Hey folks, how’s tricks? Tomorrow our third album Facts officially comes out. If you were one of the smart folks who pre-ordered it(cheap!) you get your downloads of the remaining tracks tomorrow morning sometime. Vinyl should ship sometime in the next week or so, depending on the manufacturer finishing the job, so sit tight.

This release and tour have been all consuming since November, threatening to derail my holiday fun-times in Eurpoe in Nov/Dec and slowly shredding what is left of my sanity. While I’m real happy with how things are going, the ‘democratisation’ of the music industry has made life tough for self-managed bands with any shred of ambition. On balance, I think the demise of the ‘big business’ record industry is a good thing. Every label* we’ve ever been involved with has gone under and we never saw a cent from record sales anyway. Watching the money drip in from Bandcamp sales(iTunes settles quarterly) from you kind folks over the past few weeks has been really gratifying. It feels great to see a direct link from recording/mixing/mastering a record and then selling it.

The process of booking the Facts tour and organising the digital and vinyl releases has been a real eye-opener. We’ve booked plenty of tours in the past and though I should know better by now, It never ceases to amaze me how totally unprofessional a lot of the venues are outside of Melbourne. We have things really good here, not even Sydney can hold a candle to the level of professionalism shown by mid sized venues in this town. This is reflected in the fact that no matter how organised you are as a band manager/booker, you are always relying on other people, most of whom only work a couple of days a week and seem to believe if there is a band name listed in the calender their job is done.

So, 12 shows booked, tickets on sale(Sydney, Melbourne) and we’ve moved on to promoting said tour and record. We have engaged a great publicist, someone we’ve worked with before and loves our music. This is the biggest single expense of the whole endeavor, but having tried to promote things on our own in the past it’s something that just can’t be done without. I think regardless of further changes brought about by the internet, publicists will continue to be integral to the success of any band for the foreseeable future.

We’ve also committed to a string of street press advertising, street posters and radio carts. Street press especially is something I would rather not have poured money into. Due to the slow failure of the street press industry(the print side anyway), these poor bastards are just desperate for cash. It has come to the point where asking them to run something as small as a tour announcement(50 odd words) requires committing to advertising. I guess in the past advertising from major and large indie labels would have sustained the magazines, leaving them some room to throw free editorial in the direction of totally independent bands. But no longer!

One other thing I recently discovered/realised is that most potential new fans of The Ramps are going to assume that it’s spelled Alex. Having done a Google search I’ve found that while there is plenty of content under the misspelling, there are no links to our proper site(s). So I’ve spent the weekend registering and redirecting sites with the misspelling in an attempt to direct traffic in the right direction. So you know, the list of things to do keeps growing and surprising me.

Anyway, enough ranting. Facts is out tomorrow, have at it! Come see us on the tour, it’s gonna be wild!

Watch this video of us performing Icy Facts live in September while you’re at it.

*For the record, our previous labels would be classified as ‘indie’ but they sure had a lot more money to throw around than we do.

March 1 2012: The ANU Bar, Canberra. Guests Readable Graffiti and Waterford. Tickets $10 at the door. Doors at 830pm.
March 2 2012: The Patch, Wollongong. Guests TBC. Free Entry.
March 3 2012: GoodGod Small Club, Sydney. Guests Megastick Fanfare and Shanna Watson. Tickets from Moshtix or $15 at the door if available. Doors at 7pm.
March 4 2012: Chinos, Newcastle. Guests Megastick Fanfare and Shanna Watson. Tickets $10 at the door. Doors at 6:15pm.

March 8 2012: The Rails, Byron Bay. Guests Scraps. Free Entry. From 6pm.
March 9 2012: The Spotted Cow, Toowoomba. Guests TBS. Free Entry.
March 10 2012: Tym Guitars in-store performance. Afternoon show.
March 11 2012: The Waiting Room, Brisbane. Guests Tiny Spiders and Scraps. Tickets $10 at the door. Doors at 8pm.

March 22 2012: The National Hotel, Geelong. Guests Lowtide and The Ocean Party.
March 23 2012: The Northcote Social Club, Melbourne.  Guests Lowtide and The Ocean Party. Tickets $15 from NSC or at the door if available.
March 24 2012: The Hotel Metropolitan, Adelaide. Guests Wild Oats and Radio Spectacular. Tickets $8 at the door. Doors at 8pm.
March 31 2012: The Brisbane Hotel, Hobart. Guests Tiger Choir, The Native Cats, Pines, The James Parry Band and more!

Oh, hai!

Seems this blog still exists. I had feared by now some other band would be squatting here, Trying to bring back rap-metal. Probably Linkin Park, those guys have been camped out on the corner waiting for someone to move out for ever.

