News/Blog

Finally after almost 6 years and not really a whole lotta drama (oh yeah, except for that time our drummer quit about 2 years ago...or rather he just...stopped...showing...up or returning our phone calls...but that's another story), the end is in sight for our little masterpiece.  Last Saturday, without much fanfare, the masters for our new CD arrived in the mail from Masterdisk in NYC.  That's right, the big city folks.  So here it is, just staring at us like a puppy dog wondering what we are going to do with it next.

Well, here goes kiddies.  For the time being, we are streaming the record for free right here on our website and our other popular media outlets.  Next up, if you can believe this, we still haven't named it.  Can you believe this?  Some bands name their records before they even start recording!  Not The Cocks, though.  This one is like a fine wine and like all things good and wonderful, will be ready when it's ready.  So we'll get the boys together and settle on a name, finalize the artwork with said name and get this puppy off to the pressing plant.

Final step in this big story is the official record/CD release.  Plans are for a release party sometime in the early fall and we hope to do something special for this one.  We're not saying yet as ideas are still being bounced around.  But I will say that Phil mentioned something about midgets...er, sorry...little people (dont want to offend anyone here), but who knows what will happen between now and then.  In the meantime, we're practicing like mad and working out a bunch of new songs and currently have a 17 song set were working through featuring all but 1 song from the CD plus about 4 new songs and a couple older ones we brought back into our playlists.

That's it for now.  Enjoy the new CD and tell all your friends to check it out.  While your at it, become a fan on our Cocks Facebook page by clicking the Facebook link on the right.  More info coming soon...enjoy your summer!

We are getting ever closer to completing the recording of our new CD.  A couple of weeks ago I sat down over at the studio and started to go over the tracks that we had so that I could compile a list of tasks to complete.  To my utter surprise that list was very small.  I supposed after working on this on and off over the past 5 years or so that we should have some sort of end in sight.  Right now I think we are going to have a total of 10 tracks (maybe 11), one of which is my 14 minute opus The Profiteers which is nearing completion.  All drum and bass tracks were finished last spring with the intention of finishing the recording this summer.  But then summer hit and we found no motivation whatsoever to work on recording.  So we ended up working on practicing and writing some new tunes.  Now that summer is over and the chill weather is here, we can focus now.  After today, we just have a couple of vocal tracks, some percussion and other minor finishing touches and then we are FINISHED!

With the end nearing, I thought this would be a good time to revamp the website to celebrate the impending release of a CD for which we don't even have a title (ideas anyone, anyone?).  In the coming weeks, I will be adding more stuff to the site plus some samples of songs from the CD which you have probably not heard yet.  Also, you may notice that I am keeping a similar theme as our old website.  That picture of the teepees in the background will be the cover of the new CD so I thought it was appropriate.

Maybe I can even get the other guys to start blogging on here since my last entry was from what....2007??!!?

-Mark

Yes indeed, we had a lot of fun playing the Delaware Music Festival...as always. The weather was a bit on the iffy side: it was wet and cold as hell for a mid-April weekend. I think this really kept a lot of people home as it always seemed there were better crowds at past DE music festivals.

With so many bands and so little time we didn't get a chance to catch half the bands we wanted to see. Got to hang out with our friends Tony Travalini & The Still Lifes through most of the night. This is a great local band who've been on the scene here in Delaware for far longer than either of us care to mention. Unfortunately they played the night before and we missed their set. But it was great fun catching up with those guys...just like the old days huh?

Read more: A splendid time was had by all

...or, how I learned to stop fearing digital recording and embrace Pro Tools.

So what's the score now, game fans? 2 years and counting?

Geez, who knows, but it seems as if this tale of the tape has been going on longer than a Dostoevsky novel. Back and forth through smoke and booze-hazed Monday evenings we had trudgingly committed to tape our collective output one song at a time. Lovingly rendering each instrument, each note as if it were our last. Filling reel after reel of what remained of this Earth's final few thousand feet of untouched 1/2" Ampex 456 Grand Master recording tape. When it seemed as though we were finally getting this beast off it's ass and moving forward...we hit that proverbial brick wall: the limitations of 8-track analog recording.

Read more: More tales from the recording booth...

Just though I would post some pics from the studio...
Here's some of the stuff that helps us make the noise: