Perhaps you’ve heard there’s a lot of free shit going down this weekend. If you haven’t, well, there’s a lot of free shit going down this weekend. Most of it revolves around the Kia Soul Collective tour, which has set up shop in a warehouse at 3330 New York Ave. NE, with free parking as well as a free shuttle from Union Station. Wale performs in the space tonight at 7 p.m., with DJs Stereofaith, Reed Rothchild, and Chris Burns spinning from 4 p.m. Tomorrow night belongs to Dan Deacon, The Creepers, and Nouveau Riche DJs; the music starts at 8 p.m. And MGMT is headlining an 8 p.m. show Sunday night following DJ sets by DJ CA$$IDY and Dave Nada. To get tickets to this last concert, however, you have to test drive a Kia first, which you can do all weekend, if that’s your thing.

And Future, Army Of Me (in an acoustic iteration), Laughing Man, and The Mighty Heard are all performing outdoors at the H Street Festival on Saturday, all along H Street NE. Brightest Young Things is also hosting a free party that night in the Rock & Roll Hotel’s upstairs bar. Baller.

Dischord Records is now distributing releases by Windian Records, a new label started by The Points drummer Travis “Cobruhhh” Jackson. The band’s new Beat In Hell 7″, whose 6-minute B-side is about four times longer than every other Points song, is available now.

This is a few days old: Dischord and DeSoto Records are rereleasing Jawbox’s 1994 career highpoint For Your Own Special Sweetheart, and they’ve included a few bonus tracks from the very rare Savory+3 EP. The remastered album drops Nov. 23.

The Velodrome dance/not-dance party is back from summer vaycay this weekend.

Local way-beyond-left-field hip-hop band The Cornel West Theory has a release show at Liv next Friday for its new album, Second Rome, and apparently the eminent Princeton African American Studies professor and group namesake will be there.

Image courtesy of Dan Deacon’s MySpace page.

One of my favorite local bands, Andalusians, will be releasing a three-song 7-inch single, “Do the Work,” on February 16. Dischord recently announced with a bit of info. The downloadable version will include three extra tracks!

Dischord also reports that the band will soon be touring with a stop at the Black Cat: “The band will celebrate the record release and begin a tour of the south and mid-west United States with a show in DC at Black Cat on February 5th.”

You can listen to “Do The Work” on the band’s myspace page.

We spoke this week with Alec Bourgeois, spokesperson for Dischord Records, to get his take on the year in music.

I’d say one of the coolest developments in 2008 was the return of the independent record store, fueled in part by the 12″ LP’s refusal to obey the grim reaper’s call. It’s not that places like Smash, Red Onion, Som and Crooked Beat opened in 2008, but more significantly, they seem to have thrived . Even Rick at Orpheus Records, who has been trying to call it quits for the last year, can’t even close his doors—though he keeps threatening! Chain stores, on the other hand, continue to whither and fail. With a tin ear to the format preferences of music lovers and with no loyal community to rally around them they have become irrelevant. All the better. One of my favorite things about 2008 has been shopping for punk records in Washington, D.C.!

—Alec Bourgeois

Cheers to Alec and co. for the launch of their digital catalog and a nice set of vinyl reissues.

Well, whatever, he’s all yours now I guess.

No, I’m sure you’ll be really happy together.

Actually, we were totally over it a long time ago.

Hey, did you see that really funny Dread Zeppelin video I posted?

Dischord announces that Edie Sedgwick is going on tour soon. And that the LP is now available. Check details, tracklisting, etc. here. And tour news, here.

Full Disclosure: Edie may be Justin Moyer, who writes pretty regularly for CP. He wrote a great cover story this week on the McCain campaign.

