old school bar days and some shows to rock yr minds

Well, it snowed! Like a bad muthafucka it snowed and then it froze and everybody was cold slippin’ all over the place! But the show went on! I would like to personally thank everybody that froze their asses off but still rolled mad deep and came to see Fin Fang Foom and the others on Friday night. It was an awesome show, all the bands brought it, and everybodye seemed to have a great time. Speaking of great times, a long walk in the snow is a pretty decent cure for a hangover. Rub that snow all over your throbbing head, it feels gooooooooood.

Anyway, here’s the damn sitch for the weekend people. Thursday night, we ain’t got no show! So show up and enjoy a quiet old-school bar night as Kym totally macks the rude cocktails and frosty brews, all great music fired up on the iPod, all free pool til 8. Backgammon. Connect 4. Definitely.

The tunes start up again on Friday, though, so kick back while you can. Maria Albani’s new project…actually, supergroup…Organos celebrates their album release. I got an advance of the disc, and it is the stuff. Beautiful, dreamy, classic indie rock. Anchoring the show is Birds and Arrows, a band consisting of two people that I would marry if they weren’t already married to each other. These guys are so good, gorgeous rock steeped in cosmic country. Best drum-set in the triangle too. Ye Olde Shoppe opens the thang up. I haven’t heard these guys yet, but I know Wild Wild Geese – their other project – so this promises to be good.

Saturday is totally exciting, as the best band Cary has to offer comes to town. My Majesty in Oxygen: Are they actually insane, or just weird geniuses? Is there a ghost in the band? Come and see. Athens GA’s The Back Pockets and BaroN  open up.

Don’t snow again on Friday please.

- 別針勾子

Please god don’t snow this friday

But that is what the damn fo’cast calls for, people. Do an anti-snow dance. Usually I would welcome snow, but Friday is the reschedulement (is that a word) of December’s Fin Fang Foom/Free Electric State/Gray Young show, which just so happened to get FUCKING SNOWED OUT. That can’t happen again. The bands are getting there early, so even if we all need to sleep at The Pinhook, this show is gonna happen. Show up! Bring a sleeping bag. I will personally let people sleep there. Shit, that would be fun.

Oh yeah, this bill gets further awessified by the addition of Brooklyn’s deVries – featuring former Trianglian Kuku Kooks – in the opening slot.

Saturday oh man is another good show. A solo showing from Duncan of Hammer No More the Fingers, Chapel Hill’s incredible Veelee, and DC’s filler Imperial China! YAAAAHAAHAHA!!

Oh yeah, Thursday is Cool John Ferguson at a family-friendly 7:30. Come see him rip it up.

OH

SNAP

-PHK

drama, music, radness, and rock

HELLO EVERYONE. THIS BLOG POST IS EMPHATIC, HENCE THE CAPS Y’ALL. DAMN I AM GOING TO BE INSCRUTABLE TODAY.

Actually, that’s exhausting. I feel like I’m yelling while typing. Fuck it.

Mockumentary month concludes with Spinal Tap! Yay! Everyone knows about this movie, so come watch it together and get all cozy with eachother.

Tuesday it’s some ART, as the play ART comes to the ‘hook. Let me quote a man or a lady…

“The Mebane Acting Company presents ‘Art,’ a play by Yasmina Reza, translated by Christopher Hampton. When Marc and Serge begin their verbal battle over Serge’s expensive new painting, they start down a path of revelations and verbal beatings that threaten their entire friendship. As the third member of the group, Yvan, gets involved, his problems get wrapped up in the argument and further escalate the situation. The friends finally abandon restraint and go at each other, wading deep into their failures and frustrations. Marc’s shocking final act pushes their bond to the breaking point, and the aftermath proves whether their relationship can survive. This Tony Award-winning play stars Ross Hurteau, Brook North, and Michael Williams in a funny and moving look at what makes us become, and remain, friends.”

And on Wednesday, the impeccable pop stylings of Mitch Easter! And some bands that he has produced! Boy Genius headlines with the sweet power-pop hooks, while Western Civ opens with some post-punk angularity. Mitch himself will join both bands onstage.

It’s the shit, people.

-PHK

for the dreams of the weekend, we all sing

It’s an interesting sensation, stepping outside and not feeling icicles form in my moustache. It’s nice. It’s…sort of normal.

Anyway, the weekend! It’s time to talk about it

Basically, it’s a three-day miasma of killer live music, with more than one eccentricity and some flat-out skews toward vaporous, inscrutable sonic landscapes. We welcome some mysterious out of towners, as Knoxville’s Shortwave Society brings their twisted take on early-post punk, and How I Became the Bomb brings their radio-ready, bombastic power-pop (plus a seriously interesting Paul McCartney Cover.) Folklore, the massive cosmic-weird-Americana band from Philadelphia…or are they from Athens, GA? BOTH. There are two versions of the band, and the Philly version will be rolling through the Pinhook on Thursday on the way down south to meet up with the Athens version, and, I guess, mate with it.

