Heavy Thursday Updates, MySpace Page Restorations, And Much More!!

Today at the SMS, we have some more assorted recent topics to touch on, including some random shorter recent items, new Facebook song postings, and some nice restorations on a popular social networking/band website, but first, here's the latest updates on a recently launched regular concert series!

It looks like plans to run the new Heavy Thursday series at The Roosevelt Hotel on a weekly basis have been scaled back. In a post on the series' Facebook group yesterday, promoter J.D. Pearce remarked that "there just aren't enough local acts" to cover the series weekly with three bands a night, but he does plan to continue Thursday bookings for local acts when available & when out of town bands play on a Thursday at The Rosie, so message him on Facebook or at the above links if you want in on a potential Thursday! The post leads me to think that there won't be a Heavy Thursday this week, but the next announced Thursday nighter at this venue will be on April 3rd with Babysitter and local openers, and we'll let you guys know if any are announced for this month. I did have a fear that this might happen with the new series, as the original Rosie metal nights started to be stretched thinner after they went weekly, with just one of the last 14 Dismembertainment promoted metal nights from July-October 2011 featuring more than two local bands.

Though the weekly convenience is awesome, I think the old series had better local lineup spreads and promotion when it was bi-weekly, so maybe J.D. could try promoting them on a regular bi-weekly or monthly basis? Either way, he's the right man to do a regular series right now in the Soo, and hopefully he's got some great cards up his sleeve for Thursdays at The Rosie as we enter the spring! Stay tuned for updates at the above links!

Next up, some old deleted MySpace media is back on old profiles, so we can restore some bands we deleted from our band links! In the past month, the social networking/music website has began restoring photos and videos to old profiles that don't violate current requirements or terms of use (source here), so if you've missed some MySpace videos and photos that weren't elsewhere, check again, as they're probably back! Biography information, blog postings, page comments, games, and applications remain absent though. With this revelation, a lot of source videos & photos for our back coverage is at access again, and I can add most (but not all) of the bands we deleted from our band links last summer back to the site, as some now have enough videos and/or informative photos to constitute a "relevant" link for our purposes. With that said, I'm pleased to re-welcome 7/47, The Pisstanks, Riot! By Night, Route 69, Savage Roar, Shift, Twisted Manikin, When They Fall, and Wild Fate back to our band links based on their restored content!

The artists that we didn't bring back were Askew'd, Caedis Omnis, Cherubic Red, Ephidel, Steven Flint, Traynwreck, and Wrathborne, as none have videos or effectively captioned photos, so their restoration to the site would depend on MySpace bringing back old profile information. Huge thanks to MySpace employees for bringing back the videos and photos, this makes our work a lot easier, and I know it will benefit the new music-centric focus of the site, so go check your old MySpace links to see what's "new"!

Also today, local "derd rock" project The Issues posted a couple more new/old original songs onto their Facebook page on Saturday! Uploaded as Facebook videos again, one is a re-post from their MySpace page entitled "Candy Store", and it's a slower and more deliberate song based on a true story that has a surprising maturity going for it! While "Puppets on a String (Trixie)" & "Last Stand" have not made it to Facebook yet, another old 2009 demo named "Kick" did that we haven't heard before, and it has a groove metal sound that I believe features ex-singer Alan "Power" Wells from Winkstinger, so the extreme nature should be of note! I still like the variance shown on their material, and they can handle a bunch of different styles effectively, but it remains to be seen how Mullet and Vinyl do on newer material. Check out "Kick" below, and hear more at the above links!



Finally for today, here's three more assorted shorter stories from the last while, and as usual, these are in alphabetical order by band name:

• Did you happen to notice a post on As It Stands' Facebook page on January 28th that featured a photo album of a concert from earlier that month that they were listed as playing? Just in case anyone was confused, that show was in Edmonton and featured a hard rock band from there named As It Standz (with a "z"), so chalk that up to a tagging error. The local hardcore As It Stands haven't played live in a year & a half, and have issued no updates in over 4 months, but stay tuned just in case!
• In a note we haven't elaborated on outside of this month's "Where Are The New Albums?" post, local punk/metal quintet Jack Spades' debut EP is being produced by AlgomA drummer/Bad Back frontman Jamie Vincent! That should be interesting for sure, so stay tuned for updates! (My source is Jack Spades' Facebook page.)
• Relocated local grindcore trio Shit Liver will finally play live in their new Southern Ontario homebase this Saturday in Niagara Falls as part of a breast cancer fundraiser (details here!) The date joins their Soo return date on May 4th at The Oddfellows Hall, as well as a return to the Touch of Death Festival in Cochrane in June. Nice to see the guys getting back into the live scheme of things again, and stay tuned as we hear more!

That's all for today, but stay tuned for more news this week, including hopefully something tomorrow! Thanks everyone!