We’re back! Thank you to everyone who helped us out on our tour with the Woolen Men. It was a blast! Every show we played was the best show we had played in that place, and we played a lot of places we had never been. We took a lot of photos that you can check out here.
To commemorate the tour, Sleeping Giant Glossolalia released our Split 7″ with The Woolen Men! It has our new song “Headhunting” b/w “Excess.” Woolen Men’s side has “Deaf Americans” and cover of “Frozen Car” by The Terminals.
SGG is also carrying our Flexi-Book EP, which is officially out today (so say SPIN and CMJ). If you just want the download code, rather than 10 pages of original art and a book you can play on your turntable, the MP3s are available from digital spots like Spotify, Amazon, eMusic, iTunes, Bandcamp and our fave the FMA.
The Flexi-Book is also available at these fine shops that we visited during our tour (after the jump): Continue Reading →
All of these shows are with The Woolen Men, our PDX tour buds and a fellow 3-piece. Their new tour tape, Dog Years LP, and debut for Woodsist all rule. These guys just keep getting better and we’re not only looking forward to getting in the van with ’em, but we’re also very excited about our split 7″ on Sleeping Giant Glossolalia…more on that soon!
:: MUSIC VIDEO ::
A group of imaginative 2nd-6th graders wrote, directed and starred in this video for “Frozen Egg,” one of the songs off the Flexi-Book EP. It was a project of the Inventgenuity after-school program in Brooklyn, where Jeff is a teacher. They have amazing workshops where young people solder circuits for DIY light and sound gadgets, create their own video games & custom controllers, learn carpentry with power tools, stop-motion animation, physical computing with Arduino, printmaking, building boogie boards, praxinoscopes, puppets, alarm clocks and more…kids these days are pretty amazing! The storyline that Cougar, Max, Amelia, Gigi, Warren and Isabel came up with includes time travel, zombies, procreation, and apocalypse. East Village Radio picked it up and we wanted to post it here, too!
Lame Drivers hit the road again with our PDX buds The Woolen Men, just like we did last summer, except this time with vinyl! We’ve got our Flexi-Booksalmostready! The Woolen Men have released an excellent Dog Years LP, and they have a new LP coming out on Woodsist. We’re both doing a split 7″ on SGG. Here are the dates:
If there’s a spot you think you can help us out with a place to play/stay or band to play with, we’d be so psyched. But pretty much all of the TBA’s are coming together, just not confirmed. We’ve never planned something this far in advance before and it definitely helps! Hope to see you soon.
This is a track from our forthcoming Flexi-Disc EP. Originally we’d planned five flexi postcards, but our Kickstarter exceeded the goal so we’re realizing our dream of a Flexi-Book that you can play on your turntable like this:
The Flexi-Book format is inspired by a National Geographic guide to bird sounds, and it sounds fantastic—we’ve had the Group Flex from Castle Face on heavy rotation. We’ve been working on extra songs, more handmade artwork, and enough copies to distribute around the world. We’re at the mastering stage and they should be ready within the next month.
Super fans will find a demo version of “Frozen Egg†on the Eureka California tape amidst our digital archive of every recording we have ever made, along with lots of other song ideas that we are developing thanks to your support. We’ve been making the most of our budget by doing some studio recordings with Matt Tong, JZ Barrell, and Sammy Bananas, along with home recording at Rad Town. We have 17 new songs written for our debut LP, a bunch of sessions coming up in January, and we are psyched for what’s to come.
While preparing the Flexi EP and Debut LP, we’re also got our hands full with additional Kickstarter rewards like the Covers EP and the Digital Archive of every recording we have ever made (for Super LD Fans). Meanwhile, there have been some outside distractions beyond the day-to-day: Jason was shipped off to Australia for a Home Blitz tour, he and Jeff have been doing multimedia work for Piehole productions (expect the Mann Ist Mann studio album soon—music by J. Sigal, lyrics by B. Brecht), Joe got engaged (during band practice no less!), and a few of the recording dates Matt Tong had set aside for us between Bloc Party tours were derailed by Hurricane Sandy. We don’t want to compromise the quality of the releases that our backers have made possible, so we hope you’ll appreciate that we’re not going to rush things.
You can order a Lame Drivers Flexi Disc EP here, and they should be ready in early January. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy “Frozen Egg” and feel free to share the mp3!
