We mentioned before that Fear Before The March of Flames was releasing a new album on September 19th and that one of the tracks was titled “Lycanthropy” and was seriously awesome (listen to it on podcast #50). The link below on that track will lead you to their MySpace profile where you can preview the track. If you dig it, be sure to catch them on tour.

The Always Open Mouth Tracklist

01. Absolute Future
02. Drowning The Old Hag
03. Mouth
04. Taking Cassandra to the End of the World Party
05. Ten Seconds in Los Angeles
06. The Waiting Makes Me Curious
07. High as a Horse
08. Dog Sized Bird
09. Complete and Utter Confusion…
10. … As a Result of Signals Being Crossed
11. My (Fucking) Deer Hunter
12. Lycanthropy
13. A Brief Tutorial In Bachanalia
14. A Gift For Fiction
15. Absolute Past

Albany, NY based label Equal Vision Records wants you to sign up for their newsletter. What’s in it for you other than updates on bands including Fear Before The March of Flames, The Sound of Animals Fighting, Jonah Mantranga, and a bunch of others? Well if you sign up between now and August 1st you get a chance to win 1 of 50 autographed CDs from their artists. Winning stuff is fun so sign up here.

So we already mentioned that Sleater-Kinney would be performing their final show in Portland, but now just coming across the newswire is the annoucment that they are adding a second Portland performance on August 12th! Since I’m short on time and at work, here’s the scoop from Sub Pop:

SECOND PORTLAND SHOW ADDED AUGUST 12th! FINAL TICKETS TO BE RELEASED FOR THE AUGUST 11TH SHOW! TICKETS ON SALE THIS SATURDAY. At 12 pm PST on July 15th, the 250 remaining tickets for 8/11 and the first 500 tickets for 8/12 will be available only to walk up customers at the Crystal Ballroom box office. (1332 W. Burnside, Portland). At 1 pm PST tickets will become available through Ticketmaster outlets, on- line, and via telephone. The Crystal Ballroom box office will continue to sell tickets after 1 pm until they are sold out. All ticket sales are limited to two per customer. Tickets are $12. Camp out!

This isn’t any actual news or anything but mainly just an observation. I was going to post a link to AllMusic.com‘s article titled A Case Against Sufjan Stevens just the other day and then going through my news feeds, I came across a post on Stereogum titled Sufjan Admits He’s Full Of Shjit. The AllMusic.com article is a good read and makes some valid points. In the Stereogum post there’s also a link to a brief interview on Salon.

Whenever I visit Portland, and lots of other times as well, I always wonder, “Why is Portland so cool?” Don’t get me wrong, Seattle is a damn cool city too, but Portland seems to have a little something special. Anyway, that’s not the point of this post.
In less than a month, the 6th Annual Portland Zine Symposium will be upon us. Organized by students from Portland State University and members of the Portland community, the Symposium is one of the country’s largest zinester gatherings and includes tabling, workshops, and various social events. Amazingly admission is FREE! If anyone reading this goes, come back with a full report!