Sons of Poseidon at the Garage Bar

Last night, we opened for Sons of Poseidon at the Garage Bar in Moorhead. For those of you who aren't familiar with the Garage Bar; it was formerly Pistol Pete's, then some dance-type place that got closed down approximately 17 minutes after it opened, then empty for a couple of years, and now "The Garage". It has had quite a bit of work done inside. The stage was rebuilt, a good-sized PA and excellent lighting rig were installed, the bathrooms were remodeled, and I think the bar on the lower level is new (I could be wrong on that). It's a really nice place.

We played a slightly abbreviated set, which consisted of the new tunes "Awake", "Defiance", "In the Wake of Fear", "Another Life", "Waste Away"; the 7th Seal songs "Genocide" and "Spitting Lies"; and a cover of "Children of the Sea". Overall, it went pretty well. People seem to be getting more familiar with the newest material, much of which hasn't been properly recorded at all, so that's good. It's time for us to get a few more things demoed and available for people to hear, as well as getting a second set of material finished.

Wings of the Fallen played well. I'm not very familiar with their material since I had only seen them once before, several months ago. That said, I remembered at least a couple of their tunes from having heard them once, so they must be doing something right. Nice guys, good players.

SOP was SOP. Sure, they gave the disclaimer that they really hadn't rehearsed, but any errors weren't evident to me in the crowd. The songs sounded really tight. As I mentioned in the previous entry, 7th Seal (which consisted of Troy, Dave, me, and a couple of drummers) played with SOP a lot in the 2005-2006 time frame. We always had fun opening for them. In fact, I think that some of the most fun I've had playing music was opening for SOP. Great players, and a great group of guys.

Been a long time...

I guess I nearly forgot about this blog since the first post last summer. Many changes have happened since July of 2010. For starters, our entire rhythm section has changed. We are happy to have Jon Ryan on drums, and to have Dave Stensland back on bass guitar after a year's hiatus. We've played several shows since that time; May at Rick's with Megadeaf, August at the Mainline with the Bulletboys and Alter Ego, and in September at the Garage with Cage and Iron Finger. After a very long haul of rehearsal spot problems, we now have an actual rehearsal space. This has allowed us to get a lot more work done in a much shorter period of time.

So, what do we have coming up?

S.O.P: On November 4th at the Garage in Moorhead, we are opening for the Sons of Poseidon reunion. We've been looking forward to this, because Troy, Dave, and I opened for SOP a lot back in the days of the band 7th Seal. Speaking of 7th Seal, we have a little over half of the 7th Seal album relearned and somewhat revitalized. We intend to have 6 of the 7 songs ready to rotate in and out of our sets.

New Songs: We are picking through the material that I have written or am in the process of writing, looking to have another half dozen or so new originals ready to go early in 2012 (some earlier, most likely).

Web Site: We are working on a new web site. Well, we are working on a web site. "New" implies that we have an old web site. We'll keep you posted for when it's up, at www.actofdefiance.net.

New Demos: We have started work on demoing new songs in order to reflect our actual current lineup, and to get more decently listenable material out there for people to hear. We are commencing with the song "Awake", which for whatever reason we didn't demo back in 2009 when we did "Defiance", "In the Wake of Fear", and "Waste Away."

The demos also act as our "pre-production" (sort of) for the full-length that I've talked about for 2 years and haven't gotten anywhere near done. The demo process is rather time consuming, but at the end of it you have a good idea of whether your arrangement ideas are decent or just lousy. There's something nice about being able to hear a fully fleshed-out version of the song, then being able to listen back a couple of months later and go "oh, we really should change this or that".

That's more or less what we've been up to. We'd like to thank our friends, fans, other bands, promoters, and the people who have booked us for supporting us as we get things up and running.