Candy Ambulance to reveal death-defying secret at show next Saturday

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We here at Times Boredom have it on good authority that a big secret will be revealed at the Putnam Den Saturday, August 13th, by grungy punk rock band Candy Ambulance. Therefore, we sent our entire team on crack to drum up the rumor mill in advance.

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DJ Think Noise thinks he has the scoop. “Those Satan worshippin pagans are finally gonna reveal what I’ve always known; all their songs are ripoffs of an early 2000s Albany band called Grain and the Gestalt. That free jazz hootenany of a band put out over 20 albums in 2 years, and Candy Ambulance simply ripped off the good ones and formed a band! I’ve been telling you all along!”

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Jorge Ninos’ research revealed a rumor of the more salacious variety; “Yeah, me and (drummer) Jon Cantiello are sort of an item. Though he won’t confirm it.”

TB:”What about the rumors that you’re carrying a love child?”

Ninos: “Those rumors will not be confirmed! Especially not when Jon won’t even change his relationship status on facebook!”

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Hardcore/punk correspondent xxSteve had a predictable response, after doing no actual research whatever: “Yeah, those assholes are going to admit that they’re fuckin poseurs! They don’t wear leather jackets with patches and think they’re better than everyone, so they’re not punk. They don’t dress blue collar, collectively weigh more than an elephant, and think they’re better than everyone so they’re not hardcore. Also anyone in the Capital District that isn’t friends with xxSteve or xxJoe, and doesn’t play xxJohn shows is a fuckin sell-out poseur. Though I really dig that chick that’s the lead singer. I’m a feminist and stuff; I really like Bikini Kill and Tori Amos…”

TB:”Ugh. Someone’s trying to act like a tough asshole but still get laid…”

xxSteve:”Shutup you fuckin poseur! If I see you at that show you’re fuckin dead!”

Jammin Jerry has an alternate wacked out theory. “At the show each of the members of Candy Ambulance will reveal their true forms. (Singer/guitar player) Caitlin will reveal that she is a wood nymph. (Bass player) Jesse Bolduc is actually a Satyr, and Jon is a beautiful long mained unicorn…”

xxSteve: “Are you talking to my nutjob younger brother? That jam band fucker has no right to make comments! He hasn’t been right since he, you know, smoked all that pot… and I’ll kick your ass twice for talking to him!”

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Local pervert Scott Koenig is more excited about the ‘secret’ to be revealed.

“Dude, I’ve known it for sometime. They’re finally going to admit they’re all nudists, and Candy Ambulance is going to play their entire set in the nude! Gonna be totally sweet!”

Guess you’ll just have to go to the show August 13th at the Putnam Den (again, our favorite local venue and proud sponsor! ok that last part was made up but we want to get in free!) to find out. And if you’re uninterested in awesome secrets or for some reason inimical to harmless inane satire, Bella’s Bartok and the Lucky Jukebox Brigade are also playing! Bring your cameras!

Asa Morris and The Mess too raucous and rockin

amLocal old coot DJ Think Noise did not appreciate the youthful energy and exuberance of a recent performance by Glens Falls band Asa Morris and the Mess.

“There I was, sippin my mint julip and listening to the smooth jazz I’ve come to appreciate Friday nights at Pauly’s hotel, and just appreciating the ambience. Then these dern kids storm the stage, and they’re all over the damned map! They’ve got what look like acoustic instruments, including a violin, so I thinks to meself ‘ah, a nice folk ditty they’ll play’. But then they get to rockin and rollin all over the dern stage, stompin and shoutin and causin a ruckus! I nearly spilled my beer!”

TB: “You mean your mint julip?”

“Mint julip?! What do you take me fer, some sort of southern intellectonal? Nah, I was drinking me a Pabst Blue Ribbon like I always do. Enjoyin myself until these kids are on my lawn tearin it up and mowin it down!”

When asked for comment, Asa replied “Well duh. We’re called ‘Asa Morris and the mess’. We obviously don’t play smooth jazz. Yeah we ‘tear it up and cause a ruckus’. I like the sound of that. Thanks for the blurb DJ Think Noise!”

