"Hey 2-Eyes," the collaboration with Dave End from our upcoming, nearly-released, almost-available double-CD Fustercluck!!! is now available as part of a compilation called Kitty Licks, Vol. 4, along with tracks by the likes of R. Stevie Moore, Schwervon!, and Vincent Nifigance.

More info here: http://www.myspace.com/kittylickscd

--Justin

I've decided to try out something new in the marketing of this album. I just set up a PayPal account, and I will be accepting pre-orders for Fustercluck!!!.

If you pre-order the album, you will get it at least one month early (it is currently due out in January 2010, but you'll get it in December -- in time for holiday gift-giving). Plus I will include an exclusive FREE bootleg CD of outtakes and alternate versions. PLUS I will include any other Elastic No-No Band CD you want FREE (if you don't specify in your order, I will just pick one at random).

Pre-order now! $20 including shipping: http://www.elasticnonoband.com/products.html

I've been churning out a new blog entry about the upcoming album every couple days, including some free mp3s of songs from the album, and mp3s of some exclusive bonus tracks.

So I just discovered that the links I've been putting up for the blogs I'm writing outside of this site are directing to a page that says the link is spam.

You are my friend, and I would never direct you to spam or anything that would harm your computer.

From what I can gather, Blogger and this site are having some sort of argument -- and in the heat of a corporate temper tantrum, this site is labelling all Blogger sites as spam and blocking the links.

So... you have to copy and paste.  If you would like to read my new blog about our upcoming album Fustercluck!!!, just copy and paste this into your browser: http://fustersongs.blogspot.com

And if you would like to read futher information about our 2007 album My 3 Addictions, here is the link:
http://my3addictions.blogspot.com

--Justin

SEPT. 9 UPDATE: The links seem to be working now.

A couple months ago, I started a blog about our upcoming album Fustercluck!!! over here:

http://fustersongs.blogspot.com

Well, now I am going to kick it into full gear, and keep providing you with stories and updates at a reasonable clip, augmented by audio files for you and yours.

For the newest entry, I have posted an mp3 of a song that is being left off the album.  So go to http://fustersongs.blogspot.com right now and check it out!

--Justin

Summer is winding down, and work is nearly finished on our upcoming double-CD, Fustercluck!!!.  We should hopefully have it out to you in the fall, or at least before the end of the year, or sometime during the beginning of next year, or sometime after that...

I've been timing the existing material and creating a potential tracklist for the album, and it should come in somewhere near 45 songs, running nearly 2 1/2 hours.  That's about 3 1/2 times the size of our last album -- the concise, 11-song My 3 Addictions.

Anyhow, to whet your appetite (as if it needed whetting), here are two free tracks from the album: the full-band number, "(The Shame About) Manboobs", and the mostly-solo song (Preston plays bass on it), "Emotional Tourism".

But I figured the best way to get you excited for our new album was to take a song from our last album, which is 2 years old at this point, and set that song to a photo montage.  Yeah, I'm a genius when it comes synergistic marketing.

Anyhow, this is still a bit of fun:


'Til next time,
Justin

Long time, no post.

Been busy.

Been shooting and editing music videos for folks like Thomas Patrick Maguire, Brook Pridemore and Schwervon!

Been compiling and readying the July release of the first album by Joe Crow Ryan, which will be the first non-Elastic No-No Band release on my label, Weemayk Music.  (You can pre-order it at this link right here.)

Been writing articles for Jezebel Music.  You can read them here: http://www.jezebelmusic.com/tag/justin-remer

Been spending time rearranging my living space now that my girlfriend has moved in with me and my 3 roommates.

And, of course, been trying to finish the next Elastic No-No Band album, the forthcoming double-CD Fustercluck!!!  Most of the recording is done, but there's still quite a bit to go.  My hope is to have the album done by the fall, but two of our band members have been afflicted with extreme medical conditions (e.g., our piano player Herb has been told not to use his right arm 'til further notice), and you just never know...

But while we're waiting, I did manage to scrape 6 more songs* from the album to make a little sampler, Manboobs, titled after the first track.  It is available as a giveaway at our shows this summer, and you can also hear it streaming from our Myspace page RIGHT NOW!!!

Considering that the finished Fustercluck!!! should have about 45 songs on it, I think we can spare these 6.  I'm simultaneously really excited to get this massive slab of music out into the world, and frankly, a little tired out by the process (doing all these other projects probably helps tire me out too).  But you can keep tabs on how finishing the album is going at this new blog I just created: http://fustersongs.blogspot.com where I will write about just that and post exclusive tracks and do whatever else.

It'll be a more conventional blog than My 3 Addictions: An interactive album was, but hopefully it'll be just as cool.

Well... 'til there's more to say,
Justin

*This is in addition to the 3 songs from the album that are on last year's The Meow Bits EP

Brook Pridemore posted a note on Facebook with a list of 20-plus albums that changed his life, so I wrote a response note with 20-plus of my own.

I liked what I wrote, so I'm posting it here too.

