A little bit short on time today, so I’ll make this quick.
I talked about Brendan Kelly, one of the guys from The Lawerence Arms yesterday. However, my first encounter with his music was through the band Slapstick who had a song on the Misfits of Ska CD (which I wrote about back in April). I included that song (still my favorite of his song to this day) then, but here it is again in case you’re too lazy to click on two links:
I never got ahold of other Slapstick stuff until after they had already broken up, but fortunately pretty much everything they did is compiled on a self-titled CD. A couple more from there that I really enjoy
There’s A Metal Head In The Parking Lot
A great song about getting old that really shows off the horns. Oh how I sometimes wish I could just be a ska-kid again!
Almost Punk Enough
This one isn’t really one of my favorites by them, but I thought I’d include it because it’s fairly representative of a lot of their other songs, and also because it gives me another chance to remember how funny it was to listen to kids in my high school snottily say things like “I’m so much more punk than you are!” Completely ridiculous…
After Slapstick broke up, the intermediate space between them and The Lawrence Arms was filled by my least favorite incarnation of the Brendan Kelly Experience, but still a band with a few fine moments: The Broadways. Its members include not only Brendan Kelly, but also the trumpet player from Slapstick, Dan Hanaway. However, they also paved the way for the future by uniting Kelly and future Lawrence Arms-mate Chris McCaughan.
On the whole, I think the decision to break up and form the Lawrence Arms was probably a wise one. The newer incarnation retains much of what made The Broadways good, but feels a lot stronger musically and a little less heavy-handed in its politics. If you really like their other bands, you’ll probably like the Broadways, too, but if you’re not a huge fan, you can probably skip them. Here’s one track I quite like, though.
Red Line
One other thing: my iPod is kind of freaking out. It got plugged into a Windows computer for a few seconds and now is having some kind of midlife existential crisis or something as it struggles to remember that it’s actually formatted for a Mac. I keep trying to install the newest iPod update and it keeps refusing to do so. I think I may need to reformat it, which is a pain since I’m using it to store a bunch of files that won’t fit on my computer. Very annoying…