At long last the logjam is broken - we've decided on a new name (to avoid confusion with Carrier of Colorado): Golden Birds. Just in case things weren't confusing enough yet, the European version of Heart & Arms that Paranoid Records is putting out next month will be called Carrier. :: Rediculous coup of a show coming up at the Fort on Wednesday. Lou Barlow will be in the house with just his voice and guitar. Thanks Adam for setting this up. :: Hrishi is about to head back to New England for the spring, and we're in search of a drummer to play a couple shows with us in March. Innarested?.

Good news and bad. Sadly, the bad is much larger, and rhymes with Your Sore Ears. On the small-scale bright side: Hrishi wizened up and has moved to San Francisco for the winter instead of Connecticut for the month. Good choice Hrishi! This has allowed for some quality procrastination of the recording which, according to the revised schedule, should be done by the end of next weekend (mixed by the end of the month). Meanwhile, with Hrishi on this side of the continental divide, we're looking to book some shows for mid-December... :: The European tour is a go! April '05, we'll be vanning about the Continent and the Kingdom with the District's A Day in Black and White. Word. Thanks to Selma Booking, Boz, and DiBaW for helping make it happen, we cannot wait. :: Congratulations to the Steam Engine for successfully completing the Wedding/Birthday/Bar Mitzvah Trifecta. Clocked at one month, twenty-five days, two hours. If you've got an event at which a sweaty formalweared post-punk singer-songwriterly oddity would be totally out of place, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

It's a busy night at the Fort. Sam's been tidying up the basement in preparation for tomorrow night's show with Mount Eerie, Julie Doiron, Woelv, and The One AM Radio. Tupper has stocked the pantry: the ritual pre-show chole dinner will be at five. Chris Cordon Bleu of Rust Belt Music is on his way over with the PA. Hrishi drove up from LA last night, turned my bedroom into a sea of drumkit and mic cables, and is recording his parts to new tracks as we speak. Write. Read. Well, probably not anymore. :: Tomorrow: 7pm, five bands, five bucks, it should be an amazing show start to finish. Especially once the chump opening act (us) is done. This'll be our last full-band show for quite a while, as 1) we must buckle us down and finish us up four new tracks for a European full-length release (!!) of Heart & Arms that the French label Paranoid Records will be putting out in January, and 2) Hrishi is off to the east coast for the month of November. :: In other news, we'll be featured in a compilation being put out by SF-based Tell-All records in mid-November. It is available now for pre-order from their website for four dollars American. :: "i listened to carrier...what the heck?...was that all in english?" - Internets user

So here's an attempt at cleaning up the new site a little bit. Thanks folks who reported problems with safari and navigator. Still got some kinks to iron out, but hopefully this is a start... :: Heart & Arms is now available from insound.com - which means it can be purchased with a credit card. You can also pick it up from Mod Lang Records and Rasputin Music in Berkeley and Amoeba Records in Berkeley / San Francisco. Meanwhile, H&A has been sent to over 100 magazines and websites for reviews - holler if you see one... :: Finally, a heads up: there is apparently another band out there called Carrier. A quick guide to keeping things straight: They are from Colorado; we are from California. Their debut CD has a bunch of butterflies on the cover; ours has a bunch of settlers. They're playing the Make-Out Room September 27th; we're playing Edinburgh Castle September 25th. Don't be fooled!

Greetings from Salt Lake City. It has been an incredible summer. We kicked it off with six Los Angelean days of breakneck recording. The result, our debut EP ("Heart & Arms"), was released by the Electric Human Project on June 30th (it is also currently available on CD from Level-Plane and Ebullition) The 12-inch will be put out by Lots of Love on September 22nd. Our US tour went off without a hitch (aside from a pre-emptive $450 hitch in Connecticut). We had a great time, saw old friends, made new ones, never needed a motel, stumbled upon great shows in unexpected places - Boise, St. Louis, East Lansing, Reading - and, miraculously, broke even. The last two weeks I've had the dubious honor of piloting the van back to California by myself - but at the last minute I hastily booked a handful of solo shows along the way. These have been great - fresh (lots of newer material), relaxed & low stress, and on the whole pretty inspirational - it's a bit of a revelation, that this sort of outing can come together at the drop of a hat. Leaves one with quite a sense of freedom. :: The fall should be exciting as well. We're working on a few shows in the Southwest with Malady in late September, then sweetly anticipating a concert at Fort Oregon with Mt. Eerie / The Microphones and The One AM Radio on October 12th. Meanwhile we'll be recording some of our softer material and one or two raucouser tracks we didn't have time for during the Heart & Arms sessions. :: Long term, the plan is to return to the interstates in earnest sometime around February, with fingers crossed that we can follow that up with a European tour in the spring. I'm working on a solo State-Capitol-based jaunt for the summer too - holler if you know anything about grantwriting! :: Dizzee Rascal is STRONG. Believe the hype. Gnite.

We're back from LA; the EP is at the plant. We dig it. We'll be having a CD release / tour kickoff show June 30th at Edinburgh Castle in San Francisco - come on by if you can. Meanwhile, Goleta's Lots of Love label has asked to put out the EP on vinyl later this summer, and we have said hells yes, and thank you Chandler. So we've got two weeks to finalize record / tour logistics, do a day's worth of live recording, for-posterity-style, with Chris Perdue (who has left the band to persue his own project), and put Hrishi through boot camp before we hit the road on the first. Life is good.

Review number two. Punk Planet says of the Polar Bear: "Crispety, crunchety rock that could out-jam any jam band if lyrics weren't so important to this Berkeley band. Singer Webster McBride is one funky songwriter." (Jam bands? Funk? How much tongue is in how much cheek? You make the call.)

Exciting label news: Wilmington, Deleware's Electric Human Project will be putting out our debut EP this summer. Thank you Mike!

Summer tour is going to happen. Ten weeks on the road with The One AM Radio wasn't enough for Hrishi Hirway, who will join us for a July's worth of sweaty shows. Click here for our working itinerary, and please give a holler if you can help us set up a show.

Our first review is in. After a listen to the Polar Bear, Smother.net mused: "...This post-rock trio will have you believing in them in an instant with their innate ability to blend melody and harmonious discordance between rock-n-roll and punk rock. A tremendous demo..."

The Carrier / Rust Belt Music show at St. Mary's College was an East Bay Express pick of the day (04/28/04)! Stephanie Kalem writes that we "...share a lyricism that spirals far above the typical rock morass of sunshine feelings and comparisons of eye color to bodies of water..."

Our songs "Apples", "Flesh", and "Oh My" will be featured in a play, L.E.A.R., written by Stuart Bousel and directed by Jesse Baldwin. L.E.A.R. will play the New Langton Center for the Arts, 1246 Folsom Street at 8pm on May 27-29, June 3-5, and June 10-12. Tickets are $10. For reservations / more info, visit http://learsf.blogspot.com, email Endymion82@aol.com, or call 415-752-2084.

Spring tour was a blast. Thank you Eliot, Shamus Jones, Leon Redbone, the Sailor, Hannah Bartholomew, the Killing Budda dancers, Fist Gozinya & family, Phil Elvrum, Reader's Digest et al for cooking up a surreal good time.

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