Andy Gapin

I went to see Night Birds last night in Philly. It was a good time. I took some photos.

These are a week and a half old, but I’m finally getting around to posting these photos from Shellac’s show at Union Transfer in Philly. The show was awesome, the venue is brand new and pretty cool.

Alright, so it’s been a little while since I’ve blogged. Oops. It’s probably going to be slow for the next month as well while final wedding stuff is coming together. Sorry about that, but I haven’t abandoned this thing, I promise!

Last weekend, I took a trip down to Baltimore for Insubordination Fest. This was my third time at the fest and it was probably the most fun year I’ve attended. There were no venue issues like last year. In fact, the venue, The Ottobar, couldn’t have been better for the weekend. I couldn’t come up with a complaint if I tried.

One of the highlights of the weekend was actually a joke band that was put together solely for the sake of the fest. And amazingly, the songs that were recorded a few days before the fest are actually better than most real bands’ stuff. Their set was a ton of fun.

But, that being said, the hands down best set of the weekend was from The Copyrights. So damn good. If you’re not already listening to this band, you should be.

I got myself into a little trouble with continuous mode on my camera though. I came home with almost 1400 photos from less 36 hours. Insane. I narrowed down to about 200 to edit and I narrowed down further to about 70 to post.

Enjoy.

Alright, so 90s indie-rock band Archers of Loaf is currently in the middle of a reunion tour. These things can really be hit or miss, but I figured that I’d give it a try since I’ve never seen them before. I’m not going to do a full review of the show, but for a bunch of guys in their 40s (?), they had an insane amount of energy. They really brought the show. They played everything I wanted to hear and played it well. They were tight and awesome. I was genuinely surprised and impressed. The only thing I could have done without would have been the two encores. Seriously, society as a whole needs to come together to abolish the concept of planned encores.

I’ve never been to the Music Hall of Williamsburg before, but it was very nice. We got there early and snagged a couple seats in the balcony and stayed there all night. It was a great spot to watch from, but combined with the ultra-low lighting, it was not a great spot to take photos from.

Here’s what I got.

Besides making terrible music, Jon Bon Jovi is also into saying just blatantly stupid things. Apparently, he blames Steve Jobs for the downfall of the music industry. His words:

Kids today have missed the whole experience of putting the headphones on, turning it up to 10, holding the jacket, closing their eyes and getting lost in an album; and the beauty of taking your allowance money and making a decision based on the jacket, not knowing what the record sounded like, and looking at a couple of still pictures and imagining it..

God, it was a magical, magical time…I hate to sound like an old man now, but I am, and you mark my words, in a generation from now people are going to say: ‘What happened?’ Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business.

Really, Jon? Really? I’m not here to glorify Steve Jobs, but let’s take a moment here and look at this. Steve Jobs did not invent digital music. Steve Jobs did not invent illegal file sharing and the pirating of music. Steve Jobs did not make shitty music.

What Steve did do was help put together a device for listening to music and a music store that gave the music industry a fighting chance against illegal downloading of music. The iTunes Store was the first online music store that caught on and part of the reason that it did catch on was because of the success of the iPod. Without iTunes making it, other online music stores would have almost definitely failed when competing against FREE.

When given the choice between paying for something or getting it free, most kids are going to go with free. Steve never gave the music away.

The problems with the music industry are many, but I think one of the biggest is the fact that their products suck. The mainstream music industry doesn’t put out records worth buying. They haven’t in a long time. Independent artists still get the concept of putting together albums, but the mainstream industry that complains to no end that they can’t sell records fails to understand that, with few exceptions, they aren’t producing anything worth buying.

Then, you have the fact that the music industry which very clearly is just pissed off about the fact that they lost their chance to profit from digital music by fighting against it for years. Instead of trying to embrace their fans, they treat(ed) like criminals. Had they not sued the pants off of their own customers and instead tried to get onboard with digital music right away, you’d be looking at a different story.

Pirating music and illegal downloading is definitely not good for the big name record labels, but it, nor Mr. Jobs, iPods, or iTunes, are the reason for the music industry being a mess. Shitty music and a big ol’ finger-to-the-fans is.

And let’s be real, the music business will never die, Jon, just YOUR music business. Music will always exist and people will always love it and enjoy it. Things may never be the same, but while music as a whole is still transforming a bit because of the internet and things haven’t really solidified yet, it will not go away. There will always be people that love making music and make great music purely for that reason.

If Jon Bon Jovi was really the idealist that he claims to be, he wouldn’t still be selling his music via the iTunes Store while making comments against its visionary.

Besides, when was the last time Bon Jovi was even a relevant artist anyway?

Some Epcot photos!

Last Friday, I took a ride up to Brooklyn for the first night of the Don Giovanni Records showcase at Death By Audio. The lineup was The Steinways, The Measure [SA], Black Wine, Full of Fancy, and Big Eyes and except for the disaster that was The Steinways’ set, the show was awesome.

I was able to photograph three of the bands, but of course the lighting was awful and I didn’t bring my flash. I had to bump the ISO all the way up to 3200 to get non-blurry shots, but they turned out to be pretty damn noisy. But since I knew this would be the case going in, I didn’t worry about it too much and just had fun with it.

I ended up having to convert most of the photos to black and white to deal with the different colored lights, but I did decide to keep the color for a few to see what I could salvage.

Honestly, I kind of enjoyed some of the results.

It’s a Christmas miracle! I got my top 10 albums of the year list done! I kept forgetting about this and putting it off so much that I didn’t think I’d have it done by Christmas, but I buckled down and made it happen.

In years past, I’ve done bigger lists and/or had honorable mentions and all that jazz. Mostly this was fueled by hosting The Playlist, but without having a radio show to host a top albums of the year countdown on now, I had less drive to make a list that I could fill an hour (or two) with.

This was an odd year for me, I barely spent any time listening to music. Even though I still hosted the radio show up until September, I felt less connected to the music than I used to. I think this is a temporary thing, but I really found myself never listening to music at home and listening much, much less at work. I’m putting the blame on trying to do too much and having too much going on. It used to be that the biggest thing in my life was the radio station. Most of what I did was connected to that so I was surrounded by music. Before that, I ran a venue. Before that, I did little besides going to shows. So up until recently, most of my time and hobbies were music  related. That’s changed a lot this year, I spend more time doing non-music related things now. It’s changed a lot for me, but I think things will even out sooner or later. I hope at least.

Because of all that, I think I missed out on a lot of music this year and even stuff that I did check out, didn’t get the time that it deserved. Making a list this year was hard, but I’m pretty happy with it.

So here it is, the albums I was most into for 2010…

Blake Schwartzenbach’s new band, forgetters, has a new song posted and it’s pretty solid. This is a lot better than the forgettable forgetters EP from a few months ago, it sounds much more like Jawbreaker too. Nice.

I’m not going to go too much into depth about last night’s Lawrence Arms show at the North Star Bar in Philly, but it was awesome. As with the other four or five times I’ve seen them, they tore through an awesome set that only left something to be desired because the band has too many great songs to fit into a single night.

As usual, Brendan was solidly drunk and had plenty of banter to go around, but about a third of it was slurred and completely unintelligible. Chris was quiet, kind of looked like he could barely stay awake, and his voice sounded a bit off. I couldn’t see much of Neil, but as a whole, the band was on.

I brought my camera, but the North Star Bar is pretty dark inside and I didn’t really have a good spot to take shots from so I kept the camera in my bag until the last few songs. I fired off a bunch of shots towards the end, but I wasn’t really in the position to get anything too spectacular. That and I was too busy enjoying the show to really worry about it, so here are a few photos that all look the same.