Video by Danny Matteson

Jack Buck has quickly developed a reputation as one of St. Louis’ most exciting bands in the short time they’ve been performing live. Described by musician and blogger Josh Levi as a band that is “[paving] the way in the art of brainwave eradication. Too noisy to be categorized as hardcore and too avant-garde to be metal, the band fills the niche for stoners and the art damaged alike.” The Riverfront Times listed their last show as one of the ten best of that weekend and tonight’s concert marks the first at The Fox Hole. The band will share the stage with No Sleep Records‘ Xerxes, and locals Anodes, Rotten Souls and Side-Lined.

For more details on the show, check out the Facebook event page and come to The Fox Hole at 8pm. Be prepared for a little brain eradication too.

Flyer by Adam Taylor

Video by Spotify

How many songs do you have in your music library? 10,000? 30,000? 50,000?

Do you have Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, and Radiohead’s “Subterranean Homesick Alien”? Speaking of aliens, what about Alien Ant Farm’s Michael Jackson cover? Or perhaps the King of Pop’s original?

Can you fit your entire library on your iPod? With Spotify you have access to the four songs mentioned plus millions more. Haven’t heard of Spotify? Here are a few reasons to check it out:

Screenshot of Spotify Desktop

It’s efficient
All it takes is a few quick keystrokes and a tiny tap of the enter key in Spotify’s search bar to find that one song that has been stuck in your head all day. It’s faster than YouTube, it’s legal unlike file-sharing sites like Megaupload, and it allows you to select only the songs you want to hear unlike Pandora (and if you like internet radio, Spotify has you covered.)

Screenshot of Social on Spotify Mobile

It’s mobile
On top of being a fantastic desktop app, you can use Spotify on your mobile device. With Spotify Premium, you can stream a catalog of over 15 millions songs directly to your phone. It would take more than 387 iPod Classics to hold all that music. In addition to a plethora of music at your fingertips, no more wasting time editing your iPods. The music library keeps growing and you never run out of space.

Are you convinced yet? Try it out. After you’re hooked, send me a song or playlist to check out.

Michael Tomko, Photo by Chase Macri

“Ten bands. Ten secret tribute sets. One awesome weekend.”

This is how Michael Tomko describes his annual concert series, An Under Cover Weekend (AUCW), on its website. He considers it an “opportunity to have diverse collection St. Louis’ best bands under the one roof for one amazing concert.” Over two nights, five bands perform an entire set as a different artist, like Union Tree Review as Marvin Gaye.

But this presents an interesting legal quandary: are the bands liable under U.S. Copyright Law? Tomko is pretty sure they are covered; “The venues pay license fees on a yearly basis. There is ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC, and they hit up the venues for the fees based on radio play and set lists from the top 100 tours. So in terms of the rights to cover a song, 99% of that is covered by those groups.”

Photo by Chase Macri

In this case, not much. According to U.S. Copyright Law Section 107, a copyrighted work may be fairly reproduced for “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.” Section 107 also outlines four criteria when considering if a use is “fair” or foul:

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
2. The nature of the copyrighted work
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work

In this case, the venue does charge an admission for the weekend, and the performances resemble very closely the original studio recordings. Licensing and fair use do not take trademark issues into account either. While this tends to mostly affect tribute groups, an artist’s commercial name and trademarked logo is protected and use without permission could result in legal action. Not every cover band is as lucky as Australian Pink Floyd to have the original artist invite you to perform at his 50th birthday.

Fortunately for AUCW, the “theft” here is entirely friendly and the show’s purpose is strictly fun. Besides, according to Tomko, they may be too far off the radar to really worry. It’s only for one night.

Daniel Ruder, Photo by Chase Macri

“At a show in Columbia, [MO] this band’s trailer had their band logo and ‘facebook.com slash this band’ and we’re like ‘Woah!’ Do you guys know that even if you put none of your band stuff on this you are already a target? You’ve put a spotlight on this saying ‘Steal this stuff.’ I think they even had their logo on their van too.”

Daniel Ruder, drummer of the St. Louis band Jack Buck, thinks trailers need to go. “People get their trailer broken into and get their stuff stolen. It seems to happen all the time.”

