too much fucking stuff..”
Me: “What band are you guys?”
Patrick: “We’re Titus Andronicus um…um… too much stuff….”
Eric: “Kingfisher Bluez”
*Camera off*
Me: “Okay that’s enough for me.”
Titus Andronicus’ The Airing Of Grievances is out on XL Records
Kingfisher Bluez 