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These five guys from California run their band according to the five pillars of Delta Spirituality. Check out the pillars on their official site (scroll all the way to the bottom). My favorite pillar is number V. “Pop is not the enemy”. I have a whole rant about pretentious bands, but they put it way better than I do: “No one was ever original by trying to be original… They just end up weird and self indulgent.” Hear, hear! They’ve been supporting Cold War Kids on their US tour, maybe they’ll tag along when they come our way in three months. Meanwhile I’ll be praying to the Gods of Gig to make it so.

Delta Spirit play socially conscious (not preachy!) indie pop with a southern twang. All four songs on their myspace are absolute gems and they’re so different that it’s hard to pin-point what direction they’re going in. “Children” is just beautiful, it starts with a steady low banging of a single drum, when the other instruments chime in the song seems to rise and rise to something untouchable. I’ve listened to it a couple of times now and it just keeps getting better and better. “Street Walker” is a dancy pop song, it makes me want to bust a move and it sounds happy at a first listen, but then I found out it’s about child sex slavery. Which is when I found out I’m not comfortable twisting the night away on a song about abused children, but it’s a great, catchy song. My favorite song on their myspace is “Crippler King”. It begs to be played in a big barn where all good rockabilly tunes sound best.

There are versions by a number of fantastic artists, but “Three Cool Cats” may be the silliest song of all time. I never knew the song was originally done by The Coasters, but that makes perfect sense. It’s a song that speaks for itself, so I’ll just leave you with these two very different, but equally wonderful, covers of this Poptastic classic.

   The Beatles - Three Cool Cats
   The 5.6.7.8’s - Three Cool Chicks

2006 is a tiny speck on the horizon now, but the award season celebrating the best of last year has just started, so as far as I’m concerned this list is right on time and not two months late. Here are the songs that shaped the year by bands that aren’t in our Favorite Albums List. It’s a mouthful, but otherwise this already long list would be even longer. They’re in random order and every song on it is an essential part of 100b’s 2006 experience, but we think that The Futureheads’ “Skip To The End” was the single of the year for sure. We first heard them play it live in April last year and we loved it straight away. You know a song is good when you remember it after only hearing it once.

Ever seen that horror movie starring Peter Weller as Bart Hughes and a giant rat? It’s awesome. It’s called Of Unknown Origin, but they might as well have just called it Big Killer Rat In An Appartment, like with Snakes on A Plane you’ll at least know what you’re getting before the movie even starts. Check out the excellent trailer here. I like the line “If it doesn’t kill them, it will scare them to death.” I get this image of a rat jumping out of a closet yelling BOO.

Peter’s character is obsessed with an unusually big and crafty rat in his appartment like it’s the Moby Dick to his Ahab. I was thinking about this movie while we were having a verbal smack down with the helpdesk people of a certain shitty provider, I was internetless and pissed and I remember thinking ‘now i know how Bart Hughes felt’. Anyway, he thrashes the appartment completely trying to get to the gigantic rodent. In the end his wife comes home and he’s sitting in the middle of a war zone, so she asks him what the hell happened, and he says “I had a party”. Classic.

I always thought this movie would make a great low-budget play; all you need is one set, Peter Weller and a well trained dog wearing a rat costume. Sadly, the rat bites the big one in the end. I’m sorry I spoiled the ending for you, but the movie is really about the battle not the outcome. If the big rat in the movie had won, this is the song he would play with his rat friends while he was bragging about how he snuffed out that punk from Robocop. Which makes me wonder how a rat would kill a guy, other then giving him a bad case of the plague …

   The Rats - Rat’s Revenge part 2

Ok i’m in a mega hurry, but this band deserves an epic post, so check em out! They sound like The Futureheads and Stellastarr* doing the Arcade Fire. They have a beautiful big sound with excellent harmonies. Listen to their songs on myspace. Lovely.

Hello world! I’m finally back in the world of digitalia, I won’t even start to tell you how crazy like a Bald Britney certain helpdesks and internet providers have made me this last month, but damn them all to the fiery pits of hell, is all I’m saying. Ok, now that that’s out of the way I want to say how impressed I am at how The Great And Powerful Bean has managed to move from the wretched blogger and keep up 100b so beautifully for so long.

On to greener and poppier pastures! Remember the wonderful year of 1982? Yeah me either, but I do remember this excellent song by the two Brummie sets of brothers of Musical Youth. I always wondered what a dutchie was, and apparently it’s a Dutch oven. Why then do we have to “pass it from the left hand side”?