20-plus albums that changed my life: a list like Brook Pridemore did
(in vaguely alphabetical order)

*Beastie Boys - Paul's Boutique: I was late to liking a lot of things, like Nirvana and Beastie Boys. I had License to Ill on vinyl when I was 6 or 7, but I was too scared of getting yelled at by my parents for listening to rap, to actually listen to it often or at a level above number 3 on the volume dial on my bedroom stereo. I liked "Sabotage" when it came out, but I only ever heard it on MTV or the radio. In '98, I picked up Hello Nasty on vinyl, because it was orange vinyl, and I inevitably worked my way back into the catalog, and yeah this album's a masterpiece.

* Beck - One Foot in the Grave; Nirvana - Bleach: I would listen to these 2 cassettes in my walkman nonstop on the bus rides to and from Start High School. They were both black cassettes with white writing, which was a switch from the norm (tapes were usually greyish with black writing), so these albums felt very Different and Modern. And the equal amounts of ache, rock, and weirdness made this my essential high school soundtrack.

*Bjork - Homogenic; Miles Davis - Kind of Blue: One of the biggest joys me and my best friend Zach had while working on the high school newspaper was listening to music on the newspaper's computers while typing. Initially we worked together during an early-bird hour before school had technically started, but the following year, Zach was gone, Newspaper was a regular mid-day class, and the staff was tripled in size. I would continue to listen to music I liked, and sometimes it would cause concern to other staff members. I remember the act of listening to Kind of Blue one day forced a fellow staff member to tell me "that noise has got to go!" I don't have a specific anecdote for the Bjork album, but I remember it caused the same type of reactions. And it put me in a weird spot; I felt the world at large had acclaimed the music I was listening to, how come the kids in the newspaper room didn't appreciate how smart I was being? I wonder now if I was just being a precocious nerd, or if this is just an early indicator of my ongoing marginalization in relation to pop culture.

* Elvis Costello - My Aim Is True: I bought a used vinyl copy of this in Ann Arbor, Michigan, while on a field trip in high school. I loved the shit out of it. From then on, I would go to Ann Arbor looking for culture, and I would slowly begin to build my Elvis Costello-on-vinyl collection.

*DJ Shadow & Cut Chemist - Brain Freeze: I love soul music, I love 45s, and I was slowly getting into hip-hop after decades of neglecting/ignorantly disdaining it. My best friend Zach burned me this, and since then, if I ever stick it in, I pretty much remember every second of it by heart.

*Lee Dorsey - Yes We Can: Just an amazing, funky, brilliant album, produced and mostly written by Allen Toussaint, with The Meters as the backing band. If I ever made a desert-island list, this would definitely be on it.

*Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits; Bob Dylan - Self-Portrait: For the longest time, I only knew Bob Dylan as the butt of standup comedians' jokes. I knew he was incoherent and that he mumbled. Then I heard the Greatest Hits album (vol. 1), and I was hooked forever. Much later, a few years ago, I was working the midnight shift for a friend, doing assistant-editing work on a TV show he was cutting, and I would explore his iTunes, and one of the albums he had was the much-maligned Self-Portrait by Bob Dylan. At 4 in the morning, sleep-deprived, with too much coffee and tea in your system, logging footage into Final Cut Pro, Self-Portrait becomes the most insane, best album ever. It's pretty good in the middle of the day too.

* Footloose soundtrack; Cyndi Lauper - She's So Unusual; Michael Jackson - Thriller: These are the first 3 pop albums I remember owning. On cassette. When I started listening religiously to my walkman in high school, I revisited these albums, and they continued to be some of the best pop-rock the '80s had to offer. (Okay, maybe not Footloose, that's just pure nostalgia.)

*Genesis - Invisible Touch: Another one of those formative pop albums; part of the reason I love the gated drum sound and prog-rock (which, despite popular belief that Phil Collins forced Genesis to abandon prog sensibilities, is still somewhat present on the longer cuts on this album) to this day.

*Jackie Brown soundtrack; Out of Sight soundtrack: I've always loved soundtracks, and the end of the last century felt like a high-water mark, where folks were creating really out-of-the-ordinary scores and songscapes for their flicks. Pulp Fiction's soundtrack might have made the greater cultural impact, but Tarantino's follow-up for Jackie Brown was much bigger for me (it's a much tighter mixtape too) and sent me off on countless musical and film expeditions just trying to find out about all the stuff on it. Oddly enough, the other Elmore Leonard adaptation from that time, Out of Sight, also had a kickass soundtrack, mostly of original DJ music that still sounds good, unlike those Fatboy Slim CDs I used to like then too.

*The Moldy Peaches - The Moldy Peaches: I felt like I knew these people when I first heard this, and I was astonished when I found out people I met from other cities really liked it too. I have little doubt that the homemade nature of this record opened me up to the possibility of trying to become a music performer.

*Willie Nelson - Phases & Stages: Like hip-hop, country was a genre I long ignored, because it seemed like everybody ignored it. When I finally started to play catch up, I realized that I love a lot of country music. Willie Nelson's '70s stuff is kind of visionary in a low-key way, and while Red Headed Stranger is more famous, this one does pretty much the same brilliant thing, but touches me a little deeper. Plus, I ripped this album off for My 3 Addictions.