Comrade Nixon and Bren to be offered formal adoption by the Capital District

North Country punk/alternative band Bren will be greeted at their July 8th show at Paulys Hotel with a formal offer of adoption. In addition, fellow north country/Lyon Mountain punk/noise band Comrade Nixon will be met with the same offer.

“We have a shit ton of terrible tough guy bands, terrible dad-rock bands, and worst of all terrible cover bands here in Albany.” said Capital District Commissioner of Partying Andrew Wyacheslev Katz. “What we lack is a reasonable amount of really good punk rock bands to actually have a decent party with.

“I personally have been sent to scope out good punk rock bands that frequently play the Capital District. Over and over I have seen both Comrade Nixon and Bren tearing it up like the apocalypse is upon us and the cool kids have already been left behind. However, everytime I ask where they live they insist they’re ‘not from here’. Well, no longer. With this formal offer of adoption, they’ll all be native Capital District sons, just like the rest of us that aren’t from here but somehow ended up taking permanent residence in this shithole because we’re always too drunk or too poor to get on the bus to somewhere else.”

“It’s a nice offer, but as I keep telling Andrew, we don’t live in nor are we planning to move to Albany.” states Bren lead singer and Comrade Nixon drummer Matt Hall. “I love playing the Capital District, but there are too many assholes that are always at my shows trying to suck up to me; Scott Koenig, DJ Think Noise, xxSteve, Jose Ninos, etc. I certainly wouldn’t want to live near them.”

Nevertheless, the offer will be made. Commissioner W.K. is also considering other cool bands that constantly play the area but aren’t officially from here like Hill Haints and Dinosaur Jr.

Local drummer doesn’t like the current music business model

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Sean Cranston, drummer for local band The Further Unsound, recently tweeted his outrage and disdain over current music industry business practices:

“”You gotta pay to play” – every music venue and promoter ever
YOU PAY ME mother fuckers”

Reaction from the industry was decidedly mixed.

sko“Dat boi dont know shit from shit” said local old coot DJ Think Noise. “Back when I was in the game, we’d play two sets of shit we hated for five hours at a time, literally for the peanuts that fell on the floor. We’d play Carl Perkins, Bill Haley, hell any old shit that you kids love nowadays. I myself dressed and sang as Billie Holiday on several different occasions.”

TB: “Wouldn’t that make you, like, over a hundred years old?”

“Old enough to have porked yer great grandma you damned mod rocker! Now this was durin the first world war mind ya, so we did it for scrap iron…”

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“DJ Think Noise is a fucking sell out” claims local hardcore legend xxSteve. “We didn’t ever even get a nickel. We got in the van, played every VFW from here to Cranston, and got our asses beat a hundred times by bouncers and promoters non-stop for our troubles. That was fuckin hardcore, before all these sissy bands with their ‘we want half the door money’ and ‘at least give us a free beer!’ came along. We did it all for the beatings.”

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“Yeah, xxSteve is fuckin nuts. But don’t print that cause he’ll probably kick my ass for saying it.” claims latino (that’s right, we’ve got a minority panelist now!) 90s indie rocker Jose Ninos. “There actually was a golden age, though I’m afraid it’s probably not what Sean envisions. We got some of the door money, and we’d get free pbr or rolling rock all night. Man, the late 90s were high times for indie rock. But that’s just not the way it is today.”

Local blogger Scott Koenig agrees with the latter statement; “Yeah man, you so gotta pay to play these days. It’s like being an intern without even having the prospect of getting a job in a few years since you’ll be so fuckin burned out. Take me, I run a useless local blog. And yet, I get paid in some form by every band I blog about!”

TB: “Would you care to expand on that”

SK: “Um, I reserve my second amendment rights…”

TB: “Mr. Koenig, there’s irrefutable evidence that the nature of this ‘pay’ you speak of has in the past come in the form of sexual favors.”

SK (turns to lawyer Saul Steinowitzenbergin): “Um, I again plead the, uh, sixth comandment?”

