Relive Your Crocodile Memories

I had heard this was in the works and according to librarian-in-the-know Dan Halligan over at 10 Things, it looks like the sprawling audio archives of former Crocodile soundman Jim Anderson will soon have a permanent home at the UW Library. This is fantastic news. Major props to Halligan for helping make this happen.

— Hannah Levin

Live Review: Emeralds at King Cobra

Who: Emeralds

What: Seattle’s best prog-metal band originally from outer space

Where: King Cobra

When: Saturday night (grand-opening weekend)

Emeralds was a band a friend of mine had mentioned before, usually the day they were playing some house party that I ended up skipping out on. And I almost missed them again Saturday night. Had said friend not reached out to me and insisted I must join him at King Cobra to see Emeralds, my Saturday night would’ve been as exciting as a bridge gathering at a retirement home.

I walked into King Cobra 10 minutes into Emeralds set, and was instantly floored. They are real-deal space-prog-metal with a slight touch of glam. And I love Hawkwind. They were the perfect band to highlight a Saturday night. The sloppy, stringy longhaired frontman in a ripped up Celtic Frost T-shirt climbed all over everything around him, audience included. Punks and metal heads and the dudes from Holy Ghost Revival were waking their arms and hats in the air, starting a little pit at times. In true metal fashion, the rhythm and lead guitarists showed off some hot licks, all while the bass player and drummer locked into the groove. There was a guy playing a Hammond organ, but at times it fell too far back in the mix to be clearly heard over the guitars. The songs were long, technical pieces of metal that built and built to erupt at the apex, when everyone in the room would suddenly lose their shit, myself included.

I will never see Saturday night the same way again.

— Travis Ritter

John Roderick’s Lunar Eclipse

John Roderick is the singer/guitarist in the Long Winters. He blogs every Wednesday morning on Reverb.

I was holed up in my little home studio last Thursday working on writing some songs for the next Long Winters record when I got a text message from a friend telling me to check out the lunar eclipse. There’s a window over the desk where I work, so I parted the curtains and there was the eclipse right above me, the moon a burnt red. Fortunately, I had my dad’s old Navy binoculars right to hand, so I spent several minutes inspecting the lunar surface.

I’d been laying down some mondo-distorto bass grooves over a grimy 808-inflected hard-rock disco jam, as you will, and as I examined the moon, the loop was still cranking out of the speakers two feet from my head. I gradually became aware that the music was still blaring and that I was sitting in my long johns with a bass feeding back in my lap while I studied an eclipse with binoculars, and I thought, “I’m dangerously close to achieving a ‘nerd singularity.'” If I’d been talking on the phone about the Beatles, or playing World of Warcraft, it could have been a dangerous situation.

In any case, this next Long Winters album is going to have a lot of lunar-eclipse-influenced disco jams on it, and Seattle Weekly asked me to blog about it because they are running out of ideas and hoping to squeeze some free content out of people. I, for one, don’t mind because I’m mad about blogging! I was thinking the other day that, what with the incredible shortage of books and magazines in the world, I’d like to dedicate more of my precious reading hours to consuming the unedited journaling of as many amateur diarists as time permits! Hooray!

What better endorsement of this compulsive sharing impulse than were I to blog myself? I can hear the Seattle Weekly Reverb blog audience now: “That John Roderick seems like an unlikable grouch; I wonder what he’s thinking about?” Sigh. Well, wonder no longer! I’m thinking about lots of stuff! For instance, why did I agree to let my brother park his old Audi in front of my house, even after he said, “The battery doesn’t seem to hold a charge, and two of the tires have slow leaks, but it’s a great car!”? Have I learned nothing?

Anyway, many of you young people in your 20s might find some items of interest here in my blog. Why, I remember when you had to DIAL a telephone! But seriously, I want to share some of the hope that I’ve acquired after many years of fruitless struggle. I wasn’t always a famous musician who could stay up till 5 in the morning listening to the Kinks and eating Total breakfast cereal. If you’re a struggling musician, or just interested in a career in music, and your life seems to be going nowhere, relax. Life is meaningless!

Feel free to e-mail me any questions. I’ll be updating this blog every week in the hope that the more typing I do, the greater the chance that I might accidentally compose some lyrics.

— John Roderick