Pissed Jeans January newsletter
Hello again! Hope you had a nice dose of the holidays.
2022 is in the books but that doesn’t mean we can’t reflect warmly upon the music we enjoyed from it. Matt (who is currently writing this in the third-person) collected his year-end faves over on his Yellow Green Red website, Sean’s favorites are over on this Instagram slide, and Brad’s faves are listed below. Nobody knows what Randy liked!
Straw Man Army – SOS LP
Icepield – Demo
High Vis – Blending LP
Sniffany and the Nits – The Unscratchable Itch LP
The Umbrellas – Write it in the Sky EP
Combust – Another Life LP
Blushing – Possessions LP
Ignite – s/t LP
Mindforce – New Lords
Expect a busier 2023 for Pissed Jeans than any other year since the pandemic struck! We are fixing to hit the road a little, and will be happy to share those dates once we have them. In the meantime, if you live in Philadelphia (or simply want to do the right thing and COME TO US), we’re playing Friday January 20th at Milkboy in Philadelphia! It’s with none other than the fantastic Kilynn Lunsford, whose debut solo album is a must-hear. She’s got at least a couple friends backing her up live; it should be great. Last time we played Milkboy, I’m pretty sure it was the first show they ever had, their big grand opening! We got free Doc Martens, Jeff Ziga and Nick Woj DJed Monster X records, and I stuck my bare butt out the second story window and no one noticed. This is looking to be a no-Docs, no-Woj, no-window-butt show but it’ll still be a glorious evening.
After that, we glommed onto the Philly date for Black Eyes’ big 20th anniversary reunion! Disgusting to think it’s been two full decades since we last enjoyed Black Eyes live, but the wheel in the sky keeps on turning I suppose. I believe the show is already sold out (and was sold out before any of the openers were announced!), so here’s a flyer to either make you feel happy that you have a ticket and are going or sad that you’re missing out.
Other than that, we’ll be hitting the studio in March to record a new album! Or so we think, at least! Very exciting… we’re writing our best songs yet believe it or not. More on that later, though.
As usual, let’s finish with Brad’s YouTube pick of the month. But don’t forget to see us at Milkboy!
Back in the late 90’s I started buying and trading tapes of wrestling from Japan. I had previously seen the 5th and 6th generation copies of all the hits like the IWA KOTDM tournament, W*ing fire death match, Circus Death Match etc, but now I was able to get current TV from Big Japan, Osaka Pro, BattleArts and more. Big Japan really caught my eye and specifically Tamoaki Honma. Honma started as a sympathetic young junior babyface teaming with a young Minoru Fujita, but around 1998 things started to change and Honma started working his way up the card in to the death matches. This was the age of your Mister Pogos and Shadow WXs in full outfits, but Honma still went out in his yellow trunks and yellow kick pads ready to take amounts of punishment that still to this day are tough to match. Anyway, Honma came out to this song that I didn’t know what it was, but it was a great theme song. Every time I heard it, I wondered what it was and needed to find out. This would have been likely in 2000 sometime so it was before Discogs, Spotify and maybe even music being on YouTube so I’m not really sure how I found out, but I did. The band was Gamma Ray and the song was “Heading for Tomorrow”, a 14 and a half minute epic power metal anthem. The only other super long metal song I knew at the time was “Keeper of the Seven Keys” by Helloween so it was funny to find out that the main force behind Gamma Ray was Kai Hansen who was previously in Helloween and had played on “Keeper of the Seven Keys”. At this point we are hitting an unnecessary amount of background on me loving Gamma Ray for a YouTube video. Anyway, the first few Gamma Ray albums had Ralf Scheepers on vocals and these are definitely my favorite albums by them. The video below isn’t anything crazy or special, I just love Gamma Ray and Helloween and Ralf Scheepers singing a medley of 3 Helloween songs.