Today I found out that the brother of a friend of mine was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq on Friday, along with two of his fellow servicemen. His name was Aaron Lee Preston, and he was assigned to the 9th Engineer Battalion, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division.

A close friend of mine, Spec. Javier A. Villanueva was killed in Iraq last year, also by injuries sustained from a bomb. I have friends over there fighting as I type this, and have had other friends who are going over and/or have been there and thankfully arrived home safe. Countless other people across the nation have stories just like mine, and I'm just ready for this thing to be over. The number of confirmed U.S. casualties in this war is reaching 3,000, with over 20,000 wounded.

Austin's The Black Angels wrote a song for their 2006 album Passover that is about a friend who was killed in battle, and it expresses some of what I'm feeling about the situation. The song is untitled and hidden in the last part of "Call to Arms," after a three minute silence. The band's guitarist Christian Bland says of the song:

"That song... I don’t even know what the title for that song is. Originally it was called “The Iraq War”. But I think the name was changed to something else. The title “The Iraq War” was too straight forward. I think it was tagged at the end of the album because it sounds so different from the rest of the album, so it fits better at the end. And it’s very personal. It’s about a friend who was killed in battle and it just fits well after the last song. There’s a 3 minute silence and then it concludes with that song."

I must say that Passover is really starting to grow on me, after taking my sweet time to actually sit down and pay attention to it. I even met these guys and shared a cigarrette with them one night before ACL down at The Mohawk, and at the time I only had a vague idea of what they sounded like. Pitchfork had nice things to say about the album, though they left out most of their typical elitist soliloquy. Weird.

I've heard great reviews of their live shows, and I'm looking forward to seeing them open up for Ghostland Observatory next month at the opera. That's going to be a killer show. I'll do what I can to get pics/audio/video of this performance, and we'll see what happens. I did find a live recording of the Black Angels opening up for the Black Keys in November of this year, and the show info as well as a .Zip file of the recording are listed below. It sounds great at high volume, by the way..



SETLIST:

01) Intro :49.11
02) Young Men Dead 5:31.52
03) Bloodhounds On My Trail 3:51.19
04) The Sniper At The Gates Of Heaven 4:57.56
05) Vikings and Furrs 6:05.58
06) Better Off Alone 3:50.19
07) Ronettes 7:52.18
08) Black Grease 4:13.62
09) The Prodigal Sun 4:26.32
10) Snake in the Grass 8:00.08

This recording in downloadable by clicking here, via Archive.org

Plenty more available at TheBlackAngels.com, and MySpace.

The superb Canadian instrumental post-rock band Do Make Say Think will be releasing their fifth studio album on the Montreal record label Constellation Records in February of 2007, but I couldn't wait until then to gush about it. It's not too early to give out the prize for best album of 2007 is it? Perhaps that's a bit premature, but after listening to You, You're A History In Rust I would like to at least give it an early nomination for said prize.

Is there just something in the water up in Canada? For a long time the only music they could boast about was Bryan Adams and Celine Dion, and now every time I turn around there's a new fantastic record coming out of the great white north. Below is the tracklist for one of these fantastic new records, iTunes style.


Notice how they all have stars next to them? When I preview an album via my computer and iTunes I always make sure to place a star next to songs that I enjoy more than others, which are the tracks I usually end up blogging about. As you can tell You, You're A History In Rust received high marks, and I had to spend a bit of thought choosing which one to include here. I had decided on "You, You’re Awesome," but since GvB had it covered (along with other valuable tidbits,) I went with the album's third track, "The Universe!" The album hits shelves across the pond on February 12, and on February 26 in the US.

Do Make Say Think - The Universe!

Do Make Say Think will be touring the universe (much of it) in 2007 after the release of You, You're A History In Rust. Complete details to be announced soon. Stay informed on everything at the following sites:

Constellation Records
Southern Records
MySpace (Fansite)

Labels: Albums, Rock

Sorry folks, something broke at CovertCuriosity.com that is beyond my control. Sooooooo, for the immediate future I'll be conducting things right here at Blogspot until the issues are resolved with the other address.

I was working on a few things before the .com dissappearing act, so I'll put those things here for now. Sorry again for the flip-flop, it's out of my hands...