of Spaghettifest, Shredder, and Street Corner Prophecies

Behold! This Month's Free Single:
Our musical tale of rage and ruin told in a sort of prophet-on-a-street-corner type way.
The song's title?
"Street Corner Prophecy"



Also- we'll be playing at this year's Spaghettifest Music Festival! This is the ninth Spaghettifest now, and all those who are familiar with the name know the good times that are in store. It's 3 days of independent music hosted by Midnight Spaghetti and the Chocolate G-Strings: a hard hitting funky band from Virginia with an apparent masters degree in the study of Groove. Check out the lineup- and snatch a presale ticket while you still can!

While preparing for said awesome music festival, we've got a nice busy schedule of learning new material and finishing up recording our second album!

Yeah! Recording!

By the way, on a completely unrelated tangent bit of news that has shaken us to our very core...
Did you know that on the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" cartoon, the character of Shredder was voiced by James Avery aka "Uncle Phil" from "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air"?

Believe it.


Now go forth and spread the word.

of tumblr, the new site, and robot love

Ahh... right. Been a while since we last posted- sorry! We got a bit sidetracked with our new tumblr account- which is a bit like reading this blog but in small but easy-to-assemble pieces, with 70% less rambling.
We actually probably ramble about the same on both- but differently.
To many disciples of places like Blogger, Tumblr is a forbidden word, and mentioning it may cause extreme rage- we ask that you treat our blog and Tumblr as separate entities and never as "pretty much the same thing" (they are, though.)

Our website was also given a thorough nip tuck and de-lousing - let us know what you think of the new look! (presuming you like it- kindly direct all negative comments to this non-existent page.)

Now that that's out of the way- our free single for this month is about robots.
Robots can look horrifyingly human these days. Thanks to the "Uncanny Void" of fake stuff looking more and more real, we all have to deal with distinguishing which is which. By the time you have read this today, you may have talked to a robot, befriended one, or maybe even loved one- without even knowing it.
This is a painful topic for those who have felt loves cruel sting after falling for a replicant, and for these special few, this songs for you. Enjoy!

I Love You, But I Know You're a Robot by Marley Thorn

of Mafia Track Suit and Mr. Hooper

First of all, we very much encourage you to check out this band, Mafia Track Suit.


Excellent rock band with awesome songs, (they recently put out an EP) our favorite is the zombie-fied "28 Days". We're quite partial to Zombie Rock, as it happens.
We're particularly excited right now as we will be performing with Mafia Track Suit on Thursday, July 7th at Schooner's in Roanoke. Music starts at 7pm. It's going to be a great night of Rock N'Roll, so bring along your dancing shoes- preferably a new pair.

Also, with the month of June falling prey to the advances of July, it is time for our new song!
This month: Our Nathaniel Hawthorne inspired ode to the pro's and con's of wearing semi-translucent garments, "Mr. Hooper."

Mr. Hooper by Marley Thorn

We've had this song with us for a while, we've played it in electric and acoustic shows, even recorded a version of it as a fulfillment for an English project. This recording was also the first of ours to feature the 12 string guitar ("Automated" was recorded after this one, actually).

We all know the old formula for 12 strings:

12 string guitar + treble = sunny.

Sit back, with or without your black veil on, and enjoy the audible sunshine.

You can download "Mr Hooper" for free here:

of Soundclouds, Willy Wonka revelations, and Maniacs

Firstly, it should be mentioned that we now put all of our tracks, past, present and sometimes future, on our Soundcloud page. It allows you to stream all our stuff from the interwebs at any time. Ladies and gentlemen, if CNN's holographic reporter didn't convince you that we're living in the future, let this be the final word. Huzzah for living in the future!


Latest tracks by Marley Thorn

Some more varied news would be great, but alas, I can only report that we are still in the process of recording quite a bit of new material. Quite a bit. This of course is barely news as this is the same bit of music that we've been working on for a while. However it will soon all be revealed in a Willy Wonka type fashion as we emerge with a giant horde of musicality. Rest assured, it will involve less bizarre disappearances, and hopefully will be generally less sinister...

oh and by the way, we've got another song for this month, it's called "Maniac".

of the Bazaar, Kidney Beans, and Lovin' Kissin' Vandalism

Where to start...

