Buttsweat And Tears-Well Worth the Wait

It's been over 3 or so years since Chicago band The Lawrence Arms released Oh!Calcutta! so as you can imagine, this was a great breath of new material for the fans. Buttsweat and Tears is the first "digital" release for the group, (they also released it on vinyl). This morning I grabbed my laptop and headed to Panera to use their free wi-fi to download this new gem while enjoying a tasty bagel and O.J.
The first song is Spit Shining S**t. It's very catchy, upbeat with some Oh!Calcutta! style. "The Slowest Drink At the Saddest Bar On The Snowiest Day in the Greatest City" is a fast song sung by Chris (opposed to Brendan singing the first one). "Demons" is defiantly my favourite song at the moment. It's got a little Falcon (Brendan & Neil's side project) in it as far as tempo is going and it's super catchy as well. If you're a fan of them, I'd pick it up. $3.99 for 5 songs are well worth it. Especially because I had an iTunes gift card left over. HA! I look forward to a new album in the hopeful near-future.

Madrid @ Racine's McAullife's Pub

Last week Saturday, my band Madrid. played our 2nd show ever, & our first show in Racine at McAullife's. The night looked grim when we walked into an album empty bar. "This can't be good" I told Nick, our front man. We arrived around 8. People were watching college football. How exciting!! We immediately set up my drum kit. It's been quite some time since I brought it to a live show, since it's not that great, but the sound crew mic'd it and it sounded pretty good and loud. The opening band (that originally was going to headline) was called Before Dawn. They were an electro-dance-pop group on tour and stopped out in Racine for a very small crowd...They were very enjoyable. Nick kept telling me "I just love these guys!" They were influenced by The Killers, Talking Heads and that sort of music....
Around 11:20, we went on. We opened the set with "Everyone Again", which is kind of a hard song to play for me. It's crucial not to lose time on it, and since the vocals weren't coming in too well on my monitor, it was even harder. Somehow I nailed it. It was actually more fun for me to play the song on my kit. Second song of the night was "So Real", which follows up well to the first one because it's more mellow for me to play on drums. Pat was actually singing the falsetto parts too, which gives the song more in my opinion.
We ended up doing the song me and Nick didn't plan on doing. "Modern World", but instrumental. It worked out okay because Pat played the melody on guitar. It also went straight into "Eyes and Butterflies"

Without going too far into every song, the night went quite well. Even though the monitors weren't giving us much, and I am low on sticks since I busted one at the show, AND my wife and I got lost on the long way home, we still had a great show. We actually had some people digging the music and looking for some CD's. Drat.

Need a shot of pop-punk back when it was good?

Milwaukee had some really great bands "back in the day" (TM).

In the mid to late 1990s, a show at the Rave Bar or Globe featured some opening bands that did not suck.

One show, I saw a band called Slurr. I don't remember much about them. I knew they had a tall singer and that a GF's roommate was dating the drummer.

Well, thanks to the archive at http://www.mkepunk.com, one can listen to them and discover them for themselves.

I recommend No Jon.