Pay what you want

I received an email today from Equal Vision Records stating This Time Next Year’s album was available on ‘pay what you want’ terms. In the label’s own words, “Equal Vision Records & This Time Next Year have introduced a new system to give music to anyone who is willing to listen. Fans can “choose your own price” – from $0 to $1,000,000 it is it up to the fan to decide what to pay for the music. Fans also have options in what types of files to download – mp3, AAC, FLAC, or Apple Lossless – for those who are concerned about the quality, unlike other music download options. Additionally, the file previews aren’t limited to :30 like iTunes or Amazon. Listeners can hear the full album in a number of places, including the download website.”

Now I appreciate this method isn’t new – Hell, under Punktastic Recordings I released the A Man Down CD two years ago as a physical pay what you want release – but it’s a major step forward for labels and bands to embrace new technologies. Radiohead – admittedly a massive band with an enormous fanbase – did very well out of releasing their last album in the same way. It will be very interesting to see what kind of impact this has on both the band and label and whether it will encourage EVR to do this kind of thing again. I think it’s the way forward – I’ve paid $2.50 for it which I appreciate isn’t all that much, but the likelihood is I would have downloaded it for free (or streamed it on Spotify) and if other people do the same as me label/band will scoop revenue they otherwise would not have.

Here’s hoping more people support this release and embrace the idea. And here’s hoping other labels follow suit.

To choose your own price & download: http://www.thistimenextyear.bandcamp.com Or to just listen to the full album:

AOL – http://music.aol.com/new-releases-full-cds/#/11
MySpace – http://www.myspace.com/thistimenextyear
PureVolume – http://www.purevolume.com/thistimenextyear

Cartel – where did it all go wrong?

I used to flippin’ well love Cartel. ‘Chroma’ is one of my favourite pop-punk records; Will’s vocals and lyrics just really strike a chord. But then somehow they disappeared up their own arse and after the disasterous ‘band in a bubble’ thing that MTV did, they wrote an abomination of an album (S/T) which bombed.

The band are back with a new album which is OK, but the first single is pretty good and well worth a listen. Video below. I’d be interested to hear what people think of the band and how they’ve turned out over the years…

Genius

Incase you needed a reason to be reminded of New Found Glory’s genius…

The Punktastic Sessions

We’ve posted the first in our new series called The Punktastic Sessions – these are exclusive acoustic performances recorded specifically for Punktastic. The first is from Welsh wonders Tiger Please and you can see that above. We have more on the way. If you want your band to get involved let me know!

Lostprophets are coming…

http://www.punktastic.com/andy/IDENTFINAL.mov

I can’t seem to actually get the embed to embed. So click on the link and over the next 10 weeks enjoy Ian and Lee talking to us about all things ‘Prophets…

I get by with a little help from my friends

I’m thinking of taking on a few new staffers at PT. I need a) gig reviewers, b) CD reviewers, c) interviewers and d) people who can source news items and post them between 9am – 5pm (ie when I’m busy on the day job).

If you’re interested in a) or b) you must be energetic, enthusiastic, like different styles of music and be prepared to listen to A LOT of shit bands. If you’re interested in c) you must be interesting and knowledgeable about different bands. If you’re interested in d) you need connections. I can copy and paste from absolutepunk already.

If you think you fit the bill email me at paul AT punktastic DOT com and explain why giving any relevant info you feel I should know. Don’t send me sample reviews. I don’t wanna read ‘em. I’m more interested in commitment and energy than how well you can write…

All Time Blow

Maybe I’m just getting old, but I can’t be the only one to be a little uncomfortable by the sound of members of All Time Low telling an audience of 14-year-old girls they’d quite like to ‘ejaculate’ all over them while on stage of their recent UK tour. Now I want to stress I’m not writing this blog because I’m upset the band managed to get away with the fact they got booted out of a hotel on the night of a planned Kingston DJ set and the police were called. Nor the fact that I think they’re really lame for flaking out of a scheduled appearance which fans had paid to see because ‘they’d eaten a big meal’. Nope, this is just a rant because I’m astonished, in this day and age, no-one else has picked up on it. I’m no prude. I’m not a member of Mothers Against Brokencyde either. But I do have a level of taste and decency. If I stood outside the school gates and accosted teenage girls and told them I wanted to do rude things to them the likelihood is I’d either a) be arrested, b) get a smack off someone’s dad or c) be labelled a nonce. Or maybe even all three. So how can a group of grown men not only get away with it, but seemingly be loved for it too? As all of Saturday evening’s “arrest” nonsense was going down ATL became a hot topic on Twitter. The sheer number of youngsters talking about them was staggering. I knew they were big in the scene, but i didn’t realise just how big. Nor did I realise just how young their fanbase was. I’ve heard and reviewed a couple of their records and thought they were reasonable at what they did. Good but never great. And lyrically they’re a clean-cut band singing songs about teen heartbreak that everyone can relate to.