Ahh, yes.
Fancy a free song?
Go on.



We wrote "Lovin' Kissin' Vandalism" back in Harrisonburg during the days of The Post-Apocalyptic Blues Band. It's one of those old perennial stories of romance, and periods of intense psychotic narcissistic rage. None of that Durst-ian nonsense. We're talking real violent stuff, like throwing someone's nick-nacks in the street, and leaving their ice cream out of the freezer to melt. Listen at your own risk.


Thanks to all who came out last Saturday to see us with Just Marshall at The Bazaar! A great time was had by all. Thanks to Jackie, we have some videos of the show that we'll put up soon! If anyone else snapped any photos or video let us know!

If you haven't had a chance to check out Just Marshall we definitely recommend it, he was nice enough to give us a copy of "Catnip" which he released with Nancy and Two Meteors.
Great Rock n' Roll songs with cool electronic overtones- check out more HERE

Also, the awesome upcoming indie comedy "Kidney Beans" just completed a second teaser trailer. Looks excellent. The music's pretty alright too.



Check out the Kidney Beans blog to keep up to date on all the latest developments.

We recently returned from the Caribbean- lots of fun. Congratulations to Mr. and Mrs. Woolgar! Here are a few snapshots:

James, Travis, and Alonco playing a wedding day set list of such Caribbean Standards as "Is this Love?" and "One Love" by Bob Marley, and "Heroes" by David Bowie.

One of three unplanned renditions of "Heart & Soul". This one was the sober version.

Karoake...

of SSP Films, and Our First Moving Picture Thingy

Thanks to the clever folks at SSP Films, we have ourselves one of those new-fangled moving picture thingies!

Marley Thorn - "Get Wise! (You Don't Know)" from SSPFILMS on Vimeo.

SSP Films has lots of awesome stuff on their website (sspfilms.com), and they are constantly updating it with new moving picture thingies. To get some belly laughs in on your lunch break, look no further.

MASSIVE thanks to Garrett and Eric for sharing their prowess in cinematography, and also to Jacquelyn Powell, Vanessa Stone, and Chelsea Layman for choreographing and performing the dance sequences. Hope that you enjoy watching this as much as we did making it!

Also- incase you didn't hear, this month you can get our latest single "Sweet Demon" for free. Click Here to download it.

of Sweet Demons and Rob Dower's Minty Pre-amps

First order of business- here's a free song you can download!

It's called "Sweet Demon". We've watched a lot of True Blood, on top of a lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and you know- there really aren't many songs that address the strangeness of an interspecies relationship between a human and a demon. Right now the only songs that come to mind are:

David Bowie - Width of a circle

Lady Gaga - Monster

Uriah Heep- Rainbow Demon

Danzig - Am I Demon?

Let us know if you can think of any others... it'd be interesting to know how many of them there actually are. At any rate it is a short list of songs that is now one song longer.

Really the song sounds a lot sweeter than originally intended, this is due to our good friend Sheldon Johnson- who plays saxophone on this song. We had recorded rudiments of this song quite a while ago, and had actually forgotten his track was on here until we un-muted a seemingly superfluous track and were floored by the awesome. Thanks a ton Sheldon!

If you care to keep track of all this song-a-month stuff and make sure you don't miss any- you can keep yourself in the loop by signing up to our mailing list here. By the time you read these words, those on our mailing list have already got the song. If the thought of this sends you into a jealous rage, sign up!




Next, we'd like to mention another good friend of ours; Rob Dower.
If you play an instrument through an amplifier, this is a name you ought to familiarize yourself with. We owe our recorded and live sound to him and the brilliant tube amps that he has miraculously designed and built for us, aswell as the paradigm-shattering modifications he has made to our equipment. Soon we'll put up info and specs for those amps for the guitar-tech fiends amongst us.

Most recently, he has provided us with the single coolest addition to our guitar effects pedal board. See if you can spot which it is.

Yes, it's the altoids tin. Here's a closer look:

Honestly, I don't even know how it does what it does. It somehow takes a signal and saturates it, adding harmonics etc etc. Put simply, it pushes your sound up to 11, and yes, it is curiously strong. This little tin is going to be on just about all our recordings from now on.

Drop us a line if you'd like one!