The City Veins

Charles may be in a better position to express our recent folly, but I’m going to let the cat out of the bag first. 

For the full duration of this band thus far we have used a certain unnamed duplication company to handle all of our CD duplication, from the 1st EP completed a year ago to the new EP we just completed.  Admittedly, we were intitially drawn to this particular company because it cheap.  At first, we were quite happy with their work.  We sent “Weekend Affair” to them to duplicate and add minimal artwork on the top side of the CD, and they did a solid job.  Really, how hard can this be?  They even got it right the second time we ordered.  So at that point we’re into them for $1,000 and they’ve done.

Right before we played with Robbers on High Street at the Rock and Roll Hotel we ordered another set of CD’s.  We opened the box at the club, and handed them out for free as we always do.  We noticed that the printing on the CD was not of the quality we had seen in the past, though we paid the same amount.  We collectively thought,”well, this is sort of shitty”, and moved on.  Now the artwork is actually fading straight off of the CD covers.  Not great.

It also never occurred to us that we should listen to the CD’s to MAKE SURE IT WAS US.  As it turns out, we’ve been handing out free CD’s for the past few months that are actually the recordings of some other band.  These peoples jobs are not hard…it boggles the mind that they could screw it up like this.

Unfortunately, none of this came to light until the past few days, well after we had sent our new EP–complete with deadlines and real expectations of quality–to the same company to have them reproduced.  Their web-site claims a 10 business day turn-around for the CD’s, and it was only yesterday on day 9 that they made the artwork we had sent them available for confirmation.  It is an understatement to say we are concerned.