self-described

we're a long way from cassette trading, dual-deck dubbed demos, and mixtapes... for better and worse, a band doesn't self-launch on the tape underground just by being available and free, anymore-- every band is available online now, and you can listen to pretty much everyone for free. The downside of this is that there is so much Noise in the line, it can be hard to discern a Signal (the upside, of course, is: hey, new music!).

The trick, now, is to get people listening, and that generally means describing a band engagingly enough to warrant a listen... which I thought was going to be easy, because ubik. is a pretty unique band, and the songs tend to be fairly different from anything I've stumbled upon.

Unfortunately, every band in the world describes themselves as "unique." The writeup from the emo band that sounds like they belong on a mid-90's teen sex romp soundtrack call themselves unique, the white-blues lead guy playing nothing but pentatonic minor scales over I-IV-Vs calls himself unique, the heavy rock band that really wants to be Tool call themselves unique. These bands bore me to tears simply because they really do sound like every other mediocre entry in their genre, are nowhere near unique... but I don't think anyone wants to describe themselves as sounding like everyone else.

So we've given up on self description, mostly-- it seems to be a futile effort. People have compared us to everyone from King Crimson to Rage Against the Machine. Michelle gets comparisons ranging from Karen Crisis to Bjork (though she sounds nothing like Bjork, she has black hair and a small nose, and that seems to be enough similarity for a lot of people... music be damned).

We've taken up our own genre: psy-prog drift core. We actually asked people to name our genre, and the most intelligent response we got was someone telling us that we are, in fact, a rock band... which is pretty much true, but telling a would-be listener that we're a rock band doesn't tell that listener anything: it could mean anything from The Beatles to Soul Coughing.

How people describe us is a whole other phenomenon. Everything from funk to metal gets thrown at us (seriously? funk?), though psychedelic and progressive get thrown in there often enough. A recent show billed us as Am-Rep inspired prog-metal... and though prog-metal always makes me think of Fate's Warning and Dream Theater, so be it-- but I don't even know what Am-Rep is. What does that even mean?

everett mkII

Strangely, though our Everett gigs are plenty successful (2 for 2)... man, these are difficult shows to like. I wished I'd had taken a video of stepping into that place, panning from the stage to the body of the bar (crowded with video poker and pool tables) as Sweet Home Alabama played on the overheads. It was sort of like playing the Blue Moon, but where the Blue Moon is Harley Davidson, this place was Nike (and really brightly lit).

I have to go back to the thought that this particular "girls rock" showcase was the ultimate venue to play Let's Hunt and Kill Gwen Stefani, but it was a very weird version of the Girls Rock motif (a theme that, so Michelle tells me, was irritating enough to her that she would have turned down the show had the booker told her that's the bill she was agreeing to play)-- the first band lost a member and played a short acoustic set. The other band's singer was too sick to play, so there was no Girl there to Rock... neither being any band's fault, really, but it's a good way to hamstring a show.