So where’s the need for the on-stage filth? I spoke to a couple of friends who went to the ATL tour over the last two weeks and they were pretty surprised at some of the on-stage banter. They don’t exactly discourage underage girls from flashing and they (apparently, I wasn’t there) made more than the odd reference about wanting to ejaculate on the crowd, amongst other things. And yeah I know Bink 182 made jokes about fucking dogs and the like but this seems to be a little weirder. I just find it odd no-one else finds it weird. Of course they’re Kerrang’s premier band on the mag’s tour next year so don’t ever expect a bad word to be said about them there. Maybe someone can find an interview where someone’s asked them about their on-stage habits. i’d be interested to find out how they justify being, well, sick.

Moan, moan, piss, moan. Part 2.

Yesterday someone found this blog by searching for ‘cassadee pope moaning’.

Is she the new Hayley Williams?!

Statporn

I received an email the other day claiming PT was rubbish and past it and blah, blah, blah. Happens a lot. You get used to it. Anyway, I was looking at our webstats today for the first time in a while and there were some interesting stats:

* In the last 3 months page views are up 63%
* Our current user numbers are at their highest since December 2007.
* The vast majority of PT users are aged 18-34, male, not married, at work or college and have no children.
* People spend an average of 13.2 minutes on PT at any one time. Compare that to Kerrang.com (2mins), Rock-Sound.net (less than 2 mins), NME.com (3 and a bit minutes).
* PT has the 7,791 highest traffic rank in the UK.

For those who care, March 10, 2010 is Punktastic’s 10th birthday. I’d say that’s a fucking good run for something that’s, ahem, so shit.

Fall Out Boy – a 2005 viewpoint

In 2005 I was asked to write a Big Cheese magazine cover article on Fall Out Boy. It meant interviewing the band and people connected to them. I did so, it went on the front and I was a proud boy. I was clearing out some files on my laptop yesterday and re-discovered it. And as I haven’t blogged in a while thought I’d post it here. Bear in mind this is 4 years old and was written before ‘Infinity…’ came out. It’s a retrospective piece. I quite liked it…

They’ve sold over 1-million albums in America alone, had two videos top the TRL charts, headlined the Warped Tour, sold out a UK tour, partied with Jay-Z, started their own record label and clothing line and even won a MTV Music Award. If you’d have told Patrick Stump, Joe Trohman, Andy Hurley and Pete Wentz all of that on January 1, 2005, they would probably have laughed. Now Fall Out Boy are laughing for an entirely different reason. But buried deep beneath the fame, adulation and success the band formulated in 2005 is a darker secret of how the whole thing nearly fell apart before it had even begun.

Fall Out Boy grew out of suburban Chicago, spawned from the ashes of a series of hardcore bands. All four members were part of the mid-to-late 90s hardcore scene, between them featuring in bands such as Kill The Slavemaster, Birthright and Racetraitor. But it was bassist Pete Wentz who’s pre-FOB band Arma Angelus made the biggest impact initially. With early versions of the line-up including Rise Against’s Tim McIlrath, Arma eventually settled on Messrs Wentz (bass), Trohman (guitar), Hurley (drums) and Stump (guitars/vocals); the latter bringing a poppier edge to the band. A change in name later and Fall Out Boy was born. ‘Evening Out With Your Girlfriend’ was nine songs of basic pop-punk that sounds nowhere near as accomplished as the band circa 2005, but nonetheless Uprising Records pressed and released and FOB began to play across the country to two men and their proverbial dog.

But as the song writing picked up and new demos began to surface, so did the fans. And it wasn’t too long before the bigger labels started to take an interest – and John Janick, the co-owner of Florida’s Fueled By Ramen, snapped them up. “I decided to check out Fall Out Boy because their odd name grabbed my attention after I saw they were playing a couple of shows with one of our bands,” he revealed. “I searched online for music and found ‘Dead On Arrival’.  I was immediately blown away and I knew that I had to sign the band.  There are not many bands that I feel like I need sign after hearing one song, but Fall Out Boy was one of those bands.  I could tell there was something special in the music.  I reached out to some friends in Chicago and got the number for the band apartment where Pete, Patrick and Joe were living.  I spoke to everyone in the apartment that day and we clicked right away.  We had the same vision and I felt like we had been friends for a while.” ‘Take This To Your Grave’, their first record for FBR, was released in May 2003.

