With the Fritz out on vacation this week, I thought I would do my best to fill his shoes to come up with this week's newsletter. Odds are I will not do nearly as good a job as him being witty and all, but I am willing to give it a try.Mac McCaughn's other band, Portastatic, will release a two-disc compilation of odds and sods on September 9th entitled Some Small History. The 44-song set includes covers, alternate versions and previously unreleased material. I'm just ecstatic there's a place where all can finally get his awesome rendition of Hot Chip's "And I Was A Boy From School". Merge is letting you stream the entire thing for a limited time right now, so get on that.
It wouldn't be right of me to take Fritz's place and not discuss his beloved Metallica. The band offered up a stream of their new single "The Day That Never Comes" on their MySpace page last week. The 8-minute track does indeed sound like the old-school Metallica of the 1980s that the San Francisco four-piece promised their new album, Death Magnetic, would harken back to. They successfully achieve this by rehashing the melodies of earlier songs "Fade To Black" and "One" in the same song. Good job, assholes.
Famed produer Jerry Finn passed away last week at the age of 39. Finn suffered a brain hemorrhage in July and was taken off life support earlier this month. Finn's family will announce plans in the near future for a scholarship in his honor. Finn produced many acclaimed records over the last 15 years, including Rancid's And Out Came The Wolves, Morrissey's You Are The Quarry and Blink-182's Enema of the State. The one album people keep neglecting to mention in obituaries is his tremendous production work on Superdrag's 1998 masterpiece, Head Trip In Every Key. His last work known was his production on the new Morrissey album, Years Of Refusal, which is due out next year.
Some Neil Young guy is going on tour for the umpteenth time this fall in the United States of America, and has drafted Death Cab For Cutie and Wilco to support him on the separate legs. You might remember Young doing this in the early 1990s, i.e. building his indie cred, by asking bands like Sonic Youth and R.E.M. to join him on the road.
If you live in the NYC area and have nothing to do tonight, might I suggest catching a one-off reunion of the original line-up of And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead at Santos' Party House. I guess it's not a reunion really, but just the original duo of current members Conrad Keely and Jason Reece. Either way, I'm sure it will be a pretty cool time and better than staying in and watching the U.S. Open.
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