It has never been a more exciting time to be a Lame Driver. We are incredibly grateful, humbled, overwhelmed and above all inspired by your support. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
In the meantime, we’re going through our tapes and harddrives to compile digital copies of every recording we’ve ever made (for the Super Fans). There’s a lot that has never seen the light of day. But there’s also a lot of stuff that is already up for free download at our discography. If you haven’t already found ’em, the Captain Amazing EP, the Let Them Eat Tape, and the Demoverse Cassette are all free to share. Same goes for the Cruisin’ Classics sampler, which is like a lame drivers crash course with a few songs from each of those releases plus a bunch from other sources.
Of course we’re mostly psyched about the new stuff right now. Stay tuned as we realize our lame vision, made possible by you!
Lame Drivers spent a bunch of days on the road this summer with our PDX pals the Woolen Men. We played at least one show every day, and took photos along the way of the bugs we saw, the slaw we ate, the couches we slept on, the bands we played with, the people we met, the vehicles we passed by on the road and on and on.
We could not document everything. There are many moments that will only exist in our minds and in the stories we’ll have to tell you later. But thanks to my obsession with instagram (@therewasaguy), Alex’s occasional flickr-ing, and our super photographer friends like M. Elizabeth Hershey (–> live pics from Bloomington below), there are a bunch of photos. We’re posting them here as a time capsule to aid our own memories, and perhaps as entertainment for you. There is some partial nudity. We’ve got the West Coast (Aug 17-24) photos first, then East Coast (Jul 18-29), each in roughly chronological order…
It’s a free download also featuring Big Troubles, Cloud Nothings, Sore Eros, Metal Rouge, Cursillistas, many more great bands and tracks, we were psyched to be part of this comp!!
Working Song has been featured on a couple mixes at the Free Music Archive, including this one called “Go To Work You Jerk!” compiled by the awesome Katya-Oddio (Oddio Overplay).
Back from tour, but still very much in tour/booking mode.
So when we heard that one of our favorite bands, Austin TX’s Dikes of Holland, had their Brooklyn and Philly shows both fall thru, we had to do something. Together we managed to pull off this show at Muchmore’s, a new spot in Williamsburg, with Cool Serbia, Freecare, and Chicago’s Paranoid Shart (photos in a gallery below, video after the jump). Many thanks to all of the bands for playing and to Adam at Muchmore’s for being such a rad host.
Unfortunately I had to leave early to broadcast the Dikes of Holland session I’d taped on Sunday for Talk’s Cheap (when I found out about their shows being cancelled). Click here for the WFMU archive with mp3s + video comin’ soon. It was a fun radio show with special guest Sleeping Giant Mike selecting some rad cassettes out of the new bin.
Click any of the photos below to view a gallery of 27 photos by Dylan Johnson
photos by Dylan Johnson — click an image to view the full gallery
If you missed us last night cuz of the short notice and early opening set, we have more local shows coming up at Death By Audio on Monday and Cake Shop on Tuesday with great bands from NY (Hippy, Island Twins), Chicago (The Funs, Coffin Ships), and Australia (Deep Heat). We’ll also play first at these shows, because we are Lame.
It was pretty surreal to play a show at Eureka CA’s Little Red Lion last night while this jukebox animation flashed to the side of the stage. Never before have we been so clearly up against “Millions of Songs,” with our set of live music in between Humboldt’s premier cosmic rock band Scotch Wiggly (featuring spooky theremin on mega-jam “Too Far Out”) and Arcata’s basement heroes The Wild Lungs.
But between the band’s sets, the jukebox stared out silent. The bartender didn’t have an iPod and coins stayed firmly in pockets, uninterested in those Millions of Songs (other than one curious spin of the new No Doubt song).
Instead, those quarters got together and fueled Lame Drivers’ quest to record our own songs when people put ’em towards the west coast edition of Cruisin’ Classics. Some lucky audience members also picked up the last copies of our split tape with (here it comes…) the band Eureka California, who live thousands of miles away in Athens, GA, but proudly take their name from the very town we were in! Dirty Pillows Recs might have a few more copies of the split.
We’re spreading the word here in parts of the country where nobody had ever heard of Lame Drivers. We’ve played with great bands every step of the way, and there have been a few folks in the audience each night telling us to come back so that they can set up something at their house, club, pizza palace, or wherever it is the Lame Kids of the Future are sure to be.
We’re laying the groundwork for the future of the band right now. The tour is paving a path, and your kickstarter backing puts us well on our way towards recording a few of our own Millions of Songs.
To commemorate the tour, Sleeping Giant Glossolalia released our Split 7″ with The Woolen Men! It has our new song “Headhunting” b/w “Excess.” Woolen Men’s side has “Deaf Americans” and cover of “Frozen Car” by The Terminals.
