It’s been a while since the last time I tried to gather attention around this local band. In the meantime, I realized that the internet man-eaters  that desperately seek for some objectivity in between lines written for ¨friends¨, as well as the ¨pro¨ columnists that only approve the kind of journalism that ¨respects the limits¨ are still around and watch closely*, while Soundx finally acquired itself a minimal, temporary face. Two facts that generally mean that a) not many things have changed since the last time I dealt with the local scene and b) now is a good opportunity to get right to the point.

[Three moves left]

Where ¨point¨ in question is an e-mail that arrived in my mailbox a few days ago, with ¨Download J.ALLEN's debut album for free‏¨ in the subject field. I’m not sure why J.Allen decided to distribute their debut album for free and it personally caught me off guard. Perhaps the boys considered that this material is nowadays quite old to give it further attention and therefore this is a good time to share it with the people who care. They’re probably right.

[Two moves left]

In continuity to the self-titled demo that‘s been spreading around from mouth to mouth, listening to the actual album once again gave me the feeling that’s everything is in its place: California –despite Aenima’s prophecy- is still there, the smell of smoke, alcohol and sweat still emerges from Seattle’s bars and the underground pulses still shake the streets of UK’s Teignmouth and Abingdon as they did in the early/mid 90’s.

[One move left]

¨Support your local bands¨. What a joke. Like anybody gives a fuck, if he doesn’t get brainwashed by the free-press magazines and the so-called intellectual ¨indie¨ blogs first. At the end of the day, most of these bands are forced to use a link that looks like this: click here to download

Checkmate.

*long story that I will not get into at this point