Chief lyricist Pete Wentz is seen by many to be the heartbeat of the band. A Morrissey for the MySpace generation, his lyrical prose is famed for its scything sarcasm and cutting wit. Metaphorically adept at wearing his heart on his sleeve, ‘Take This To Your Grave’ is perhaps one of the most personal records you could ever hear. Laced in 80s teen culture and littered with cult movie references, it’s a pop-punk record which is cool to like. It’s also about one girl. “I wish that I was as invisible as you make me feel,” they sing on ‘The Pros and Cons of Breathing’. They have song titles such as ‘The Patron Saint of Liars and Fakes’. And who can’t associate themselves to lines like “my heart is on my sleeve, wear it like a bruise or black eye, my badge, my witness, that means that I believed every single lie you said,” from ‘Chicago Is So Two Years Ago’? They’re the band you want to love, the band you yearn to win out and have a happy ending like the nerdy character from one of the 80s movies starring John Cusack that Wentz and co clearly worship.

But despite its melodic choruses and bouncy riffs, ‘Take This To Your Grave’ is a record that’s steeped in depression, anger and self-loathing. Scratch away at the surface of Pete’s lyrics and you find what appears to be a troubled young man. His heavily-tattooed torso and black eyeliner may hint otherwise, but the pressure leading up to their third full length (they also squeezed in an acoustic EP and DVD) nearly took its toll. Arriving for their Spring UK headlining tour, Fall Out Boy arrived minus their bassist. Although the official word was that he was ill, something was clearly awry. Interviewing Patrick within hours of the band arriving in the UK, he was quick to play down any major problems. “Pete couldn’t make this tour and I’m dying to see the stuff people write about it. Everything is mutated,” he revealed. But when pushed to find out exactly why he couldn’t make it, the singer became a little rattled. “Just some personal stuff he had to take care of,” he added. “He missed the flight and he will come out later.” Sadly Pete didn’t come out later – he missed the entire tour with ‘food poisoning’.

This later transpired to be a breakdown brought on by the stress of writing the new record. After struggling to cope with the pressure and settling for anxiety pills, two days before the start of the UK tour he ended up in hospital and then therapy. The rest of the band came over not knowing how their band mate was. Although now recovered, his almost daily rants on his online journal show an insight to a clearly distressed mind. “Sometimes it’s hard to look in the mirror and feel okay with the person looking back,” he wrote this summer, one of the many frequent self-deprecating posts made on the band’s own website. Another states: “I wave my hand side to side and mumble something about doing so-so. It’d almost be admirable, that is how good I’ve become at lying, if it wasn’t so pathetic.” Around the time of the UK tour he wrote: “In between all of the hooks and the screams – the right clothes and our eyes darkened just to the right shade – there is a boy who just doesn’t fit in. But if it weren’t for this place we have made, I don’t know where I would be.” And all this before their record had even been finished. Pete’s journal postings have become synonymous with a band famed for using the internet as a resource to help spread the word. So much so they even wrote a song called ‘I Liked You A Lot Better Before You Became A Fucking Myspace Whore’. Patrick added: “That song isn’t on the album but it’s had a lot of press. We recorded a demo but it won’t see the light of day. The title refers to some more of the negative things. It’s not about Myspace even, just frivolous people who talk about stuff. People they don’t know or rumours. Pete came up with that title because he was reading about stuff he apparently did. He was reading stuff that totally wasn’t true.” Pete added: “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet – most of all what we write on it.”

Eventually the band settled on 13 songs and the result of their labour was new album ‘From Under The Cork Tree’ – their first for Island Records. Released in the summer it not only sold by the bucketload, but catapulted them from internet heroes to America’s next big thing. The album name – like most things FOB – came from the brain of bassist Pete Wentz. Inspired by his favourite childhood book ‘The Story of Ferdinand’ by Munro Leaf, the story tells of a giant bull that sits under a cork tree and smells flowers instead of getting into the ring and battling a bullfighter. According to the heavily tattooed songwriter, it’s a metaphor for the underdog, and ‘following your own path and not doing what’s expected of you’. “‘From Under The Cork Tree’ is a child story about a bull and he’s the biggest toughest bull in the world but he doesn’t want to fight. He just likes to sit under his cork tree,” Patrick added. “We did it with Neal Avron who did Yellowcard and New Found Glory and he’s a lot more of a minimalist. Our last record was very thick and it has a certain sound, but Neal likes less is more. It’s not just thick, so it feels more like a band. We’re a much older band now so we are better. We can play better and that’s more evident. It’s got the big choruses. We know who we are; we didn’t want to do the interesting second record. We didn’t want to do the synth album. There’s a couple of things, maybe a chord change that’s a little different but we’re the same deal.” ‘From Under The Cork Tree’ is arguably my favourite record this year. It’s fun, tongue-in-cheek and equally sarcastic. But most of all it’s something I – and a million others – can associate with. Whether FOB are laughing at themselves with lines such as “we’re only good for the latest trend, we’re only good cause you can have almost famous friends,” or taking on the same old subject matters in tracks like ‘Dance, Dance’, it’s an album filled with catchy hooks and massive choruses and a band that not only believe in themselves, but they make you feel like they believe in you too.

