Greetings from Seconds Before HQ.  We’re still alive, just hibernating a bit this winter.  We shall emerge soon with some new music to entertain/torment you.  In the meantime, a few of us will be joining members of the extended Blue Worm Records family this Thursday at Grumpy’s Northeast for a listening party for the newest members of the BWR roster, Bastard Saint.  Word on the streets is that most or all of the bands will have various freebees to give away.  We’ll have a stack of CDs to hand out, so if you haven’t yet gotten your hands Change Is The Only Constant, and live anywhere close to NE Minneapolis, well, consider the deal sweetened.  Come on down and hang out with a bunch of rock dudes and dudettes.

Here’s the full press release and details on the event.
Cheers!!!

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We got a couple of fine events coming up to celebrate the release of Bastard Saint’s debut BWR LP release, “Homewrecker.”

We’re happy to welcome Vivian Elizabeth Larson into the extended Seconds Before family, born August 23 2009. Congratulations to Brian and Liz!  As Brian gets himself acclimated to fatherhood we’ll be taking a break from live performance for a couple months, but we hope to be back at it before too long.

In other news, Mike performed last night in Ieper, Belgium with 108, co-headlining with Darkest Hour at Ieperfest 2009. Our local Minneapolis friends Disembodied are playing tonight’s lineup.  Mike toured with 108 in Europe and USA in the 90s and got the call about playing this show as 108’s current drummer was unavailable for this date. We’re definitely hoping for video of this show - stay tuned here, if we get our hands on anything, we’ll be sure to post.

We’ve retrieved video evidence of Seconds Before in a live performance.  Here’s “Of Little Faith” from the new album from the Blue Worm Records 10 Year Anniversary Show last October at the Triple Rock.  The entire set is up online (along with all the other bands who performed) at http://www.youtube.com/user/bluewormrecords .

Look, we try not to gripe too much about our weather here.  We wear our resilience to subzero temps as a badge of honor in these icy climes.  But there comes a time (right around the six-month mark of winter weather) when our patience wears a little thin, the beards start to grow a little shaggy, and we begin to long for a brief change of scenery.  But reviews like this in the latest issue of Rift warm our icy hearts.  Thanks Rift!  There’s a fine review of “Death Ride” by fellow BWR comrades Casanatra in this month’s issue as well.  Thanks also to everyone who came out to Club Underground last Saturday, as well as Days Of Rae, Midget Pony, and Orange Blank for making it a great show.

The fine folks at Midwest Movement have released their 2008 Holiday Sampler as a free digital download from their site.  You can check out a new track from CITOC entitled “Signal Down” along with a bevy of other fine rock songs by fine rock bands.  The sampler is only available for download until 1/1/09, so get to it.

It’s a happy time here at Seconds Before HQ as we congratulate our guitarist Chris and his lovely wife Tracy on the birth of their daughter, Adrienne Charlotte Dales.  She’s not even 48 hours old yet and Chris reports that she’s already proven to be a fan of rock music, which means that she was born cool.  Plans to decorate her room with Iron Maiden “Eddie” posters may or may not materialize.

We’d like to wish everyone safe and happy holidays.  We’re laying low from live performances until the new year (and giving Chris a much-deserved break to ease into fatherhood).   We’ll be back at it in 2009.  Cheers!

Time to pay respects to a venerable online institution - aversionline is one of the best independent music blogs out there.  Andrew is a prolific writer and super cool human being.  Most of the bands covered here are somehow linked with the hardcore scene (frequently inclined to the 90’s definition of hardcore - treading the glorious grey area between 80’s punk and 00’s metal), with a smattering of metal and even (gasp) indie rock performed by aging veterans of the aforementioned 90’s hc scene.  Andrew has been kind enough to waste precious pixels covering our humble musical output over the years and has posted a nice writeup of CITOC this week.

In other news, CITOC keeps showing up in the damnedest places.  You can find the new record at eMusic and Rhapsody this week, along with iTunes.  As you may have seen, Myspace launched their new music service this week.  Our distribution service, The Orchard, is one of the first independent labels to sign up with Myspace music, so we have a hunch that CITOC will be available there, along with our back catalog, sometime in the not so distant future.

Today is actually the “official” release date of CITOC, although those of you in the Twin Cities area have been able to get your hands on the CD at most local independent record stores for a few weeks now.  As a smaller independent band, the timing of our releases showing up in various distribution channels is occasionally somewhat flexible, as they say.  While our record went live on iTunes today, it has yet to show up in certain other stores like Rhapsody and Amazon digital, but it’s simply a matter of time at this point.  For those of you interested in the physical cd (complete with all of Jason’s killer photography), copies should be available via online stores including Amazon and BN shortly.

Direct link to iTunes >>

Thank you so much to everyone who came out to the CD release show last night.  It was a very memorable show for us and we were thrilled to have so many friends (old and new) there with us.  Kingfield, Attention and Down And Above were all amazing and are some of the finest human beings currently performing rock music anywhere in the known universe.  It blew our minds to hear people singing along to the new songs - you’ve warmed our bitter old hearts.  The staff at the Triple Rock was awesome as always, dealing with major technical hurdles and making it look easy and sound great.  We’re looking forward to playing there again in a month for the BWR 10-year anniversary show.