Every band needs a van. That is, every band that wants to play shows outside of its hometown. Since the advent of Marshall amp stacks and drums too big to fit in the trunk of a hatchback, many bands opt for dragging a trailer behind their van. However, Ruder feels trailers are “theft boxes” and actually aren’t necessary for most bands.

Ford Econoline "The Band Van"

It is less safe indeed. In fact, just ask Portugal. The Man, or American Me, or Vital Remains, or consult the 857,000 Google search results for “band trailer stolen”. Then the question is, how does a band better protect its gear? Ruder thinks the van itself is enough:

I think of it as the convenience of having everything in one spot. In [Jack Buck's] specific situation, we don’t have a lot of money to spend so it’s the best option. To have an ‘all-in-one’ everything fits in this one box and we also fit in it. With a 15-passenger van with two benches, everyone except the driver can sleep comfortably; and that’s a pretty good advantage.

While being the more cost effective option, both at the initial purchase and in saving fuel costs, keeping your amps and guitar cabinets in the back of the van makes it easier to discourage theft. “Another really good advantage of storing your stuff in a van is you can park with it backed up against a wall. You can’t even open the door.”

Ruder on tour, Photo by Chase Macri

“MythBusters ran a car into a brick wall at highway speed and found that a box of Kleenex travels with enough force to kill you. “I imagine a guitar going that speed would decapitate someone,” Ruder expounds. “We build this steel thing around our equipment and we crash, our equipment will survive and be all perfect and keep it from crushing us.”

On top of protecting yourself with iron bars, most renters’ and homeowners’ insurance also covers musical equipment at very reasonable rates. Geico’s renters insurance covers theft, and State Farm estimates $20-30,000 of coverage costing as little as $8 a month. “Renters insurance is insanely cheap. It’s like $120 a year and that covers all of your stuff. It’s worth it.”

Jack Buck performing live in Columbia, MO

Last week’s post was the first introducing the topic of my master’s thesis: how people of faith relate to anti-religious music. Particularly, do Christians dig anti-Christian metal?

Impending Doom's "Repentagram" Logo

The feedback that I have received from you all based on my thesis topic has been primarily of interest in the final product. In response to this, I plan to share my progress researching different attributes of Christianity and extreme metal. I would like more feedback from you in the process. Leave comments on the blog, interact with me on Twitter and Facebook. If you have any resources you think would be of interest to me, share them! And I’m still looking for more people to participate in the survey I posted last week.

Last bit I want to share is this quote from Greg Piper, over at the blog Cultural Imperialists, said “Jesus was born knowing he was going to die a violent death in his dirty thirties, a virgin, wearing a loincloth, ignored by his God. Come on, how much more death metal can you get?” Truth.

Photo by Chase Macri of some Vegetarian Chili I made for New Years

I bought three shirts on Monday, January 2nd. My family—namely my parents, sisters Melody and Katelyn, Aunt and Uncle, and my grandparents on my mother’s side (those on my father’s side are dead)—also bought me various clothing items as Christmas presents this year. Some shirts, a heavier military style jacket in navy, some leather shoes that look like Chuck Taylor’s but aren’t, a ski cap; all of which maintain their original thread count, are as bright as the day they were sewn, and are, most importantly, new.

New clothes have a baptismal affect on me. Their newness is a fresh start, a clean slate and the ability to think of and define myself as someone I was not only moments before. To consider who I am, what I believe and what that means. Are these the clothes of the old me? This cut, this color, this pattern, and this combination is the fashion of the person I want to be. Forget the former things baby, and check out the new sneaks.

Inevitably, when the new year approaches the question of “resolutions” arises. I seldom think very long about my answer to this question and somehow I’m always surprised that it is asked.

“Do you have any new years resolutions?”

I respond, “Hmm, not that I’ve thought of but maybe I could…”

These hip-shot resolutions last about as long as I consider the question. In the past, I’ve tried adding to my schedule some humanitarian volunteer work, playing guitar every day, writing a song-a-week (with lyrics and even singing!), regularly attending morning prayer services, and (that is until lent of recent past) vegetarianism several times and not one of those resolutions ever did stick as a consistent or meaningful part of my life. They were lofty ideals that sounded good at the time but were never motivated by a realization of some existential truth or an emotional, life-changing event. They were pretentious. They were prayers of lead tied to balloons of hot air.