*Neutral Milk Hotel - In The Aeroplane Over The Sea: Similar to my experience of The Moldy Peaches, once I had a rudimentary idea of how to play the guitar, I realized that this album -- which my best friend Zach had burned for me, calling it akin to Sgt. Pepper's-- was really easy to play on guitar, and that it was the emotion (and the arrangement of the other instruments) that mattered. This was a big boost to my fledgling songwriting career in that respect, although I haven't listened to it in years.

*Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense (reissue): Seeing Stop Making Sense during its '99 theatrical revival run was one of the best moviegoing experiences I've had. The reissued soundtrack album, which includes all the songs from the concert film, instead of the handful on the original LP, is one of the most joyous collections of performances put to disc.

*Velvet Underground - White Light/White Heat; Tom Waits - Small Change: Some time in high school, I went to a garage sale and bought a bunch of records for a twenty-five cents apiece. These two were included in that purchase. I had never heard music from either act before, and you can pretty much say that I've never been the same since.

*Brian Wilson Presents Smile: Having little history with the Beach Boys besides what played on oldies radio, I had no reason to be disappointed with Brian Wilson's release of Smile when it came out. I thought it was visionary and astonishing. I'm still not disappointed. It's one of the best fucking albums ever, gahdammit.

I've been thinking a lot about double-albums lately, not least because the next Elastic No-No Band album, Fustercluck!!! (due [hopefully] this summer), is intended to be a double-album (although if it ends up being 79 minutes of music, I'll not hesitate to jam all that onto one disc). I was talking to Brook Pridemore about how, as I've been listening to new songs as we record them, I inevitably have thoughts like, "That one will go somewhere in the first three songs on disc 2," "That one will probably be near the end of disc 1," "That could go in the middle of either disc," etc. etc.

It's a bizarre fascination/compulsion to have, because I don't think track order matters as much with a double-album. I was listening to the White Album by The Beatles today, and found myself kind of scratching my head at the sequencing choices, the songs bump up against each other and progress from one to the other, sometimes with a discernible flow and often without. At a certain point, the content -- all those songs -- rather than the presentation is what matters. People want to hear "Blackbird" or "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" or whatever; it doesn't really matter where it lands during the album's play.

(Now of course with the double-disc concept album, that's a different case. If the band is trying to tell you a story, even if it's only a story that makes sense to them, the order in which the songs show up usually matters.)

The Clash's Sandinista! -- whose all-over-the-placeness and extraordinary length (36 songs, originally on 3 records) was a big influence on my initial approach to Fustercluck!!! -- has 2 songs I really like, "The Magnificent Seven" and "Police on My Back." The first song is the first track on the album and easy to find, the second is like... track 4 on side 3, or something. But it doesn't matter. I like Sandinista! because it's all over the place, and somewhere in there it contains those songs I like.

Now some double-albums can be real focused and conceptual, not just in a storytelling way. Maybe disc 1 is rockin' and disc 2 is stripped-down (my favorite example of this is Taj Mahal's Giant Step/De Ole Folks At Home -- he even bothered to give each disc a different name). Maybe the two discs explore distinctly different lyrical or musical themes.

These are not albums I am concerned with.

I'm pondering the albums where the artist or the band obviously just had too much to say in too many different ways, or they just had too much time to fuck around, to put the end result on one measly LP or CD.

A couple of weeks ago, I got Squeeze's East Side Story out from the public library, and at first, it seemed like the perfect follow-up to Argybargy, a new-wave/pub rock album that includes tons of gems, but especially "Pulling Mussels From A Shell" and "Another Nail In My Heart." But then... East Side Story started to go in weird directions -- that perennial '80s blue-eyed soul track "Tempted"* crops up, and then there's a tune with weird psychedelic organ touches, and then there's a country song! Shit, despite being a single disc, this feels like a double-album. A trip to Wikipedia reveals that the album was going to be, but was scaled back. But you see, I could tell.

Somehow, a double-album is a state of mind rather than a running time.

A perfect example of this would be a recent acqusition: Benji Hughes's debut album A Love Extreme, a double-CD despite only being about 65 minutes long. But my man Benji goes this way and that, from dance music to '70s-style rock to low-key singer-songwriter to ramshackle garage rock and beyond. And after the album, you are tired. You need these tunes broken up a bit for you.

Hmmm... Well, Fustercluck!!! is going to be a full-band rock album, mixed with some stripped-down solo stuff, a lot of collaborations with a bunch of different featured performers, there's gonna be some children's songs, some covers, a lot of new original material, some goofy little throwaway tracks, some tracks which we've been recording in segments for months, and some tunes we're just gonna rock out live in one take.

I think maybe even if it ends up clocking in at 50 minutes, this thing is definitely gonna be a double-album.

Justin

*It was interesting to find out too that the guy who sings "Tempted" was only in Squeeze for one album and only sang on this song. Later, he joined Mike + The Mechanics and sang "The Living Years".