And it was at this point where things started to take off. “There’s a tonne of hype about us in the scene or whatever, but we are on a major label now so they are pushing us to another scene as well,” Patrick said, talking about his band’s new-found status. “In the grand scheme of things no-one knows who we are, but in our scene we are way over-hyped. It’s good and bad at the same time. Being hyped isn’t the most fun experience. As a writer you just want to write, you don’t want to write as work. So, really I think that’s one of the reasons why this album took so long in the first place, just getting somewhere where we were inspired.” With a stint headlining the Warped Tour, and MTV showing their video every hour, copies of the new record flew from the shelves. “Warped is like a punk rock summer camp, it’s really humbling,” Patrick added. “Everybody, even the big bands, eat the same food. This whole punk thing, whatever we have, that’s where I see the best of it. Andy and I were eating one day and there’s Benji from Good Charlotte and Justin from Anti Flag and Hidden In Plain View all sitting together and it’s all familiar. It feels good to be there. It’s like the cub scouts.” Keeping fans entertained throughout the tour via his journals, Pete added: “Warped tour was fun, but since being home I remembered that showering and sleeping are fun too.” Of course the live experience is where the band is really at home. Energetic and enthusiastic, Joe and Pete are swirling, spinkicking monsters that swing their guitars round their heads more times than Chelsea sign multi-millionaire footballers. “I say never trust a band that won’t physically bleed for you onstage,” Pete added. “I’m not saying that we go onstage every night and bleed – but the potential is there. One night I got hit above my eye by Joe’s guitar and needed about six stitches. Blood was everywhere – the front row got absolutely covered. And my mom wasn’t happy when I got home – she had to wash my shirt!”

2005 was also the summer where Fall Out Boy became MTV darlings. The antler-inspired video for ‘Sugar We’re Going Down’ inched its way to number one on the channel’s TRL programme, while the high school prom pastiche of ‘Dance, Dance’ later followed suit. As thousands called every day to cement the band’s position on the charts, the suits and TV bigwigs twigged something was going down. That something came to a head in August when the band won the M2 award at the MTV Music Awards in Miami. “When we heard we were playing the VMAs we tried to come up with some hilarious stuff to do – like first we suggested that we throw a big party on stage while we play and have some live deer and maybe two tranvestites dressed up like Madonna and Britney Spears, kissing – MTV was like, ‘try again’,” Pete wrote in his online journal. “So we rented space suits from a movie company and planned to play in those and kind of just smash each other with our guitars.” And if winning an MTV award isn’t cool enough, hanging out with Jay-Z and his current beau Beyonce Knowles at the after-show party is just an added bonus. Of course it wasn’t all hard work and no play, with FOB taking time out to record The Police’s classic ‘Roxanne’ for a compilation. “It’s a big song,” Patrick revealed. “The Police are such a weird band to cover. That’s the thing because so much of their stuff it’s the way his voice has a rasp and Andy Somers plays weird jazz chords. We wanted to make it a Fall Out Boy song and hope for the best. Basically we thought about it and we wanted to please the kids and ourselves and make it something we want to play. If our kids don’t know The Police, for whatever reason, we want them to go out and hear it. We decided the best we could do it was make it sound like us.”

Fueled By Ramen boss John Janick admits fame hasn’t got to the band. “Looking back everything has been amazing.  The band is where they are today because everyone involved worked very hard, the band toured non-stop, they wrote great music, and everyone in the band are amazing people.  Today I still talk to the band daily and we have Decaydance Records with Pete.” Fall Out Boy return to the UK in January for a string of sold out shows. Many were upgraded to bigger venues just days after tickets went on sale. FOB are bringing their Fueled By Ramen buddies in Gym Class Heroes with them after Patrick revealed he sang on the rap heroes latest record. “Pete heard their demo and loved it. We played shows with them and they’re the coolest guys. We became friends and it was a thing where they had this song and it had a sample in it. They had the rights but they didn’t have the rights to the recording. They asked me to sing it and we stayed up late and hammered it out. I love the fact they let me do it.” The band then go back on tour in the US before making plans to start album number four. With rumours surfacing about r ‘n’ b mogul Babyface handling production duties, it seems literally anything could happen in the FOB camp. Pete added: “Me and Patrick have been writing a bunch of new songs already. The first song we have written so far is called ‘You can’t spell star without A & R’. Truth is, Fall Out Boy already have stars in their eyes.