Look Mexico vs. Disney World

Okay okay okay!

We’ve been back from tour for a few days, but here’s the highlights!!!

Our show in Lawrence, Kansas was the freakin’ bomb! The Replay Lounge again handed us out our most attractive paycheck of the entire tour, and it’s always a pleasure to play that place.

The next day we drove to Dallas. The show at The Door was pretty righteous. A solid showing of folks there to see us, and we rocked it real hard. I had a drum riser for my drums, which is always kind of embarrassing. I got to see my good friend Jules, who is an amazing filmmaker. Other than that- Matt went down the street and heard a real amazing band that was playing a city festival there. (Sarcasm). They had a song called Tel Aviv in which they shouted Tel Aviv over and over. (Also sarcasm).

After that we drove the crap home! In the middle of the night we found some amazing vegetable oil behind a Chinese buffet that lasted us the rest of the way to Tallahassee.

The tour all in all was a success. We came back with a little green, some amazing stories to tell, and energized and eager to get to tracking this new record. We were so stoked to see our crowd sizes steadily grow from our last treks across the states. And even more encouraging, we played with a number of bands out there that told us that we were one of their favorite bands and biggest influences. That’s a real amazing thing, and it always gets us buzzing to hear stuff like that. A huge thank you to everyone who came out to these past shows, and thanks for bringing friends too. It was one of our most comfortable tours yet.

A few days after our return we headed down to Full Sail (an arts school in Orlando, Florida) at which we spent three days tracking four of our songs with four separate recording classes. The sessions went very quickly, but we laid down real solid demos of three of our new songs, and a new version of “I Like Being a Millionaire, You Will Too Believe Me.” You can expect to hear those demos in a live stream some time in the next couple of weeks on Punknews.com and the new version of Millionaire should be uploaded to our myspace. It promises to be a bit more, how should we say… balls out.

On a day off from recording, our main man Ian got us passes to go to Disney’s Hollywood Studios (formerly MGM Studios) through his mother that works at the Disney Parks. A big thank you to the Kutch family for letting us sleep at their place, and getting us those tickets. Also thanks to Slate and Smith’s long time friend Navid, for letting us crash at his place and making us some of the best popcorn we’ve ever had.


We had a real awesome time at Disney. I think all of us have real fond childhood memories of the spot. To mark the occasion, Ian bought us a round of beers inside the park. It was kind of surreal. We saw the Indiana Jones Stunt Spectacular, went on Star Tours (the Star Wars ride), Tower of Terror, and Muppets 3D which is still hilarious after all these years. Dave was real scared on Tower of Terror- even though he likes to think he wasn’t. I put together this little video of our time there. Ian took all the video with his digital camera. Disney World RULZ! Thanks Mama Kutch!!



We came back to Tallahassee and had a few practices where we locked down a fresh new track that will appear on this new record. We also started work on the infamous song two- and may have cracked the case as to why that song was giving us such trouble. (We just needed to speed it the crap up and make it ROCK AND ROLLLLLLLL!) Thankfully enough- our frustration with song two has acted as the catalyst for a number of other songs we’ve written thus far for the new record.

After about a week back, we made our way back down Florida for a show at the University Of Florida Campus in Gainesville. We’re all FSU alums- man did we have them fooled- I’ll punch a gator right in his brain.



It was an awesome show in their outdoor amphitheater. We did feel a bit bad though- the UF students had to set up a huge lighting rig for our show. It was a bit immodest for our tastes, and it weighed on our collective conscience since those dudes had to spend their night setting up and striking lights and sound equipment (sans pay I am sure). The show was nonetheless a bad A success, and we felt for once that we could rock a bigger area with no problems.

That night we made our way over to The Top and The Atlantic where our buddy Cam (No Idea/ Southern Lovin’) let us in the show FO FREE!!! Playing were Anchor Arms, Gatorface, and a few other bad-A bands. Gatorface’s drummer, Richard, used to play for the band New Mexican Disaster Squad, and is also known under the penname Horsebites. If you’re not familiar with him, he does amazing design stuff, and it was my first time meeting the design juggernaut. He’s a real awesome dude. We also hung with our good bro Tony from No Idea Records, where we locked down our spot at this year’s The Fest, and I will again be designing a t-shirt. After the show (again with Ian Kutch and now accompanied by his brother Paul), we partied hard, as per usual when we make our way through Gainesville.

The next day we spent about five hours in a Tire Kingdom getting some simple maintenance done on our bus. After that we made our way down to Tampa for our show at The Crowbar. The show went real well. And it felt good when the crowd that for the most of the night had been clinging to the walls, made their way forward to get close and comfortable to us. We played with our long time buddies In Passing, to whom we owe a great deal to for getting folks out to our early shows in the Tampa and Brandon areas. We also played with this real awesome band from the area called Anthony and the Grapes. Solid musicians writing solid music. Hope to play with those guys again soon. We drove all night back and arrived around eight the next morning.

Dave, Matt, Smith and Slate returned to their glamorous restaurant jobs. Here you can see some little characters Matt fashioned with a coworker on a particularly "busy" night.



I head out to L.A. this week to get some work done with a friend, and when I return we’re going to start laying down the drum tracks for the first five songs for our upcoming record. We’re freakin’ stoked! We have all of May, June and July basically off , but might take a little run through Florida some time in June/ July and a Tallahassee show there in the mix too. Our main man Phil Martin is giving up any partying until this baby gets done, and our good buddy Auggie (ex One Small Step For Landmines drummer) is going to be drum teching on the record. (The same production team behind Gasp Asp).


In other news:

I ordered a new drumset from C&C drums. They make amazing kits. It’s going to be turquoise sparkle. I am so pumped about it, I could punch a whole bunch of idiots in the face. Sadly- it won’t be done for a few weeks, so it may not appear on the next record.

I have a play I wrote going up in Amherst, VA this July at Sweetbriar College with Endstation Theater Company (www.endstationtheatre.org) It’s called My Brother’s Knife and it’s about an old rock and roller whose suicide attempt is thwarted by a loose cannon cop that forces the suicider to start a rock and roll band with him. It should be awesome. If you’re in the area- hit me up, and I’ll get you tix.


All right, dudes. Thanks for reading. More soon.
+joshua