things are buzzing here in b+p land — our show at mercury lounge last friday was too good to be true — great crowd, great bands, wow. delaware was alot of fun the next night, met some great folks and again saw some awesome bands. hopefully i’ll locate some photos to prove that this wasn’t all just a fantasy.

meanwhile, we’re getting ready to play a bunch more shows:

9/19 - the delancey (nyc) w/ aldenbarton, beanstalk library
9/24 - the fire (philadelphia PA)
9/25 - velvet lounge (washington DC) w/ the bloodsugars
9/26 - snug harbor (charlotte NC) w/ simple
9/27 - 3rd floor (fredericksburg VA) w/ the bloodsugars
9/30 - SUNY-geneseo (geneseo NY)

hope to see you out as we venture from of our island home..

here at b+p central we have to struggle a little to come up with things to talk about on our poor neglected blog. i’m endlessly amazed by our friends(heroes) who have been blogging regularly for years and have managed to continuously report news and provide high quality content.

a couple of those heroic souls:

thanks to ryan at RSL for a really great post on us this week. ryan is based in boston and puts together monthly shows in our favorite new england metropolis. they are not to be missed!

our friend joe from instrumental analysis is also an insane booking genius/chemist putting together 3 (!) fantastic shows in the coming weeks. two are for the anniversary of his site(aug 8/9 at IOTA in arlington!!), to which i regularly find inbound links all over the world.

yay shows - and lots more to be added. especially excited to be playing with +/- a band featuring members of the legendary ‘versus’ whom i used to listen via cassette tape in my youth.

upcoming:

8/15 - mercury lounge - nyc - w/ +/- and hymns — buy tickets here!

8/16 - mojo 13 - delaware - w/ galaxy 13, speedgoat

nyctaper is kind of like a superhero. he swoops down and tapes shows and then disappears, on to the next show, the next recording. it’s fantastic. please tell your friends and make the world an easier place for superheroes.

his recording of our after the jump showcase just went up, check it out

1) the re-release of dennis wilson’s long languishing ‘pacific ocean blue’ roolz my world. henceforth b+p is going on a major seventies singer-songwriter kick and i’m requiring beards to be grown all around.

2) b+p was in the studio all day yesterday tracking our version of fugazi’s ’song #1′. dennis wilson unfortunately would have only semi approved of our version, but that’s ok, because i only semi approve of dennis’ outfit in this photo:

oh. actually maybe that’s brian wilson. i got confused by the surf board.

thanks to kamilo who recorded us at the fantastic soundworks in astoria, details on the release of the song to come!

3) oh yeah, and i’m not gonna tell you what andrew did on saturday, but here’s a hint

we were very excited to have our album reviewed by popmatters this week. They seemed to have liked it about as much as they liked the new dokken album, which puts us in excellent company i’d say.

i took some time out to go see our pals from aldenbarton play at the delancey. b+p is also looking forward to hitting the up the mercury lounge debut of square wave punch on july 22. it’ll be tremendous!

meanwhile, we’re hitting the studio this weekend to track our contribution to the fugazi covers project. don’t tell pete though.. we’ve hired a drum machine that we’ve affectionately named ‘pete 3000′ to take over the rhythmic duties. i’ve estimated that ‘pete 3000′ will save us thousands a year by preventing auto collisions and minor entanglements with the legal system.

i’m sorry to keep referencing my last.fm widget (see bottom right hand corner of blog) but i’m endlessly fascinated by the statistical breakdown of what i’ve been listening to. as you can see (for the next few days at least) I was rockin out to some JRR Tolkien this week.

in related news, pete was rocking to another classic european (pete himself being a bit of a classic european), danish superstar tommy seebach. tommy returned the favor by starring in our second video:

our video was the paste magazine video of the day yesterday!! (july 4) nothing is more patriotic than sock puppets.

i wondered why our massive blog readership wasn’t responding to our frequent controversial and insight-spurring remarks and just realized that there was a registration requirement to comment. that feature is now off, let the dialog begin! 

well, you may have noticed a hole in the place where the b+p upcoming shows list used to be. i had always taken pride in the fact that since our first show, this had never happened; we had never played a show without knowing when our next show would come. daunted by this tradition, i donned my booking hat in earnest last week, soothed by the reverby loops of panda bear’s ‘person pitch’ on repeat (musically, it was like being in a room full of mirrors) and started planning the b+p road adventures for the coming months …. so, keep an eye out, there’s lots of great shows on the horizon!

meanwhile, while waiting patiently for the b+p ‘uncalibrated’ video to come on the television (not actually expecting it come on the television, just hoping for a miraculous coincidence,) I caught the MGMT bug. and then i made an impulse buy on iTunes. the result: MGMT’s ‘time to pretend’ on endless repeat unseating that silly panda bear dude. that is one catchy-ass song…