TB: “Mr. Koenig, there are witnesses and damning testimony! Did Mr. Cranston provide any quid pro quo for you to write this article!”

SK: “I did not have sexual relations with Mr. Cranston”

TB: “How about oral? Was oral sex involved?”

SK (turns to Steinowitzenbergin esq., who nods him on): “No gloryholes whatsoever were involved.”

TB: “Who said anything about gloryholes?”

SK: “This interview of myself is over!”

The Man who killed Albany rock

As a hard hitting local journalist, I’ve been investigating why Albany consistently fails to rock out with its cock out for years. Ever since I got here, I noticed a wealth of great original live bands; punk, metal, hardcore, indie, etc.; but they never seemed to coalesce or play together regularly at any of the same venues. Over the years, people have attributed this to all kinds of factors, frequently the diversity of the music/atomization of the scene and people’s unwillingness to cross genres. Others blame it on that vomit inducing vodka and red bull drink, the decay of abstract expressionism, cross-dressing, Green Day, wearing your socks to bed at night, etc.

To research further, I’ve traveled to much smaller towns like Saratoga Springs and Burlington, even as small and far north as Plattsburgh. However, even in the winter you can hear the sound of live music everywhere in these towns. When the clock strikes midnight, people are on the streets shouting drunkenly, looking for the next show or pizza place to keep rocking. Albany, on the other hand, is a much bigger yet quieter town with tiny pockets of rock that never seem to last. WTF?!

I recently sat down with former City Planner/Councilmember Grendel Moses and found out why.

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“I love cities, but only the good, traditional American daylight side. I love to see gangs of bankers and bureacrats walking through kafkaesque mazes after parking their cars a mile away. I love the site of 3 piece suits silhoutted against unnecessarily tall phallic structures and plazas calmly talking about boring shit like interest rates and tax burdens.

“As a city planner and politician what I HATE HATE HATE is live rock music and local art in general. That’s the kind of shit that leads to fun-filled riots. I just want all the nice smelling straight laced businessmen to leave Albany empty after 6 PM, and have it completely anti-septic when they get back Monday morning. About forty years ago, I single-handedly set in motion the dismantling of rock in Albany. And here’s how;

“Far as I’m concerned, the best way to engender rock is to have a centralized downtown location where young people live and college kids can get to. This breeds live, original music, and a community where arts can thrive and young punks can get together and have fun. I obliterated that shit with divide and conquer.

“You think ‘Sprawlbany’ means there’s lots of suburbs? Bullshit! There’s suburbs everywhere in America. What I did was to make the city itself a bunch of suburbs surrounded by dangerous neighborhoods. That way nobody could walk or party anywhere without worrying.

“First thing I did was kill anything cool on Lark Street. Best way to do that is subsidize and permit shitty bars that play garbage music on the jukebox (Nickelback’s my favorite. I’ll walk into any bar on Lark, play a whole Nickelback album and watch people yawn and go home). Any live music venue was shut down. Took me twenty years, but I knocked down the entire park south neighborhood just to get rid of Valentines.

“Same deal with Pearl Street; only a different strategy there worked way better; dress codes and discos. You put a bunch of well dressed people stinking of cheap cologne in a bar where they serve expensive beer and french fries, and you’ve got a lethargic contingent of zombies looking for sex for about twenty minutes before they get tired and realize it’d be better to make the long drive home now so they can catch up on episodes of The Good Wife on their TiVo.

“Next, I further divided and conquered through incentives; live music can spring up and spread like cockroaches, especially when punk and metal came around and anyone could do it. So I handed out subsidies to anyone that would relocate their club to a remote location, away from walking distance of anywhere, in bad neighborhoods ‘mid-town’, even got a couple up and running way down by the river on the Ghost side of town. Then I ensured that only dad-rock and bands that covered crap like ‘Oh! What a night’ played at the big downtown locations. It was beautiful.