Well, the boys and their target audience were too young to be singing about weed or ganja or mary jane or grass or whatever we’re calling it now, so they changed the words of The Mighty Diamonds’s song “Pass The Kouchie” - which happens to be about sharing a blunt with your friends, to something less intoxicating and more kid friendly. Since it’s a true Poptastic song it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t make much sense, it’s all about squeezing the most out of a catchy tune and a cute bunch of kids.

Oh and yes, kouchie means marijuana … if you, like me, thought it meant something more naughty then get your head out of the gutter you dirty, dirty, gutter head.

Only five days to go!

   The Decemberists - My Mother Was A Chinese Trapeze Artist

A little less than a year ago, I was having a poke around on the Tapes ‘n Tapes site, looking for something or other, and saw that they were touring with some band called Cold War Kids. (Don’t worry, I’m not going to start gushing about CWK again.) As we all know, I ended up loving them. So when I got an email from the Tapes ‘n Tapes mailing list this week with names of bands they’ll be touring with this year, I thought I better check them out. Ladyhawk sounds interesting, but I couldn’t get their myspace page to play anything (don’t worry, I’m not going to start ranting about how much I hate myspace) and they’ve been around too long to count for New Band Day anyway.

Harlem Shakes, on the other hand, just released their first EP and I even like them! Like I said last week, it’s difficult finding a band that you’re excited about every single week, but these guys are pretty cool, especially considering “Burning Birthdays” is their first release. They have an indie 50s-pop thing going on here and there, which makes me happy. A wee bit like what Special Needs were doing before they imploded. You can listen to a couple of tracks off “Burning Birthdays” over at (sigh) their myspace page and a few other songs as well - I liked “Carpetbaggers” right away, so make sure not to miss that one. Or you could download the whole EP from emusic, which is where I’m headed right now.

I’m always so excited to find out that a now established actor released some crappy album in the past. So just imagine how happy I was to see that one of emusic’s recently ripped albums is John Travolta’s Can’t Let You Go from 1977! I guess it makes sense that John Travolta would have released some albums around the whole Grease period, but I never thought about it before. Anyway, I picked this track because it sounded really ridiculous and it was definitely the right choice. I think I might have to download this whole album, this is the awesomest thing ever.

But did you know that (according to the wikipedia) John Travolta also released an album called The Road to Freedom in 1986, which is apparently a Scientology album. I have to wonder what makes an album Scientological exactly…

   John Travolta - Easy Evil

A few days ago, Tam and I went to the most amazing concert we’ve been to in a very, very long time. I know I say that kind of thing all the time, so this may be a little like the girl who cried awesome, but this really was incredible: Elvis Perkins and Dearland, Cold War Kids, AND Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. It was a huge event in our heads even before it happened and it ended up being the kind of evening that we’ll talk about for years.

Of course, it started off with panic and rushing - that’s how these things always go, isn’t it? I live about an hour away from Amsterdam and rely on public transportation to get me anywhere. But that morning, before I had even had any coffee, the Dutch newspapers were already reporting that half of all trains were pre-emptively cancelled due to severe snow warnings. I started having flashbacks of that day back in 2005 when a freak snowstorm in March kept us from seeing Adam Green. So I grabbed my stuff and left hours earlier than I’d normally need to, just to be sure I wouldn’t be stranded in my concert-less house.

We actually missed the very beginning of Elvis Perkins’ set, which was disappointing, because I enjoyed so much what we did get to hear. Perkins is a charming performer, and his slightly madcap band Dearland made everything just a little zany and exciting. Being joined by Alec Ounsworth didn’t hurt anything, either. “While You Were Sleeping” is my favorite Elvis Perkins song, at least until his album is released later this month, but, sadly, we must’ve missed it on the night.

   Elvis Perkins - While You Were Sleeping

We’ve written about Cold War Kids so many times, there’s probably not much more to say. They were the main reason this show was so exciting for us, as much as we love the other two bands, and they didn’t let us down. I had actually worried that I’d built it up too much beforehand and that it wouldn’t be able to live up to my expectations. I understand that some people have to hate Cold War Kids (but that’s for another post) but that’s fine - more for me. CWK are most definitely my favorite of the recent batch of new bands, and in my opinion they beat out a lot of the ones who came before. Twice we’ve seen them play to audiences who didn’t know them, and both times they started out with a lukewarm response and left the stage to deafening applause. In all the concerts we’ve gone to, I’ve never seen any other band win over a crowd the way they do, with no fancy tricks or witty remarks - just their music. The real highlight of the whole evening was CWK joined by Elvis Perkins and members of Dearland playing Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come”, one of the most beautiful moments I’ve ever had the pleasure of witnessing. I hope they release it as a b-side one day, but until then, here’s another (from their “We Used To Vacation” EP) which closed their set.

