Mar fed up with schemes, went or looking for work.

Yawn, Acid. Use your freedoms wisely. Fans like me, who came of rock & roll age in the ‘70s and ‘80s, remember when a band like Yawn would not have existed without some strictures—song length, number of tangents a tune could take and still be considered a tune. Instead the band is able to throw all caution windward and do as they please. The fine points of this winding, ultimately winning, unpredictable “single” are not hard to pin down. Maybe it’s that title—“Acid”—but I can’t hear it without thinking of it as an album side on a ‘60s blues/prog-rock LP, and wondering what the distilled 45 single version would sound like.

Which one do you prefer? The one without the “the” is actually the second printing; both represent the first paperback edition published in 1956. Even though the “the” is unobtrusively lower-case, it must have rankled somebody—maybe O’Hara himself, since few of the titles of his many short stories and novels have more than three words in them.
One of O’Hara’s other short story collections is called And Other Stories. You could judge that either as a superfluous “And” or as a title so concise that the subtitle has overcome the need for a title.
In any case, this is what I call editing!

People always said they though Joey Joey of Prize Pig Blonde Wig was ripping off “Branston” Bickle of Happy Nephew with his elbows-akimbo stage mannerisms and pause-for-effect vocal delivery.
So when JJ had a fit and ditched on the band before a big outdoor show at Dead Eagles Pier, his fed-up bandmates said “What the Hell” and asked BB—whose initials also currently stand for Between Bands (but for the best reason; Happy Nephew bassist Merko just had a baby)—to sub for him.
“We were feeling lucky,” says guitarist and main songwriter Natty Nat. (This band’s all about alliteration.) Nat neatly corrects himself: “I mean, Joey leaving was NOT lucky. Joey’s great. It’s just that, uh, he DID leave…”
The show was spectacular. Not only did Branston learn a whole set of PPBW songs in record time, the band returned the favor by learning some of his favorite covers and even—with that on-hiatus band’s full approval—a couple of Happy Nephew treats. Several gig offers resulted due to the pier show, and the band suddenly finds itself busy for eight nights this month. One of those, of course, is Wednesday at the Bullfinch.
Joey, who’s dug a hole of furor and denial he’s having trouble crawling out of, was unavailable for comment. Branston is typically tightlipped. Humble and hardworking, he’s insisting this situation is “all about the music.” But we swear we could detect a fresh glee in how the humble, hardworking Bickle belted the Prize Pig Blonde Wig staple “New Man”—one of the band’s first originals, wrought four years ago and now prophetic:
From no man to new man
The showman is superhuman

Hard-Luck Boy and Champion Egg Spinner at the Bullfinch… Scattered Cards and Merko’s Grandson, double dose of dense Eurorawk at Hamilton’s… couple of days on the team at D’ollaire’s: First Day of School and Extra-Good Sunday…

Have no idea how to sell a novel, and need to do it in two weeks, before rent is due again.

The Horrors, Skying (Release date Aug. 9)
The Horrors apparently feel that they have to carry the banner for every British band of the ‘80s or ’90s that was ever any good. I’m hearing bits of Blur, Pop, Human League, Cure and even U2 here. Luckily The Horrors have a shtick of their own to add—that dark bass-bumped swirl of imminent menace which sets its own leisurely lion-in-waiting pace.

So instead of aping all those other bands, it sounds instead like they’re being slowly swallowed into a gaping maw of malevolent modern pop music. Even the higher-pitched, jumpier stuff like “Wild Eyed” is tense and forboding.

I got a jar of Smucker’s Apricot Preserves at Stop & Shop yesterday for $1.67 because, according to a little sign near the jar, “this product is being discontinued.”
Discontinuing APRICOTS? Smucker’s can no longer convince people to like APRICOTS?

Guess the jig is up.

The scene reels still from last week’s revelation that Art & Architecture are breaking up (shoddy architecture!) just as their debut album is set to be released on a major label. A&A is one of the few area bands to score such a career-making deal in years, and the only one of those to emerge from our own beloved Bullfinch/Hamilton’s subscene. (Other noted signees were bands which erupted from well-appointed suburban studio basements without ever playing live, or otherwise existing outside our scrappy clicque.)
We could digest the Art & Arch newsflash more readily if we could fathom the reasoning behind it. All four bands members have told us there’s no rancor, no “creative differences.” They can’t all be lying, because at least two of them were drunk enough to be exceedingly truthful when they told us.
The official, and so uncontested, explanation is that songwriter Pierce Lab has been accepted to grad school. Understandable—this is a college band, after all, and it’s as hard to get academia out of your system as it is music. But what Pierce pursued as an undergrad was Electrical Engineering. What he will be studying now, in Massachusetts, is… Music.
Do you really need a master’s when you have a signed band? Isn’t having a signed band the same as a diploma?
Know who’s hopping mad about this? Oh, of course you know. Ick, long-in-the-tooth frontman for The Deadaloos. Ick’s been this close to getting signed so many times that it’s all he thinks about, the only reason he says he’s still in the rock racket at all. The proud townie rails against ivory tower bands who think the real world spins around them. “They just don’t get it,” he sniffs. “They just don’t get it.” Not that he liked the band. But according to Ick, even the undeserving should be more grateful.
An Art & Architecture album, remastered from singles and demos the band made at Homer Studios, whose engineer Eddie Berens amy be the only one who can turn this situation into a resume-builder. Always looks good when your clients get signed off of work you did. But odds are that the album won’t go anywhere. It’s got a release date, but no major press (and, obviously, no tour) are being scheduled. It’ll just get burned off with a stack of other bands who got signed by mistake or misfortune. Albums like that clog our mailbox every spring, and we always wonder what the backstory of the burn-off was. This is the first one we’ve witnessed personally.

Chaste Adventures of Joseph and Piece of Foolishness, ideally matched wordy songwriters, at the Bullfinch… A Tragic Fantasy (aka Long Time Ago) and Poor Harold at Hamilton’s… Rim of the World, the unfortunately named European folk act, at D’ollaires with Angel Intrudes…

Up all night figuring whether I’m owed any money by the government.

Las Kellies, Kellies. Argentinian female trio doing that leisurely sparse Delta 5/Yello/Trio/Slits thing, but with a bit of rockabilly suspense added. I get quickly sick of the intentionally underproduced, but this stuff seems to understand its limitations and actually sounds fuller with all the bursts of silence and clean drumbeats. Lots of repetition, thumps and stray notes, really builds an atmosphere. The lyrics lend mystery to the exercise: the main line in “Keep the Horse” goes “To whom it may concern, to whom it may concern, to whom it may concern, to whom it may concern.” The bit “You may keep the horse” comes out as a quizzical afterthought. Color me enthralled by Kellies.