“And that my friend is how I killed your scene. It’s too much of a hassle to rock out in Albany now. Everyplace is so far you have to drive, and if you drink enough to have fun you’ll get a dwi and not be able to leave your house! You might as well move to Saratoga, where the streets are safe and the college kids mingle with the twenty somethings. Though I’ve been talking to their zoning boards too…”

I asked him why the fuck he cared so much about what happens in the city after he’s home in his suburban bedroom community. Why did he have to take away the small joys I had as an Albany resident that likes rock music?

“Because I hate you dirty punks and rock music! You bums lost! The Bureaucrats and underhanded politicians will always run this town and you’ll never rock!  You’re just a drunken punk! Mwa-hahahahahahah hahahaha ahhahahaha ahahahahaha (cough cough cough)…”

“Are you alright?”

“Just a (cough) sec… (cough)… Mwah -hahah ahahahahah hahahahah….”

He goes on like this for twenty minutes before I decide to just leave. There’s a band I like playing tonight but it’s a long drive and none of my friends are going. It’ll be much easier to buy a bottle of booze, watch Rick and Morty again and drink myself to sleep.

Old dude knows way more than you about Burnt Hills

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“I been e-mailing this punk kid Scott about his stupid blog, and tellin him how much shit he gets wrong.” says crotchety old scenester ‘DJ Think Noise’.

“So finally he asks for some background on this band he’s never heard of but likes called Burnt Hills, and I give that ignorant sumfabitch the real low down.”

“I first approached Jackson (Wingate) about forming a noise guitar supergroup nar twenty years back. This was after Paraquat Earth band broke up, and I says to him why don’t we form a band with these kids from The Wasted and Lincoln Money Shot and Jamboyz an other young whippersnappin noisemakers?

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“Course I made the first seven inch Jackson released on Flipped Out Records (though back then bein a DJ was too avante garde), so Jackson says ‘yeah Think, let’s get this shit together and make history. We gonna be bigger than the Figgs!’ Then he cuts me out of the band, pretty soon he cuts the other guys out and keeps changing the lineup Built to Spill style. You ever heard of Built to Spill? Course not, long before your time.

“Point is, whole thing was my idea. And this little punk Scott, can’t be more ‘n 23-24, don’t know shit about shit even though he’s the one everyone’s reading. So I tell him, you let me tell it like it is. I’ll learn you know-nothing kids.”

When asked for comment, Burnt Hills band leader Jackson states; “I have no fucking clue who ‘DJ Think Noise’ is. Never heard of or seen this guy in my life.”

DJ Think Noise retorts by asserting: “I need a ride to the VA. My niece says she’s gonna stop by with some cigarettes and scratchoffs today. I think it’s my birthday.”

Local musician pissed at fake blog’s popularity

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Local musician Scott Koenig is furious that his fake blog is the most significant thing he’s ever done.

“I’ve been playing in bands around the area, writing music, rehearsing, performing, and touring for over twenty years now. But making fun of my peers; this is what people pay attention to? That’s fucked up dude.

“In the first few weeks alone I’ve gotten thousands of hits. Meanwhile my band Fucking Christ’s new album on Bandcamp has gotten 2 downloads. And we have 5 band members!

So why is Koenig so pissed off about making people happy? What kind of asshole would..

“I’ve been around man. I started off in a band from Schenectady called Brown Cuts Neighbors. They kicked me out cause I wore a koala mask, and they thought that was just ‘too weird’.

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“Next I moved to Saratoga to join Dryer, but I quit once it became apparent that Hawaiian vampire Bob Carlton only wanted a second guitarist to drink my blood when he needed a boost.

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“In the early 2000s I joined Complicated Shirt, only to get booted for being too ‘1980’s punk not mid-seventies’.

“A few years later I was in Che Guevara T-Shirt for a brief spell, but I was kicked out cause I was ‘too good looking’ and ‘attracting girls to the shows’.

“Then I was in Casa Sleep (later rechristened Bare Mattress), but couldn’t keep up with the grueling 8 nights a week performing schedule.

“Moon Worship kicked me out for ‘bringing down their peppy jangle vibe’.

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“Next was Black Ships. I’m one of the guys in the gas masks in the photo. But I wouldn’t pony up the dough to pay the mall studio photo fee.

