It’s Sunday, February 3rd, 2008. You know we’ve had more news submissions on this potential Arrested Development movie than anything else today, purpose of this website be damned. I love you guys. Welcome to Navel Gazing, your look back at this week in Punknews.

Top on the list of shows you didn’t get get to see last week, ALL reunited on stage in Fort Collins at what was billed as a Drag The River show. Keeping with the reunion theme, Hot Water Music has announced a trio of European festival dates. We also had video footage of the band performing “Turnstyle” at their recent Sayreville, NJ show. The Gaslight Anthem may have delayed their upcoming EP this week, but it also slipped that the band will join the SideOneDummy roster. The real world stepped in as Fox News, for whatever reason, uncovered the “Emo Backlash”. Cheers also go out to the Oregon Attorney General for investigating the RIAA.

There was lots of touring news this week, with the Warped Tour confirming its 2008 routing and further news on the metal-focused spinoff tour featuring bands like Mastodon and Dragonforce. The Mighty Mighty Bosstones announced a Los Angeles show with the Street Dogs and Pietasters, as well as an appearance at the Bamboozle. Similarly, the west coast Bamboozle Left will feature a reunion performance from Face To Face. We’re waiting on dates for two upcoming tours, one to feature Anti-Flag will the Briggs, Street Dogs and Fake Problems, the other an Asian Man Tour with Queers, Lemuria and Bomb The Music Industry.

This week saw the break up of street punks Clit 45. Upcoming releases for the mall punk crowd were discussed, including Fearless Records’ “Punk Goes Crunk” compilation and Panic At The Disco‘s upcoming “Pretty. Odd.” Not on the horizon? Good Riddance‘s live DVD. It’s probably not going to happen. Between some new music from Anti-Flag (“The Bright Lights of America”) and Fake Problems (“Viking Wizard Eyes, Wizard Full of Lies”) this has been a pretty full week.

Our Video of the Week featured the first part of an interview and performance with Bomb The Music Industry!. The twenty seventh edition of Vinyl File featured an interview with Dan Yemin (Lifetime, Kid Dynamite, Paint it Black and Armalite) and a look at upcoming releases. On the new music front we previewed three upcoming 7″ releases from Toronto power-pop act Marvelous Darlings, featuring Ben Cook of Fucked Up and No Warning.
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Berlin-via-Montreal low-fi garage rocker King Khan is headed out on the road in Europe with both of his current bands in the coming months. First the King Khan and BBQ Show, the duo featuring Khan and the ever prolific Mark Sultan, will hit the road throughout February in support of the What’s For Dinner? full length. In mid-March Khan will take to the streets again with King Khan and the Shrines, supporting their much acclaimed recent album What Is?!.
Source Continue reading Tours: King Khan taking the BBQ Show, the Shrines out on the road in Europe →

San Francisco’s Set Your Goals have assembled a 20-minute video documenting their recent trip to Japan. The video was entirely edited and filmed by Michael Ambrose.

Source Continue reading Set Your Goals post 20-minute tour video →

Long-standing Hermosa Beach punk act Pennywise has titled their upcoming record Reason To Believe. The cover art for the release is also now available.

The full length is due on on March 25, 2008 via MySpace Records. It follows up the band’s final release for longtime label Epitaph, 2005’s The Fuse.

As previously announced the album will be available as a free digital download via a Textango promotion. Anyone who adds Textango’s profile as a friend on the social networking site MySpace will get access to the songs. Textango is a company that allows users to purchase online music downloads via cell phone text messages.
Source Continue reading Pennywise “Reason To Believe” artwork →

Dead Meadow are heading out on a massive three month tour in support of their new album, Old Growth, coming out on February 5th on Matador Records. They’ll start with a few shows in California, then cut across the South before shipping out to Europe for an extensive run. They’ll finish off with a ride up the East Coast in April.

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Chicago’s June, just shy of outright calling it quits, have announced a scaling back from full-time-band status. Drummer Mark Sutor posted a lengthy statement to the band’s MySpace page. Among his comments he stated:

Basically, it’s been our dream since we could all actually play songs on our instruments to be in a successful touring band. We’ve worked hard since we were sophomores in high school (a pretty bad garage band at best, ha) to build a very cool following in Chicago and then eventually sign to Victory Records and put out two CD’s in stores while touring with the absolute coolest bands across the country. All of these things were amazing goals that we achieved and will be things that we will never ever forget doing…

Unfortunately, the music industry, as awesome as it is to be apart of, is a tough place to really set yourself up for a stable setting in the future. Everything is so fickle regarding how a band breaks out or not. You can be together for 2 months and then be on top of the world…or it could take you many years of touring your asses off and working hard before you start seeing a return…or you could work just as hard as the next band but have nothing ever happen for you. I think the key here is “working hard”. That’s why we’re not as upset over this as we thought we were going to be. We toured as much as we possibly could and poured everything we could into our songs… The one thing we wanted to make sure is that nobody thought we just gave up like it was nothing. This was definitely one of the hardest conclusions we have ever had to come to and we’re all very upset things didn’t work out like we wanted them to.

He notes that despite the band moving to the back burner, future music is not out of the question:

I don’t want to say that we’re broken up…we still want to write music, trust me…but as far as touring and taking months off to do it, that’s what has to change. None of us will be able to completely block this out of our lives…and if we can…we will still be releasing music to the world.

The band recently released Make It Blur on Victory Records, their second full length for the label.
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The Loved Ones have announced tour dates for March. They will be supported by The Flatliners and Cobra Skulls on all dates.

They also will be releasing Build and Burn via Fat Wreck Chords on February 5th, 2008. You can check out the band’s MySpace page for tour dates in February and tracks from their upcoming album.

Source Continue reading Tours: The Loved Ones / Flatliners / Cobra Skulls →