Public service announcement, etc.

Greetings, good people. Just a quick note about a show that STATS is playing this coming Sunday, 8/2. It's part of the Show No Mercy metal series at Public Assembly in Williamsburg, and the bill is amazing. Headlining is Cleveland's Keelhaul, who make complex and brutally elegant music. This will be a release party for their brand-new Hydra Head record, Keelhaul's Triumphant Return to Obscurity. The show will be rounded out by three other great, loud bands, and the whole night was co-curated by Pitchfork/Stereogum scribe Brandon Stosuy and Brooklyn Vegan blogger Black Bubblegum. All pertinent info is on the flyer above (click to enlarge). I don't know for sure yet, but my guess is that we'll be playing first, right around 8pm. [Update: Just confirmed this, and we are in fact playing first.] The new STATS EP, Marooned, is still available in a digital format free of charge. Drop a line to statsbrooklyn[at]gmail[dot]com if you'd like to hear it.

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Recent delights:

Old and New Dreams s/t [ECM, 1979], Playing
Such comfort and delight in teamwork. Just makes you want to live and listen. Love these guys.

Charlie Haden The Golden Number
Fascinating session, justly adored by Ethan Iverson, to name one prominent fan. To me, the Archie Shepp duet is the real gem, but everything here is special. Anyone catch Haden with Paul Bley this past weekend? I really wanted to see that.

Cecil Taylor 3 Phasis
Masterful, celebratory turbulence. A lot of bawdy soul in Cecil's playing. Raphé Malik is so bold and LOUD—a severely underrated player. Love those fly-on-the-wall Gary Giddins liner notes too.

Muhal Richard Abrams with Malachi Favors Sightsong
Excellent, concise and very diverse duo jams from these two AACM geniuses. Some pieces free-flowing; others tight and swinging.

George Harrison All Things Must Pass
Still digesting this deep-feeling classic. When I'm done it may be one of my favorite albums, period. Ringo is killing throughout. "Wah Wah" is a phenomenal song.

Dirty Projectors Bitte Orca
Finally giving the rest of the album its due after months of exclusive obsession with "Stillness Is the Move." The guitar solo on "Temecula Sunrise" is an insta-classic: total brain-frying skronk.

Paul Auster Leviathan
I like this book a lot better than the Mastodon album of the same name. Masterful storytelling. Psyched for Auster's new one, Invisible, due in the fall.

Terror's Advocate
Stone-faced yet utterly bonkers documentary about a lawyer with a soft spot for violent revolutionaries and other questionable characters (e.g., Pol Pot). Really hard to understand (well, for my historically challenged brain, at least) but worth the slog.

28 Days Later [the movie]
Interesting mix of completely fucked-up and sweetly sentimental. Excited to compare The Road with this. Which will be the gold standard for postapocalyptic melodrama?

Ween "I Smoke Some Grass (Really Really High)"
A brilliantly infuriating song. Eight minutes of unrelenting hell.

The Evens Get Evens
What a strange and cool band. Wry polemics: the good kind of preachy. Love the wiry sound of MacKaye's baritone guitar and Farina's limber, funky drumming. First song, "Cut from the Cloth," is an elegiac masterpiece. Considering these two have a son now—see this fine recent interview for a bit more info on that—I hope they can find time to keep the band going.

And, of course, that marvelous William Vollmann Times piece that everyone is talking about. Can't get enough of this guy. He can rest assured that no matter how much people are daunted by his doorstop literary dispatches, said folks will always go nuts over the stats of his insane life. "'Crack,' [Vollmann] said recently, 'is a really great drug — it’s like having three cups of coffee at once.'"