Saturday sees the incredible Beloved Binge, who we are so pleased to have back with us in our tender bosom after they finished their tour last summer. They got really, really good on that tour, so come check that jam out by gad.

-PINHOOK

Hidden Civilizations and the fictional men who are fond of them

Hello everyone. Please excuse my sober tone. Sometimes the jazz just doesn’t flow…sometimes I am not the man that brings the jazz. Grappling Hook played their last show ever on Saturday. It was amazing, but these are the words of a sad man.

But we can’t wallow in our troubles forever, my nerds, because awesome things are on the three-day horizon and they are flying at us faster than we can dodge. Don’t attempt to dodge. That will make them mad.

Monday is the third installment of Mockumentary Month, featuring probably my favorite film of this series, Forgotten Silver. This is Peter Jackson’s exploration of what an early-20th-century New Zealand film industry would have looked like…if New Zealand contained the never-before-discovered ruins of an Angkoresque civilization beyond its sheep-tended hillsides.

It’s got the dude from Six Feet Under in it, if that means a thing.

Tuesday is another one of our infamous YOUTUBEOFFS. I call it that because I like the word. You know what to do. Come to the bar and show everyone your favorite internet videographizing. It’s easy!

Sincerely,

Le Crochet de Pin

Goodbye Grappling Hook

So, the weekend is about a million major things, but the main thing is that it is time to say goodbye to one of our favorite bands of ALL TIME, the immaculate Grappling Hook. Dave, in his previous incarnation as Torch Marauder, has rocked the Triangle’s face for many years, combining a keen sense of the ridiculous with a keener sense of what rock n’ roll is supposed to be: big, powerful, and full of dangerous objects swinging inches from your face.

Saturday night is Grappling Hook’s last show. If you’ve never seen them, you really must, or I will hunt you down and break things in your body. Double guitars, the meanest keys in town, Evan from Maple Stave punishing the kit, and the inimicable Dave hurling an actual metal grappling hook around with aplomb and panache. No man has ever wielded the hook with the skill of Dave. It’s a spectacle, sure, and they have a big sense of humor, but the most important thing (as always) is the music, which in the case of Grappling Hook is riveting. We’re sad to see them go, but we’re thrilled to host their swan song. Grappling Hook is Dead, Long Live Grappling Hook.

And that isn’t even all about Saturday night that will both crush and uplift you simultaneously. The other bands on the bill are goddamn incredible. The inimicable Cantwell, Gomez, and Jordan close the show, and CLAWFORM FUCKING A CLAWFORM opens up. If you haven’t seen Colin Booy and his battle-axe banjo, get there early. The banjo is actually perfectly suited to being a metal instrument. All arpeggios. All modulation. All killer chops. Colin can play a damn ‘jo muchachos.

Working backwards, what the hell is going on Friday YOU ASK. Why even ask? It’s MUTHAFUCKIN LONNIE WALKER. Certain memebers of the Pinhook staff played a show with Lonnie Walker at Raleigh Undercover, and believe me these guys bring the intimidation. Dance Punk? Country? Hard-ass Cascade Range indie? Who gives a shit, they are Lonnie Walker and they are great.

AND OH MY MAN OH DAMN GOD IN HELL AND HEAVEN the Moaners open the show. We all know who these guys are, but when do you get to see them play  in Durham? Rarely, that’s when.

Ok, listen, it has to be said. RIP JAY REATARD.

We Love the Living Shit Out All Y’all,

PHK

how many guitars? so many…

Oh doggs and only friends, this Thursday’s show is such rareness and beautiful like an expensive jewel, as New Jersey’s killer Liquor Store brings their FIVE GUITAR ASSAULT to our humble stage.

HAHAHA look at that! How is that ever a thing that you wouldn’t want to see? I bet these guys have really bad attitudes but inside they are hell of kind and would totally help you jumpstart a car, all of them looking around at the open hood and frowning and trying to remember which clip goes on the engine block.

But these hoodlums aren’t the only band of the moment Thursday night, because Wild Wild Geese returns to the Pinhook in a blaze of glory. Highest Power, another group of Jersey pysch-cavepeople open the show at NINE O’CLOOOOOCCCK!!!

Friday, Ricky and Joe bring back the pain with another one of their destructive dance parties. It’s gonna be a rare opportunity to get all hot and sweaty in this the frigid winter of 09/10. The theme this month is Queerlympics, so dress as your favorite Olympian. I expect alot of tennis gear, although in this weather you might want to think about the winter olympics, all hot pink neoprene one-piece speed-skating outfits, all USA hockey. My favorite olympian was a danish skiier named Ingmar Stenmark. He was around in the eighties and I thought I was this dude, back when all I wanted to do in life was be a professional skiier.

Saturday brings the Sugar. Sugar FIX, as Billy Sugarfix, Now You See Them, and the excellent Wembley rock the house.