The new clothes are a similar façade. They’re only new for so long, eventually becoming one with the rest of the wardrobe. And the “new me” fades just as the dye in the clothes after a thousand washes. Then I search again for another renewal, a second and third and fiftieth baptism. My problem is these fabric baptisms are the same as my new year’s resolutions: the direction of the change is backwards.

I imagine myself doing all these lofty and righteous things and I like how that person looks on the outside, so I try to make my outside resemble that person. Take on his clothes. Resolve to do what he does. But I don’t consider the cost of believing what he believes. In years past, I tried on vegetarianism because I wanted to lose weight. I wanted to look better, sexier, and more attractive with the rational that eating more veggies would be healthier than the pork and bovine I had enjoyed. That translated into a few days of suffering through meals of salads, cans of green beans and peas, dipping baby carrots into peanut butter before finally binging on a double cheeseburger with bacon. I actually like eating those veggies! But the superficial motivation for restricting my diet was chasing after the wind. As the preacher says, that’s vanity, bro.

My most recent foray into vegetarian living, as is any drastic lifestyle change that is worth a damn, was this time motivated by something more significant than waistline. Modern meat production in this country is anti-Christian. It is unethical, dehumanizing and unsustainable from every means of measurement (social, economic, environmental, psychological, etc., etc., etc.) Without telling the sordid tale here, because other people have already told it better than I could (Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Eating Animals”, the documentary Food, Inc. are two examples), I can no longer look at a hamburger, a strip of bacon, or a chicken breast without wondering if the cow my burger came from lived in a cage in which it couldn’t turn around, or how many antibiotics the pig had taken to combat the rampant disease that spreads from the close proximity the pigs are inventoried, or if the chicken was slaughtered after its legs gave out from the immense weight he was engineered to grow (which assumes the chicken spent much of its life standing to begin with!) I used to put this in my body? This is “food”? And I used to eat these creatures? I can’t avoid thinking about that anymore. I can’t block it out of my mind and ignore it. I cannot, as I paraphrase Foer’s paraphrase of Franz Kafka, “choose to forget.” It isn’t right. These are not the animals slaughtered in The Garden, and weren’t those animals begrudgingly killed to begin with?

We worry so much about the pollution our industry and our cars emit and how it is accelerating climate change in the world, but did you know that animals accounts for more CO2 production as our machines? According to Scientific American “It turns out that producing half a pound of hamburger for someone’s lunch a patty of meat the size of two decks of cards releases as much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere as driving a 3,000-pound car nearly 10 miles.” All so I can eat a hamburger that costs $1. How is that sustainable? Meat is so easy and normal and commonplace and I imagine many feel it is a basic right but I have no idea where that meat came from, how that animal was treated, who killed it or how it was killed, who processed, packaged, and shipped it to us, and that lack of intentionality, that hip-shot thinking, is literally killing us. I can’t pretend that the problem doesn’t exist anymore. All the excuses I kept were childish and immature. I can’t say no any longer. I’ve changed. I am baptized.

I didn’t resolve to eat vegetarian. I didn’t imagine this different version of myself in these animal-loving clothes or as one who joined PETA, or took part in animal activism; my beliefs were shaken by the truth and a vegetarian is who I am now. It isn’t a phase. It isn’t something I am trying on for size. It isn’t something I’m doing to appear sexier. It’s just the facts. A stream popping up in the desert. A path in the wilderness. Behold, all things are become new.

Now I can look at you in peace; I don’t eat you anymore.
—Franz Kafka, while admiring fish in an aquarium

Photo Damian Strohmeyer/SI

In sports the cliché goes “may the best team win” and that cliché is often the expectation. However, unlikely things happen all the time in sports like when the underdog Dallas Mavericks swept most experts pick to win it all, the Los Angeles Lakers, in the second round of the NBA playoffs last year. The Mavericks continued on to win the Larry O’Brien trophy, beating the Miami Heat. The Heat beat the Mavericks in the Finals in 2006 and the dominant narrative during the series was the Mavs revenge and power forward Dirk Nowitski’s chance at redemption and greatness.

In sports journalism there is always an accompanying narrative no matter how closely it actually relates to the two teams playing. In the weeks leading up to the National Football League Conference Championships games, the narrative of the New England Patriots season was “Redemption Road.”