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“I didn’t even make it past audition for Further Unsound. They told me my ‘bass note progression was more of a mixolydian while we’re typically running an E-Minor cycle and also, you suck.’

“Most recently I got kicked out of Candy Ambulance for constantly ogling the bass player. Whatever dude. If he doesn’t want me drooling over his pecks, he shouldn’t take his shirt off.”

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When asked why he can’t just be happy that people think his blog is funny, he responds;

“I’m just trying to forward the punk cause man, which means stealing the time machine before George Carlin gets it and assasinating The Jam before they ruin punk rock. Also Jefferson Airplane. I really fuckin hate Jefferson Airplane. I mean ‘Marconi plays the mambo, listen to the radio’? What the fuck does that even mean?”

Another Dryer show, another deadly riot

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Alternative indie-rock band Dryer began their show last Saturday at the Putnam Den (which has the BEST sound in the area and should totally book my band) amiably as usual, but devolved into the all too frequent scene of utter mayhem and destruction the band’s become famous for lately.

After finishing their song ‘gonna beat all yall motherfuckers to death with a garden hoe’, singer/bass player Rachel Sunday announced: “I just want to thank all of you for coming out tonight, and to let you know how fabulous I’m feeling.”

“Well you may feel fabulous, but everyone knows that I look and sound fabulous.” retorted singer/guitarist Bob Carlton.

“Yeah whatever Bob. We all know that we nearly got signed to Atlantic because of how fucking fabulous I am.”

“Bullshit. We got signed because they found out I was a Hawaiian vampire!”

At this point drummer Joel Lilley pipes up from behind “There can only be one super fabulous member of this band, and we all know that’s me!”

“Shut the fuck up and play some music ya wankers!” comes a shout from the audience.

“Fuck you xxSteve! I knew I should’ve killed you when I shot you over a decade ago! I WILL DRINK YOUR POI!”

At this point everyone knows what’s going to happen next.

In an all too familiar scene, Lilley cracks the sticks and blasts into a break beat with his double kick drums to set the scene for a rumble. Carlton springs off the stage, wielding his guitar like an axe, hacking, breaking, bruising, biting. Sunday tilts her bass guitar like a lance, and spears at least 2 fans in the first run through. Utter chaos and carnage follow.

By the end of the night, 7 are dead and scores injured. The Putnam Den is in shambles, and all the liquor has been drank, stolen or broken. A good time is had by all.

Complicated Shirt: The most EXCELLENT authentic retro band EVER

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Complicated Shirt recently went on a most excellent adventure to prove they were the most authentically retro band ever. It was a tortuous route with some bogus detours, but it finally paid off.

“When we started this band we had one goal in mind; to become the most authentic band in the 21st century to sound like a mid nineties band that sounded like a late seventies punk rock band. Then we retrogressed further to an early nineties band that sounded like a mid seventies NYC proto-punk band.” claims Complicated Shirt lead singer/guitarist Drew Benton.

“So when Bare Mattress came out with his retro 80s dance pop casette, we were like, we got this. We’ll put out a vinyl record of our retro NYC 70s punk rock. But then we thought, that’s not far enough! What was the coolest retro thing to do in the mid-nineties? Put out a vinyl record. So we needed to be before that, say in the early nineties. But a proto-punk NYC record? That would need to be released before the Ramones in 76; before Marquee Moon and Blank Generation in 77.

“So the first thing we did was went back to the future, to steal the time machine from George Carlin before he gave it to Bill and Ted. Next, we took all the copies of our new record ‘This’ to the Village and St Mark’s Place in ’75 and snuck them on the shelves. Then of course we took a short detour to assasinate Billy Idol and thereby save punk rock. Not killing Billy Idol would be like not killing Hitler. Duh.

“When we got back, there were no extant copies of our record anywhere, but we’d been reviewed in Sniffin’ Glue magazine! Which means we are, definitively, the coolest most underground band EVER…

“Either that or it was all a dream and I still have a bunch of the new records. If you want to buy one e-mail me or go to Last Vestige.”