Mark Ryan isn’t really sure why you are reading this. Sure, Ryan has been a part of two beloved garage punk groups – first in The Reds and then later with The Marked Men, but his latest endeavor – Mind Spiders – started off with modest intentions. Ryan intended for the project to remain studio-bound, where he could explore and tackle genres he may not have dared to before with his previous groups.

But people do care and after hearing the self-titled debut from the band, it’s not really hard to see why. It just might be the best damn thing the man has done in his long and celebrated music career. Diverse is just one way to describe the album – which one moment goes from the spazzy power pop similar to The Marked Men to T. Rex-inspired rockers to even Spaceman 3-esque shoegaziness. And the best thing is that it all works flawlessly. Sprawling, fun, and one of the best things I’ve heard in 2011 so far.

I had a chance to talk with Mark over the phone recently, just a few days after the band played at SXSW 2011.

Were you thinking about doing The Mind Spiders record for a while?
While the Marked Men were going, I had been screwing around with side projects. I did this other thing briefly called The Crying Jags. There was at least one song I had with that band that I used with this [Mind Spiders] record. I knew it didn’t fit with The Marked Men.

Did you see it as a solo record?
The Mind Spiders started out as just a recording project. I didn’t really intend for it to be a band. After the first 7-inch came out, I had written a bunch of other songs. I know lot of people that play in other bands so I got them to record with me. That’s pretty much the extent of it and then all of the sudden we’re playing a bunch of shows.

With you playing more shows, the band has developed a consistent lineup. If you were to record another record, would you’d record with a full band again?
I’m going to try to record here in the next couple of months. I think the record will sound more like a band than a recording project. It’s gotten kind of ridiculous because there are six members. Two drummers, two guitar players including me [but] I’ve been playing synthesizer recently. It’s just hard because every member of the band has other projects going on. This isn’t going to be a full-time band. I’ve gotten the opportunity to play more. We did SXSW and we’re going to do the Mess-Around in Atlanta and Chaos in Tejas in May. I’m hoping to do more stuff.

Continue Reading

As we said below, Thursday is playing a huge show with Hot Water Music and Paint It Black at Terminal 5 in NYC this weekend. Along with all the excitement that comes with HWM’s return to the Big Apple, It’s also Thursday first official show in the city in nearly two years.

We talked to Geoff a few months ago, but I had a chance to talk with him recently about the show, the infamous Warped Tour 2006 incident in Long Island, and the new full-length. Stay tuned for all of that and the rest of my interview with Geoff on Monday. For now, read about his thoughts on the show this weekend.

Do you feel like this show is sort of your NYC comeback?

Geoff: It’s more about Hot Water Music playing. I love that band. Our first demo, we axed a song because the beginning of it was Blacktop Cadence and the end was Hot Water Music. We were like, ‘we can’t do this. This is too fucked up.’ It’s one thing to wear your influences on your sleeve. It’s another to take somebody’s song and pass it off as your own. [Laughing] This weekend, it doesn’t feel like [it's] about Thursday to me. [Hot Water Music is] back and I’m stoked about them playing again.

Photo Credit: Todd Pollock

“I wanted to make our Everything Sucks,” H2O lead singer Toby Morse said when describing the process of making their latest album, Nothing To Prove (Bridge Nine Records). While nearly ten years passed between those Descendents records, comparing the two makes sense. Seven years have passed since their last record, the much-discussed major label debut, GO. Think about that for a second. By music industry standards, that’s like being gone for a century.

Personally, I graduated high school and college in that time frame. All the bands that were banging out that mall-rocking pop punk back in 2001 have traded in their Dickies for dayglo hoodies and flat-brimmed baseball hats. Hell, the whole music industry is a different machine now. Ultimately though, through it all, H2O are still, as Morse describes, the “same old dudes” and their message will never change. Nothing To Prove is their testimony to that.

It’s been seven years since GO. Obviously, a lot has happened with you personally and the band along the way. That being said, what do you want the overall message of Nothing To Prove to be?

Toby: We’ve changed as people as far as getting older and having more responsibilities [but] we haven’t changed as people who still believe in the music that we were playing seven years ago. All the albums, the message and how we grew up into this music, it’s still instilled in us. We’ve done the indies and we’ve done the majors. We definitely paid our dues. It was a no pressure and fun record to make.
We all have other forms of incomes. Before it was a full time thing and now it’s not. We did the record in two and a half weeks. What do we have to lose at this point? We definitely wanted to make our best album. When the Descendents disappeared for a long time, they came back with Everything Sucks and that record was amazing. I wanted to make our Everything Sucks. A record that when you heard it, you’d be like ‘oh shit, these dudes still got it.’ It’s the most personal record [but] it’s just as raw and in your face as the first couple records. The last record we had a lot of money and a lot of time to make it. I wish we would have done it this way.