In an all-football mailbag and on his podcast the B.S. Report, Grantland’s Bill Simmons said the Patriots on a path to “extinguish every awful memory” from previous post-season defeats. They took care of the New York Jets, a team who beat them in last years Division Championship game, twice during the regular season. They defeated the Denver Broncos, a team that had their number twice in post-season appearances past and, most recently, the Pats put away the Ravens at home in Foxboro (the Ravens knocked the Patriots out of the playoffs in 2009 at home.) The icing on the cake for New England is Super Bowl XLVI will be held in Indianapolis Colts’ stadium. The Colts beats the Pats in the Conference Championships in 2006-07 season.

The only team that could make their salvation complete would be a rematch in the Super Bowl with the team that beat them in Super Bowl XLII: the New York Giants. Well, it seems to be 2007-08 all over again as the Giants narrowly edged out the San Francisco 49ers 20-17 in overtime. The Giants will be facing the Patriots in the Super Bowl for the second time in five years.

For Giants’ fans, and the journalists who write their narratives, a rematch of Super Bowl XLII isn’t very interesting. The Giants beat the Pats earlier this season in a game that eerily resembled the Super Bowl game with the Pats leading by 3 late in the fourth before quarterback Eli Manning completed two passes to Jake Ballard that were carbon copies of the David Tyree’s “Helmet Catch” and Plaxico Burress touchdown in the back of the end zone to seal the game. ESPN NFL East columnist Dan Graziano echoed what Giants’ fans were really hoping for: “a rematch of Super Bowl XXXV — the one for which the Giants’ fans will want revenge.” The Ravens crushed the G-Men 34-7 in that game. Unfortunately the narrative for the game in two weeks has swung in New England’s karmic favor.

While the narrative certainly favors the Patriots to win it all in Indianapolis, another sports cliché has to be considered: “that’s why they play the games.” We’ll see if the Patriots can get the last monkey off their back or if the Giants can bring home another Super Bowl upset.

David Butler II/US Presswire

Photo by Chase Macri

On January 12-14th, the bands Jack Buck and Coward set out across the midwest to play four shows in three days. The tour, entitled the “Home Turf” tour, went through each of the three cities the members of the bands live: Kansas City, Columbia and St. Louis. The below video shows live and candid footage of the bands throughout the three day tour.

For their EP My Heart Is The Eastern Horizon, the Nashville band Clemency decided to release each of the EP’s five songs individually a month at a time as singles, a tactic bands are increasingly exploring. But what makes Clemency unique is each single was also released as a music video.

“We’ve never really shot videos before,” says Jason Watkins, lead vocalist and guitarist of Clemency. “We were like ‘What if we shot a video for every song and release them as singles?’”

The band wrote the music and the screenplays for each of the songs, and videographer Joey Williams filmed and edited the videos. The band released the first single “The Wild Wind” on June 27th to Youtube and iTunes and repeated that process every month until each video was out. Watkins was happy with the results:

“Each video got a couple thousand plays in the first weeks,” he says. “They each topped out at like 5,000 or whatever. We were really pleased as an indie band that doesn’t have a lot of marketing push.”

Clemency are a truly independent band without a record label or access to significant capital to market their music. Beyond promoting with social media, the band used Google Adwords to get exposure:

“Our whole strategy was to put $500 dollars towards marketing for each video,” Watkins explains. “We ended up doing Adwords and different marketing through Google. They had taken notice of what we were doing and the attention we were getting and a representative contacted us and said ‘I think there’s some things we can do to maximize exposure.’ We had one more video to release. So we worked with Google and the video ended up having 73,000 plays in one week. In one week!”

With the success of the videos, and the responses the band has received from fans via Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and in person the band hopes to continue a similar method for promotion in the future.

“It would be kind of hard to sustain; making a quality video for every song you write. But I think it could be done. It’s ambitious, but I think we’ve proved to ourselves we can do it. And if you do it well you can be known as the band that does that. ‘Oh, that’s the band that does videos for all their songs.’”

“My Heart Is The Eastern Horizon” was released digitally on January 3rd and can be downloaded from iTunes. The EP will be available physically at the band’s CD release show on January 11th at The Rutledge in Nashville, TN. Clemency’s videos can be seen on their Youtube page.