I, of course, have to miss all this, because I’m going to Horrorland Helltown aka Los Angeles for the weekend. I don’t even care that it’s warm there. Why is there a place called Los Angeles and why is it what it is?

See you when I get back, all tanned and boring and irritating.

-T’ P’Hook

let’s have us a champagne jam (no champagne)

Gonna let this one speak for itself y’all. Gonna have the Indy do my work for me. Word.

“From the costumed, fake-pus-tossing mongoloids in GWAR to the grandeur of film composer Bernard Herrmann to the theories of Jung, Malt Swagger cite and extract creative juices from multiple sources to create a narcotic bouillabaisse,” Finn Cohen wrote in the Independent Weekly in 2002, a week before Malt Swagger played a New Year’s Eve show at Ringside in Downtown Durham. Ringside is gone, and The Swag doesn’t come out to play too much anymore (not since June 2008, in fact), but their sound remains as distinct as Cohen described it seven years ago—tenacious and teeming instrumental music with Morricone-size themes and Varèse-size details. Shark Quest Attack? Hungry Tortoise? No, man: Malt Swagger Reunion. THE PINHOOK. $5/ 10 p.m.

So, that’s happening. Are you gonna be there? No one knows yet. No one may ever know. I’ll tell you one thing more, though. DJ Soulful Love is spinning the greatness starting at 10. He rules, is a good friend, and is going to India for like ever on January 4th. Come send the man off by shaking your ass to the music that he plays.

Other stuff. We closed on Friday, to recover. But Saturday sees the new decade kicking off in style as Tyler Hypnosis throws a hip-hop party and DJ battle. That’s gonna be the jam.

Sunday sees the fourth Vegan Brunch hosted by my main lady Shirle. The menu is Indian food! I know, you’re all like “Indian Food for Brunch? What?” but then you totally mow that stuff and you go “DAAAAAAAAMN!!!”

Happy New Year My Main Damies!

Catch you on the flippysty. All the way down…

-HOOK!

Q: Who is ready to be drunk?

A: We. We are the ones.

Yes people, it’s that week. A week tht requires rock n’ roll squat thrusts and pint liftin’ all year long just to be in shape. It is the week of NEW YEARS EVE, and we are going to say goodbye to the godforsaken annum of 2009 in wide-eyed, destructive style.

JOIN US as the epic insanity of MALT SWAGGER reunites for one special kiss-off starting at 11:30. These guys will ring in the new year with an incredibly bizarre and fun version of Auld Lang Syne (I bet. I need to talk to them about that), and rock until lateness is upon us.

The excellent DJ SOULFUL LOVE kicks off the show and ends the show, with 60’s garage, psych, R&B, soul, funk, and other tunes that commence asses to begin shakin’ and quakin’. Soulful Love is heading to the far east in a week, so this is his last appearance for at least 2 months. Come send the sucka off.

IT’S GONNA BE CRAAAAY.

But first, we got the last movie night of wizards and sorcery month. It’s SORCERER.

Check out that POSTER. That poster is awesome.

Seriously, this is THE MOST suspenseful film ever made, as four badass dudes attempt to drive truckloads of nitro-glycerin across the most dangerous road in the world. CHECK IT OUT.

CAPITALS,

PINHOOOK.

bloggin, with a certain festive attitude

Oh, there’s a feeling in the air. That feeling is cold, but it also has a certain piney aroma. It’s a holiday kind of feeling.

Now I am not a religious man, but I love me some Christmas. All givin people stuff. All gettin stuff. All just getting wonky from scotch in front a roaring fire, my dog all curled up, looking hell of cute. It’s good! Stressful but good.

So some of may know, and some of those some may care, but the Fin Fang Foom, FES, Gray Young shindig on friday got kiboshed due to the weather. It was terrible. I was a sad, sad man. But fear not. It’s been rescheduled for January 29th, adding New York’s Fantan to the bill. Pretty sweet.

So, it’s not the most eventful week here, but that’s ok. It’s Christmas time! Monday night we do have a very special movie presentation, of WIZARD PEOPLE, DEAR READER. A cult phenomenon of the highest level, this is a true piece of Illegal Art. Austin cartoonist Brad Neely (creator of the The George Washington Rap) dubbed his own narration over the first Harry Potter movie, as if it was a Book-On-Tape. I have managed to secure a (rare) copy, and I must say that this is one of the funniest thing I’ve ever witnessed. Sample quote: “Hagar the Horrible hands Harry a jug of what is definitely whiskey. Harry takes an appreciative slurp.” Guys, this is awesome. Check out an example of Neely’s work below.

On Saturday the 26th, don’t be sad and blue. Come see a show! The roaring insanity of Bobby’s Fever hits the stage in support of up and coming rock stars En Serenade! It’s gonna be a very aggro way to finish off the season.

Love and Happiness,

THEPHK