Did You Get it All Out of Your System?

Bill just told me that The Format (myspace) called it quits.  Which is a real shame.  Their 2006 CD Dog Problems is seriously lurved by a devoted few, deserved more ears.  A nastily sundered major label contract and the vicious dissolution of a relationship came together in one of the head-boppin'est break-up records you'll ever hear.

I saw them in August of that year at Irving Plaza, a sold-out show that was so All Ages the venue refused to sell liquor downstairs.  I'd come for Anathallo (myspace), the Michigan Xian prog group responsible for the gorgeous (and unjustly dismissed) Floating World.  That band was shakers and gigantic bass drums and flugelhorns and balloons and slugs and bugs and humble earnestness.  Their winds stuck around for the main act and lent bouncy Dixieland fills.

The Format - Dog Problems(mp3) (buy)

The Arizonan bunch were built around Sam Means and Nate Ruess, and the latter was a natural frontman.  Charisma to burn.  Something about the name makes folks - me, included, before I'd heard the tunes - think the band's a bunch of guyliner models, and Ruess told a story about how someone had just spray-painted "Emo Sucks" on their trailer in Massachusetts.  "We were about to have it removed, but just left it.  Because, y'know, it sort of does."

One of the last songs that night was "Inches and Falling;" that one'll suck the city right out of you.  "I love love," its chorus goes.  "I love being in love, I don't care what it does to me!"  It'll have you skipping through Union Square, singing in the face of strangers.  It'll earn you unkind words, unfortunate gestures, stitches.

Means and Ruess say the parting is amicable.  Which is a real shame.  Because last time things went down nasty, they came up with a pretty darned good record.

(a couple more pics from that show are here)

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Time used to be when folks took incriminating photographs, you just had to make sure you got the negatives.  This is the digital age, and the blackmail's perpetual.  So, yeah, I'm on Blog Fresh Radio for a second time, sounding like a moron.

I didn't know they were going to use what I was saying about the Hype Machine Music Blog Zeitgeist on their podcast - I need to be more wary with the faux-press if I ever run for office - otherwise I'd have explained a little more about what it was and who did the real work.  Next time I'm just going to make a lot of monkey noises.

If you've come here from there, the Apes & Androids song is up here for a another day or two; you should really listen to everything streaming on the band's myspace page, then go to their site and buy their CD.  It's quite good.

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Vampire Who?  WeekWha?

tags: the format  rip  

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