Well, gotta clean this place up and make room for FACTS, some new film-clips and tour details. Aleks’ White Power treatise will have to go and there’s no longer room for Joe’s Golden Girls slash-fiction archives. We’ve sunk our entire budget into Vinyl copies of FACTS, thousands of them. I read somewhere that Vinyl sales are increasing every year and extrapolating that through the next decade it looks like we can’t really go wrong.

Ah, fuck. I guess I spoke too soon, it seems we are supposed to be hand dubbing cassettes. Finally, a use for all those mix-tapes I obsessively made for non-existent girlfriends in 1985.

Okay, enough comedyyyyyy JOKES!

Our new album FACTS is to be released on Feb 14th! It’ll be available in Vinyl from our bandcamp(with free download), and from a huge list of online stores both within Australia the rest of the World. iTunes and Vinyl pre-sales will start on Feb 1st and oh, we’re going on a 12 date national tour in March!

FACTS has been quite a while coming I know! It’s actually been finished since September 2011, but we’ve been busy in the intervening months. Al has been in Berlin testing the limits of liver cell regeneration; Joe has been hanging with his one year old baby girl Raven(his beard is now 3 and almost as good looking as Ravey); I’ve been keeping busy as a live sound engineer; Sez has been touring her solo project Kikuyu and Pas has been… I have no idea what Pas does. Mostly perfecting his creepy uncle impersonations I imagine.

Anyhoo, expect us(me) to be updating this blog pretty frequently for a while, we gotta convince someone to buy all the different outdated formats of FACTS.

did you see our clip for Middle Aged Unicorn on Beach with Sunset? Looky here.

Peace out!

Simon. xx

Last week we finally got back up on stage. Thanks to everyone who came along to The Toff, we had a blast playing with Teeth and Tongue and Near Myth. It was our first show with new member Whistling Nancy and she totally fucking nailed it. So much fun! So goddamn nerve wracking after 8 months without playing.

Never fear though, we won’t wait that long for the next outing. I reckon end of August will be a go-er…. Stay tuned.
Here is a gallery of very nice shots from the evening, courtesy of Everguide and photographer Leah Robertson.

Here is one of a series of our latest press shots:

On another note, we’ve finished recording and mixing album no.3. Hopefully we’ll figure out a way to get it to you soon, cause its rad.

go on, have ‘em. you might as well.

ramps studio times from Brain Cobra on Vimeo.

Hello.  He is a short list of things as they are:

• We have now booked five shows in Japan this October, with perhaps a couple more to come.  Details soon.
• Brain Cobra and Flying Diamonds are currently mixing our next single, due out in a few weeks, in Sydney.  We’ll be playing shows in Sydney (Spectrum, October 13) and Melbourne (Workers Club, Oct 29) to launch it.

The end.  Told you it was short!  Did I mention that we’ve got Twitter?  It’s sort of like this blog, except we offer you medical solutions to erectile dysfunction less often (but not never).

We got totally wastoid on some kitten juice, woke up the next day and it turned out we booked flights to Japan, so we’ve decided that we should play music while we are there.

So yeah, come October 2010, the ramps will eating horse sashimi/wasabi doritos/squishy sweet things in Japan and drinking terrible coffee from vending machines. Fuck yeeeaaah. One of the ramps will also be playing in ii too. Do Come!

or so i’m told.

on a non ramps related note, i made a music video for pikelet. it was filmed in the pacific somewhere, and we gave the camera acid. here ’tis.

we’re playing with crayon fields at their ‘welcome back from the US!!’ show at the Northcote Social Slub on April 24. we haven’t played in ages, so it’ll be rusty.

oh, and celebricheese

BAM!

Our song ‘antique limb’ is in the running for the jjj hottest 100. i’m not sure what happens if it makes it in, maybe we win a fancy car or something.

So you can go vote for it here, if you’re one of those people who votes for things.

Also, we made an EP that you can get on iTunes right here. Kinda forgot to tell anyone about this, y’know how it is.

It features our song ‘destroy the universe with jazz hands’ from the midnight believer album, plus a remix by our pal slo-mo speedboat, an 8-bit re-imagining of ‘antique limb’ by neutro & lone zero and a cover we did of leonard cohen’s ‘don’t go home with your hard on’.

We’re playing at the Order of Melbourne this Sunday December 20 (after a “design” “market” “thing” earlier in the afternoon there) with NAmericans Castanets and Tiger Saw, and Novocastrian church organist Alps. Come see! Extreme Wheeze’s beard is going to turn bright white. It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.