rain on my parade

Outfit posts will resume Monday! In between pre-black-friday prep, thanksgiving, black friday, and weekend activities there is no way I can keep up with everything. I think next week will be back to normal, thank goodness! I need to catch up on sleep in a serious way. I kind of wish I was a dog, ours sleeps like 15 hours a day, at least.

I thought I'd share my friends' band with all you readers. They certainly won't be everyone's cup of tea, which I realize. They're kind of experimental, lo-fi, non-traditional. I suspect if you like bands such as Minus the Bear, The '89 Cubs, Sunset Rubdown, Wolf Parade, and Animal Collective, you may like pə-ˈrād. One of my best friends from college is the guitarist and for the nascence and early months of the band he actually used my electric guitar. If they become famous it will be my claim to fame.

The rest of the band are good friends from college as well and they actually were all up in Alaska this summer living in tents in a small wilderness tourist town. They would play gigs at the local historical hotel/pub and spend most nights drinking beer around bonfires on the shore of the Susitna River.

(photos: kristen black)

Their label, Leftist Nautical Antiques, just released pə-ˈrād's first album on cassette tape on the 9th of Nov, so if you want you can order it or download the whole album online. They recorded their debut album in a West Seattle bedroom by another friend of mine in one afternoon. LNA is actually founded by my best writer/photographer from CORSAIR. If I ever actually start a magazine I'd die to hire him. He was a life saver. So glad to see people from my old school really exercising their creativity in an entrepreneurial way. Things like pə-ˈrād and LNA really make me miss Spokane. There is this incredibly creative enclave there which is just nuclear with inspirational energy. It's very small, but so wonderful to bask in and contribute to. It's a very positive place, I think.