The Damned Things Talk “Supergroup” Label

The Damned Things

The Damned Things sat down with Consequence of Sound:

When it started so many years ago, and people were saying that is was a supergroup, I didn’t like that tag. I didn’t like what it implied. I didn’t want to just come together and try to sell it because of these names are in it. I wanted it to be a band. So when we kind of split off and went our own ways, and I realized that we weren’t coming back anytime soon. I was like, “Fck, it was what I didn’t want it to be.” And I realize after that it had become that. And it was exactly what people were framing it out to be. And, fck, I was so mad about it and really hurt that it wasn’t happening again and weren’t doing it again.

YouTube Renews ‘Cobra Kai’

YouTube

YouTube has renewed Cobra Kai for a third season and will be releasing their original shows free, with ad-supported windows, in the future:

YouTube has ordered a third season of Cobra Kai. But before the Karate Kid sequel returns with more episodes, the streaming video platform is hoping to attract a bigger audience for the show.

On Sept. 11, YouTube will make the first two seasons of Cobra Kai available to watch for free with ads. Episodes of season two will be released weekly. Previously, those seasons were only accessible for people who paid $12 per month for subscription service YouTube Premium.

Review: The Dangerous Summer – Reach for the Sun

It’s funny the way that albums can mark time. How hearing the right songs at the right moment can make them sound like more than songs, or how going back to those songs after 10 or 15 or 20 years can reawaken every feeling you had when you first heard them. It’s funny, too, how the music that does those things to you might not do anything for anyone else. How something can be an incredibly meaningful and important document of your past, but just sound run-of-the-mill to someone else. Or how, if you’d heard an album a decade or a year or six months too early or too late, it might just be a footnote in your musical history rather than a symphony.

No album has ever taken me more by surprise than The Dangerous Summer ‘s Reach for the Sun. I didn’t see it coming, and I wasn’t looking for it. I had no knowledge of the band or their past work, no clue what they sounded like or what their songs might have to say about my life. I just read a rave review of the album one day on AbsolutePunk and decided to give it a shot. Ten years later, those songs still shoot shivers down my spine and choke me up, because they sound like the cusp of adulthood, and like all the friends and memories I’ve left behind in the past decade.

Reach for the Sun had remarkable timing. Its release date was May 5, 2009, just as spring was bursting into full, glorious bloom. I first heard it on May 3, in the early evening, coming out of old boombox speakers in my bedroom, with the gentle glow of the sunset streaming through my window. The day before, my sister had graduated from college. In another month, I’d graduate from high school. My parents and I had driven home, from Ann Arbor to Traverse City, that afternoon. I had a boatload of calculus homework to do and was dreading the evening. AP exams were just days away, and I needed to buckle down and focus. Certainly, I knew I needed a good soundtrack for the study session. So I downloaded this record on the recommendation of a glowing 95 percent review from Blake Solomon and loaded it onto my iPod.

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