Cory Graves
Eisley Falls Short, Cool Out Returns and A New Team Starts Rallying.
Local mall punk heroes Forever the Sickest Kids may have a new album due out this time next month, but we get the feeling that all is not right in that band's camp of late.
First, there was that news that came down late last week regarding frontman Jonathan Cook and his legal troubles: After being arrested for selling counterfeit watches, Rolex is now suing the singer and seeking as much as $70 million in return.
Meanwhile, FTSK guitarists Caleb Turman and Rico Garcia have just completed work on an EP for another band altogether. The new project, called Team, also features Brian Donahue from Boys Like Girls, and, according to the the band's publicist, the band is indeed “looking to make this their main thing going forward.”
While that Team EP isn't scheduled for release until late September or early October, interested parties can get a taste of the band's new sound via their newly-released “Am I Alive?” video right here. We'll call their sound just grown up enough to attract some new fans while at the same time not necessarily alienating too many fans of their other projects in the process. In other words? It's just catchy enough where Cook's bandmates may not have to concern themselves with whether he can keep himself out of trouble for much longer.
Meanwhile, all Eisley is concerned about these days whether they can tour in support of their recorded efforts at all. Their recent Kickstarter project, which the band hoped would help them acquire a vehicle safe enough to transport themselves along with their four newborns, ended yesterday, falling roughly $40,000 short of its $100,000 goal.
Though we've seen acts such as Amanda Palmer raise over $1 million for their projects in the past, one still has to think that Eisley's goal was a longshot from the outset. As AV Club reporter Jonah Bayer pointed out in a column on that site yesterday, the band's crowd-funding efforts felt markedly more abusive than some of the site's more successful projects — especially in that it felt exploitative in its wording, with band seeming to be asking its fans to help pay for tours that inexplicably lose money. Or as Bayer succinctly puts it: “No other business would abide by a model that loses money on the thing that's supposed to support it.”
Still, the continued debate on the ethics behind crowd-funding hasn't stopped other local bands from launching campaigns of their own of late. Denton's Robert Gomezand Dallas' Salim Nourallah are each in the early days of campaigns to help fund their upcoming efforts. In Nourallah's case, though, it seems somewhat peculiar that he'd need an additional $12,000 to help his band travel to Austin to finish work on an album that's already been started — especially when one considers the fact that Nourallah owns his own studio here in town. And that's before we even mention the number of local musicians who pay the producer to record their albums at said studio.
And yet funding — or the lack thereof — hasn't kept a whole slew of other local artists from jumping back into the studio or to prep new albums for release. Just last week, fuzz-pop act Spookeasy began work on a new EP as a follow-up to last year's Faux Show. One again, the new release will be recorded in Dallas' Tomcast Studios under the supervision of Spoon multi-instrumentalist Eric Harvey.
Meanwhile, indie-folk collective Fox and The Bird has been working on its own upcoming full-length at Austin's Ramble Creek Studio. Though the band doesn't expect to release the album until much later in the year, the album's first single, “Wreck of the Fallible,” has already been made available as a name-your-price download on the band's BandCamp page.
Then there's In the more immediate future, surf-punk favorites Sealion preceded the release of their sophomore album this Friday with a limited edition split cassette release with fellow Lo-Life Records band Doom Ghost. Per both bands, the six songs on the tape came from scrapped recording sessions.
Similarly, Tweed EQ and Venetian Sailors frontman Robbie Saunders will be releasing his country-folk solo EP on June 15 at City Tavern.
In news not related to album releases: As if the resurgent Lower Greenville spot The Crown and Harp weren't already trying hard enough to remind Dallasites of its glory-filled days as The Cavern, the fact that they'll be bringing back the once long-running Monday night staple Cool Out back to their upper floor beginning on June 3 should send that message loud and clear. Good news, indeed. Lest you worry: Yes, Tony Schwa will once again be leading the charge on that front.
Lastly, you should check out the just-released trailer for the upcoming Dallas hip-hop documentary, We From Dallas, in the space below. No word yet on a firm initial screening date for the feature-length film, but we'll keep you posted as we hear news on that front.
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