Over the last 15 years, Kansas House, a tiny four-bedroom home in Arlington, has seen members of bands that recorded for almost every D.C. record label—Dischord, Teenbeat, Slowdime, Simple Machines—crash on its floors, perform in its living room, or be thoroughly revolted by its rat-infested basement.

Kansas House is not a club. Shows happen there once or twice a month. But the experience of seeing a show at Kansas House is different. At the Black Cat, for instance, you buy a ticket and see a band. But anyone who’s crammed into Kansas House’s tiny living room to watch Black Eyes, Q and Not U, or Trans Am could be forgiven for feeling  like they were part of a movement.

You can still feel that way, at least for a few more months. On Dec. 1, Kansas House’s epic run will finally come to an end. The building is in the process of being sold to an Arlington development firm. Eventually, the house will be demolished to make way for mixed-use development.

Read More “I Think We’re Not in Kansas House Anymore” »

This morning, I broke the news that Jawbox would be reuniting on a late-night TV show to be named later. It got named! This all set off a flurry of Tweets and blog posts: who knew so many people were pining for mid-’90s posthardcore? “This is all rather funny, isn’t it?” Jawbox singer-guitarist J. Robbins wrote in an e-mail today. “We’ve been kicking the reunion idea around for a while, not particularly seriously, since we decided to do the ‘Sweetheart’ reissue,” he wrote.  “When the Fallon opportunity came up, I think everyone looked at it this way:
1. it can be sort of a “diet reunion” – any time we’ve discussed playing again, we all agree that we’d want to be as good a band as we were 12 years ago. But 12 years ago, we could afford total immersion: we all lived together, rehearsed 3 times a week for 4 hours at a stretch and toured 6 – 8 months out of the year. It’s much easier to imagine doing justice to one song for one day than it is to imagine pulling off a full set and tour, particularly with [drummer] Zach [Barocas] being in NY and with the family and work commitments that we have. Maybe this will adequately scratch the reunion itch for those of us who are feeling it.
2. it’s such a weird idea, such an unlikely opportunity, why wouldn’t we do it?”

As to a reunion beyond the confines of late-night television, Robbins wrote: “I don’t think that doing the Jimmy Fallon show would really be a likely catalyst for that sort of thing. Or would it? I think we are all just playing this by ear and we’ll see how much fun we have. But it’s still unlikely given our number one condition, which is not to suck if we got onto a real stage in a room with people who give a shit about seeing us play. I think we’re all a bit taken aback that anyone is paying attention.”

A few days before all this, I spoke with Robbins about the upcoming reissue of For Your Own Special Sweetheart, Jawbox’s 1994 major-label debut.

Read More “Jawbox’s J. Robbins on the For Your Own Special Sweetheart Reissue” »

Jawbox hasn’t played a show in years, but there’s a chance you’ll be able to catch the band in action soon. Well, so long as you can stay up late enough.

Sources close to the band say that Jawbox will reunite on a late-night TV show to coincide with the reissue of the band’s third and finest LP, For Your Own Special Sweetheart. This is not a prelude to a tour, the same people say. I spoke to J Robbins last week, and he didn’t mention anything about this, but he did admit that a few one-off shows weren’t totally outside the realm of possibility. “We’ve entertained the notion of playing some shows, but that’s as far as its gotten,” said Robbins. “It’s conceivable, but only remotely, that we could play some shows.”

But playing on somebody else’s show? Looks like that’s a little more of a possibility.

Update: According to Billboard, Jawbox will appear Dec. 8 on NBC’s “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.”

“Savory” video after the jump:

Read More “Jawbox to Reunite on Late Night TV?” »

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.

Read More “End-Of-The-Week Music News, Free Stuff Edition” »

The Aquarium, D.C.’s reigning power-duo, has a brand new 7″ single out today on Dischord. Produced by Benjy Ferree and mixed by Brendan Canty, “Performer” b/w “Battle of the Bands” finds Jason Hutto and Laura Harris cranking their keyboard-and-drums formula up a couple of notches. Suffice it to say, keyboards haven’t shredded this hard since the soundtrack to the N.E.S. version of Double Dragon.

The duo will be celebrating the record’s release tonight with–appropriately enough–a performance at Galaxy Hut alongside Eyes of the Killer Robot.

Aquarium/Eyes of the Killer Robot
Galaxy Hut
Mon., 8/24 @ 9 p.m.
$5

Title Tracks, the most recent project of former Georgie James member Jon Davis, will be releasing a 7″ single April 6 on Dischord, but you can hear the A-side right now if your go over to the band’s myspace page.

“Every Little Bit Hurts”–which also features former Georgie James players Michael Cotterman and Andrew Black, as well as Pash’s Meredith Munoz–is a pretty sturdy piece of power pop, the kind of song Elvis Costello might have written back when he was still angry.

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.

New York Magazine recently ran an item about the dark and sketchy side of inauguration festivities in DC.

After a paragraph about the influx of out-of-town prostitutes dropping into DC to take advantage of the influx of party-minded tourists, the reporter chats up a drug dealer who is apparently relaxing in the back room of Rock & Roll Hotel doling out bags of cocaine to venerable European journalists. More interesting, he isn’t just any run of the mill hood–he’s a Dischord fan!

“The dealer, who grew up moshing to D.C. punk, laid out $3,000 to stock up because he plans on moving “serious weight.”

Judging by his language–later on he confesses that he’s going to need to “re-up”–my guess is that he’s also a guy who really enjoys watching The Wire. Whatever, who doesn’t love a story where the guy with the straight edge tattoo gets caught drinking at the bar, or in this case, dealing narcotics?

But the article also states that said slam dancing drug dealer is only 29-years old. If that’s true, then he was born in 1980–which means he was roughly 7 years old when Fugazi showed up and outlawed moshing forever! Was he getting thrown around the pit in diapers? A Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit? Or was he really just doing-the-standing-still in the back of the Dismemberment Plan concert?

Fifth in a series of 6, we asked DC’s favorite recording engineer Don Zientara for his take on the state of recorded music in 2008.  He responded in limerick form (and in an interview at his studio in Arlington):

There once was an audio format called mp3
Where parts of the digital word were sent off to sea.
The data was minced,
for the song that convinced
us that vinyl more pleasing, you see?

Don Zientara is owner of Inner Ear Studios, and has engineered records for such bands as the Bad Brains, Minor Threat, Rites of Spring, Scream, Nation of Ulysses, Fugazi, Lungfish, Jawbox, the Dismemberment Plan, Q and not U and many others.  He also writes and performs his own music, and has released two solo albums, Sixteen Songs and Clocks & Watches.

All contributors to this series were guests on DISSONANCE, a DC punk oral histories show on Radio CPR. Don Zientara’s interview can be heard here.

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.