There’s nothing better than the feeling of crawling into bed after a long night out. The way your body sinks into the mattress, and your pillow feels like a cloud of comfort beyond the capability of man to devise. So next time you fall into bed with heavy eyelids, keep this playlist in mind. Comprised of soft tunes to lull you into dreamland, it won’t be long before you’re catching some well deserved Z’s.
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If you’ve not yet had the pleasure of listening to New Jersey natives, The Early November, you should fix that immediately. Lucky for you, we have their latest music video, “In Currents” for you to delve into right here, right now.
As the title track off their July album release, the video is an impressive step towards what we can only hope will be several more music videos to come.
View the video here and catch The Early November on tour with Cartel and Seahaven this month.
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With summer right around the corner, we can’t help but be totally stoked for Warped Tour. In case you haven’t heard, we’ll be sponsoring our own stage for twenty-two dates and bringing twenty-three artists out to perform on it. Twenty-two acts will snag a performance at their local tour stop, and one lucky artist will get to perform on every date (tour bus included). In addition, there are a handful of other OurStage artists already booked to play various dates of the tour. We decided to catch up with them to get the scoop on their summer plans.
Having earned their stripes from a young age under the name Another Option, War Games are primed to be breakout stars on this year’s Warped Tour. Comprised of lead vocalist/guitarist Kyle Therrien, guitarist Ian Provost, bassist/vocalist Andy Calheta and drummer Cameron Raubeson, this indie rock outfit promise fun and energetic shows this summer that are sure to win over plenty of new fans. We caught up with Kyle, Ian and Andy to talk about the band’s history, who they want to see at Warped Tour, and why they love Ace Enders.
OS: How did the band first begin?
KT: Technically, the band started when me and Andy were very young. We decided we wanted to start a band after being pretty heavily influenced by bands that were big at the time, like Green Day, Blink-182, Saves the Day. Before we even knew how to play any instruments, we decided we were going to be in a band. We started walking around our lunchroom in middle school and started taking donations so we could start buying equipment, literally, with a bucket, walking around. We were pretty popular at school so we made a lot of money and were able to actually buy some equipment for ourselves. We assigned each other instruments and started to learn them. If you jump forward to where Ian joined the band as a drummer and things started to get serious, ever since then, the better we got at our instruments, and as soon as we started playing shows, we became more and more determined to become more of a serious band. Somewhere along the line, we decided it must be a career choice, so we never let go of that dream and we’re still kind of chipping away at that.
OS: Where did the name War Games come from?
IP: It kind of just popped into our heads one night. It wasn’t anything thought out, there wasn’t a general way we wanted to go with a new name…it thought of itself, I guess.
In the early 2000s, Drive Thru Records was the place to be for pop punk, emo, indie rock and post-hardcore bands . The label was home to rising stars like New Found Glory, Finch, The Starting Line, Dashboard Confessional, Senses Fail, Something Corporate, Rx Bandits and Midtown. Also among this group was The Early November, a young group from New Jersey who had perfected their own style of emotional and energetic rock with songs like “I Want To Hear You Sad,” “Decoration” and “Ever So Sweet.” Led by singer-songwriter Ace Enders, the band released two full-length records and two EPs before going on hiatus after a final show at Bamboozle 2007.
During the break, each member pursued other projects and interests. Enders has continued to release music under his own name and his side project, I Can Make a Mess Like Nobody’s Business. Drummer Jeff Kummer released a solo album called Your Best Alternative, and guitarist Joseph Marro signed on as keyboardist for fellow DTR alums Hellogoodbye. Then, in late 2011, the band announced that they would be playing a show together in Philadelphia. The success of this show led the band to add several more dates, and eventually, reunite. We had the pleasure of speaking with Marro about these reunion shows, the band’s upcoming album and when we can see them live again!
OS: You played some reunion shows over the holidays, which were the first shows the band had played together in a few years. Was it strange, initially, to get back together for practice? Was there a noticeable change in the band dynamics?
JM: Surprisingly, there wasn’t, really. It felt pretty normal. Seriously, the same jokes came right back out. The same personalities that you haven’t been around everyday that you used to be around every single day for seven years or so…they’re still the same. Obviously, people are older, but they’re still the exact same people. It was pretty fun, it was like we never really split up. It was interesting, how that was.
OS: How did you decide on a setlist for the reunion shows?
JM: Oh jeez, that was tough! Usually, Jeff, our drummer, is largely in control. He wrote up a setlist that was about, fourteen or fifteen songs long and which we knew was roughly about an hour and fifteen minutes, which is how long we wanted to play. From there, we said, “We really love this song, let’s try to fit it in,” or “this song really isn’t coming together.” Some of the songs we tried to play after not playing for a long time and they just weren’t working or we just felt, maybe, too far removed from that stuff. But we tried to include a little bit of everything from all of the records and I think we did a pretty good job of it. We touched on a lot of the stuff from the last record and we played a good portion of the first release, the EP, and probably six or eight songs from The Room’s Too Cold, so it was all in there, for the most part.
Continue reading ‘Exclusive Q and A: The Early November Are Back…And It’s Ever So Sweet’
