For those of you who missed our recent social media campaign, we deemed the operation a success and have posted our Regional Variations bonus EP online for all the world to hear:

It’s basically demos & alternate mixes of songs from our Indifferent Cities EP.

The last song is our favorite. During the production of the album, we were emailing audio tracks & Pro Tools sessions back and forth, but Team Vietnam’s hard drive died before they could make reference mixes from the final recording session. This means that Team America was basically putting together a pile of puzzle pieces without any idea of what the finished puzzle was supposed to look like.

The only session that survived the crash intact was “Tay Ho”, though something awful happened to it along the way. Maybe it went mad from watching so many of its brothers die in the drive failure. In the weeks before we realized what had happened, Misha and I had some fairly tense discussions about quality control. He thought I was being racist; I thought he had finally lost his mind.

We eventually got it sorted, put it on the album as a secret track, and were soon playing “Tay Ho” to appreciative crowds across Vietnam. The rest, as they say, is history. But, generally speaking, this is why you don’t record an album over the internet.

In other news, our store’s back, just in time for the holidays. Probably the only place you can get five albums for $20 this side of Moscow.

Misha and I were looking at our Facebook and Twitter pages this morning. They’re pretty cool, we said to ourselves, but…man. They’d be great if they had a few more fans. Like, really next-level great. Vin Diesel great.

So we figured we’d bribe you into following/fanning us with a totally unreleased and never-before-heard studio MP3 from the Indifferent Cities sessions. (Don’t bother clicking that link, it’s just text we turned blue and underlined.)

Here’s the deal: everyone who befollows/befans us on:

…will be beTweeted/beFaced with four and a half minutes of audio awesomeness come mid-September. (Again, ignore that link, we’re just being jerks.) Everyone who doesn’t, won’t.

Cool? Cool. Let the games begin.

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.