Read more after the jump.

Continue Reading

The Binary Code are the answer to New Jersey’s endless amount of shitty Bruce Springsteen and Bouncing Souls clones. They are a unique combination of hardcore and metal heaviness, with an almost jazz or concert-violinist technicality. Both brutal as fuck and incredibly concise and intricate at the same time, they are on a mission to put all those dayglo-wearing “metalheads” to shame.

Give me a brief history of The Binary Code.

Jesse Bartholomew [Guitarist]: It’s a long history as far as members go. We’re kind of like the Steely Dan of underground metal. We’ve had so many different members since we started back in 2004. Basically, I met a couple of dudes who wanted to play the same stuff I was into. I worked in a music store selling instruments, and the dudes came in and heard what I was playing, and we got to talking, and that was the beginning. I was trying out for their band, and the bassist ended up wanting to form our own band with me. We lost touch for like three months before we formed the Binary Code. I went to Florida for my mother’s wedding, and my grandfather back in New Jersey passed away the day my mom married. So I came home to the funeral, after the wedding, and got a hold of the bassist.

Read after the jump for more with The Binary Code.

Continue Reading

Think back to when you first discovered punk rock. What were some of the names and bands that first entered your vocabulary and ear drums? The Dead Kennedys, Bad Brains, The Misfits… of course. The list goes on and on. Excluding Henry Rollins from that class would be a crime. Through his work in Black Flag and Rollins Band, he’s inspired an uncountable number of people, along with his writing, radio, and spoken word career.

Of late, Rollins has left the band life behind and hopped back on the spoken word path. I got a chance to catch one of his performances at Brooklyn’s Warsaw that went down late last month. It was a blistering, three-hour marathon of conversations, ranging from Pakistan to his one-off performance with The Ruts in ’07. The topics were wide and Henry’s delivery, of course, was relentless. I mean, god damn, one sip of water after three hours of talking? What else would you expect?

I had a chance to talk with Rollins on the phone while he was in Athens, Georgia for a gig. We talked about his recent trip to Cape Town, South Africa, the two books he’s working on for ’08, and his thoughts on the upcoming presidential election.

I know you’ve been traveling around a lot lately with the tour. One of the stories I saw on the website that I thought was really interesting was your experience in Cape Town, South Africa. Can you expand on everything you experienced?

Henry: It was mind-blowing. I’ve been to Africa seven times and of all the trips there that was the one that really moved me the most. Unless you just sit in the hotel all day, you end up seeing things that are very moving and extremely beautiful, very sad and sometimes scary. Life and death is so in your face there. It’s very real. In South Africa, what was interesting and different than Egypt or Morocco was the white/black dynamic. There’s a lot of white people, there’s a lot of black people. I wasn’t use to seeing so many white neighborhoods in Africa. The apartheid, which is in the past, is still a topic. You can’t not talk about it. What I saw was a lot of people dealing with the aftermath of it. Trying to get move on past it and get on to what the new chapter is going to be. That was the fascinating thing. The white and black people that I met were working together to move forward. To see these people really wanting to make tomorrow different. I ended up walking around in these townships, basically a government run zone. You see a whole lot of people living in a small space. Basically, the dorm room from hell. People having to make due in very close proximity to each other. 1,000 people, four toilets. Aids clinic, 150 patients a day, one doctor. They realize as long as they stick together and have a strong sense of community and teach their children right. If they let it slide then what? It was very hard to see some of the stuff but it was inspiring to see how they were dealing with it. I met some of the strongest people I’ve ever met like these doctors treating AIDS and HIV patients. It’s the most grueling work and they are saving lives. I don’t know what their off-time is like. This one woman who worked there, she’d been there for eleven years. Teenage, HIV- positive moms with their kids walk by you. ‘Wow, this is very real.’ We are not joking around. In America these days, we are given some wiggle room. It’s not really in your face like it is in South Africa. Walk into a room full of HIV-positive people waiting for treatment. It’s an amazing facility, it’s immaculate and people get tremendous care, but there’s a lot of them. That’s what I encountered. The audiences, primarily white people, [were] incredible audiences. I can’t wait to go back there. The show sold out really quickly. The promoter said we could do these shows tomorrow night and we’d sell them out again. We are looking at trying to get me back out there sooner or later. I’d love to put South Africa on my tour.

Read more of my interview with Henry Rollins after the jump.

Continue Reading