Yeah… about that…

Hey guys. I guess we got some ’splainin’ to do. Here’s the thing: August is a crazy month. Things that have hap­pened in August:

• I went on vaca­tion to New Mexico.
• Mike moved upstate for grad school.
• Niina moved upcountry for grad school.
• Joel per­fected the sci­ence of tele­por­ta­tion and hasn’t been seen since.

But I at least am back. Never fear. Those other three mixes, though… I’m afraid they might never arrive. Things just get lost in the shuffle.

Mean­while, inter­esting things have been hap­pening in the music world. Don’t they always? There’s a new Out­kast record out there! Remember when Speakerboxx/The Love Below leaked and it was like Christmas and the Fourth and Kwanzaa and Pres­i­dents’ Day and Bastille Day all rolled into one? I do. The new Decem­berists leaked, too. I’m not such a fan of their par­tic­ular brand of pirate rock, but that makes an exciting day for at least half of the 18–25 web-based demo­graphic. But both of these events have been cov­ered to death on teh big blogs, so what’s a tail-between-his-legs absentee blogger to post about? Well, how about going back to my bread and butter?

Mastodon!

Those crazy fuckers from Atlanta (my soon-to-be home­town!) are back and they’re still pretty good at that guitar and drums thing. The new album is called Blood Moun­tain (not to be con­fused with Light­ning Bolt’s Hyper­magic Moun­tain or, uh, Slayer’s Reign in Blood, though I guess it could the­o­ret­i­cally be posi­tioned some­where between them in some kind of bizarre Venn dia­gram) and it’s coming out on Sep­tember 12^th on Warner/Reprise (pre-order). On a sonic level it’s some­where between the southern-fried slowed down Pan­tera sound of Remis­sion and the epic, story-driven con­ti­nuity of Leviathan. As on Leviathan, there are lots of col­lab­o­ra­tors here–some the same (that guy from Neu­rosis) and some new (that douche from The Mars Volta). Brann Dailor’s drum­ming is still absolutely fucking insane. Anyway, here are some tracks:

• Mastodon — “Colony of Birchmen”
• Mastodon — “Siberian Divide”

[site] [myspace] [label]

As I men­tioned above, I’ll be moving to Atlanta soon–probably by the middle of next month. That means that Girl­pants’ four writers will be scat­tered all across this fine land of ours, and might pos­sibly mean that we can cover more “scenes”, if you will. There should def­i­nitely be more live show reviews, anyhow.

Be seeing you.