   Cold War Kids - Quiet, Please!

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah were, of course, as fantastic and fun as you’d expect. We’d seen them before so we knew we wouldn’t be let down. It seemed that a lot of the audience didn’t have Some Loud Thunder yet, and to say they appreciated the band playing songs from their debut album would be a serious understatement. But to me, the best part of their set was “Satan Said Dance”, during which little pockets of people all over the room shouted “Said Dance!” when needed, which made me (and the band, I think) very happy indeed.

   Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Satan Said Dance

Someone mentioned that this tour was about halfway over, so if you still have a chance to get tickets for a show near you, grab some while you can. You’ll have a wonderful time, I promise.

Oh, and the snow turned out to be a big fat nothing. It had stopped by time we got to the venue and melted by the time we went home. Of course.

I’m running a day late with New Band Day and, just to warn you, this is going to be a cheat post anyway. I didn’t do this last night because, frankly, I didn’t really have anyone to write about. With Tam internet-less, it’s hard having someone new (who I’m actually excited about) to write about every week! I’ve been doing some New Band research this week, but I haven’t listened to anything enough yet to know if I should recommend it.

So, I’m just going to link to a blog I’m fond of, Keep Hope Inside and the fantastic three-part feature he did on new bands for 2007. Some of the mp3 links have expired by now, but Mr. K has written descriptions for each band he’s listed. That should be enough to inspire you to do further searching if anyone sounds interesting to you. So rather than me going through his list and telling you about what I liked, why not just have a look for yourself?

Keep Hope Inside: Bands I Want To Namedrop Because They Will Become Big In 2007 - Part One

Part Two

Part Three

1. Spending all day watching the original Star Wars trilogy (no fancy new graphics or edits, the old-school theatrical release) and doing nothing but that is Good. You should try it.

2. Princess Leia has a very dodgy accent (perhaps trying to sound posh, maybe English, it’s hard to say exactly what she was going for) through about half of A New Hope. It never resurfaces throughout the rest of the series, or at least not that I noticed. How did the people in charge not notice that?

3. Non-human creatures rarely speak English, but they all seem to understand it.

4. While many people think the Ewoks are crap, at least they have spears and stuff and helped beat down the Storm Troopers. That alone makes them at least ten thousand times more acceptable than Jar-Jar Binks.

5. It’s totally un-cool that I gave my Ewok Village Action Playset away when I was too old for it. That thing was badass and I would display it proudly if I still had it now. When aDawgg and I would play together when I was little, the G.I. Joes would come attack the treehouse, but the Ewoks were crafty and would always win. Or at least, that’s how I remember it.

6. The Darth Vader theme will be stuck in your head for days:

   Star Wars - The Imperial March (Darth Vader Theme)

Sometimes you know you’re going to have one of the those days or weeks the equivalent of a Championship Fight or shady warehouse bareknuckle brawl. When those times roll around (and they will if they haven’t yet), you need to be on your game. Pumped up. Ready to roll, rough and ready. That’s when you need a Boxing Anthem.

Boxing Anthems mentally prepare you for the challenge. Imagine walking into the arena. The cheers for you or jeers against that will focus your energy, calm the nerves, feed the fire down in your belly.

For me, Earl Simmons, aka DMX, fits the bill. While I enjoy DMX, own three of his six albums, and plan on eventually rounding out the catalogue, he never really challenges standard Slangin-n-Cappin-n-Bitches hip-hop. Which is fine. I’m not making a judgement. I don’t think music always has to have a mission or purpose. Sometimes it’s just about the feeling it gives you. And for this reason a few DMX songs are on my Boxing Anthems soundtrack.

And for me, at least, when I close the door on the way to work and need to know I just gotta school these punks ass cheetos nothing feeds that fire like the heavy bass, horns, and growl of “X Gon Give It To Ya” off Grand Champ.

If the only thing you cats did was came out to play, stay out my way. Muthafu … Hit it with full strength … You against me. Me against you. Whatever. Whenever. What the fuck you gonna do?

That what I’m talking about. Grrr.

   DMX - X Gon Give It To Ya