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!

MySpace's New Layout & Band Page Info Deletions, And How It Affects The SMS

This post is dedicated to outlining changes to one of our biggest band page sources, and what this means for our links and coverage at The Sault Metal Scene. In a nutshell, social networking website and popular band page resource MySpace had a new profile layout, format, and direction rolled out last weekend, which focuses on music and artists. You think this would be good for what we do on the site, especially as the past uses of it as a social networking portal have fallen by the wayside compared to Facebook and Twitter, but not quite. As part of the upgrades, almost everything has been deleted from old MySpace pages with the exception of songs (if you had any uploaded), your existing friends (now called "connections"), and your profile photo. Biography information, videos, blog postings, page comments, most external applications, and games are all gone, though other photos can be retrieved on request if you log in. I'll note that MySpace administrators did not give any advance warning about these deletions, and while there is a visible outcry from existing users, I have little faith that MySpace will bring the info back (though Microsoft did revert on some of it's unpopular Xbox One policies, so who knows.)

Now, what does this mean for the site and local metal/hard rock bands? This honestly won't have a direct bearing on most current artists, as few local bands primarily used MySpace for their online media anymore compared to Facebook or Reverbnation, but this is a major headache for me and local music fans who used MySpace to catch up on older local bands. Unlike the closure of GarageBand, MySpace didn't give advance warning that they were going to delete so much from pages, so we went from a vast resource of band information to a stripped down version that feels more like a glossed up Soundcloud out of nowhere. To be fair, there is potential for the new MySpace, as Sault Ontario hardcore band Destroilet have made effective use and updates of their MySpace page, but they lost all old info too when they upgraded early, and many bands had a lot of information, posts, details, and videos there that was really a benefit to fans of local music. If the goal is to turn MySpace music-centric, why delete things that would have supported that aim?

As a current use site, this won't be a major loss, but in terms of material and SMS usage, this is a huge blow, but to try and soften it as much as I could, I archived biography information and details on as many local metal/hard rock bands that I could using cached copies of each using Google, so save for blog posts and videos, I think I have much of what would be handy. However, I had to update, change, and in some cases, delete some band links due to the "updates", as they made almost all local band MySpace pages shells of their former selves, and no longer the most updated and representative page for their information, material, and concert listings. For some, I left their MySpace page linked here as it still had audio material, and still remains their most substantial (or only) online page, but I saved info for most via cached page copies. For an unlucky 15 bands, the MySpace changes eliminated all info that kept them in our listings, and because they have no songs there, or other surviving online pages, I had to regrettably delete them.

Just to outline all the changes to the band links on here, I'll run through them quickly, and if a specific band isn't mentioned, I either left their MySpace page alone out of necessity, or they weren't linked to MySpace in our band listings. Most of the link switches were to Facebook pages or groups, with Sault Ontario bands As It Stands, The Bear Hunters, Changing Waves, Destroilet, Detroit, Dirty Virgin, For All That Is Lost, Gates of Winter, The Issues, Lion Ride, Lorax, Paraside, Riverin, and Shit Liver, and Sault Michigan bands Clownsack, Drayton Fever, Insipid Brutality, Life's Eclipse, Nixxon Dixxon, Oddfellow, Scofflaw, Swampghas, and Unleashed now linked through there. I also switched 5 bands each from their MySpace to Reverbnation & PureVolume pages, with Bad Side, Elipzis, Integrated System of Machines, No Arrow, and Skull After Betrayl now linked through Reverbnation, and Apocrytha, Dark Salvation, Fitswitch, Infrastrate, and Mike Libertoski now linked through PureVolume.

I also moved two bands from MySpace to SoundClick pages (No Remains & Traces), while the other switches were for single bands, which now link to 2wo Man Baand's Freewebs page, ApocalyptiCDistroyeR's Wix website, Bent Rollercoaster's OurStage page, and Woods of Ypres' Bandcamp page. As for page deletions, as these artists had no songs on MySpace or other existing online pages, I regrettably have deleted 15 metal/hard rock acts from our SMS band listings, including Sault Ontario artists Caedis Omnis, Ephidel, The Pisstanks, Route 69, Steven Flint, When They Fall, and Wrathborne, and Sault Michigan-regional artists 7/47, Cherubic Red, Riot! By Night, Savage Roar, Shift, Traynwreck, Twisted Manikin, and Wild Fate. Most weren't too active in their heyday (Shift & Route 69 being notable exceptions), but even though I hate deleting links, I had to so we didn't link to barren, uninformative pages for the sake of preservation. No offense is intended to these bands' members!

The last switches that I have to make relate to MySpace links for non-bands on the site, and I'll tackle that soon. I hope MySpace administrators listen to their fans and bring back at least previous profile information, photos, blogs, and videos, as all would benefit their music-centric aims and show that they listen to their users, but I'm not holding out hope that they will. I just wanted to let you guys know about what happened and how it affects the SMS, and if your band has a MySpace page, I'd say spruce it up and make use of the new features, even if what's old is lost, as I can see it having some good uses. It's just a frustrating no-warning change, but I think we'll be alright in the long run. Stay tuned for more news soon, and thanks for the patience!