If you haven’t already read Nicholas Schroeder‘s fantastic review of Handful of Fog in this week’s Portland Phoenix, you should do that now. This post can wait. Jason enjoyed Nick’s review so much he wanted to write a review of it or even thoroughly annotate it. Then he started muttering about a being a “real life Charles Kinbote” and his eyes glazed over and we stopped listening. The point is . . . actually, nothing to do with the substance of the review itself. You probably noticed that the article include a picture of the cover of Handful of Fog, which you’ve been pining to see since we released that redacted cover a while back. Well, not to be outdone by the Phoenix, we’ve decided to post a larger picture of the cover than the meager 220 x 220 pixel one they used in their online article. (We have no idea how large the image appears in the print version of the Phoenix; we refuse to read any paper with a thread count under 400.) Behold this glorious 500 x 500 pixel picture of the cover:

You’ll have to come to our show tomorrow night at Mayo Street Arts if you want to see it any larger than that, pervert.

Want to hear our new album? Then you need to come to our show next month on the 22nd at Mayo Street Arts with more than just cover money. How much more? No idea. Just bring an extra . . . $20? We won’t sell the record for that much, but we figure you’ll want to buy yourself a drink and maybe a t-shirt if we get around to making those. We considered posting a picture of the album cover here but decided against it, because we know how you love a surprise. Then Derek suggested putting up a fake album cover to throw you off the scent, but Jay pointed out that everyone would end up saying they prefer it to the real cover and we’d have to burn all the records we hadn’t already sold out of spite, sending the market price of the album through the thatched roof and out of your price range. Ergo, no pseudo covero. So, basically, the thesis of this post is . . . we should have spent this time practicing instead.

Mice. They shit in the corners of your studio where you don’t notice it until months later. They chew on the cables to your cheap Behringer monitors (although in fairness to the mice, Behring probably uses high fructose corn syrup to make the cable insulation). And they insist you pump the fuck out of the gain on your new album because all the cool Ibizan DJs do that and mice eat that shit up like Behringer monitor cables. So, as you might have gathered, we faced a few setbacks while recording Handful of Fog. But, it shouldn’t take way too much longer now. Want proof? Look at this:

Sure, Derek could have just banged that out in Photoshop in half an hour to trick you. Well, he did actually bang that out in Photoshop in half an hour, but not to trick you. He did it for our album, a test pressing of which you see above.
Oh, wait, no. That’s not it. This is the test pressing:

We know you’re thinking, “Why should I trust that piece of wood? It has paint smeared all over it. A real gentlewood would dress itself nicer than that.”
Look at yourself! You just said “gentlewood” with a straight face.
“First of all, I thought it; I didn’t say it. Second of all, how can you see my face right now? Third of all, they’re called quotation marks, not thought marks, dipshit. Maybe proof read these posts for puncuation before posting them next time. And spelling too, apparently. Didn’t Derek used to be a copy editor?”
Totally besides the point. We gave Teenarena Records the go ahead to get our records pressed, so some time in the foreseeable future—
“To quote William Strunk, Jr.‘s Elements of Style—”
Fuck off. You don’t get to see the album now. Or hear it. Or taste it. It’s totally off limits to your senses.

Want to see the cover of our new album? Well, may be you should have come to practice a couple times, you wingdingbat. But, since you have those puppy dog eyes (out of a Sarah McLachlan commercial), here’s a redacted version of the cover for you to feast your rabid eyes (or mouth, with the aid of a printer) on:

If you squint hard enough to cause the blood vessels in your aforementioned dogeyes to burst or if you stand back about eighteen feet, you can begin to distinguish the important features of the cover. So enjoy that. Or, alternatively, just wait until the album cover out, buy a copy, and drool over it like, we don’t know, a dingo or something. Or just listen to the record. Whatever sinks your battleship.

You might have noticed that when search engining for us a lot of useless etsy listings come up that just want to sell you earrings or probably mercury-infused hats decorated with feathers made of metal. This hurts you just as much as it hurts us. So join us in boycotting the trade of literal metal feathers. We believe this will increase our searchability and save the lives of thousands of plague carrying owls that need your love too.

The good folks at Teenarena Records told us they wanted to put out our third album, Handful of Fog, on vinyl, and we told them we wanted them to, so they will. We got our first reference lacquers last week, which you won’t get to hear because they self-destruct after a single listen or something like that. We don’t know when the album will come out just yet, but since it’s out of our hands now, probably before 2014.

1. This Band Is a Secret
2. In the Moon and Still
3. Dreary Beats
4. Rotten Cop
5. Yellow Tiger Tambourines
6. I Hold Her Up
7. Balance Beam
8. Witch Tricks
9. Sparkle Motorcycle
10. Of Human Bandages
11. West End Blackout/The End of “Chains”
12. She Had Her Doubts