Dischord folk write:

We are currently stocked on many Dischord titles on Vinyl that have been unavailable for months and in some cases years, including Dag Nasty, Can I Say, which is now available for the first time on blue vinyl. We are also fully stocked on the following releases:

Minor Threat Out of Step EP
Minor Threat, First Two 7″s EP
Minor Threat, Salad Days 7″
Minor Threat, First Demo Tape 7″
Rites of Spring, S/t
Fugazi, Seven Songs
Fugazi, Repeater
Fugazi, In On The Killtaker
Fugazi, End Hits
Fugazi, Instrument Soundtrack
Fugazi, The Argument
Pupils, S/t
Lungfish, Feral Hymns

And notes: “All these Vinyl albums come with a complimentary MP3 download when purchased from our website.”

I missed Faraquet the first time around—they were calling it quits just as I was moving into town—so it was nice to finally get to watch them play. In as much as Faraquet has hits, they played them all: “Cut Self Not”, “Review”, “Yo-Yo.” It would have been worth every penny of that guy’s $40 had the Black Cat been willing to take it.

Below are the 2.5 songs that I filmed before the camera ran out of juice:

“Study in Movement”:

“Carefully Planned”:

“The Whole Thing Over”:

Trouble viewing? Try the YouTube versions here, here and here.

Kay Bozich Owens and Lynn Owens‘ new book, Lost in the Supermarket: An Indie Rock Cookbook, includes recipes from the likes of Black Dice, Belle and Sebastian, Country Teasers (still keepin’ it classy with a drink called “Red Headed Sluts”), the Mountain Goats, Xiu Xiu, Sonic Boom, and more. I know practically nothing about cooking, and I’d be pretty careful about ingesting anything prepared by a former member of Spacemen 3. But Guy Picciotto’s recipe for rhubarb crumble does sound appealing. Reprinted with permission of Soft Skull Press.

Guy’s Rhubarb Crumble

Serves 6 to 8

Filling Ingredients:

4 cups diced rhubarb, cut into smallish chunks

3 Granny Smith apples

3/4 cup of honey

1-1/2 tablespoons of cornstarch

1/8 teaspoon of cardamom

Crumble Topping Ingredients:

1/2 cup unbleached flour

1/2 cup firmly packed light brown sugar

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

5 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into tiny cubes (put butter in freezer briefly till cold and hard)

2 tablespoons of sliced almonds, crushed walnuts, or crushed pecans or all of the above

Preparation

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

2. Dice the rhubarb into small chunks and peel, core, and cut the apples into thin slices.

3. Combine all the fruit in a big bowl then mix in the honey, cornstarch, and cardamom.

4. Dump the fruit concoction into an 8 x 8 inch baking pan and then smooth out the top with a rubber spatula so it’s nice and even.

5. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, brown sugar, salt, and cinnamon.

6. Take the cold butter and dice it up into little mini butter squares.

7. Toss the butter square tidbits into the dry topping ingredients. Rub the butter bits into the mix with your fingers just till it forms crumblets. Don’t over rub—you want nice crumbs. Add the nuts and then spread the crumble topping over the fruit filling in the pan.

8. Bake for 55 minutes till the top is nicely browned and the fruit filling is bubbling up like a tar pit.

9. Serve warm with vanilla ice cream or as is. Refrigerates nicely.

This Dischord “digital” site offers a unique hybrid of the direct sale and subscription based download services (as well as the usual CDs, LPs, DVDs, etc). Customers have the option to download entire albums for a set price (usually $7), purchase Digital Credits (15 credits for $10) that can be used to download individual songs, or receive a free album download with the purchase of a 12″ vinyl LP from our store.

Never mind: We already told this story.

Medications are playing a surprise show of sorts tonight at the Galaxy Hut. Rumor has it Chad Molter is back in town to do some round-the-clock recordings with the rest of Medications. Molter recently moved out West. So this show is big news for fans of Faraquet and Medications. [You can read Brent Burton's really sweet take on Faraquet's new anthology here and Joe Warminsky's smart take on early Medications here].

See ‘em while you can! The show starts at 9 p.m. It’s only $5!

*photo courtesy of Dischord Records.