Kult Des Hasses! New Acheron.

     My friend Vincent's band, Acheron,  just put out a new CD this past week, Kult Des Hasses, on Listenable Records from France. I was lucky enough to hear it last month, and while it's not 100% exactly my type of music, I still dig it. The music and lyrics are awesome, and the whole album just flows from beginning to end. I was blown away by amazing sound quality of this thing. Whoever mixed and mastered this did an incredible job. I have been mixing and mastering our new releases lately and thought that I was doing a pretty good job until I heard how great this sounded.
     Another thing that blew me away is the incredible amount of press that Listenable Records is getting out there for this release. I am actually jealous! Interviews here, reviews there, pieces coming in from all over the world. It's good to see a label out there giving a band like Acheron the respect and push it deserves. These guys paid their dues and reached cult status years ago, it's cool to see that their worldwide legion of fans will be able to pick up this CD anywhere, and more importantly, know that its even out there and available.
     Every once in a while I will tell the story about the time that Vince scared THEE living shit out of me when we were messing around with a ouija board back at the house in Detroit, but I don't think that I want to relive that moment again, so I'm not writing about. Nope, never happened.
     So if you are a metal fan, I suggest you check this out. Hopefully we can get them to stop by Delaware one of these days.



Kult Des Hasses


FTW!
-Randy

Lana Del Rey is Hot.

     Lana Del Rey is hot.

 And Talented. I just picked up Born To Die - Paradise Edition last week after hearing the tune "Burning Desire" on Facebook. I think that I had to buy that tune as a single because it wasn't on any particular album at the time.
     There is just something about a girl with a dark side that does it for me. A lot of people that I know didn't really care for Amy Winehouse all that much, but those of my friends that did like her music and act, understood what was going on with her. Lana reminds me of an American version of Amy. That whole sexy lounge lizard thing, reminds me of something out of a 1930's gangster film.
     I saw a clip of her on SNL where she was a little out of key and a bunch of people were bashing her about it. Hell, so what. I've been out of key plenty of times, especially when the music is too loud in the mix or there are no monitors to work with, and besides that, I have seen plenty of worse performances on that show over these years. She may have been nervous too, who knows.
   I hope this chick stays around for a long time and sells a gazillion records. I like her style. I currently have her in the #3 slot in my 6 disc changer in the car. It's not something that I will listen to every day, but it's there if I need it to help calm me down after a shitty day.


Stars and Bars, baby! She's our dark, sad, American girl!

Born to Die

Right on,
FTW,
-Randy
Jake and the Stiffs

The Tax Man

Me and the tax man discussing important issues. Trying to make light of my money disappearing.
I saw three boxes that indicated what my fines would have been if I didn't have health insurance. The fine was $464 for this year, then $650 or so for next year, and a little over $1000 for the following year. Insane.

Right on,
FTW,
-Randy
Jake and the Stiffs

Nothing New

     There is nothing new going on today on Facebook other than the sad news that Scarlett Johansson got knocked up by some French dude who's name I didn't even bother to remember. I thought I was hearing thunder last night, but it was probably the collective boners of every free speaking adult male in the world as they came crashing down after hearing the news.
     I have been spending most of my time lately remixing and remastering music that we (Jake and the Stiffs) recorded back in the the 90's. I was lucky enough to find someone a few years back that still had access to a working Ampex 456 machine. According to him, he was the only person between here and Indianapolis that had one. He was able to pull each individual track off of the reels and put them into WAV files for me. The whole lot filled up 4 or 5 burnable DVDs, almost 5 gigs of music. I feel very fortunate to be able to go back and listen to songs that I we did 20 + years ago, and to be able to reformat them and put them out in the event that anyone should want to hear it too. Check it out here. Or on the links at the top of the page.
     I have been able to put 3 digital releases together so far with the music I now have available and will be able to put out 2 more from these sessions. This material covers the years spanning 1990-1997 roughly, and was recorded at Target Studios in Newark, DE. Target was awesome, it was run by the Moss brothers and was always a fun place to go to. It was off the beaten path a little and the studio was, I believe, a converted slaughterhouse that sat at the back of the old farm. At the time we were recording there it was known as the "Art Farm". Mr. Moss had some really cool, giant, metal art sculptures on the property.
     I have recently been in touch with Eric Teather from the old "Manic Music" studios in Newark, De, and he told me that he just found a 90 minute ADAT of ours but has no idea how many songs are on it. We started recording there around 1997 and kept recording through about 2002 or so. I am hoping that there are several songs on there and enough material to complete the entire Jake and the Stiffs collection of works.
     Anyway, the whole point of this ramble was to talk about what I was doing today. I talked to George this morning via email about the artwork for the next release on the slate, "LUB 84".  It's a 16 song release that has a lot of tunes on there that many people have no doubt ever heard before. This is the "tape" we were working on when Zach left for Vegas, and right before the time when Vince came in. Looking forward to getting it out there and heard. I will discuss the album in more detail at a later time.

Right on,
FTW,
-Randy

                                               http://www.cdbaby.com/jakethestiffs2