Hi everyone,

I was just updating our gigs and noticed we haven't written a blog in a while so I thought I'd say hello and write down a collection of random thoughts. Disclaimer: this is going to be a random collection of thoughts which may or may not have nothing to do with anything.

Firstly, playing drums is fucking awesome - so glad to be back behind the kit again. As you may or not know I played guitar in NHA for about a year and a half, and while I loved the music it was so hard to get into it on stage having played drums all my life. Plus I get to sit down and it's easier to play drunk.

I just got in from practice, we've basically finished another new song tonight, which makes 9 so far for our album we will be recording in early 2009. I think it'll be a 12 track affair, so we're 36/48ths of the way there. I love the stuff we're writing at the moment - it's pretty much the music I set out to make when I first started playing in bands - dynamic, heavy, melodic, and just interesting to play and to listen to. We recorded 4 new songs about a month ago which we're working on semi-kinda-half-releasing as a little 4 track offering in the meantime since our album won't be released until the middle of next year. It'll have these 4 songs on, and we'll probably upload them all to MySpace as soon as their finished, which should hopefully be in a few weeks:

Into The Fire
Smiles/Denials
Desire To Build
Timing Is Everything

You'll also be able to hear those 4 songs, along with an even newer new song and a few classics when we play at Monto Water Rats this Thursday. I saw one of my favourite bands Fighting With Wire play there a month ago and it was incredible. Great venue and sound, so I'm really looking forward to this gig. After that we're off on a mini-tour around Scotland stopping in Dumfries, Glasgow, and probably Edinburgh. We'll be playing some or all of those gigs with my brother's band Reginald who are ridiculously awesome - please check them out (www.myspace.com/reginaldrock).

On a seperate note, here's some stuff I've been listening to a lot recently:

Twin Atlantic: my current favourite band I think - their songs are amazing, and I got to see them live for the first time a couple of weeks ago at the 229 club. I'm pretty sure these guys are going to do very well for themselves.
Captain Everything: Probably the band I fell in love with in the shortest amount of time - my old band played with them at a gig in Dundee and I'd never heard them before. When they got on stage I think it took about 8 seconds of Watford banter, amazing harmonies, and fast punk music for me to decide I was buying their CD as soon as they'd finished. Shame they aren't playing anymore, although I guess I've seen them 5 or 6 times already.
Mexico: My old band - always nice to reminice (a word I can never spell) with a listen to the couple of CDs we manged to churn out in our 4 years together. Some of the best times of my life were spent living in Perth and playing endless gigs with Gary - hopefully we'll get to rok together again some time in the future...

Anyway that's enough 'blogging'. Look out for our new songs in a few weeks, come along to a show if you can, and tell us which songs you love, and which ones should go the same way as Budgie Smuggler (it only saw 2 or 3 gigs, and I never liked it anyway).

Bye for now!

Neil NHA