DOUBLE BLACK DIAMOND RECORDS

The New Mary Jane Dave Shouse and Scott Taylor, formerly of the mighty Grifters, have their new thing going off called The New Mary Jane (see Beatles if you don’t get the reference.) Groovy, more guitar-driven than say Those Bastard Souls, Shouse’s previous solo, and then later, band incarnation. What it sounds like Hail The Young Girls is a spacey, heavy, drum n’ guitar thang. Shouse still channels Bowie gracefully. Guitars and bass and synth effects still collide and reign supreme thankfully. The Chinese government prides itself On delivering a clear blue sky for the holidays Great new stuff form two of the greats in the indie world everyone with any sense of taste was dying to see play together again. Be ready to run right out when The New Mary Jane cd drops and if you’re lucky enough to see them play live, prepare to be blown away. Years ago my brother’s friends and I traveled three hours in the snow in Upstate New York to see The Grifters play. Joan as Police Woman’s lovely Joan Wasser was in attendance, and when the Grifters laid into Bummer from One Sock Missing (Shangri-la Records) she and we couldn’t help from bopping our Heads to a sound coming through the stacks unlike anything we’d ever heard before. Again, prepare to be blown away. Link to three mp3s at The New Mary Jane Myspace: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=373565214

Wherein Steve Kilbey spills the beans on the Church’s follow-up to 2006’s masterful Uninvited Like The Clouds:

new church album(straight from the panthers mouth)

Original post at THE TIME BEING, Kilbey’s bloggy:

http://stevekilbey.blogspot.com/2009/01/new-church-albumstraight-from-panthers.html

Touching From A Distance is a tremendous gift to Joy Division fans and anyone else who might care about the star-making machine and its human toll. 

This book is captivating as all hell, a peek behind the veil into who Ian Curtis was in his homelife, in addition to being just the guy who wrote Unknown Pleasures. After all, Deborah Curtis has an innate understanding of the man as she saw the madness closest-at-hand.

The early chapters concern, inevitably, the formative years of Ian and his future bandmates in New Order and Joy Division, respectively to their later larger fame. Ian was obsessed, as so many young men of that era, with Iggy and Bowie. Ms. Curtis does a fantastic job of letting us see how they came to be a married couple with a new child by the early age of 21 and the sad, tragic effect this had on a rising star in the shameless rock business. Ian wouldn’t live to see 24.

What’s most stunning here is that Deb Curtis seems to have inherited, inhabited even parts of Ian’s reality and hallow-graphically, rather than hagiographically, represented the many attributes of Ian’s poetic gifts and stunning sensitivity and window into the human condition. In point of fact, she proves herself equally gifted. God bless Ms. Curtis for what she endured in losing Ian and having her family shattered, and her return to her better senses and the legacy of inheritor/benefactor to her fair share of Joy Division’s not inconsiderable fortune. Lord knows she deserves all this and more for all she’s been through.  My hat is off to her. Run, don’t walk to Barnes & Noble or your computer for excerpts.