OK, no more vague innuendoes: there’s a new EP in the works, and we’re hoping to get it finished in time for spring break. Why spring break? Because our last two official releases, God bless ‘em, were a little rough around the edges, at least relative to the Bull Moose. Gibbard and Tamborello had nothing on the 7000 miles currently separating Portland from Vietnam, so we want to make sure we take the time to do this one right.

Here’s a very rough bedroom recording of “Seattle”, for the brave and/or impatient.

In other news, our cinematic stepchild Monster Camp just came out on DVD. We’re totally biased, but we still think it’s a great movie, and now you can add it to your Blockbuster or Netflix queue with the push of a button. Specifically: your mouse button, on those links in the last sentence. You can also pick it up for keeps at Hyrax Films’ online store, along with our original (but mostly instrumental (and weird)) soundtrack album.

Finally, if you’re into live music, there are a few new shows here that weren’t there yesterday.

Is what we’re going on. So don’t take it personally if you email us and it takes weeks to get a response. Multi-week backpacking trips are truly the lifeblood of this band - something about the combination of cool mountain air and doing most of your drinking through a warm plastic nipple really gets the hits flowing.

In the meantime, may we recommend a little something from our archives.

Through the miracle of science, there are finally moving pictures of us on the internet. We just kind of threw them up there because we realized the only other clip of us on YouTube was 18 seconds long - please feel free to add your own if you have any, or let us know if we uploaded something you shot without attribution, or whatever.

We’re giving our media section an overhaul in much the same way as the Colorado River carved the Grand Canyon - slowly, and wetly, but for keeps.

Also, a new show just got confirmed, but we don’t want to steal the tour page’s thunder.

Behold: our latest free EP.

hi myspace friend,

happy holidays! we’re writing you today because we have a new EP available for download, and it’s free.

about a month and a half ago, our myspace account got deleted. like, completely wiped off the face of the internet, and we’re still not sure why. our online operations ground to a screeching halt, as we realized we no longer had any way of letting the friends we’d made on myspace know about upcoming shows, albums, and other mission-critical band stuff.

it was pretty awful.

then one morning, just before thanksgiving, it came back. like, all the way back - friends, favorites, the whole nine yards. and we said to ourselves, “you know, we should really make sure this never happens again.”

so we’ve recorded four new songs, and on december 15th, we’re giving them away for free. the catch? we’d like you to sign up for our actual, real-world email list:

http://www.speechwritersllc.com/signup/

you have our word that we’ll *never* share your information with anyone outside the band. we just want to make sure we can find you when our next album comes out, which is sooner than you’d think.

(seriously.)

thanks for reading, and enjoy the rest of your day.

sincerely,
dave and misha