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. 

I just placed the order to produce the CD.

So my friend Darren came over to Aaron and Spencer’s place on Monday to get pictures for the cd. As discussed here, we did get our 8×10 taken. Basically, Darren just set up a camera and took pictures while we messed with each other. There are a lot of pictures that, while hilarious, should never be seen by anyone outside of this band. One involves Aaron putting a weird stick ball thing down his pants. Strangely enough, most of these pictures capture this band perfectly, from the way we interact with each other to the general level of stupidity that surrounds us. That is why they can never be shown.

So things are quickly wrapping up for this project. I hope to get the whole thing mailed out to get produced by the end of the week. If it goes much later, we are really pushing up against our June 6th deadline.

So we haven’t updated the blog for a while now. We suck.  Here’s our bit of news: the CD is well on its way now.  Silver Sonya Studios has it for mastering and we’re working on the artwork/posters/press kits and all that.  This is actually more fun that it sounds.  We’re doing all that stuff by hand, splattering acrylic paint around haphazardly like talentless Jackson Pollack.  So far we made 40 unique posters and a dozen or so press kit folders like this.  They look pretty awesome (well, most do; some of them are hideous).

So far the plan is to use one of our posters are the cover art for our CD.  We were going to hand-decorate every CD, but that sounded better in our heads than the reality of actually hand-painting 1000 CD cases.  We still might do a limited run of 100 or so like this later.

I’ll put pictures of our art up here soon.

is The City Veins. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s not out of arrogance. I’ve never been able to listen to my own band’s CDs. It’s like listening to a recording of your own voice or watching yourself on video. You know that it’s you, but it seems foreign and awkward and makes you cringe a little. That, plus there’s almost always several things about every CD I’ve ever made that I would change if I had the time/money.

But our new CD is awesome and I’ve been looping it in my car for the last week. I’m psyched. When we set forth to make this EP, we wanted to make sure that we did it right, that even if no one bought it or heard it we’d still be proud of the product. I’m thrilled with what we’ve got and can’t wait to share it.

On a related note, Mike Eudy at Jamalot Studios in Rockville is an awesome producer/engineer/mixer/jack of all trades. He deserves a ton of credit for our CD. If anyone out there is in the market for recording services, Mike’s your man (and he’s cheap too).